Workshops

WORKSHOP: DEI in the Context of White Nationalist Resurgence

Wednesday, May 20, 6:30 – 9PM ET

Full Workshop: $150

This is a 2.5-hour Zoom workshop on DEI in the contemporary neo-segregationist era. We will collectively think through two central questions: first, how should those committed to equity and to resisting apartheid culture respond? When should we reframe our work, and when should we openly double down on our commitments to institutional anti-racism?

Secondly, we will think through anti-wokeness in its local and global dimensions, its pasts and its futures. It has been argued that capitalism needs racism, and that racism is the means through which class is organized. If so, does the campaign against wokeness do the work of policing uprisings against class exploitation? If so, how do we account for putative anti-capitalists joining the anti-woke movement? What are we to make of “identity politics”?

Full Workshop

WORKSHOP: How to Write

Sunday, May 24, 1-4 PM ET

Full Workshop: $75

Participants will bring writing in any state of completion—from a thought kernel to a near-final draft. Sessions begin with the presentation of the work and the author’s questions, followed by feedback and protected collective writing time. Workshop conversations emerge from the work itself and address procrastination and “writer’s block,” the pitfalls of losing the plot, the “tyranny of the blank page,” and how to turn one piece of writing into multiple pieces. We focus on editing like a poet: not for typographical correctness, but for rhythm and music, argument, meaning, storytelling, and the clarity of mental images.

This is a three-hour virtual (Zoom) writing workshop. It is designed for those who are allergic to bland, utilitarian forms of writing and AI slop suited to form input, five-paragraph school essays, and the transmission of stale boilerplate used to reproduce empire through cliché and vapidity.

Participants are welcome to bring work in any genre or form, provided they are prepared to write seriously and engage critically with others’ work.

PAST COURSES (Available for Groups on Request)

LIVE: Deconstructing the Police

Mondays, 8-9:30AM ET, (16-17:30 EAT)

Beginning March 2 | Join Anytime

Per Session: $40, Full 4 Session Course: $150

This 4 live session class examines the origins, evolution and ideas about policing. We consider theories and critiques of policing including those that consider policing to be disciplinary power, as an apparatus of class rule, a white supremacist instrument, a necessary democratic institution and others.

We ask where do the police come from? What do they do? Whose interests do they serve? Why do they dress like that? How are they or might they be legitimized? Why might they be necessary? Why might they be abolished? What is the relationship between the “extrajudicial,” the lynch mob and the police? What accounts for the apparent tension between policing, gender, race and class? Is policing an inherently anti-Black institution?

We will look at struggles against police power and confinement and the writings (free online links provided) of critics of the police including George Jackson, Louis Althusser, Michel Foucault, Frantz Fanon, Egon Bittner, V. I. Lenin, Ida B. Wells, Angela Davis, and Bobby Seale in an attempt to (theoretically) deconstruct the police.

Weekly Breakdown

Week 1 – Genealogies of the Constabulary
Theories on the origins of the police
The function of the police in modern society
Week 2 – Ruling Class and Ruling Class Ideas
The repressive and ideological apparatuses
Colonial governmentality: invisible and daily policing
Week 3 – Law, Race, and Confinement
Are prisons obsolete?
The apartheid “rule of law”
Week 4 – Policed Protest of Police Violence
Political demonstration or parade?
The racist police-state and its futures
Settler-police killings and the spectacle of the colonized’s death

LIVE: Fascism Before Fascism

Wednesdays, 10-11:30AM ET, (18-19:30 EAT)

Beginning March 4 | Join Anytime

Per Session: $20, Full Course: $75

“…what he cannot forgive Hitler for is … the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the ‘c—’ of India, and the ‘n—’ of Africa.”
— Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism

“…what is feared in ‘totalitarianism’ is the generalizing of the life of Adam, and of Sandra Bland… Colonist discourse, which at its heart cannot conceive of Black lives counting, is forever cautioning against the eventual ‘descent into fascism’ or about ‘the worst instincts of the base’ in a country of our charred remains.”
— Yannick Giovanni Marshall, The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon

This three-session course, “Fascism Before Fascism,” interrogates why the concept of fascism dominates our understanding of today’s political crises. While fascism may have arrived loudly in Europe, its traits — state violence, statolatry, the attempted erasure of peoples, knowledges, and cultures, jingoism, totalitarian police repression, futurism, the cultic worship of a “master” — have long defined the status quo in the colonial world.

We will ask whether fascism is even a useful term, or whether, as Langston Hughes argued, “fascism is a new name for the terror the Negro has always faced in America.” Why is “fascism” the preferred language of the present? Is it because it is legible to the lives that matter — European lives? Why has fascism become a rallying cry while colonialism — wider, older, and more devastating — has not? Does the term obscure the far older, global conditions of colonialism? If it is useful, what does it clarify — and for whom?

We will glance at key writings on fascism to examine what they meant by the term, as distinct from what we mean by colonialism and what Malcolm X meant by “catching hell.” More importantly, we will set those texts against the lived experiences of the colonized, in slave’s quarters, reservation, or project lobby, who endured similar violence without anyone sounding the alarm bells. Ultimately, we will explore what traditions of surviving and, in some cases, overturning colonialism locally can teach us about responding to the West’s latest “imperial boomerang.”

LIVE: Unthinking Patriotism

Thursdays, 8-9:30 AM ET, (16-17:30 EAT)

Beginning March 5 | Join Anytime

Per Session: $40, Full Course: $150

“No modern nation possesses a given ‘ethnic’ basis… The fundamental problem is therefore to produce the people.”
— Etienne Balibar, “The Nation-Form: History and Ideology”

If the nation is not natural, then it must be manufactured. The nation does not build its state; the state precedes and invents its nation. The project is never complete, and every effort takes the form of racial, political, and ethnic violence.

This theory-based seminar takes that manufacture as its object. Each week we will take a reading critical of nationalism, nationalization, and national identity in any form as the basis for thinking through the production of “the people,” the useful fiction of political unity, and the demonization of anarchistic, anti-colonial, and anti-fascist “divisiveness.”

Authors may include Etienne Balibar, V. I. Lenin, Ann Stoler, Partha Chatterjee, Harsha Walia, Mahmood Mamdani, Eve Tuck, Joseph Massad, Assata Shakur, and more.

LIVE: Hostiles

Fridays, 8-9:30AM ET, (16-17:30 EAT)

Beginning March 6 | Join Anytime

Per Session: $40, Full Course: $150

Hostiles: Lessons from African Indigenous Resistance

In the mid-19th century, when the caravans came in from the Swahili Coast, with a pith-helmeted white supremacist leader in front and scores of Black porters in tow en route to “penetrate the Dark Continent,” Indigenous people did not greet them with placards reading “no justice, no peace!” Instead, these “hostile natives” met them with a flurry of poisoned arrows on sight. The white-led caravan — progenitor of the colonial state — was not an entity to make demands of but an alien, invasive, threatening beast the people attempted to extricate from the land.

This four-session course examines African Indigenous resistance, especially in East Africa, not as a moment in “pre-colonial history” but as political tract. African Indigenous resistance is an advanced demonstration of a radical, anti-colonial position. Indigenous anti-colonial resistance represents a perspective unencumbered by colonial narrative — a denaturalizing of white rule and the police order, and the will to remain radically autonomous. The move away from the flurry-of-arrows position in the 20th century and beyond is neither the inevitable “onward march of civilization” nor “economic development,” but a devolution — an internalization of the logics of the colonial state and colonialism. Drawing on scenes from the colonial encounter through the establishment of the colonial state, this course reads African Indigenous hostility to all colonial things as political tract and template for anti-colonialism today.

Sessions:
Week 1 – Beware the Hostile’s Flurry of Poisoned Arrows
Week 2 – Pacification and the Expansion of Punishment
Week 3 – The Apartheid Police City
Week 4 – Mau Mau and a View to a Post-Western Future

LIVE: How NOT To Be A White Liberal

Saturdays, 11-2PM ET, (19-22:00 EAT)

Beginning March 7 | Join Anytime

Full Course: $150

It wasn’t just John Brown.

On August 5, 1848, Patrick Doyle, a white student at Centre College, helped lead seventy-five enslaved people armed with guns and crude weapons toward the Ohio River. They fought local authorities. Three Black leaders — Shadrack, Harry, and Prestley — were hanged. Doyle was sentenced to twenty years in prison. In 1860, two hundred enslaved people and five white men were said to have plotted to rise and flee to Mexico. Fifty enslaved people were executed, and the five white men were hanged. On July 29 of that same year, the Matagorda Gazette reported that a white man was burned to death in Texas for supplying pistols to the enslaved. Another, a Methodist minister, Anthony Bewley, was lynched in Fort Worth for his alleged abolitionism.

The tradition of white resistance to the white supremacist state has not always been ribbons and “I see you, I hear you” listening sessions. There has always been a radical resistance to colonialism, spurred by disdain for oppression and the clear-sighted recognition that the enslaving police-state was a direct threat to their own freedom as well.

This single, three-hour session examines the domestication of white radical opposition to the genocidal state and how such taming has been instrumental to the rise of the current white supremacist resurgence. We will begin by concentrating on passages on the white liberal from Steve Biko’s I Write What I Like to ground the conversation. From there we will confront commitments to colonialism and liberal politicians, the reflex of “critical patriotism” on stolen land, and the instinct to flatter the friendly, token Black liberal with attention in a re-staging of the “good master.” We will also consider liberalism itself as the colonist position — an ideological trap for the otherwise well-intentioned. As “white liberal” is a political character that can be inhabited across racial lines, this course is not solely for white people, but for anyone interested in examining a figure so essential to the maintenance of modern racist oppression.

INSTRUCTOR

All courses are led by Dr. Yannick Giovanni Marshall, poet and scholar in exile. He has taught Black Studies at American universities since 2017 and holds a PhD in Middle East, South Asian and African Studies and an MA in African American Studies from Columbia University. He is the author of two poetry collections and more than two dozen op-eds and feature essays, and is a recipient of a Canada Council for the Arts grant supporting the completion of his novel. His most recent book, “The End of Supplication: The Invention of Prostrate Blackness as a Replacement for the Maroon,” brings together lyrical Black radical and postcolonial traditions with historical scholarship.

*IMPORTANT: Scheduling & Cancellation Policy

Further Black courses and live sessions run based on sufficient enrollment and instructor availability.
Sessions may be canceled, rescheduled, or replaced if registration is too low or due to unforeseen circumstances.
Participants registered for a canceled session will receive notice before the scheduled start time and may attend a future session covering similar material or apply their registration toward another course.