The UnderCommons Collective was imaged, literally, around the kitchen table. It is the outcome of entangled thoughts on race, postcoloniality and capital, with speculative fiction, quantum physics, and ways of knowing and doing not subjected to the rule of universal reason.  It is the answer to the question of how can the intellectual occupy the space between poet and madman. This publishing collective is an experiment set amid and apart from neoliberal practices wherein sterilisation of thought is lucrative business and from autonomist practices that have ceded themselves a peculiar racial valence.It is an opportunity to share musings, urgent and immanent, across disperse(d) formations, that deprioritize lines and planes for scatters. In this, the collective moves towards constituting the scene for what might be (re-)imaginations of knowing and living. The work(s) of the collective is/are a reflection of the inherent counter-disciplinarity of radical thinking. Together, they trace the political as constituted across the various modes of the creative and the material, that is, the ideational, the emotional, and the spiritual. As a group of academics and artists, we anticipate the commons through the creation and production of the ‘unsaleable’, bearing in mind its potency not only in anti-capitalist and anti-colonial practice but, more importantly, in redressing the violences that constitute racial existence.In so doing, the collective performs the reimagining of the commons (autonomia)  necessary under the rule of global (racial) capital.

MISSION

The UnderCommons is a collective composed by academics, artists, and activists - many of us all three at once - whose practices constitute what we are calling The Underground University. We envision our work as a manifestation of the autonomous spirit actualized in the struggles against global capital, in particular its deadly attack on the public university and its mission.  Towards the goal of maintaining, expanding, and radicalizing the aims of critical thought and radical political engagement, our publishing initiatives, books and the magazine, have been designed to create an open-ended space for ongoing conversations around themes they raise. The revenues from book sales will be used to support students, departments, and interdisciplinary programs who suffer the most from recent budget cuts.

THE COLLECTIVE

Denise Ferreira da Silva

Rashné Limki

Mark A. Harris

Pedro Daher

Fred Moten

Stefano Harney

Maryam Salehi