Disturbing the peace Bohrer, Ashley J.
Peace and change,
July 2023, 2023-07-00, 20230701, Letnik:
48, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
This paper analyzes how the US state deploys the concept of “peace” against protesters in the use of legal charges related to “disturbing the peace” and other related infractions. Taking the US 2020 ...Racial Justice Uprisings as a case study, I argue that underneath the criminalization of protest under the auspices of “keeping the peace” is a central facet of state‐backed epistemic violence.
What does the development of a truly robust contemporary theory of domination require? Ashley J. Bohrer argues that it is only by considering all of the dimensions of race, gender, sexuality, and ...class within the structures of capitalism and imperialism that we can understand power relations as we find them nowadays. Bohrer explains how many of the purported incompatibilities between Marxism and intersectionality arise more from miscommunication rather than a fundamental conceptual antagonism. As the first monograph entirely devoted to this issue, »Marxism and Intersectionality« serves as a tool to activists and academics working against multiple systems of domination, exploitation, and oppression.
This article traces the centrality of capitalism in the work of three decolonial feminists: María Lugones, Sylvia Wynter, and Sayek Valencia. Elaborating on the role of capitalism in each of their ...work separately, I argue that each of these thinkers conceptualizes capitalism in a novel and urgent way, charting new directions for both theory and social movement practice. I thus argue that the decolonial feminist tradition holds crucial philosophical and historical resources for understanding the emergence of capitalism and its endurance.
This paper explores the links between international law, race and colonial capitalism through the Spanish and Portuguese Conquests of the Americas. Turning to the early modern philosophers of the ...School of Salamanca, Bohrer argues that economic theories of emergent capitalism are deeply intertwined with the racial theories of colonial conquest. Moreover, through a close reading of these texts, and in particular of the texts of Francisco de Vitoria, this paper argues that the conceptions of international trade, commerce and travel at the heart of liberal notions of international law are themselves suffused with the logics of racism, colonisation, and capitalist accumulation.
While much has been written on Six Books on the Commonwealth and his Demonmania, scholarship on Jean Bodin generally treats these as two separate areas of inquiry. Moreover, discussions of Bodin's ...economic writing, especially his Reply to Malestroit are nearly universally lacking in these discussions. In this paper, I analyze all three of these works together, arguing that Bodin's political economic perspectives on money, population, and the state form the ground for his interest in witches, sorcery, and the occult. By highlighting the historical context of rising mercantilism and the widespread peasant rebellions that contested it, I argue that Bodin's maintains a unified and coherent philosophy across his political, economic, theological, and demonological works. This materialist reinterpretation of Bodin argues that his philosophy chiefly concerns a defense of mercantile state wealth accumulation, in which witch hunting plays a crucial role of population discipline and reproductive pronatalism.
Many accounts of the contemporary structure of racism argue that we live in an age characterized by color-blind racism. In many of these accounts, color-blind racism is discussed as a distinctly ...contemporary phenomenon, brought on by the rising regime of neoliberalism in the late twentieth century. This article problematizes this periodization, arguing that the first, developed, color-blind racist philosophy was, rather, developed by sixteenth-century Spanish jurists seeking to develop an international legal framework to justify—in universal, humanist, and color-blind terms—the colonial domination and exploitation of the Caribbean and the Americas. Through a careful reading of the work of Francisco de Vitoria, I explain how the creation of a color-blind system of universal human rights—specifically, the “universal rights” to travel and commerce—operated to uphold systematic white and Euro supremacy through color-blind discourses. I thus argue that in order to understand contemporary manifestations of color-blind racism, it is necessary to understand it as a consequence and development of this earlier colonial history.
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