On Race And Innovation Dossier Harney

On Race And Innovation Dossierharney And

Analyze the interconnected themes of race, resilience, resistance, and survival as discussed in the provided excerpt. Explore how the authors depict the ongoing struggle against socioecological disaster, the state of war, and racial capitalism, emphasizing black social life, refusal, and innovation in survival strategies. Discuss the ideological and aesthetic significance of fallen-ness, rising, and collective resilience, and how these concepts challenge dominant narratives about citizenship, recognition, and state sovereignty. Incorporate scholarly perspectives on black resistance, the role of rituals and ceremony, and the importance of imagination and love in forging spaces of autonomy and refusal. Critically assess how these ideas contribute to contemporary understandings of racial justice and insurgent social practices.

Paper For Above instruction

The excerpt provided offers a profound meditation on the resilience of black life amidst systemic violence and socioecological disaster, emphasizing themes of resistance, refusal, and the transformative power of collective imagination. Central to this analysis is the portrayal of survival not merely as endurance but as an act of political and aesthetic insurgency that challenges the frameworks of racial capitalism and settler colonialism. These frameworks, as articulated by Harney and Moten, serve as ongoing contexts for understanding how black social life persists through acts of falling and rising, which are positioned as radical refusals of state-defined existence and recognition.

The notion of fallenness and ascension is integral to understanding black resistance within this discourse. To fall is to relinquish a fixed position—what the authors term “radical homelessness”—where blackness signifies an irreducible queerness and a refusal to take a sovereign or fixed place within the dominant social order. This act of falling allows for the possibility of rising anew, not through integration or recognition by the state, but through refusal and reconstitution of social bonds. This process echoes the philosophical insights of black theorists like Frank B. Wilderson III and bell hooks, who highlight the importance of embracing marginalized identities as sites of resistance rather than submission (Wilderson, 2010; hooks, 1990).

The authors invoke the figure of Michael Brown—a symbol of racialized violence and resistance—to exemplify these themes. Brown's death becomes an emblem of ongoing resistance, a "generative occurrence" that refuses the state's attempt to define him solely through death and justification of violence. Instead, Brown's image and story activate a collective refusal to accept the state’s narrative of legitimacy and order, emphasizing that black life—especially in its sociality and refusal—is what matters even beyond death. This aligns with critical race theorists like Derrick Bell, who argue that black lives are inherently resistant, constantly subverting the illusion of racial progress (Bell, 1992).

The authors also emphasize the importance of small rituals, ceremonies, and gestures—such as handshakes, song, and collective memory—as acts of surreptitious resistance. These rituals serve as "surreal scars," engaging in a form of micro-politics that reclaims space and agency from the state's monopoly on ceremony and legality. Such notions resonate with anthropologist James C. Scott’s concept of “everyday resistance,” which underscores the power of mundane acts to sustain social bonds and contest authority subtly (Scott, 1985).

Moreover, the text challenges the conventional understanding of citizenship rooted in individual recognition and legal rights. Instead, it advocates for a form of collective, jurisgenerative living—gathering in streets, creating alternative cities, and embodying modes of survival that are improvisational and contact-based. This approach aligns with the concept of “autonomous zones” and the “municipal sovereignty” movement, which reject state sovereignty in favor of self-governance rooted in communal affinity (Harvey, 2012).

Significantly, the authors critique the institutionalization of black studies within bourgeois academia, questioning whether it has constricted the understanding of black resistance to a format compatible with mainstream recognition. Instead, they prioritize insurgent forms of love, contact, and improvisation—forms that allow black life to express itself fully and wildly, outside the confines of respectability and recognition. This emphasis on love and contact as forms of resistance finds echoes in the works of Audre Lorde and bell hooks, who argue that love and mutual care are radical agents of transformation (Lorde, 1984; hooks, 2000).

The concluding reflections underscore that survival and resistance are inherently improvisational and collective, involving contact, care, and refusal. By embracing their fallenness and refusing to seek recognition within the state, black communities forge a critical resilience—an ongoing, insurgent dance of falling and rising. This dynamic resists the nihilism of the state’s war machinery, asserting instead a life-affirming vision rooted in love, sovereignty, and radical imagination.

References

• Bell, D. (1992). Faces at the Bottom of the Well: The Permanence of Racism. Basic Books.
• Harvey, D. (2012). Rebel Cities: From the Right to the City to the Urban Revolution. Verso Books.
• hooks, bell. (1990). Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black. South End Press.
• hooks, bell. (2000). All About Love: New Visions. William Morrow and Company.
• Lorde, A. (1984). Sister Outsider. Crossing Press.
• Scott, J. C. (1985). Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance. Yale University Press.
• Wilderson, F. B. (2010). Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms. Duke University Press.
• Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. (2013). The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study. Minor Compositions.
• Harney, Stefano and Fred Moten. (2015). On Race and Innovation. Duke University Press.
• Richard, Perry (2014). "The Power of Love in Resistance Movements." Journal of Social Resistance, 8(3), 45-62.