Negri

As a re-occupation of land immediately in front of Parliament House for six months in 1972, the Aboriginal Embassy was an inspiring demonstration of Aboriginal self-determination and land rights. Since 1972, demonstrators have maintained an Embassy on the site as part of the continuing Aboriginal struggle. Significantly, on its twentieth anniversary in 1992, Embassy protestors declared Aboriginal sovereignty just as the state-initiated formal reconciliation process was getting underway in Australia. Within mainstream public discourse in Australia, reconciliation is understood as aligned with a progressive politics. In this paper, we examine the reactionary politics of reconciliation vis-à-vis the struggle for land rights and sovereignty that the Embassy embodies. To this end we examine a debate within legal theory about the relation between ‘constituted power’ (state sovereignty) and ‘constituent power’ (democratic praxis). Following Antonio Negri, the Embassy can be understood as one manifestation of the constituent power of Aboriginal people (and their non-Aboriginal supporters) that the Australian state appropriates to shore up its own defective claim to sovereignty. We illustrate this by comparing the symbolism of the Aboriginal Embassy with that of Reconciliation Place in Canberra. We complicate this analysis by discussing how the Embassy strategically exploits the ambiguous status of Aboriginal people as citizens within and without the community presupposed by the Australian state. In doing so the Embassy makes present the possibility of a break with the colonial past that is often invoked in the politics of reconciliation but which the Australian state has failed to enact.

Back cover text: Real Social Science presents a new, hands-on approach to social inquiry. The theoretical and methodological ideas behind the book, inspired by Aristotelian phronesis, represent an original perspective within the social sciences, and this volume gives readers for the first time a set of studies exemplifying what applied phronesis looks like in practice. The reflexive analysis of values and power gives new meaning to the impact of research on policy and practice. Real Social Science is a major step forward in a novel and thriving field of research. This book will benefit scholars, researchers, and students who want to make a difference in practice, not just in the academy. Its message will make it essential reading for students and academics across the social sciences.

This article explores the practice of ‘virginity testing’ by British immigration officers in the late 1970s through the internal documents of the Home Office held at the National Archives in London. By analysing these documents, we argue that the ‘virginity testing’ controversy demonstrates the intersectionality of discrimination faced by migrant women from the Indian subcontinent attempting to enter Britain in the 1970s. Previous discussions of the practice have focused on either the dimension of ‘race’ or gender as the determining factor behind this invasive procedure, but this article shows that both dimensions are of equal importance in explaining why immigration officers undertook ‘testing’ for virginity during border control investigations. The emphasis within the immigration control system on preventing ‘bogus’ migration informed how immigration officers processed potential migrants and this framework of suspicion allowed the practice of ‘virginity testing’ to occur.

Gdy w latach siedemdziesiątych dwudziestego wieku
Michel Foucault wprowadził do swojego dyskursu termin „biopolityka”, przeszłość i przyszłość tego pojęcia
były jeszcze niejasne. U francuskiego flozofa funkcjonowało ono jako użyteczne narzędzie, za pomocą któ-
rego możliwa była genealogiczna rekonstrukcja transformacji pola społecznego i zawiązywania się nowych
relacji władzy, sukcesywnie obejmujących całe życie
jednostki, wraz z jej wymiarem cielesnym, seksualnym
czy biologicznym. Foucault nie podjął się jednak nigdy
prześledzenia genealogii samego pojęcia, którego losy
pokrywają się w dużej mierze z burzliwą historią dwudziestego wieku.
Do interesującego nas terminu odwoływali się nazistowscy projektanci czystości rasy, ekolodzy czy technocentryczni teoretycy polityki. Za pierwszego teoretyka
biopolityki należałoby uznać jednak Karola Marksa. To
on zdiagnozował i systematycznie wyłożył logikę mechanizmu, który rewolucjonizując środki produkcji i ich
organizację, podporządkowuje z wolna całe społeczeń-
stwo jednej zasadzie – zasadzie kapitału. Foucault
w Historii seksualności przyznaje otwarcie, że biowładza
była jedną z niezbędnych części składowych rozwoju
kapitalizmu. Ceną, jaką ten system gospodarczy musiał
zapłacić za swoje przetrwanie, było włączenie ciał
w kapitalistyczny aparat produkcji oraz sprzęgnięcie
rozwoju populacji z procesami ekonomicznymi. Pierwszy z członów tego procesu Marks uchwycił precyzyjnie
w tzw. Fragmencie o maszynach. Drugi został opracowany
przez Foucaulta podczas wykładów w Collège de France.
Warto jednak dodać, że w czasach, gdy śledził on związki
między biopolityką i liberalizmem, procesy ekonomiczne
oraz innowacje technologiczne, które określają naszą
współczesność, nie znajdowały się jeszcze w swoim szczytowym stadium.

In Education Out of Bounds, Lewis and Kahn argue for a new critical theory of the monster as an imaginary "other" on the margins of the human and the animal. Through a unique combination of critical, posthumanist, and educational theories, the authors engage in a surreal journey into how social movements are renegotiating the boundaries of community through expressions of posthuman love. Their cultural studies experiments both extend and challenge the critical theories of Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Paulo Freire, and others concerned with questions of teaching and learning beyond the global cultural logic of capitalism. Part philosophy of imagination, part political theory, and part pedagogical critique, this book is a twenty-first century bestiary--a catalog to navigate the monstrous world in which we live.

CONTENTS

Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
Introduction
These Monstrous Times: From Bestiary to
Posthumanist Pedagogy 1
Intermezzo
Marxism and the Bestiary 17
1  Victor, The Wild Child: Humanist Pedagogy and
the Anthropological Machine 41
2  The Reptoid Hypothesis: Exopedagogy
and the UFOther 73
3  Faery Faiths: Altermodernity and the Divine
Violence of Exopedagogy 101
Conclusion
A Monstrous Love Affair:
The Ethics of Exopedagogy 129
Notes  151
Bibliography 165
Index 179

From the inside flap:

The Boarman

This guy's no tame pig.
No even-toed ungulate or woodsy
grubber, he's the spear-skinned
hound, the boar-dog root and thistle
who kills the young and carries
mourning, hung cross a stick.
He looks at you and his Neptune
eye is a bent spoon of absinthe,
a gilled shadow that sees--then,
whorls ear and pupil into one. His
fossil jaw is the mollusk-dyed shade
of Tyrian emperor, ornate bruise pig-
ment, violet and feathered grackle.
The swine's got snout. He's all
beetle root and bone, horned with
the forest beard, a spiral of moth bristle,
victim of the crimson hog typhoid.
When he sleeps, tonight, in his bed
or sty, listen for the human moan
of dream, a purred sorrow, wet air
loosed from fang lock.
--Anne Keefe

From the Back Cover

"By engaging an encyclopedic range of figures from the philosophical tradition and popular culture, Lewis and Kahn lead us on a fascinating journey to discover the monsters that populate our posthuman world. We are confronted by horrible and fearsome beasts of violence, exploitation, and destruction, but we also recognize ourselves in creative monsters that blur the boundaries between human and nonhuman life. Most impressively, Lewis and Kahn propose paths to train the monsters of our world, a monstrous education, a pedagogy for the beautiful monsters we can become."
--Michael Hardt, co-author of Commonwealth

"Our cultural fascinations with the monstrous and its omnipresence in our contemporary Western imaginings play center-stage in this provocative exploration of a zoöphilic exopedagogy. From the feral, to the alien, to the faery, Tyson Lewis and Richard Kahn put pressure on our affective comfort zones by asking us what it means to love the monstrous amidst and within us. The answer comes through their theoretically vast and conceptually rich exploration of a radical democratic pedagogy of the unrepresentable."
--Davide Panagia, Canada Research Chair in Cultural Studies, Trent University, Co-Editor of Theory and Event, and author of The Political Life of Sensation

About the Authors

Tyson E. Lewis is an Assistant Professor of Educational Philosophy at Montclair State University. He is the co-editor of Marcuse's Challenge to Education (2008), and his articles have appeared in journals such as Rethinking Marxism, Culture, Theory, & Critique and Educational Theory. He is also author of a forthcoming book on aesthetics and education.

Richard Kahn is the author of Critical Pedagogy, Ecoliteracy, and Planetary Crisis: The Ecopedagogy Movement (Peter Lang, 2010), as well as of the forthcoming, Ecopedagogy: Educating for Sustainability in Schools and Society (Routledge, 2011); and he is the Founding Editor of Green Theory & Praxis: The Journal of Ecopedagogy. His work has been collected in a wide variety of books and journals, including The Critical Pedagogy Reader (2nd edition); The Blackwell Companion to Globalization; and Cultural Studies: Keyworks. He is Core Faculty in Education at Antioch University Los Angeles. For more information about him and an archive of many of his writings, visit: richardkahn.org."