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The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study by Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, J. Jack Halberstam
chicana99's review against another edition
challenging
informative
reflective
medium-paced
4.0
Reimagining our world for equity through projects & revolutions & study is something I am interested in as somebody interested in design, eco-anarchism and the land back movements. This book articulated several barriers and limitations my family has collectively experienced- whilst acknowledging the realms of possibilities and powers that are found (existing within us, around us, in spaces, texts, in between, in the way we transform things) while living, while studying. Where the text is drawing the scaffolding around the destitution of the university is a section I found especially compelling. Growing up in America of mixed heritage, immigrating to Aotearoa- reflecting and talking on the subjects this book draws out, with my family, has opened up so much room for discussion, imagination and perspective.
This book is like a smush of academia, art and jazz with lots of revolutionary compassion + sparks + tools. I wound up watching "Praxis 10/13: The Undercommons"; a panel discussion on Youtube, when the book was feeling particularly opaque (posted by Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought) and enjoyed that greatly, so want to offer it to you, too.
This book is like a smush of academia, art and jazz with lots of revolutionary compassion + sparks + tools. I wound up watching "Praxis 10/13: The Undercommons"; a panel discussion on Youtube, when the book was feeling particularly opaque (posted by Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought) and enjoyed that greatly, so want to offer it to you, too.
ralowe's review against another edition
5.0
i feel like i had placed my self under advisement to read this book right away for about a year before i actually did. maybe it was two years. i should be ashamed of myself. i had the digital download but this is the kind of book you have to feel in the world with the paper and i lucked upon a copy that allows that. this book is rather audacious in its insistence that blackness should be a resource to any political action in our global present (code for a very gentle read on the occupy paroxysm and other associated social events within and without trickle-down academia). that examining the predicament of black people provides necessary insight into the empire you're fighting. this came off as poetically stretched in a way that teased contrivance and will merit and obtain later re-reading, re-absorption. of course i keep being like "who's this stefano guy?" and it should be little doubt that i was there for fred mostly. the first thing that pops up for the other guy is a page placing him in singapore. i've been told he's really out of the uk. so i have this disjunctive image of a containerized hold heading for singapore probably from london piloted by captain phillips. so this guy is naturally on my reading list, i mean if fred likes him, heck! it's something to tide you over till moten's follow-up to in the break, but not quite as expansive as that longed-for fantasized book would have to be.
jckmd's review against another edition
Borderline unreadable. Baffled at all the rave reviews. Some of the most insufferably indulgent academic word salad I have come across in recent memory. It's not that the ideas aren't important or incisive, it's that they're buried beneath exhausting, pretentious diction and sentences that get so lost in themselves they don't even seem to realize they've ended. It is not anti-intellectual to call out excessively arcane stuff like this, but rather pro-inclusion; if your arguments really are universal, they should also be coherent and accessible. And if accessibility was the goal, the authors failed miserably. Maybe hire a copyeditor next time?
melirod0699's review against another edition
5.0
“We owe each other the indeterminate. We owe each other everything.”
Absolutely required reading for anyone who works in education and who has attended the university, but also so foundational for thinking that occurs, as the text informs us, Necessarily OUT of the university. Lots to think about here, about how to be IN something without being OF it. The Undercommons as a constant, the way the structure of the university shapes and defines socialization around carcerality, criminality, and education . Absolutely stellar.
Absolutely required reading for anyone who works in education and who has attended the university, but also so foundational for thinking that occurs, as the text informs us, Necessarily OUT of the university. Lots to think about here, about how to be IN something without being OF it. The Undercommons as a constant, the way the structure of the university shapes and defines socialization around carcerality, criminality, and education . Absolutely stellar.
lizahl's review against another edition
4.0
Either the best or worst thing for me to have read just now, on the edge of returning to the university in Fall 2020. More complicated than that, of course. I will be processing many of these ideas for a long time, I think. Policy & study & planning in particular -- though all of the ideas here are tied up in one another.