Toward Terra Incognita: A Critical Look at Cultural Essentialism, Nationalism, and Body Policing

“I feel nationalism has escaped the grave long enough. With this text I seek to instigate and encourage an anti-authoritarian flame that once and for all sets fire to its anarcho-confused, stumbling corpse. I also encourage anarchists to question the notion of any said thing belonging exclusively to any said culture, to question the notion that every individual identifying with said culture claims to own it, and to question the authority of whoever it is making universal claims on behalf of others in the first place.

I say normalize dreadlocks across all racial categories; rebel against work – especially the type of work that seeks to conform us to beauty standards of marketing and production! I say dismantle white supremacy by making whiteness as insubordinate to colonial order as every black and brown youth who light up precincts like bonfires to freedom!

I propose an anarchy that moves beyond the politics of embracing assigned identity, toward de-territorializing one’s body and destroying identity-based occupation all together. At the intersection of anti-colonial and anti-authoritarian praxis is a nihilist critique of any and all cultural ownership of one’s body, becoming a dangerous space of terra incognita.”

Toward Terra Incognita_A Critical Look at Cultural Essentialism, Nationalism, and Body Policing pdf

Cultural Appropriation is a Toxic Concept

From back cover:

“I have faced racism — it is a fact of my life as a woman of colour. But I refuse to be on the cultural appropriation bandwagon — I find it nearly insulting that while I deal with people’s harsh judgment for the colour of my skin, that while I have faced actual physical violence for it — there are people who care so goddamn much about who gets to wear henna on their hands and who doesn’t. How about making this world a safer place for me? How about not deciding on my behalf what could offend me?…

…I am asking you to look at the concept of cultural appropriation with a critical lens. Ask yourself if the censorship and banning of words/arts/crafts/food by people in power is something that provides a viable solution to the problem of structural racism and inequality here. For instance, when black people are mocked for wearing dreadlocks, while white people wearing dreadlocks are seen as cool and edgy — that is absofuckinglutely racism. But is the solution then to instruct white people (or non­black people of colour) to not wear dreadlocks? Will white people or non­black PoC stopping to wear dreadlocks stop the discrimination and mockery that black people get for wearing dreadlocks? The censorship of freedom of expression lies at the core of this concept, and the parallels it has with the blasphemy laws of the country I come from are really rather striking.”

Cultural Appropriation is a Toxic Concept pdf

Cult of Resentment: How Identity Politics Fails Everyone

From back cover:

“Individuals are nearly as unique as their fingerprints might suggest. Attempts to lump large swathes of people together is often based on ones own limited ability, or willingness, to know and genuinely understand other unique individuals on an individual level. This mechanism has served as the underpinnings of some of the most brutal ideological manifestations in all of history.”

Cult of Resentment_How Identity Politics Fail Everyone pdf

Another Word For White Ally is Coward


“The fear that we would like to critique here is the fear of forming one’s own opinion, the fear of developing one’s own analysis and then acting upon it. We do find fault in this fear of the White Ally. To be a White Ally is to stop thinking for one’s self, to blindly follow a leader based on no other criteria than their identity. At least this is what is demanded of us by those who would make us into Allies.”

Another_Word_For_White_Ally_Is_Coward pdf

Setting Fire to The Church of Social Justice: 3 Critiques of Identity Politics, Call-Out Culture & Other Forms of Statist Thinking

A multi-perspective, thorough and in-depth look at identity politics, call-out culture and the accountability process and their relationship to church and state.

Published by Dandelion Distro ( www.facebook.com/dandeliondistro )

Setting Fire to the Church of Social Justice pdf

Against Innocence: Gender, Race & The Politics of Safety

Text from back cover:

“Ultimately, our appeals to innocence demarcate who is killable and rapable, even if we are trying to strategically use such appeals to protest violence committed against one of our comrades. […] When we rely on appeals to innocence, we foreclose a form of resistance that is outside the limits of law, and instead ally ourselves with the State.”

Against Innocence pdf

An Obituary for Identity Politics

From back cover:

“Rather than taking aim at identity itself and the apparatus maintaining this paradigm, energy is spent tearing one another down, ignoring the complexity of individual uniqueness, and playing the State’s role of defining each other based on membership to identity categories. Embracing a particular identity only reaffirms that identity’s existence as a ‘universal truth’ – and therefore, by the colonial intentions of assigned identity, the servitude and enslavement of some to others as a universal truth as well…

…I refuse to participate in upholding enslavement as a condition of my existence, and therefore these ‘truths’ are nothing more than political works of fiction…

…These ‘truths’ are the social constructs of control, keeping the life of rebellion shackled in a cold well of reform.”

An Obituary for Identity Politics pdf

From Identity to Individuality: A Nihilist’s History in Leftism

From back cover:

“Rather than adhering to these strict rules, we felt free to communicate our individual desires…

…My friends of all different socially constructed identities – by race, gender, sex, etc – could behave as they wished, without being concerned that they were fulfilling stereotypes or betraying their identities.

It’s far from utopian, but as leftism continues to demonstrate, utopia is impossible without  authoritarianism.”

From Identity to Individuality_ A Nihilist’s History in Leftism pdf