The author compares the strategies used in the conquest of the American West, the imperialism of the Third Reich, the creation of Bantustans in South Africa, and cautions against sanguine readings of the Oslo Peace Talks between Israel and Palestine. He concludes that the current agreements are in fact the last stages of Israeli conquest of Palestine.

The author criticizes efforts to resuscitate W. E. B. Du Bois’s claim that people of African descent have a special obligation to each other premised on race. He concludes that Africana philosophers such as Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Lucius Outlaw do not claim to possess essential knowledge of the human condition but instead propose a story human beings can tell about what they’re doing with their lives. Their story exerts imperative force only when they can convince themselves that it is a better story than all the others they have inherited.

This essay is a reading of two Hollywood films: The Defiant Ones (1958, directed by Stanley Kramer, starring Tony Curtis and Sidney Poitier) and Rising Sun (1993, directed by Philip Kauffman starring Wesley Snipes and Sean Connery, based on the Michael Crichton novel of the same name). The essay argues that these films work to contain black demand for social and political equality not through exclusionary measures, but rather through deliberate acknowledgment of blackness as integral to US identity. My reading shows how a homosocial bond between white and black stands in for US national identity, and how this identity is unified by foregrounding the threat of an apocalyptic outcome. I use the concept of brinkmanship to illustrate the political effects of this particular narrative form. Then I move to Rising Sun, a film that employs a racial triangle of white, black and Asian men to manage black demand for social change. I argue that the narrative logic and the cultural politics of the film require any figure that is both Asian and masculine to be coded as a foreign enemy.

The paper included here was presented by Nanette Funk in Honor of Gertrude Ezorsky, the famed philosopher, feminist, and antiracism activist, at the 1997 Meeting of the Society for Women in Philosophy. It is published here as presented. Thus, although it is a coauthored talk the “I” refers to Nanette Funk.

This reflection considers my dawning realization that Zapatista insurgency reflects not only opposition to racist devaluation of the cultures of indigenous peoplesbut more fundamentally a struggle to overcome spiritual deracination. I contest two basic assumptions of much contemporary social theory: that race and deracination are entirely socio-cultural phenomena and that the central role played by dialogical accord in Zapatista communities can be understood without a spiritual conception of human existence. I propose that only a spiritual understanding of these three pivotal issues—race, deracination, and dialogue (or accord)—aptly captures the core intuitions that inform Zapatista insurgency.

Both feminists and Marxists have realized that it is necessary to avoid reductionism and recognize the intersections between gender, race, and class. But we donot have a methodology sufficient to develop this idea. I argue that Bertell Ollman’s book Dance of the Dialectic provides a way to think about intersectionality usingMarx’s methodology of abstraction and his theory of internal relations. As a relational abstraction, gender is intersectional. We may legitimately focus on it, as longas we treat it dialectically. We can recognize that it is not homogeneous but stands in relations of identity and/or contradiction with other social relations.

The concept of living labor in Marx’s Grundrisse represents the key notion that conceptually ties his early theory of alienation with the drafts of Capital of the 1860s. Through a critique of the formalism that opened space for Marx’s economic writings, I explore living labor, not only as alienated within the capital–laborrelation, but as an absolute, metahistorical exteriority. Furthermore, the interpretive writings of Enrique Dussel on the Grundrisse are contrasted with the reading ofMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri to show how living labor can be understood as ethical excess within the framework of biopolitical production.