"Everything We Love Was a Criminal Act" - Felicia Denaud on the Master's Violence and Social Treason
May 15, 2023
This is part 2 of our 2-part conversation with Felicia Denaud.
In this part of the discussion Denaud talks about what the category of political prisoner might do politically, in thinking about movement building through a lens of movement defense in this moment. We also continue our conversation on her work on the Master-State Complex and thinking about the state capacity for violence and the private outsourcing of that "sovereign" power that comes about with the slave trade, plantation economy and settler colonialism. It’s worth saying that this conversation happened a week before Jordan Neely was murdered, but that case also relates deeply to these dynamics described in this conversation.
Denaud talks about the use of light and darkness in Fanon’s work and talks about his concept of social treason as a potentially more robust language to deal with those who leverage political struggles for their own personal, political and monetary gain on the backs or at odds with the social movements that propel them to levels of power and accumulation.
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Links:
Campaign to Free the Pendleton 2 // Our episode on this struggle
“Into The Clear, Unreal, Idyllic Light of the Beginning | A Will of the Night"
"we’ve barely begun to speak/scream/sing: on frankétienne’s dézafi"
Renegade Gestation: Writing Against the Procedures of Intellectual History
Cooperation Jackson's Kali Akuno on the lessons of and the ongoing struggle in Jackson MS
More on political prisoners: