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| Media type | Collection of essays |
| Pages | 166 |
| ISBN | 978-1-57027-267-7 |
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The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study is a collection of essays by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, published in 2013. The collection criticizes academia.
The Undercommons is composed of essays written by Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, alumni of Harvard University who met while at the school. [1] It was published in 2013 [1] by Autonomedia [2] and Minor Compositions. It is 166 pages long. [3] Upon publication, it was made available for free download. [2]
In 2018, The Undercommons was translated into Spanish by Cristina Rivera Garza, Marta Malo, and Juan Pablo, and published by Cooperativa Cráter Invertido and La Campechana Mental. [4]
The Undercommons is composed of six essays as well as an interview [3] with Stevphen Shukaitis. [5] The text includes criticism of academia and public policy (as a discipline). [1] While densely written, the second and fifth essays generally suggest that universities are part of a societal structure that turns "insurgents into state agents" (the professional–managerial class, in socialist terms) and upholds existing capitalist society; the societal respectability that universities provide should be rejected. The other essays consider topics such as debt and a comparison between modern transportation networks and the experience of African communities in the slave trade.
In the Chicago Tribune in 2015, Abigail Satinsky described The Undercommons as being "about how to intellectually be together," while her fiance Anthony Romero described it as "about how everyday social life, outside of academic institutions, forms a kind of intellectual practice". [6] In T in 2016, Maggie Nelson listed The Undercommons as one of her ten favorite books, describing it as a "difficult, beautiful, vertiginous, fortifying and enlivening piece of work" about concepts including "study, debt, surround, planning and the shipped." [7]
A 2018 article about Fred Moten by Jesse McCarthy in Harvard Magazine described The Undercommons as a manifesto, characterizing it as "an analysis of alienated academic labor at the contemporary American university" but also a more radical "manual for free thinking". Referring to the way the text circulated among students, adjunct professors, and professors without tenure, McCarthy compared it to samizdat. [2]
In a 2021 review in CLA Journal , Timothy Lyle described The Undercommons as "a provocative world-making project or, at the very least, a radical reorientation toward love and belonging that has deep ties to a Black radical tradition", [3] and stated that "Harney and Moten see little value in merely altering variables in an already-existing social world". [8]
In 2015, an article in New Zealand Sociology suggested that the undercommons as characterized in The Undercommons was a necessary creation as a response to student debt and financialization at the University of Auckland, using it to suggest that students "must look beyond the university for progressive alternatives." [9] Defining the "commons" as the shared wealth of the university as an institution, a "commons of knowledge and pedagogy", [10] the authors subsequently questioned its status as a commons because of the university's status as "an elite institution which is in itself based on hierarchy and privilege". [11] They stated that people who are not welcomed within the university "will seek that refuge beyond the institution’s professionalised modes of knowledge and pedagogy", in the undercommons, [12] and noted The Undercommons's characterization of the undercommons as a space that envisions "not necessarily the end of the situation but the end of a ‘world’ in which the current situation makes any sense whatsoever." [13]
A 2018 article by G. H. Greer in Brock Education analyzed the concept of the undercommons in the context of secondary school, [14] proposing that "in a high school context, the virtual space of the undercommons is created by affiliation among individuals passing out of belonging with the functions of administrative policy and into belonging with each other." [15]
In Postdigital Science and Education, a 2020 article by Richard Hall titled "Covid-19 and the Hopeless University at the End of the End of History" stated that the COVID-19 pandemic "has made real the undercommons of the University as a moment of survival and of fugitive planning". [16] Hall elaborated that academic laborers including university staff and students had generated organizing power and energy during the crisis, and questioned how those laborers would "respond to the institutional focus upon its own economic and financial welfare, over our corporeal and psychological well-being". [17]
Saint Vincent College is a private Benedictine college in Latrobe, Pennsylvania. Founded in 1846 by Boniface Wimmer, a monk from Bavaria, it is operated by the Benedictine Monks of Saint Vincent Archabbey, the first Benedictine monastery in the United States, which was also founded by Wimmer.
Mississippi College (MC) is a private Baptist university in Clinton, Mississippi. Founded in 1826, MC is the second-oldest Baptist-affiliated college or university in the United States and the oldest college or university in Mississippi.
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Marxism is a political philosophy and method of socioeconomic analysis. It uses a materialist interpretation of historical development, better known as "historical materialism," to understand class relations and social conflict. It also uses a dialectical perspective to view social transformation. Marxism originates from the works of 19th-century German philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marxism has developed over time into various branches and schools of thought, As a result, there is no single, definitive Marxist theory. Marxism has had a profound impact in shaping the modern world, with various left-wing and far-left political movements taking inspiration from it in varying local contexts.
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Germaine Greer is an Australian writer and public intellectual, regarded as one of the major voices of the second-wave feminism movement in the latter half of the 20th century.
Western University (Kansas) (1865–1943) was a historically black college (HBCU) established in 1865 (after the Civil War) as the Quindaro Freedman's School at Quindaro, Kansas, United States. The earliest school for African Americans west of the Mississippi River, it was the only one to operate in the state of Kansas.
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Fred Moten is an American cultural theorist, poet, and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is Professor of Performance Studies at New York University and Distinguished Professor Emeritus at University of California, Riverside; he previously taught at Duke University, Brown University, and the University of Iowa. His scholarly texts include The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study which was co-authored with Stefano Harney, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, and The Universal Machine. He has published numerous poetry collections, including The Little Edges, The Feel Trio, B Jenkins, and Hughson’s Tavern. In 2020, Moten was awarded a MacArthur Fellowship for "[c]reating new conceptual spaces to accommodate emerging forms of Black aesthetics, cultural production, and social life."
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Stefano Harney is an American activist and scholar. Prior to relocating to Brazil, Harney taught at Singapore Management University, but was dismissed in part for awarding all his students A grades. Since then, he has taught at Royal Holloway, University of London as well as at the European Graduate School.
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