darkmatter Journal

The central question of Escape Routes sounds quite simple: ‘How does social transformation begin?’ But the answer that the book provides is provocative and contests many dominant explanations of social change: according to the authors it is not the brimming revolutionary events occupying the imagination of the left that capture the mechanics of social transformation but the seemingly ‘insignificant occurrences of people’s daily actions’.

The hope that Cornel West wrote about in Social Text in 1984 was not destined to become policy in 2008. The ones who practiced it, within and against the grain of every imposed contingency, always had a plan.

This essay revisits Marc Bousquet’s insight that the flexibilization of labour is at the centre of the informatization of the university as it embraces the force of neoliberal regimes. This orientation of labour around processes of informatization draws on work undertaken by various researchers…

When District 9 was released…the film was an immediate box office hit…This was much to the surprise of critics, reviewers and bloggers, who seemed astonished…that a science fiction film with this impact could originate from South Africa.

When news of the M/V Maersk Alabama hijacking broke from Western media outlets, Americans scoffed at the notion of a forthcoming “War on Piracy” where the global shipping industry would be at the mercy of young Somalians dressed in second-hand…

In 1827 there was a bloody mutiny aboard the slave ship Defensor de Pedro sailing from Africa to Brazil. The mutiny was successful and the leader of the revolt, a Galician sailor turned pirate named Benito de Soto, reportedly renamed…

Earlier this summer, we were both at the Harbourfront Centre, on Toronto’s waterfront, watching performers do magic tricks for children and families. One of the performers was dressed as a pirate straight out of Walt Disney films, such as Hook^[1]…

There’s not a liberal America and a conservative America. There’s the United States of America. There’s not a black America and white America and Latino America and Asian America; there’s the United States of America.
- Barack Obama^[1]…

Embodied Experience of Race and Gender in Precarious Work

Murat Kurnaz, born in Bremen but holder of a Turkish passport, is a well-known figure in Germany, due no doubt, at least in part, to his voluminous beard. A racializing interpretation…

There are black people who believe that they treat us that way because we are black. That is not to understand history at all. The persecution of subordinate minorities or weak majorities is a commonplace of history, and you have

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