What we’re reading
Decolonisation has lost its way. Originally a struggle to escape the West’s direct political and economic control, it has become a catch-all idea, often for performing ‘morality’ or ‘authenticity’; it suffocates African thought and denies African agency.
Olúfẹ́mi Táíwò fiercely rejects the indiscriminate application of ‘decolonisation’ to everything from literature, language and philosophy to sociology, psychology and medicine. He argues that the decolonisation industry, obsessed with cataloguing wrongs, is seriously harming scholarship on and in Africa. He finds ‘decolonisation’ of culture intellectually unsound and wholly unrealistic, conflating modernity with coloniality, and groundlessly advocating an open-ended undoing of global society’s foundations. Worst of all, today’s movement attacks its own cause: ‘decolonisers’ themselves are disregarding, infantilising and imposing values on contemporary African thinkers.
This powerful, much-needed intervention questions whether today’s ‘decolonisation’ truly serves African empowerment. Táíwò’s is a bold challenge to respect African intellectuals as innovative adaptors, appropriators and synthesisers of ideas they have always seen as universally relevant.
"The Professional Managerial Class is a stratum of any complex capitalist society that is made up of credentialed elites who have influential positions in the creative professions and liberal industries, academia, government, journalists, the NGO and foundation world, and corporate America.
Does this sound too vague? They are white-collar salaried workers who had to get professional certification to do what they do. At the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, they made up a small part of the population and were a mediating class between workers who labored with their bodies in unspeakable conditions and the capitalists who owned factories, oil wells, mines, steel mills, etc. and who were known as robber barons. In 1900 in the U.S., there were many more family farms and small business owners. Today, that part of the population is much smaller, and the PMC is much larger: credentialed elites are experts, engineers, doctors and MBAs. They manage other people and their wealth and produce content, but the PMC cannot live on the interest of their wealth alone. They own a lot of American assets, but they have to go to work. They make up now about 25% of the workforce, but they exert an undue amount of power over culture and ideology. Academia is a place where we train the Professional Managerial Classes. In orthodox Marxism, they would be called petit bourgeois. John and Barbara Ehrenreich, who created the concept of the PMC, noted in 1977 that they were a new class that had emerged in the U.S. and that they had taken over progressive politics and had interests that were increasingly divergent from those of working-class people.
From acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips, a meditation on what we must give up to feel more alive.
To give up or not to give up?
The question can feel inescapable but the answer is never simple.
Giving up our supposed vices is one thing; giving up on life itself is quite another. One form of self-sacrifice feels positive, something to admire and aspire to, while the other is profoundly unsettling, if not actively undesirable.
There are always, it turns out, both good and bad sacrifices, but it is not always clear beforehand which is which. We give something up because we believe we can no longer go on as we are. In this sense, giving up is a critical moment—an attempt to make a different future.
In On Giving Up, the acclaimed psychoanalyst Adam Phillips illuminates both the gaps and the connections between the many ways of giving up and helps us to address the central question: What must we give up in order to feel more alive?
“Identity politics” is everywhere, polarizing discourse from the campaign trail to the classroom and amplifying antagonisms in the media, both online and off. But the compulsively referenced phrase bears little resemblance to the concept as first introduced by the radical Black feminist Combahee River Collective. While the Collective articulated a political viewpoint grounded in their own position as Black lesbians with the explicit aim of building solidarity across lines of difference, identity politics is now frequently weaponized as a means of closing ranks around ever-narrower conceptions of group interests.
But the trouble, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò deftly argues, is not with identity politics itself. Through a substantive engagement with the global Black radical tradition and a critical understanding of racial capitalism, Táíwò identifies the process by which a radical concept can be stripped of its political substance and liberatory potential by becoming the victim of elite capture—deployed by political, social, and economic elites in the service of their own interests.
Táíwò’s crucial intervention both elucidates this complex process and helps us move beyond a binary of “class” vs. “race.” By rejecting elitist identity politics in favor of a constructive politics of radical solidarity, he advances the possibility of organizing across our differences in the urgent struggle for a better world.
Author Ethan Watters thinks that America is "homogenizing the way the world goes mad." In Crazy Like Us: The Globalization of the American Psyche, he describes how American definitions and treatments of mental illness have spread to other cultures around the world.
"[McDonald's] golden arches do not represent our most troubling impact on other cultures," Watters writes. "Rather, it is how we are flattening the landscape of the human psyche itself. We are engaged in the grand project of Americanizing the world's understanding of the human mind."
Watters talks with NPR's Rebecca Roberts about the cultural diversity of mental illness — and how that diversity is quickly disappearing.
Between Sanity and Madness: Mental Illness from Ancient Greece to the Neuroscientific Era traces the extensive array of answers that various groups have provided to questions about the nature of mental illness and its boundaries with sanity.
Does this sound too vague? They are white-collar salaried workers who had to get professional certification to do what they do. At the beginning of the 20th century in the United States, they made up a small part of the population and were a mediating class between workers who labored with their bodies in unspeakable conditions and the capitalists who owned factories, oil wells, mines, steel mills, etc. and who were known as robber barons. In 1900 in the U.S., there were many more family farms and small business owners. Today, that part of the population is much smaller, and the PMC is much larger: credentialed elites are experts, engineers, doctors and MBAs. They manage other people and their wealth and produce content, but the PMC cannot live on the interest of their wealth alone. They own a lot of American assets, but they have to go to work. They make up now about 25% of the workforce, but they exert an undue amount of power over culture and ideology. Academia is a place where we train the Professional Managerial Classes. In orthodox Marxism, they would be called petit bourgeois. John and Barbara Ehrenreich, who created the concept of the PMC, noted in 1977 that they were a new class that had emerged in the U.S. and that they had taken over progressive politics and had interests that were increasingly divergent from those of working-class people.
Her new book, “Mad World: The Politics of Mental Health,” released by Pluto Press, is a rigorous dissection of mental health as a profoundly political issue. In its pages, she situates our understanding of mental health within the larger constellations of capitalism, systemic racism, disability justice, and queer liberation, among other frameworks.
“Mad World” is a revolutionary manifesto, probing into the possibilities of empathic care and a reimagining of what we mean by mental well-being. Critics have lauded it as a “radical antidote” to the prevailing paradigms that dictate our attitudes toward mental health. It serves as an indispensable primer for those seeking to subvert the status quo in their respective fields.
The civil rights era is largely remembered as a time of sit-ins, boycotts, and riots. But a very different civil rights history evolved at the Ionia State Hospital for the Criminally Insane in Ionia, Michigan.
The Protest Psychosis, psychiatrist and cultural critic Jonathan Metzl tells the shocking story of how schizophrenia became the diagnostic term overwhelmingly applied to African American protesters at Ionia-for political reasons as well as clinical ones. Expertly sifting through a vast array of cultural documents, Metzl shows how associations between schizophrenia and blackness emerged during the tumultuous decades of the 1960s and 1970s-and he provides a cautionary tale of how anxieties about race continue to impact doctor-patient interactions in our seemingly postracial America.