Africana Studies and Research Center
310 Triphammer Road,
Multipurpose Room
Anarchism: no gods, no masters. Enough with religion and the state.
This workshop makes an additional demand: no peripheries.
The diffusionist line – anarchism was in areas outside of Europe an import and a script to be mimicked – has faced the challenge in recent years of research that reveals anarchism in its plural origins and sheer multiplicity of local variants. In this sense one might go so far as to argue that early twentieth century anarchists were—in their emphasis on the world as their home, in their peripatetic radicalism, in the fact that anarchist perspectives could be born from (rather than prior to) migration, in their critique of the constant efforts to divide and hierarchize people—the first postcolonial theorists. To reflect on the histories and cultures of the anti-statist mutual aid movements of the last century, then, will be one aim of this conference. It has a second aim that dovetails with the first: the re-examination of the historical relationships between anarchism and communism, without starting from the position of sectarian difference (Marxism versus anarchism). Rather, we will look at how anarchism and communism intersected; how the insurgent Left could appear—and in fact was—much more ecumenical, capacious, and eclectic than frequently portrayed; and that such capaciousness is a hallmark of anarchist practice, which is pre-figurative in its politics and anti-hierarchical and anti-dogmatic in its ethics.
