On no-state solutions, hopping in place, and responsible action
Plus a chance to support writers surviving incarceration and trauma
Greetings, my dears! First thing:
Join me on May 1 for the annual benefit for the Golf Pencil Group, a creative writing program bringing classes to women locked up at King County Jail and to adults in supportive housing as they transition out from homelessness, psychiatric care, and addiction treatment. I’ve taught with GPG since before Finn was born. We’re welcoming two new teachers to our team and we’ll use money raised for teacher stipends, essential supplies, prep time, and student book requests. GPG’s absolutely dear to my heart—the students produce brilliant, wise, humane, and deep work, and it’s an honor to tend a creative community for them—and I’d love to have you join. Or, if you can’t join, make a gift! We’re hoping to raise $6,800 this giving season.
Starting with a great big guy, with some smaller writeups at the end.
Aslı U. Bâli and Omar Dajani, “Beyond the Nation State in the Middle East,” Noura Erakat, “Designing the Future in Palestine,” Nathan Thrall interviewed by Isaac Chotiner, “What Would a Lasting Peace between Israel and Palestine Really Look Like?” Ken Opalo, “Reckoning with Guinea-Bissau’s Enduring Political and Economic Stagnation.”
The nation state has been a disaster for the Middle East. The region has always been multi-faith, multi-ethnic, multi-sectarian, and horribly ill-suited to the colonial imposition of western-style states, but that, following the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, was just what it got. Wherever colonial lines were drawn and these new states were created, political power was centralized, the majority ethnic group wielded demographic power, and the new governing authority sought patrons among the stronger regional (or colonial) powers. Communities and ethnic groups that had lived in relative peace, toleration, and local autonomy under the Ottomans turned violently against each other and “minority rights” for those without a state (Yazidis, Druze, Kurds, Palestinians) were barely existent. But what else is possible? Bâli and Dajani introduce confederal political projects—of decentralized government, grassroots representative democracy, self-constituting civil societies, and cultural rights for all peoples—within and across the borders of traditional nation-states.
First up is Rojava, a majority-Kurdish region of Syria abandoned in 2011 by the brutal central government to fend for itself against both ISIS and Turkish-backed forces. Amazingly, the region survived; in its breathing room, a “democratic confederalism” theorized by Abdullah Öcalan (a Kurdish political thinker imprisoned since 1999 by the Turks) has flourished there. What does this confederalism look like? Öcalan, after a study of American anarchist Murray Bookchin and ecofeminist intellectuals, became convinced that the dream of a Kurdish nation-state was a dead end, a “capitalist distortion,” and that the future for the Kurds lay instead in greater cultural autonomy and in the devolution of political power to local bodies irrespective of where state borders happened to fall. Rojava’s political vision is small-scale and consensus-based, with shared institutional life practiced on democratic councils with mandatory ethnic, gender, and religious representation, and with the central federal government holding primary responsibility solely for defense. For more than a decade, Rojava has put Öcalan’s theories into living practice.
Will Rojava’s radical experiment survive? Probably not, if Turkey receives NATO’s blessing to reoccupy the territory, but the dreams and attendant habits of self-governance don’t die entirely when a border moves. Speaking of moving borders, Bâli and Dajani next consider a much longer-shot dream: a confederal, binational vision of a unified Israel-Palestine put forward by A Land for All. This has long been a dream of activists and thinkers, especially Palestinians, who recognize that the economic strangulation of the occupied West Bank and the steady growth in its borders of protected Israeli settlements make a two-state solution impossible. The only vision of “two states” tolerable to Israel would be of carved-up, weakened Palestinian Bantustans over which Israel would maintain total security control. By contrast, the vision of A Land for All is two “nations,” two peoples, sharing a single state, with a right to travel and to become permanent residents (though not citizens) of each other’s territories, with shared institutions premised on equality, with an inter-state court, and with a unified Jerusalem “whole, open, and shared rather than carved by walls and fences.”
But in the absolute horror of the war on Gaza and the reverberating shock to Israel of the attack on October 7, where is the soil out of which a confederal life could grow? The Kurds of Rojava are one ethnic nation spread across several nation states; by contrast, there are precious few shared Jewish-Arab political parties and mass organizations in Israel, and these have been increasingly suppressed by since October 7. Past peace efforts, always on Israel’s terms, have been premised on partition, with as much space as possible between the two peoples. But, since 1967, Israel has moved closer and closer to a one-state reality from the Jordan to the Mediterranean, in which half the people within its borders live under brutal military law, bureaucratic and municipal encroachment, lynch-mob violence, and, now, mass starvation and indiscriminate death from the air, all backed by US weapons, support, and diplomatic cover. Could global pressure compel Israel to recognize this one-state reality, perhaps with a security guarantee from the US, and move toward a tolerable vision of coexistence wherein the Palestinian people are given either legal autonomy apart from Israel or civil rights within Israel? As Nathan Thrall notes, binational coexistence is very, very, very hard to imagine in Israel-Palestine; it’s hard enough for (say) Fleming and Walloon, Yoruba and Igbo and Fulani-Hausa, English and French Canadian, polities whose shared life stretches back decades or centuries. And, of course, dominant polities around the world have remained hostile to national reforms that move toward plurinational politics.
Throughout the post-colonial world, in fact, dreams of liberation through the nation-state have remained “unfinished business” (in Adom Getachew’s polite formulation) or worse. Africa, like the Middle East, provides many examples. In his long, fairly crunchy article, Georgetown scholar Ken Opalo looks closely at Guinea-Bissau, where a revolution was won by a mobilized, empowered, and educated citizenry who—after the assassination of revolutionary leader Amilcar Cabral—were then slowly pushed out of governance by new elites.
Across the new nation, local governing councils were subordinated to a central state; unions were defanged; entrepeneurs were scattered; universities were defunded. Out of this came economic stagnation (as the lifeline of commodity exports snapped), political decay (as graft and mismanagement spread), and inter-ethnic strife (as identity politics sharpened under majoritarian abuses).
So then what? Noura Erakat asks, can the idea of a national homeland be de-linked from that of a nation-state? Erakat highlights the work of Palestinian women—an agronomist, a geographer, the members of a feminist anti-violence collective—who, in recognizing the dead end of a “peace process” that would leave Palestinians stranded on “tiny hills of barricaded land,” are imagining other alternatives. These are in line with indigenous scholarship around the world asserting that “any decolonial vision should begin at home.” This vision includes seed-banks for heirloom plants, feminist organizing against honor killings and partner violence, restorative justice, and intergenerational organizing in spite of, and around, the moribund and corrupt Palestinian Authority.
The Palestinian Feminist Collective and Tal’aat (Women Stepping Out) don’t articulate a full revolutionary program; rather, their vision is of participatory and popular practices that can endure through settler violence and official repression. Erakat’s evocation of this common movement can be modish and handwavey: of a community “turned away from the settler sovereign and toward one another,” “using love as a compass in its strides toward liberation.” But a praxis that recognizes the shared nature of liberation, community leadership, and spiritual endurance (“we existed before, we exist now, and we will exist later”) is one that, at least, is undeceived about the symbolic victories of legal recognition from a de jure apartheid state.
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Juice & Toya’s YouTube channel. When I turned forty, I asked my doctor (who always wears cool shoes and writes in her clinic-staff bio about how much she loves burgers) what basic maintenance should be for a body entering middle age. She told me to worry less about weight training and to instead spend time being kind to my lungs and heart: “move so that you get your heart going like this,” (she clapped out a brisk tap-tap-tap-tap) “thirty to fifty minutes, three times a week.” I mostly manage to do it—breathing thank you body afterward, red-faced, listening to Sade as I cool down. When weather permits, I’m running on pillowy delicious shoes or biking to work and back; when it doesn’t, I’m hopping around like a fool in my living room to these guys’ videos.
There’s some regrettable diet-culture pound-pinching but I like how much they vary their exercises, the way they high-five like kids, and the wholesomeness their whole thing radiates. It’s good to sweat, to feel connected this way to my body.
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Laura Snapes, “Pitchfork’s Absorption into GQ Is a Travesty for Music Media—and for Musicians.” Old news now—I’m grinding slow but fine!!—about which a lot of ink was spilled, but Snapes’s article is a good place to start. Pitchfork, the biggest music publication on the internet, got squashed in January by its parent company, Condé Nast, with dozens of staff being laid off and the publication being folded into (unbelievably) GQ.
This puts it right back in the hands of the sort of middle-class white fanboys who started Pitchfork twenty-five years ago, and from whom some really outstanding critics and editors (including Snapes, Amanda Petrusich, Lindsey Zoladz, Doreen St. Félix, Alphonse Pierre, and the now-downsized Puja Patel) had helped rescue it. These layoffs came despite the site drawing more daily visitors than any of Condé Nast’s other publications: Vogue or Vanity Fair or the New Yorker, or, for that matter, GQ.
Why did they do it? Who knows. This is more small bad news for arts media: Pitchfork could be smug, blinkered, or backward, but the space they afforded was unique; they could help make small good bands and artists big; and some of their features, especially the “Sunday Review” series on a past album (no hook to the present necessary), were an absolute treasure. But this small bad news comes in a time of dawning big bad realities for musicians. Just how much does it suck now to make a living in music right now? Let me tell you: streaming revenues skew hugely toward present megastars; private equity is devouring and monetizing past megastars’ catalogs; 99 percent (quite literally) of artists are squeezed out by streaming. What does this look like in practice? Once-and-future punk rocker Jenny Toomey does the math:
[A] band that sold 10,000 copies of an album in the ’90s could expect to earn around $50,000 in revenue. Today, that band’s entire album would have to be streamed a million times for the same financial return.
That volume of streams would be enough, music critic Marc Hogan notes, for each of this hypothetical lucky band’s songs to be in Spotify’s top one percent of streamed tracks. For $50K. This is yet another example of the gradual enshittification of the internet, yet another way the internet’s promise of “abolish the gatekeepers!” in fact empowered a whole new class of gatekeepers and deepened inequality rather than abolishing it.
What can we do? Move your money to artists. I’m not going to quit Spotify—I’ve created, the app tells me, 1,539 playlists there—but I’m not going to treat it like it does anything good for anyone I stream. I go to shows. I buy t-shirts, vinyl, patches, stickers, cassettes. I spend money on Bandcamp. It’s a single customer’s choice, but I guess it’s all I have.
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Quote of the month: Political theorist Wendy Brown on maintaining an ethic of responsibility in a nihilistic age. A political actor must recognize “that politics is a singular sphere, one that always features contingency—your action may produce results at odds with what motivated it—and that also always has violence in the wings, because politics does. These two features of political life—the fact that political action is fundamentally untethered from results, hence cannot be justified by a pure principle animating it or by the end at which it aimed, and the fact that violence is one of its ineradicable elements—are together at the heart of the ethic of responsibility.”
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Substack recommendation: you should 100 percent follow Money for Artists (“the other MFA”), where Nico Alvarado explains finance for non-finance people. Learn! Plan! Save! Prosper!