new blog: whack—calzone

Nudes, 0, Walter Battiss

Vice, Blackmail, and Murder, Murder, Murder!

Like a lot of what I’ve written over the years on here has been focused on whiteness and capitalism, so the list is thick with those titles because I consistently have to return to them in my discussions. The list is alphabetically organized, for the most part.

Michelle Alexander. The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness

Theodore W Allen. The Invention of the White Race (Volume One: Racial Oppression and Social Control); The Invention of the White Race, Volume Two: The Origins of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America

James Baldwin. The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985

Eduardo Bonilla-Silva. Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States

Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic. Critical Race Theory: An Introduction, Second Edition

Lisa Delpit. Other People’s Children;The Skin That We Speak

Richard Dyer. White: Essays on Race and Culture

William Faulkner. Go Down Moses; A Light in August

Sylvia Federici. The Reproduction of Labor-Power in the Global Economy, Marxist Theory and the Unfinished Feminist Revolution; Caliban and the Witch: Women, the Body and Primitive Accumulation; Wages Against Housework (1975); Feminism and the Politics of the Commons (2010); The Unfinished Feminist Revolution; The Means of Reproduction: Interview with Silvia Federici By Lisa Rudman and Marcy Rein, from Race, Poverty & the Environment, Vol 19, No 2 (2012)

Karen E Fields and Barbara J Fields. Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life

Paolo Friere. Pedagogy of the Oppressed

bell hooks. killing rage: Ending Racism; Black Looks: Race and Representation; Where We Stand: Class Matters

Nella Larsen. Passing

George Lipsitz. The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, Revised and Expanded Edition

Ian Haney Lopez. White by Law 10th Anniversary Edition: The Legal Construction of Race

Karl Marx. Capital, Volume One; Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts; Value, Price, and Profit.

Monica McDermott. Working-Class White: The Making and Unmaking of Race Relations

Manning Marable. How Capitalism Underdeveloped Black America: Problems in Race, Political Economy, and Society; Race, Reform, and Rebellion: The Second Reconstruction and Beyond in Black America, 1945-2006, Third Edition

Dana D Nelson. National Manhood: Capitalist Citizenship and the Imagined Fraternity of White Men (New Americanists)

Arthur Miller. Death of a Salesman // Eugene O’Neill. The Iceman Cometh

David R Roediger. The Wages of Whiteness: Race and the Making of the American Working Class

Lillian Smith. Killers of the Dream

Matt Wray. Not Quite White: White Trash and the Boundaries of Whiteness

Richard Wright. Native Son // Ralph Ellison. Invisible Man [read together]

Richard Wright. 12 Million Black Voices

I read in a lot of anarchist theory and especially like Kropotkin and Malatesta, but The Anarchist FAQ is pretty great reading with lots of citations for further reading (link).I write a lot using all sorts of stuff I studied in undergrad for my philosophy degree, for my grad work in history and literature and theory. It’s a little too much to list. I can go into this more, if you like, in a different response. But I’ll try to summarize:

I read in Deleuze and Derrida, and related.

I read a lot of poetry and fiction, and theory-related to both.

Judith Butler and Donna Haraway certainly figure into the way I think about things.

Any of the bell hooks’ writing about love.

I was influenced by Frankfurt School writers while at university, esp Walter Benjamin, but the group in general. Benjamin remains important to me. I think Adorno is over-rated (and has a lot of white boy fans who are closet cultural conservatives) but I like reading him. Anyway, the FS writers were an introduction to theory for me in my early twenties. No internet yet and I saw the famous anthology of their work with the green cover and white text (image). I picked up by chance. I used to walk through the library shelves in the sections with the subjects I liked and grab whatever caught my eye. That FS anthology caught my eye.

The same thing happened with William Burroughs prior to university wandering through the stacks in a library and picked up Queer and Junkie and Wild Boys. The library stack exploring was so important to me.  

I read a lot in philosophy and phenomenology, esp. So the following list of writers is influential to me (alphabetically listed): Hannah Arendt, Roland Barthes, Henri Bergson, Maurice Blanchot, Simone De Beauvoir, Rene Descartes, Michel Foucault, Freud and Lacan, Heidegger and Husserl, Michel Henry, Luce Irigary, Kant and Kierkegaard, Kristeva, Jean-Luc Marion, Merleau-Ponty, Nietzsche, Plato, Paul Ricoeur, Richard Rorty (I guess), Wittgenstein.

Shout out for Spinoza and Leibniz