In recent years, scholars have offered two different accounts of opacity's uses as counter to transparency's violence in Édouard Glissant's oeuvre. One group describes opacity as offering temporary relief within extant conditions. Another describes opacity as the foundation for more liberatory governances and socialities. This essay confirms both accounts but adds that the uses of both opacity and transparency depend on the relation in which each emerges. On this basis, the article argues that consenting relations afford both opacity and transparency the potential to create a more radical alternative to the present. This essay returns to the French of Glissant's Caribbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation and to translations of the word consentir to foreground relation's partial constitution of opacity and transparency in Glissant's work. To clarify and elaborate consent and its mutual constitution with coercion, this article then turns to Gayl Jones's Corregidora (1976), a novel whose form foregrounds the ways in which relation partially determines the uses of the other's opacity or transparency. The article provides a clearer account of the kinds of representation — transparent or opaque — valorized in Jones's novel. It also clarifies Glissant's account of consent, relation, and the function of opacity and transparency.

Platforms like Amazon, Google, Uber, Apple iOS, and Pinduoduo currently coordinate planetary activity on a massive scale. Critical theorists concerned with labor, education, incarceration, sex, migration, or life on earth must reckon with the global dominance of platforms. Expert insight comes from the twenty‐year‐old field of platform studies, which documents, explains, and tackles the rise of corporate platforms. However, platform studies fails to incorporate the insights of colonial theory. This article opens up an urgent conversation between platform scholars and colonial theorists by offering a primer to the field and then arguing that the East India Company (EIC) fits the definition of a platform. While platforms are theorized as new, neoliberal inventions, this article argues that platforms are a continuation of long‐standing colonial business as usual. The EIC features every characteristic of a platform: a corporation that fostered and facilitated trade within its ecosystem, administering law, collecting taxes, sentencing life and death, and cultivating obedience in order to streamline and stabilize the profits—as well as cultures of radical subversion and resistance. Using the example of the EIC in British Malaya, this article models an anticolonial platform studies that zooms out four hundred years to understand the history behind how modern platform granular classification systems invigorate ethnic conflict, how platform automated ranking systems galvanize identity politics, and how platform grammars always segment populations into exploitable and condemnable differences. The objective of this article is to engage colonial and platform scholars, together, to tackle the crises posed by modern corporate platforms.

Sophie Lewis coined anthrogenesis as “the production of human beings” and, using this unfamiliar term, calls for the radical reimagining of gestational politics, as an alternative to liberal feminism's focus on choice. Revivisng Shulamith Firestone, for feminists like Lewis and Helen Hester this reimagination takes shape within a techno‐utopic communist framework. While enticing, such a framework relies on a modernist understanding of institutions that has been critiqued by decolonial and abolitionist theory and risks undervaluing the fugitive underground work of radical care and mutual aid that already exists today. In this article, two strategies at play in the contemporary Marxist reimagination of anthrogenesis are differentiated: (1) a communist approach focusing primarily on fundamentally restructuring the commons of reproductive care on a grand societal scale and (2) an “undercommons” approach that aims to fugitively abolish public institutions through small‐scale mutual aid and radical care practices that are already constituting otherworlds of reproductive justice through transnational coalitions. Highlighting abortion and birth networks in the Netherlands (the Abortion Network Amsterdam and the Geboortebeweging, a loose collaborative network of midwives) who transnationally and fugitively care for anthrogenesis, the second strategy is proposed as the more promising one for the anthrogenesis of human beings otherwise. The author develops another possible outcome of Firestone's revolutionary thought: not a gestational communism but an anarcho‐abolitionist fugitive undercommoning of anthrogenesis, through the work Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, Marquis Bey, and Chiara Bottici.

Spectacle is central to protest efficacy, yet the term performance has a history of being used pejoratively to discredit both protestors and their causes. This deflects analysis from the ubiquitous tactical performances enacted by institutional representatives themselves. Following Cape Town mayor Dan Plato's 2020 dismissal of an eviction resistance on the grounds that it was a “staged act,” this article identifies various repertoires of performative intimidation enacted by local authorities against South African land occupiers during 2019–22. These staged acts were strategically performed with a dual audience in mind: one direct and the other, necessarily, oblique. In recasting such repertoires as rational actions in response to radical acts, municipal officials control the means of identifying and critiquing cynical public performance.

This interview with the intellectual historian Gary Wilder explores the philosophical and methodological theses in his overall work, particularly focusing on his 2022 book Concrete Utopianism. The conversation explores such themes as relationships among solidarity, filiality, and freedom; the forces and fears of normative claims; the definition of an image; and the place of the flesh in a critical Marxism, among others. This is the second conversation in a series initiated by Salma Shamel (PhD candidate at New York University) with anthropologists, historians, philosophers, and media theorists whose work is located at the intersection of intellectual history, critical theory, and historical change.

Abstract Stanley Aronowitz was the author's professor in the PhD program in sociology at the City University of New York Graduate Center and influenced her intellectual development. This memorial essay presents reflections on the author's years working with Stanley as a student, and six ways that his influences were generalizable beyond, but also including, her particular experiences.

Abstract Although Wikipedia has a widely studied gender gap, almost no research has attempted to discover if it has a comparable race and ethnicity gap among its editors or its articles. No such comprehensive analysis of Wikipedia's editors exists because legal, cultural, and social structures complicate surveying them about race and ethnicity. Nor is it possible to precisely measure how many of Wikipedia's biographies are about people from indigenous and nondominant ethnic groups, because most articles lack ethnicity information. While it seems that many of these uncategorized biographies are about white people, these biographies are not categorized by ethnicity because policies require reliable sources to do so. These sources do not exist for white people because whiteness is a social construct that has historically been treated as a transparent default. Thus, these biographies cannot be categorized as white because whiteness is unverifiable in Wikipedia's white epistemology. In the absence of a precise analysis of the gaps in its editors or its articles, I present a quantitative and qualitative analysis of these structures that prevent such an analysis. I examine policy discussions about categorization by race and ethnicity, demonstrating persistent anti-Black racism. Turning to Wikidata, I reveal how the ontology of whiteness shifts as it enters the database, functioning differently than existing theories of whiteness account for. While the data does point toward a significant race and ethnicity gap, the data cannot definitively reveal meaning beyond its inability to reveal quantitative meaning. Yet the unverifiability of whiteness is itself an undeniable verification of Wikipedia's whiteness.

Abstract The US-Mexico borderlands used to host a wide range of natural and social environments, many of which have become irreversibly altered by the structures built to reinforce geopolitical boundaries. To rethink the form and purpose of these borderlands is a political objective of utmost importance, yet most future thinking about the border has remained restricted to imagining new versions of border walls euphemistically rebranded as “sustainable” alternatives. This essay analyzes the limitations of popular design projects that effectively greenwash the securitization imperative of the nation-state. It then turns to a lesser-known speculative project that reimagines the borderlands from the perspective of underground tunnels through a multimedia model. The essay draws on the insights of critical environmental media studies to illustrate the affordances of specific media forms for articulating future worlds with a greater focus on care. This analysis proposes ruinous speculation as an affirmative form of future thinking that orients toward infrastructures that enable human and nonhuman worlds to thrive and away from infrastructures that reinforce the violent hierarchies of the geopolitical divide.

Abstract How do protests and security regimes engage each other on the question of difference? This question frames this essay's ethnographic portrayal of the expression of dissent and political claims in a borderland site of national security and the Indian security state's management of such dissent to reinforce its legitimacy as a liberal democracy. Border residents in eastern India, predominantly Muslim or depressed caste, are minority citizens. By closely reading the terms through which they articulate their claims and humiliations and how they are rendered suspect, subordinated, and othered from fulsome democratic rights and citizenship, this essay offers a portrait of the slow violence of affective rule in a place of “no conflict.” Turning away from spectacular instances of militarism and state violence, this essay illuminates the affective force of militarization whose goal is to disable critique and segment minority citizens into subordinated inclusion. It asks how collective political action might be heard and endure in such constrained conditions. This specific locus is instructive for the logic of contradistinction as a mode of security rule more widely. It demonstrates that the intersection of gender and religious identity is not a “dimension” of contemporary national security regimes but must be seen as foundational to their constitution and legitimacy.