Textual Trimmings

 This is the last of my end of the year trimmings (in other words pieces that I wrote throughout 2021 but did not publish). It is also the last of a series of commentaries I wrote on Obama's memoirs, A Promised Land. While a lot has been written about the book, I feel that the question of empire has not been centred enough in extant reviews and commentaries. This is what I try to do here. The Black President, the White House, and the Parable of the Two Butlers In his reminiscence of the early days of his presidency, Barack Obama recounts the story of two black butlers who showed excess diligence in their service of their first African American “first family.” Against the Obamas’ attempts that their butlers lighten up while serving them, one of the butlers responded “We just want to make sure you’re treated like every other president,” while the other emphatically charged “See, you and the First Lady don’t really know what this means to us, Mr. President. Having you here…You

  This is the second in the series of unpublished pieces that I wrote throughout this year. The first could be found here. This year I wrote, in Arabic and in English , about the Kyle Rittenhouse case. A paper I submitted over a year ago to Radical Philosophy discusses the hierarchization of fire in Western thought, and opens by discussing the shooting scene in Kenosha, wherein Rittenhouse shot three people, killing two and seriously injuring the third. The editors suggested I focus the paper more on the Kyle Rittenhouse case, which was still recent then. I reformulated the paper to centre the argument that the impunity with which Rittenhouse carried out the shooting is rooted in a Western epistemology that entrusts the white man with the advanced forms of fire (the fuller argument can be found in the Radical Philosophy paper , and hopefully in a forthcoming paper on incendiarism and hysteria- perhaps parts of a future book project on fire). About two weeks before the paper’s publi

(كتبت هذا المقال منذ أكثر من شهر وكان من المفترض أن يُنشر في حبر ثم حالت ظروف الكورونا دون ذلك؛ أنشره هنا الآن لا تشفيا في انسحاب ساندرز وإنما لأن قضايا الإمبريالية المالية وبناء شبكات الضمان الاجتماعي في حواضر الإمبراطورية على حساب أطرافها، وأسئلة التضامن العالمي ومحاولات فرض اليسار الإمبريالي لأجندته ومصالحه على بقية العالم، تبقى كلها قضايا ملحة؛ بالذات في ظل أزمة كورونا).  وعود ساندرز الاجتماعية والإمبريالية المالية قدم بيرني ساندرز، ربما لأول مرة في تاريخ الانتخابات الرئاسية الأمريكية منذ انتخاب فرانكلين روزفيلت، برنامجًا قائمًا على إنشاء شبكة رعاية اجتماعية، فتحمس له الكثير في أمريكا بالذات ما بين الشباب وذوي الميول "التقدمية"، وتيم به بعض مثقفينا وأصبح التغني به من عادة بعض "اليساريين" و"المعارضين" في عالمنا العربي كأن علينا، حتى في خطاب المعارضة، أن نأتم بالمركز الإمبريالي. ولكن في غياب أي رؤية ثاقبة لموقع أمريكا الإمبراطوري وأي نقد للإمبريالية، فإن وعود ساندرز لا تتعدى إعادة ترتيب محدود للأوراق الإمبراطورية تستفيد منه الأقلية في حاض