Humanities advocates focus on demonstrating the humanities’ value to encourage participation. This advocacy is largely done through institutional means, and rarely taken directly to the public. This article argues that by reframing the theory of Direct Action, humanities advocates can effectively engage the public. The article begins by exploring three different understandings of the humanities: that they develop good citizenship, that they develop understanding, and that they develop critical thought. The article then discusses what Direct Action is and how it works. The article concludes by describing how to reframe Direct Action to suit the needs of the humanities, including potential actions that will achieve those ends. Humanities Direct Action must be seen as a debate and will focus on increasing critical thinking.

I argue that while recognition is important for Middle Eastern and North African philosophers in academia and society, recognition alone should not define the anti-colonial movement. BDS provides a better model of engagement because it constructs identities in order to bring about material changes in the academy and beyond. In the first part of the essay, I catalog how MENA thought traditions have been and continue to be suppressed within the academy and philosophy in particular. I then sketch one possible path to better representation in philosophy by reading Fayez Sayegh’s analyses of Zionist colonialism and Palestinian non-being. In the second half of the essay, I argue that BDS is among the premier anti-colonial movements on American campuses today because it is a materialist anti-racist movement. Insofar as that movement is often shunned and prohibited, an anti-colonial society offers a membership in exile.

In this article, I explore the contrast between the recent George Floyd protests and the lockdowns immediately prior by situating these rebellions in the context of Foucault’s disciplinary society and subsequent scholarship on biopolitical management. I assert that the disciplinary mechanisms operative in finance/debt, policing and epidemiological management of the virus share similar epistemological assumptions stemming from liberal individualism. The revolutionary character of these uprisings therefore stems from their epistemological subversions of the predictable individual, and this figure’s spatiotemporal situatedness, a construction that helps power make claims on our collective future. The protests push us to see beyond a strict Foucauldian reading of this moment to uncover the metastatic status of identities in rebellion, which sustain resistance to disciplinary society’s epistemological foundations.

Leftist political theory remains trapped between two dominant conceptions of sovereignty: the liberal conception of popular sovereignty and the decisionist conception of sovereignty as the power to declare a state of exception. This essay offers a historical critique of the liberal and decisionist conceptions of sovereignty and develops a descriptive theory of aristocratic sovereignty, which is more suited to the history and the needs of radical political theory and praxis. By tracing the genealogy of sovereignty through early modern European political thought to the founding of the United States, this essay reveals the debilitating shortcoming of notions of sovereignty derived from both Carl Schmitt and the liberal tradition and provides a basis for a distinctively radical analysis of the sovereign aristocracy in Amerika.

In the United States, Protestant Christian identity is the dominant religious identity. Protestant Christian identity confers status privileges, yet also creates objectionable status inequalities. Historical and contemporary evidence includes the unfair treatment of Mormons, Native Americans, Muslims, and other religious minorities. Protestant Christian supremacy also plays a significant role in bolstering anti LGBTQ prejudice, xenophobia, and white supremacy. Ways that Protestant Christian identity correlates with objectionable status inequalities are often neglected in contemporary political philosophy. This paper aims to make a modest contribution towards filling that gap. Some forms of inequality linked to Protestant Christian supremacy can be characterized as domination and oppression. Other instances include barriers to fair equality of opportunity for self-determination. Adapting ideas from egalitarian political philosophy I propose an analysis of objectionable status inequality rooted in Protestant Christian supremacy. Alan Patten’s defense of an egalitarian principle for assessing the effects of law and policy is helpful for this task.

This essay elaborates on Rodolfo Corky Gonzales’s “Yo soy Joaquín” as an inter-American articulation of the critical commitments of Chicanismo, which is here identified as the sociopolitical philosophy and ideological/normative leanings of Mexican Americans who call(ed) themselves Chicanas/os. The purpose of this essay is to show both how syncretism frames Chicanismo as a philosophy of growth and identity beyond borders and that this worldview can be critically explained as seeking alliances to communities and contexts defined by struggle. It engages the historical groundwork, philosophical influences on, and cultural ideals and values voiced through this poem by proponents of Chicanismo among its multiple forms and various representatives.

In this article, the author argues that anti-colonial Marxism has been obscured and distorted by the contemporary post-Cold War imaginary. The author analyzes the historical-political context in which the narrative of Marxism and decolonization develop during and after the Cold War. Focusing on the writings of Frantz Fanon, Amílcar Cabral, Thomas Sankara, and Ernesto “Che” Guevara, the author reconstructs the “principles” of anti-colonial Marxism, attempting to ameliorate the scholarly deficit of theoretical literature on the anti-colonial Marxist tradition. In conclusion, the author argues that the “revolutionary theory” of these thinkers remains relevant to persistent, present-day conditions of neocolonialism and capitalist imperialism, becoming increasingly relevant with the progression of catastrophic climate change.

Mexico faces a crisis of national sovereignty and independence as it struggles to establish a democracy amidst integration into the world market system and internal demands for social justice. U.S. involvement in Mexican affairs, providing military training and equipment for government troops, contributes to a state-sponsored war against civilians, namely indigenous groups and the middle and lower classes devastated by NAFTA. While resistance movements in Chiapas respond to capitalist practices and repression, Valdez argues the Mexican government minimizes them to displace its indigenousgroups and facilitate their silent annihilation. U.S. policy, the Mexican state, indigenous issues, and free trade are interconnected with Mexico’s larger society.

With 5,000 convicts, most of them lifers, working soy, corn, and cotton crops, Angola’s “penal slavery” system today eerily recalls Louisiana’s past investment in the peculiar institution. Present-day form of discipline (chain gangs and striped uniforms) also indicate that dehumanization and popular vengeance are the selling points of a new punishment order. Using “America’s worst prison” as a case study, the author charts an archeology of the penal system in the U.S. South, arguing that prison revolts, and particularly the heelslinger revolution of 1951, have historically ushered in significant if short-lived improvements in the penal system, and that activists in the free world must heed them in their efforts to bring about prison reform.

In this address, Mumia Abu-Jamal argues that a sustained commitment to revolutionary activity is no accident, that it depends upon an initial and irrevocable choice to change intolerable social conditions. The individual who makes such a choice, Abu-Jamal recognizes, is often aware of the suffering that his or her decision may entail. Citing the deliberately led lives of several revolutionaries, including Huey Newton, John Brown, and Ramona Africa, the author hopes that young people will draw inspiration from these examples by understanding the importance and continued possibility of such a choice.

Although the demographics on male versus female death-row prisoners suggest that males are criminal justice system’s primary targets, the author argues that the system still discriminates against women. Vtilizing postmodern scholarship, he argues that female prisoners are punished primarily for violating dominant norms of gender correctness.

The authors provide a concise analysis of the changing political economy of race, incarceration, political imprisonment, and execution in the U.S. criminal justice system. The article goes on to describe the circumstances surrounding the arrest, conviction, and impending execution of the black militant, Mumia Abu-Jamal. From here the discussion turns to an examination of the political efficacy of various boycott strategies and tactics, and, in closing, begins to outline a specific plan of action aimed at preventing Abu-Jamal’s execution.

Using analysis and anecdote, the author examines fifteen Puerto Rican political prisoners in the U.S. prison system and the disproportionate sentences for their actions to end U.S. colonial control over Puerto Rico. These prisoners, lacking prior felony convictions, received punitive, restrictive treatment by the U.S. justice system - despite monitoring by Amnesty International and lawsuits by attorneys. The manufacturing of sting operations to entrap prisoners in illegal activities; their isolation from families; the infliction of physical abuse and psychological torture; and the withholding of medical care, are strategically applied by U.S. courts and prisons to force the renunciation of their political beliefs.

Ever since it was annexed from northern Mexico in 1848, San Francisco has catered to tourists attracted to its good year-round weather, natural splendor, as well as its licentious entertainment industry and, since the 1950s, the buoyancy of its lesbian and gay community. The author looks at the growth and vibrancy of alternative lifestyles in San Francisco, arguing that the visibility of the queer community there is not the result of general tolerance in the Western outpost but, paradoxically, the outcome of a struggle between the lesbian, gay, and transgendered residents of the city and the repressive local, state, and federal agencies whose harassment of the alternative communities, culminating in the 1930s and 1940s in frequent bar-raids, arrests, and the “war on vice,” brought about the queer community’s politicization and grovving militancy.

Fascist, liberal democratic, or Marxist states are premised upon the violation of indigenous rights. If the transformation of U.S. society emerges where racism, sexism, ageism, militarism, classism, and corporatism are eradicated - what happens, the author asks, to the material and political rights of native peoples? Interrogating the objectives of progressive methodology and practice, which promotes liberatory rhetoric, but replicates a global colonialist system, the author calls for a nonindustrialized Fourth World. Debunking the three worlds paradigm establishes working models of decolonization,allowing the foundation of ecologically balanced socioeconomic and political organization.