Login
In a decrepit house in São Paulo lives a woman who many people call a bruxa (the witch). As a blockbuster Brazilian podcast recently revealed, Margarida Maria Vicente de Azevedo Bonetti is wanted by U.S. authorities for her treatment of a maid named Hilda Rosa dos Santos, whom Margarida and her husband more or less enslaved in the Washington, D.C. area:
In early 1998—19 years after moving to the United States—dos Santos left the Bonettis, aided by a neighbor she’d befriended, Vicki Schneider. Schneider and others helped arrange for dos Santos to stay in a secret location, according to testimony Schneider later gave in court. (Schneider declined to be interviewed for this story.) The FBI and the Montgomery County adult services agency began a months-long investigation.
When social worker Annette Kerr arrived at the Bonetti home in April 1998—shortly after dos Santos had moved—she was stunned. She’d handled tough cases before, but this was different. Dos Santos lived in a chilly basement with a large hole in the floor covered by plywood. There was no toilet, Kerr, now retired, said in a recent interview, pausing often to regain her composure, tears welling in her eyes. (Renê Bonetti later acknowledged in court testimony that dos Santos lived in the basement, as well as confirmed that it had no toilet or shower and had a hole in the floor covered with plywood. He told jurors that dos Santos could have used an upstairs shower but chose not to do so.)
Dos Santos bathed using a metal tub that she would fill with water she hauled downstairs in a bucket from an upper floor, Kerr said, flipping through personal notes that she has kept all these years. Dos Santos slept on a cot with a thin mattress she supplemented with a discarded mat she’d scavenged in the woods. An upstairs refrigerator was locked so she could not open it.
“I couldn’t believe that would take place in the United States,” Kerr said.
During Kerr’s investigation, dos Santos recounted regular beatings she’d received from Margarida Bonetti, including being punched and slapped and having clumps of her hair pulled out and fingernails dug into her skin. She talked about hot soup being thrown in her face. Kerr learned that dos Santos had suffered a cut on her leg while cleaning up broken glass that was left untreated so long it festered and emitted a putrid smell.
She’d also lived for years with a tumor so large that doctors would later describe it variously as the size of a cantaloupe or a basketball. It turned out to be noncancerous.
She’d had “no voice” her whole life, Kerr concluded, “no rights.” Traumatized by her circumstances, dos Santos was “extremely passive” and “fearful,” Kerr said. Kerr had no doubt she was telling the truth. She was too timid to lie.
Read more in this series: Cotton Capital
More and more institutions are commissioning investigations into their historical links to slavery – but the fallout at one Cambridge college suggests these projects are meeting growing resistance
Continue reading...Well Colombia have agreed to publish a second dark, dark, intense book. Clearly they couldn't get enough of Dark Ecology, the Wellek Lectures that I gave in the lineage of Cixous and Balibar, and now they're going to work with me to get this one out for Earth Day 2024.
It's a book about slavery, racism, capitalism, AI, ecology, despair, religion and mysticism. It's freaking AWESOME. I wasn't quite ready to say stuff like that out loud when I last worked for Columbia.
Because Columbia have done this, I'm now committing to them. I've been living my life waiting for approval and love in so many ways and I am DONE. Love is a thing you DO not a thing you wait for. That phenomenology cashes out to being a theater critic and in the end, all the plays are bad. Because you're waiting for them to be bad. I got really good at getting up and leaving the theater no matter where the play was at: I could see the writing on the wall. So at least there's that. But that is still...that.
So this is my proclamation to the world. I'm with Columbia now. Like how my best buddy Jeff Kripal (the X Men actors have to read his work when they're on set) is with Chicago. It's a great thing. I kept thinking when I found that out, he must have a lot of space in his soul to think, he doesn't have to keep waiting for people to say yes like me, who acts like they're a character in a Jane Austen novel.
That never occurred to me until this week, when Columbia accepted Hell. But it had occurred to me in my personal life, in part because my mum's family traces their lineage back to the lower gentry in the later eighteenth century. And that's a horrible precarious place to be. My grandmother to cap it all was Welsh lower gentry. Imagine Sense and Sensibility, but set in Wales. Just horrible ancient colonial vibes. You're dead unless Mister Right sweeps you off your feet. So you have to sit around ever so politely waiting for Mister Right, not putting a foot wrong, including doing a single day of work, and you can't access your own money until said Mister Right shows up.
This was me and book contracts. I thought it was great, a kind of naive drifting that meant I wasn't pushy and manipulative, and I'm not. But this is better. I'm not Elinor Dashwood. That energy crippled my family. Austen novels are about the terrible pain of a precarious class, women in the lower gentry during a time of enclosure and transition from primitive accumulation to automated capitalism.
Hell is about masters and slaves. Hell is about the Devil. Hell is about the biosphere as the Devil and ideas about the Devil as the Devil that's burning the biosphere.
Hell is also about AI. ery directly, because it’s totally relevant. I think the real driver here is the master slave template that drives everything else (subject versus object, male versus female, active versus passive…). We need to abolish that template. The idea of creating the perfect slave that is then the perfect master is basically every story about selling one’s soul to Satan.
Treating the biosphere like that, because treating each other like that, is why AI people are blundering into this and why that feeling of “the search for AI is like an unstoppable AI” keeps happening…
From Hell: How to Dance with the Devil on Your Back
Like Satan, an algorithm is a servant that carries out your commands...perfectly (be careful what you wish for). Think about plantations. They're attempts to force human beings to carry out other human beings' commands perfectly. A silicon wafer is a plantation for electrons.
So many other links but that's one huge main one.
...I used to live in Davis, CA. It was a gigantic factory, made of columns and rows and columns and rows of fruit trees and almond trees and etc, stretching as far as the eye could see. Machine-like in its precision. The Great Central Valley is so flat you can see it from space, and they use lasers to guide the irrigation channels. Workers and enslaved people also treated with this kind of profit maximizing precision aka violence.
Next step: all the dualisms that plague us, subject-object, human-animal, person-machine, masculine-feminine...are possible because of the master-slave template of Mesopotamian-style societies with a certain agricultural logistics running in the background.
The fantasy of AI is that its personhood will be "greater than the hum of its parts" (as Daniel Dennett put it).
This is precisely the problem. We are inventing the wheel of the master-slave duality, and hardwiring it into powerful machines made of silicon and plastics and metals, and robot dogs. Dogs have always been trained as slaves.
Trinity academic to establish how college benefited from slave trade in move to achieve ‘reconciliation’
A University of Cambridge college is to appoint an academic to examine its legacies of slavery.
Trinity College, Cambridge, has announced that its new legacies of slavery research and teaching fellow will investigate the college’s links to the transatlantic slave trade.
Continue reading...
In recent books, Adolph L. Reed Jr. and Imani Perry offer divergent explanations of Southern inequality.
If you went to primary or secondary school in the US or watched any mainstream movie that discusses the past, you learned the white-washed patriotic uplifting (for some) story of people persecuted for their belief in a particularly oriented Christian God and their desire for liberty, freedom, and capitalism. — Read the rest
The Crafts, a married couple in Macon, Georgia, fled bondage in plain sight: she disguised as a white man, he as her slave. In a riveting excerpt from her new book, Master Slave Husband Wife, Ilyon Woo documents their flight:
As dawn began to break, the station filled with travelers bound for Savannah. Ensconced quietly in the only car where a Black man was supposed to sit, William carried the cottage key and a pass. And he, or perhaps Ellen, carried a pistol. On this morning, William had to hope that they would not need to use it. He himself had resolved to kill or be killed, rather than be captured.
Traffic at the station thinned as travelers crowded about the train, ready to board. They said their goodbyes. For enslaved riders, this may have been the last time they would see the faces of loved ones, if their loved ones even had permission to see them off.
With the engine fed and the water tank full, the conductor made his final calls. William dared to peek outside. Linked to him, he knew, if only by way of rickety clasps between the cars, was Ellen, who by this time should have been seated in first class. It would be difficult for William to see her before the train stopped. But briefly, William could glimpse the ticket booth, where Ellen, as his master, would have purchased two tickets.
Instead of his wife, he saw another familiar figure hurrying up to the ticket window. His heart dropped. The man interrogated the ticket seller, then pushed his way through the crowd on the platform, with purpose. It was William’s employer — not his legal enslaver, but another white man who “rented” William’s labor in a cabinet shop. This man, who had known William since childhood, scanned the throng as he approached the cars.
The cabinetmaker was coming for him.
FreshRSS 