Common Tern is an internationalist cooperative of cultural workers, knowledge producers, and political educators engaged in plural forms of anticolonial, anticapitalist, antifascist, politics and aesthetics.
Contemporary conditions in the global postcolony make it clear that culture uniquely coheres the questions of capital to those of colony in this ongoing global fascist moment. With so many compulsive returns to the past to try to create maps for the present, the category of the cultural worker stands out as needing to be centred in our analyses and our action, for the constant crucial and immediate work it does—as artist, as educator, as community organizer—in producing new maps and relations in our world. Many of us have felt the need to connect across cultural workers in different spaces that can allow us to together articulate an overt political programme centering the global south, and to acknowledge internationalism as a practice in many forms.
The realms of politics and aesthetics, and the question of sensibility, are a central locus around which our contemporary struggles are being waged. Our limitations in prevailing over them have a lot to do with the prescribed forms in which art, academia, and political activism are supposed to be cast in in order to be legible and valued as valid interventions as such. Many efforts at bringing these realms—artworld, academy, and professional politics—closer often lapse into a kind of subsumption, and a mere transfer of institutionalities and disciplinarities. To counter that, we feel the need to recover the actual locus of cultural production — and pedagogy as a connecting thread therein — as the unifying frame for what we are all engaged in, thus allowing a direct relation to critical and historical discourses rather than satisfying contemporary performances of institutional value production, in scholarship, research, politics, art, activism, and organizing.
As a continuation of the work many of us have been doing in various contexts, this new cooperative hopes to convoke a different political subject and different vectors of connection across various localities. It hopes to be an autonomous space of cooperation that provides an exit from institutional reliances, anchored and unanchored in various sites, held together by a cultural production wing to actually put those collaborations out into the world. It could provide space for the kind of connections and network we need in these fascist times without the nauseating performances even our friends and mentors sometimes require of us. Importantly, we hope that the Common Tern Co-op would not be held hostage to Anglo-US ideas of what counts as arts, letters, education, and political work, thus relieving us of the need to appease the institutions that see themselves as vanguards of these performances and productions. We value the work of organizations such as the Tricontinental Institute for Social Research, and have learnt from its structure and commitments. We want to extend that practice into, as Fred Moten and Stefano Harney put it, what surrounds that which is deemed as instrumental and logistical politics, art, and scholarly practice, with variations in form, genre, and “utility” of participation as spaces of relations and abundance.
GCAS-Jəhān will tap into the resources and relations corralled woven together by Common Tern and its production wing, Common Tern Works.
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