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Otherwise, without authorization, to conform with the proposed solution, states will push uncooperative federalism. "Uncooperative federalism occurs when … states implementing federal environmental law use that power to push federal authorities to take a new position" and generally, in practice, when "states use their power as federal servants to resist, challenge, and even dissent from federal policy." Although the Supreme Court consistently condemns commandeering and favors preemption, proponents of uncooperative federalism insist that the Court is wrong and "would push the Court to tolerate a degree of conflict between such laws and their federal counterparts" along with "greater federal-state integration." Therefore, although the Supreme Court has not yet approved this theory, uncooperative federalism provides a way for states to continue to push the proposed solution to increase renewable energy sources.

The U.S. political system provides governors with opportunities to shape policy at many levels. From working with localities and quasi-governmental bodies, to crafting state budgets, to testifying before congressional committees in Washington, D.C., the modern-day governor fills many roles and is the key player at many of the crucial decision points in the development of policy. In recognition of this important fact, political scientists have worked to increase both the quality and quantity of the research on this office in the past three decades. Scholars such as Joseph Schlesinger, Larry Sabato, Thad Beyle, and Nelson Dometrius have helped push the field forward and have led the move toward truly understanding the office of the governor as it currently exists. Common knowledge of the formal and informal powers of governors, the factors that impact gubernatorial elections, and the factors that affect the ability of governors to work with state legislatures, for instance, has been made available as a result of the efforts of these scholars and countless others.

But even though scholars have focused on systematically examining the internal policy-making efforts and powers of governors, relatively little research has been dedicated to understanding the ways in which governors work to influence policy outside the borders of their home states. On its face, the lack of focus on external gubernatorial powers may not seem like a significant point of weakness in the literature. After all, governors derive their authority and political power from the voters who place them in office, and they must work with the legislatures that is directly elected by those same voters in each state. Thus, it is only logical that scholars study governors as they work in that particular context, and it is likewise imperative that researchers examine governors in that environment. But by ignoring the ability of governors to shape policy outside the borders of the states they preside over, researchers fail to capture one of the most important aspects of the modern governorship. As governors regularly testify in front of Congress, provide input on the development of rules and procedures being adopted by federal agencies, and actually implement many federal policies within their states, they are provided with ample opportunities to shape policy and are given effective control over the direction of considerable sums of federal resources.

Every action or decision has some kind of effect on something or someone, if only in an indirect way. How we approach these decisions or actions we take can have a huge impact, not just on those directly involved, but on others we could hardly fathom would be affected. You never know what little action may be the tipping point for another action and or reaction.

When you hear the words “The Butterfly Effect”, most of you will probably think of the movie. That was about the chaos theory, meaning one series of events leads to another and the effect of changing the course of those events.

The place "United States" is difficult to define for two reasons: the different meanings of United States may not be coextensive, and there are several plausible permutations of what the United States may encompass. First, the scope of the United States as an entity need not be coextensive with its scope as a place because an entity can own or exercise control over places that are not physically within itself. The Constitution seems to recognize this fact in at least two provisions. The Thirteenth Amendment refers to conduct "within the United States, or any place subject to their jurisdiction,"87 and the Eighteenth Amendment (now repealed) referred to imports and exports "into" and "from" the "United States and all territory subject to the jurisdiction thereof."88 A place can thus be affiliated with the United States in a constitutionally meaningful way without being "in" it,89 and so the term "United States" may have distinct context-sensitive definitions depending on whether it refers to an entity or a place. 90 Moreover, asking whether a given place is a physical component of the United States rather than merely subject to its control (i.e., is it "in" the United States or "of' the United States) may often be pointless because there is no reason to think that the distinction matters beyond a few exceptional issues noted below. 91 Thus, for example, there might be no reason to develop legal fictions about whether the land under a particular federal installation is on U.S. soil, 92 or whether a ship flying a U.S. flag is an "island" of the United States. 93 What matters is how a particular place relates to the United States, which may not exclusively be a function of the place's location.

Second, because the Constitution defines many types of places, there are numerous permutations of these places that may collectively comprise the "United States." For example, the "United States" might merely be the sum of all land in the "States," or may also include land in the "Territories," the "District" constituting the seat of government, and/or federal "possessions." 94 The Constitution is silent about which permutation is accurate. The Supreme Court addressed the void by opining that the "term" "United States" "is the name given to our great republic, which is composed of States and territories."95 This statement appears correct insofar as it defines the United States as more than merely the sum of the states because the District of Columbia seems clearly in the United States even though it is not part of any state. 96 But the Court did not purport to treat all territories equally, nor did it purport to exclude other types of places from the ambit of the United States even if these arguably could not be classified as "territories" (such as embassies, military bases on foreign soil, U.S.-flagged ships, and the exclusive economic zone that extends 200 miles from the U.S. coast 9 7). 98 The Court's dicta thus adds little to our knowledge about what places are in the United States and what places are outside it.99

United States. Both the Articles and the Constitution utilize this term to designate the organized nation or the group of states taken as a single entity. In fact "United States" became the standard term at the time of the Declaration of Independence to designate the national unit of government and has been used in that way ever since.

There is, however, a subtle difference between the Articles and the Constitution in the way in which "United States" is used. Nearly every use of the term in the Articles is in the phrase "the United States in Congress assembled," as if the United States did not exist except when the delegates from the several state legislatures were assembled in a Congress. Usually the words "United States in Congress assembled" are not even capitalized. Clearly the term "United States" did not as yet mean a fully united nation or a political entity with an established name, a government, and a being of its own.

Claimants argue that the statute's broad, “pre-civil war” definition of “United States”—meaning the several states and territories—when applied to subsection (f)(1), gives Rhode Island a cause of action. Claimants also argue that the provisions in subsection (f)(4), measuring liability to include costs incurred by a state government, and subsection (f)(5), requiring a state's authorized representative to act as a trustee to recover costs of restoration, confirm that states have standing under section 311 of the FWPCA to sue the shipowner.

2 But this selective reading of the statute misses more direct language that only supports a cause of action by the federal government. The language of the statute must be given its ordinary meaning, absent clear legislative intent to the contrary, Consumer Product Safety Comm'n v. GTE Sylvania, Inc., 447 U.S. 102, 108, 100 S.Ct. 2051, 2056, 64 L.Ed.2d 766 (1980), and this Court must be chary of reading into the statute any remedies that are not expressly stated there, Middlesex County Sewerage Auth. v. Nat'l Sea Clammers Ass'n, 453 U.S. 1, 14–15, 18, 101 S.Ct. 2615, 2623–24, 2625, 69 L.Ed.2d 435 (1981). A common-sense reading of the statute compels the conclusion that states have no standing to sue under section 311. Subsection (f)(1) plainly makes shipowners and operators liable only “to the United States Government” for costs incurred during the removal of oil. 33 U.S.C. § 1321(f)(1) (1988). The last sentence of this section adds: “The United States may also bring an action against the owner or operator of such vessel....” Id. “United States Government” and “United States” mean the federal government.

Q. When I refer to the government of the United States in text, should it be U.S. Federal Government or U.S. federal government? A. The government of the United States is not a single official entity. Nor is it when it is referred to as the federal government or the U.S. government or the U.S. federal government. It’s just a government, which, like those in all countries, has some official bodies that act and operate in the name of government: the Congress, the Senate, the Department of State, etc.

You contend further that the ten percent test is consistent with the plain meaning of the word "substantial": "Belonging to substance; actually existing; real; not seeming or imaginary; not illusive; solid; true; veritable. Something worthwhile as distinguished from something without value or merely nominal." n7 You also contend that foreign banks that meet the ten percent test view their deposit-taking and credit extension activities as substantial due in part to the resources that must be extended to engage in those activities. In addition, you assert that the relevant foreign financial authorities view these activities as substantial, as evidenced by their specific regulation of such activities. In determining whether a foreign bank derives "a substantial portion of its business from ... extending commercial and other types of credit, and accepting demand and other types of deposits," for purposes of rule 3a-6, we are not inclined to provide an interpretation based on particular minimum percentages of either the bank's liabilities (in the case of deposits) or assets or revenues (in the case of credit extensions). This conclusion [*9] is based, in part, on the fact that the Commission, when adopting this standard, chose not to define it by reference to minimum percentages. Although we are not willing to set forth such minimum percentages, we recognize that various percentages could demonstrate that a foreign bank derives a substantial portion of its business from extending commercial and other types of credit and accepting demand and other types of deposits.

should /ʃʊd/ Show Spelled[shood] Show IPA –auxiliary verb 1. pt. of shall. 2. (used to express condition): Were he to arrive, I should be pleased. 3. must; ought (used to indicate duty, propriety, or expediency): You should not do that. 4. would (used to make a statement less direct or blunt): I should think you would apologize. Use should in a Sentence See images of should Search should on the Web Origin: ME sholde, OE sc ( e ) olde; see shall —Can be confused:  could, should, would (see usage note at this entry ). —Synonyms 3. See must1 . —Usage note Rules similar to those for choosing between shall and will have long been advanced for should and would, but again the rules have had little effect on usage. In most constructions, would is the auxiliary chosen regardless of the person of the subject: If our allies would support the move, we would abandon any claim to sovereignty. You would be surprised at the complexity of the directions. Because the main function of should in modern American English is to express duty, necessity, etc. ( You should get your flu shot before winter comes ), its use for other purposes, as to form a subjunctive, can produce ambiguity, at least initially: I should get my flu shot if I were you. Furthermore, should seems an affectation to many Americans when used in certain constructions quite common in British English: Had I been informed, I should (American would ) have called immediately. I should (American would ) really prefer a different arrangement. As with shall and will, most educated native speakers of American English do not follow the textbook rule in making a choice between should and would. See also shall. Shall –auxiliary verb, present singular 1st person shall, 2nd shall or ( Archaic ) shalt, 3rd shall, present plural shall; past singular 1st person should, 2nd should or ( Archaic ) shouldst or should·est, 3rd should, past plural should; imperative, infinitive, and participles lacking. 1. plan to, intend to, or expect to: I shall go later.

Hours before the historic Paris climate accord was to be ratified in a final vote, someone noticed that a word had been changed in the final draft of the text—a single word that threatened to derail the entire deal. As reported in the Washington Post, someone changed the word “should” to “shall.” Now, it seems like a little thing, but given that the words were in reference to sweeping new legal and financial obligations, it mattered. A lot. When it comes to legally binding terminology, there’s a big difference between “should” and “shall.” Whereas “should” is a kind of wishy-washy call to action, the word “shall” implies an obligation, and this is why Secretary of State John Kerry could not abide the unexpected change. The New York Times reports: Throughout the process, the longer and less binding “should” was a deliberate part of the international agreement, put there to establish that the richest countries, including the United States, felt obligated to pony up money to help poor countries adapt to climate change and make the transition to sustainable energy systems. “Shall” meant something altogether different, American officials said. When “shall” was spotted in the document on Saturday, Secretary of State John Kerry called his French counterpart and made it clear that unless a switch was made, France could not count on American support for the agreement. “I said: ‘We cannot do this and we will not do this. And either it changes, or President Obama and the United States will not be able to support this agreement,’ ” Mr. Kerry told reporters after delegates had accepted the deal by consensus Saturday night, amid cheering and the celebratory stamping of feet. Thankfully, cooler heads prevailed, and within hours the wording within the 31-page text was reverted back to the original “should.” A subsequent vote affirmed the Paris Accord, and all was saved.

The word resolved stated before the resolution means "obsolete", to deal with successfully, clear up, an immediate course of action, meaning that the plan would immediately be enacted. Therefore, if you come across a case that involves something like cooperation with other countries or anything that takes a significant amount of time, you can argue that it violates the word resolved.

This is not a niche enterprise. Because all legal thought and practice necessarily takes place in and in relation to sound, an acoustic jurisprudence is as relevant to the law of property, evidence or immigration as the law of genocide, human rights or torts. But this diversity also makes it hard, and indeed undesirable, to offer a road-map in advance. There is no one story here, no single narrative capable of capturing or appraising the law–sound relation as a whole. Nevertheless, the four analytics outlined at the outset of this piece do provide something of a starting point. (1) The soundscape is always also a lawscape. We must attend to the role played by law in the production of our sonic worlds. (2) We can and should read legal texts for what they reveal about law’s sonic imagination: how legal institutions conceive sound from one context to the next. But law doesn’t just regulate sound. Legal practice itself is soundful. So (3) we should equally concern ourselves with the judicial soundscape, both the acoustic features of the courtroom, and the ways in which that environment was constructed, understood and perceived.41 Finally, because law’s conduct is soundful out of court as well as in it, (4) we should also address the many and changing modes of law’s acoustic expression: its juris-diction. In each instance, the necessary attitude is neither purely internal nor external, neither that of apologist nor critic. An acoustic jurisprudence requires both a knowledge of law and a certain distance from it: a matter of walking alongside, an interested listener. The purpose is not to absolve or condemn law then, but to hold legal institutions to account. Life and law are necessarily lived in sound. The wager of an acoustic jurisprudence is that those of us who think and work with law have a responsibility to pay attention.

In “Black to the Future” (1993), Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Since then, an increasing body of Afrofuturist scholarship has emerged and expanded upon Dery’s coinage of the term, particularly in terms of genre spectrum and even medium, as scholars continue to study Afrofuturism from a musical perspective.3 Given that Afrofuturism profoundly challenges ideas about science, technology, and knowledge, many afrofuturist texts do not fit neatly into the conventions of science fiction and actually borrow from other speculative genres such as fantasy, magical realism, horror, and so on. 4 In a recent essay, Julia Hoydis argues that the literary tradition of black female writers of speculative fiction that started with Octavia Butler produces a “hybridization of genres.” Hoydis claims that women in Afrofuturism especially are “more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and ... they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation” (71). Certainly, Hopkinson’s work does not escape such definitions; as Rob Latham puts it: [c]ritics have been hard-pressed to come up with an adequate critical vocabulary to describe the complex genre-crossing involved in [Hopkinson’s] work. Is she producing variants of magic realism? Adaptations of the folk tale to technocultural realities? Futuristic fables? The short answer is that she is doing all of these things, and more. (338) In addition, as Hoydis aptly remarks, “a Hopkinson novel ... [typically] features characters of all ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual orientations” (81). In his definition of the movement in the Oxford Companion to Science Fiction, De Witt Douglas Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be seen as less a marker of black authenticity and more a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine” (8). Kilgore’s definition is particularly probing because it underlines the afrofuturist project of contesting the idea of linear time and subsequently subverting the primitivism/modernity binary. Recent works by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek re-examine nineteenth-century novels as afrofuturist5 ; other scholars such as Yatasha L. Womack and Kodwo Eshun argue that the Afrodiaspora was a science-fictional experience.6 Lonny Avi Brooks suggests such retroactive analysis when he writes that “Afrofuturism as a basic framework suggests promising directions for reinvigorating our language to speak about racial identity in the deep past and the long-term future” (153). Afrofuturist texts subvert images of a post-racial future in which technology and modernism have allowed white people to survive and racialized others to fade away. 7 But they also reclaim historical narratives, particularly traumatic histories such as the African diaspora and US slavery, and play with time and time travel in ways that do not allow for a simple conception of time as linear. Considering the engagement of afrofuturist texts with histories of racism, slavery, colonialization, and systemic oppression, as well as the position of racialized bodies in stories set in the future, it is crucial to analyze the conjunction of race, gender, and sexuality. In her recent essay “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledging,” Susana Morris argues that Afrofuturism and black feminism share similar preoccupations with resistance to systemic oppression and erasure, so much so that they are “symbiotic” (153). She defines “Afrofuturist feminism” as “a literary tradition in which people of African descent and transgressive, feminist practices born of or from across the Afrodiaspora are key to a progressive future.” She writes further that Afrofuturist feminism “offers a critical epistemology that illuminates the working of black speculative fiction in vital ways” (153).8 Morris applies her theory to the works of Octavia Butler, whom she sees as a prime example of an author whose fiction is both Afrofuturist and profoundly engaged with the concerns at stake in black feminism, namely race, gender, sexuality, and ability (154-55).

The relationship between Native genocide and anti-Blackness has been articulated sometimes in terms of presumed solidarity or comparison, such as the notion that Native peoples harbored runaway slaves and that Black fugitives assisted Native peoples in armed struggle against settler encroachment. Sometimes it has been articulated in terms of antagonism, such as the focus on Native peoples who owned slaves and on enslaved or indentured Black people who participated in settler raids on Native nations. Nowadays, it seems to be in terms of incommensurability, which asserts a lack of commonality/relationality between Black and Native folks. This project emerges from us thinking that all of these modes are insufficient. While certainly solidarity, antagonism, and incommensurability are distinct and no one mode of relationality can be presumed, at the same time it is illogical to presume we can talk about any mode without doing it in relationship with one another. If we submit momentarily to the popular position that Black and Native peoples and, by extension, Black and Native politics are at an impasse represented by their incommensurability, then the flip side of being stuck together—or this stuckness—is already a form of relationality. As a result, we think Édouard Glissant’s “relation” seems to be a helpful starting point: Relation...does not act upon prime elements that are separable or re-ducible. If this were true, it would itself be reduced to some mechanics capable of being taken apart or reproduced. It does not precede itself in its action and presupposes no a priori. It is the boundless effort of the world, to become realized in its totality, that is to evade rest. One does not first enter Relation, as one might enter a religion. One does not first conceive of it the way we have expected to conceive of Being.1 2Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro & Andrea SmithIt seems that much analysis of the relationship between Indigenous geno-cide/settler colonialism and anti-Blackness tends to be prescriptive in that the analysis presumes a certain prescribed politic—whether it be a call for solidarity in a certain way or a call to reject solidarity. But analysis of re-lationality suggests something otherwise—that the relationality between genocide and anti-Blackness is not fixed and easily knowable. In addition, to borrow from Antonio Viego’s Dead Subjects, t here is an imperative in the academy to make Native peoples knowable and to presume that Black peoples are already known.2 Thus, not surprisingly, the relationship between the two is presumed to be fully representable and it keeps Black and Indig-enous communities in isolation from one another, which is a settler desire/dream.

In attempting to apprehend the difference that Indigenous dispossession makes to Marxist understandings of land, labor, accumulation, and property, Rob Nichols addresses what appears to be a contradiction outside of Indigenous studies: If the Earth cannot be owned, how can land be stolen from its rightful owners? He argues that, first, dispossession “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” and that, second, the dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself.”

As he elaborates, “It is thus not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into property.” Naming this process “recursive dispossession,” Nichols pinpoints why Indigenous lands, stolen into property and possession, are so difficult to apprehend outside the systems of property and possession. As he explains, recursive dispossession works through “transformation,” “transference,” and “retroactive attribution.” Indigenous peoples’ relations to land are transformed (from a relation of responsibility to a relation of rights) only so that land-as-a-property relation can be transferred or sold to settlers.

In “Black to the Future” (1993), Mark Dery defines Afrofuturism as “speculative fiction that treats African-American themes and addresses AfricanAmerican concerns in the context of twentieth-century technoculture—and, more generally African-American signification that appropriates images of technology and a prosthetically enhanced future” (180). Since then, an increasing body of Afrofuturist scholarship has emerged and expanded upon Dery’s coinage of the term, particularly in terms of genre spectrum and even medium, as scholars continue to study Afrofuturism from a musical perspective.3 Given that Afrofuturism profoundly challenges ideas about science, technology, and knowledge, many afrofuturist texts do not fit neatly into the conventions of science fiction and actually borrow from other speculative genres such as fantasy, magical realism, horror, and so on. 4 In a recent essay, Julia Hoydis argues that the literary tradition of black female writers of speculative fiction that started with Octavia Butler produces a “hybridization of genres.” Hoydis claims that women in Afrofuturism especially are “more concerned with speculation and disturbing notions of reality than with scientific-technological ideas and ... they often maintain a concern with history despite a distinctly futurist orientation” (71). Certainly, Hopkinson’s work does not escape such definitions; as Rob Latham puts it: [c]ritics have been hard-pressed to come up with an adequate critical vocabulary to describe the complex genre-crossing involved in [Hopkinson’s] work. Is she producing variants of magic realism? Adaptations of the folk tale to technocultural realities? Futuristic fables? The short answer is that she is doing all of these things, and more. (338) In addition, as Hoydis aptly remarks, “a Hopkinson novel ... [typically] features characters of all ethnicities, ages, genders, and sexual orientations” (81). In his definition of the movement in the Oxford Companion to Science Fiction, De Witt Douglas Kilgore writes that “Afrofuturism can be seen as less a marker of black authenticity and more a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unthought assumptions about what histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we may imagine” (8). Kilgore’s definition is particularly probing because it underlines the afrofuturist project of contesting the idea of linear time and subsequently subverting the primitivism/modernity binary. Recent works by Isiah Lavender III and Lisa Yaszek re-examine nineteenth-century novels as afrofuturist5 ; other scholars such as Yatasha L. Womack and Kodwo Eshun argue that the Afrodiaspora was a science-fictional experience.6 Lonny Avi Brooks suggests such retroactive analysis when he writes that “Afrofuturism as a basic framework suggests promising directions for reinvigorating our language to speak about racial identity in the deep past and the long-term future” (153). Afrofuturist texts subvert images of a post-racial future in which technology and modernism have allowed white people to survive and racialized others to fade away. 7 But they also reclaim historical narratives, particularly traumatic histories such as the African diaspora and US slavery, and play with time and time travel in ways that do not allow for a simple conception of time as linear. Considering the engagement of afrofuturist texts with histories of racism, slavery, colonialization, and systemic oppression, as well as the position of racialized bodies in stories set in the future, it is crucial to analyze the conjunction of race, gender, and sexuality. In her recent essay “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledging,” Susana Morris argues that Afrofuturism and black feminism share similar preoccupations with resistance to systemic oppression and erasure, so much so that they are “symbiotic” (153). She defines “Afrofuturist feminism” as “a literary tradition in which people of African descent and transgressive, feminist practices born of or from across the Afrodiaspora are key to a progressive future.” She writes further that Afrofuturist feminism “offers a critical epistemology that illuminates the working of black speculative fiction in vital ways” (153).8 Morris applies her theory to the works of Octavia Butler, whom she sees as a prime example of an author whose fiction is both Afrofuturist and profoundly engaged with the concerns at stake in black feminism, namely race, gender, sexuality, and ability (154-55).

In attempting to apprehend the difference that Indigenous dispossession makes to Marxist understandings of land, labor, accumulation, and property, Rob Nichols addresses what appears to be a contradiction outside of Indigenous studies: If the Earth cannot be owned, how can land be stolen from its rightful owners? He argues that, first, dispossession “transforms nonproprietary relations into proprietary ones” and that, second, the dispossessed “are figured as ‘original owners’ but only retroactively, that is, refracted backward through the process itself.”

As he elaborates, “It is thus not (only) about the transfer of property but the transformation into property.” Naming this process “recursive dispossession,” Nichols pinpoints why Indigenous lands, stolen into property and possession, are so difficult to apprehend outside the systems of property and possession. As he explains, recursive dispossession works through “transformation,” “transference,” and “retroactive attribution.” Indigenous peoples’ relations to land are transformed (from a relation of responsibility to a relation of rights) only so that land-as-a-property relation can be transferred or sold to settlers.

The frst chapter in this book introduced Afrofuturism as a Black cultural form that counters sf’s colonial heritage. Where chronopolitics is a method that disrupts capitalism’s teleological organization of time and space as the necessary building blocks for expansive accumulation, sonic Afrofuturism disturbs the western hierarchies through which sf world-building is expected to follow the same measurable coordinates. In Bakhtinian terms, this makes her work centrifugal rather than centripetal (Hassler-Forest 2016, 189): where most forms of Eurofuturist sf replicate capitalism’s measurable approach to space-time, Monáe’s sonic Afrofuturism constructs speculative worlds without simultaneously seeking to measure, map, or control them (Prescod-Weinstein 2021, 257). Just as Eurofuturist sf has tended to reproduce the basic structural coordinates of industrial capitalism, Afrofuturism has thereby made capitalism’s racial organization more starkly visible. Cedric J. Robinson introduced and developed the term racial capitalism to emphasize how racism has been a primary rather than a secondary component of the capitalist system. His foundational work as a theorist and historian of the Black radical tradition1 has documented in exhaustive detail how slavery and antiBlackness were “historical and organic rather than adventitious or synthetic” in the development of global capitalism (2000, 4). Every failure to acknowledge race as a central component therefore implicitly perpetuates white advantage2—even among those who supposedly seek to criticize or demolish it. Robinson’s term therefore helps us see more clearly that “one cannot understand capitalism without understanding the stolen labor of enslaved Africans and their descendants as a fundamental organizing principle and building block” (Prescod-Weinstein 2021, 140). In his book Necropolitics, Achille Mbembe has identifed the three central drives that have structured racial capitalism from its inception: The frst is the constant manufacturing of races, or species (as it happens, Negroes); the second is the seeking to calculate and convert everything into exchangeable commodities (law of generalized exchange relations); and the third is the attempt to maintain a monopoly over the manufacture of the living as such. (2019, 177) The interlocking nature of these three drives clarifes the inextricably intertwined relationship between racism and capitalism. This has resulted in a set of social hierarchies that distinguish Black from white, subject from object, center from margin, human from inhuman (Zamalin 2019, 11). In the same way, it has depended upon narratives and mythologies that reproduce whiteness as an invisible and “neutral” default identity. Across its many depictions of speculative futures, the sf genre has historically privileged racial capitalism’s basic mechanism of primitive accumulation through imperialist expansion (Rieder 2008, 30). This has yielded a feld of cultural production in which whiteness has been deeply ingrained across the wide and diverse feld of mass-cultural sf (Rieder 2017, 140–141). Considering this seemingly endless variety of futures where Black people either don’t exist at all or exist only as barely present background fgures, one understands how Afrofuturist utopias have deviated from white utopian fction. Rather than expressing in narrative form the white modernist’s drive toward god-like mastery, Black utopias have constituted a mixture of “pragmatic experimentation and critical reexamination” that challenges liberal humanism’s master narrative of Eurocentric progress and colonialist expansion (Zamalin 2019, 14). By contrast, the Black utopian tradition is steeped in what Paul Gilroy has described as “both a hermeneutics of suspicion and a hermeneutics of memory” (1995, 71): a double movement that combines the critical deconstruction of white supremacy with refections on the legacy of African enslavement. This double movement facilitates a form of redemptive critique that opens up pathways toward a future of liberation. And because this redemptive critique emerges in response to the historical legacy of colonialist extraction and racist oppression, it is shaped by dreams of escape rather than by fantasies of expansion. This is, again, why the Afrofuturist imagination is so much more than the expression of Black centered speculative futures. If the overarching goal is not the expansion of power but the eradication of oppression, then we can see how Afrofuturism as an expression of Black radicalism is uniquely able to project a truly universal utopian horizon. And since Western fantastic fction has been dominated by its systematic demonization of Black people as an inherently threatening “Dark Other” (Thomas 2019, 9–10), it takes substantial effort to reverse this dynamic, decolonize our shared vocabulary, and “re-story” our narrative culture (159). This re-storying process has been central to Afrofuturism. It contributes to antiracist movements by foregrounding the signifcance of race in all speculation about the future. It bolsters the civic imagination by providing speculative alternatives to the grim reality of racial capitalism (Jenkins et  al. 2020, 5). And it provides frameworks for postcapitalist speculation that are drawn from histories of the oppressed, rather than those who continue to proft from racial capitalism. As Robinson once wrote: “What is required for the African Diaspora to assume its historical signifcance is a new and different philosophy and a new theory of history” (Robinson 2019, 22). Afrofuturism draws on sf to help us imagine such philosophies and theories of history, while showing us how they fnd expression in stories that invite us to look beyond racial capitalism’s hegemony. As a Black utopian project, Dirty Computer articulates a vision of futurity that “troubles normative, and normalizing, temporalities as it affrms a forward-leaning desire for life lived otherwise” (Brown 2021, 17). Monáe’s world-building vividly clarifes how Western defnitions of the human have always been grounded in processes of exclusion: her Metropolis Saga used the android fgure as a vessel for those who are denied their humanity, while Dirty Computer foregrounds queerness as a primary destabilizing force (Romano 2018). These movements place Janelle Monáe’s work within the larger framework of critical posthumanism as a necessary correction to liberal humanism (Roden 2015, 9). Unlike liberal humanism’s singular, stable, and unifed subject, posthuman subjectivity represents “an amalgam, a collection of heterogeneous components, a material-informational entity whose boundaries undergo continuous construction and reconstruction” (Hayles 1999, 3). More than anything else, this means coming to terms with an ethical philosophy that tears down humanism’s hierarchical structures and opens itself up to more radical understandings of social and political justice (Braidotti 2013, 46). As the previous chapters have illustrated, racial capitalism’s social organization is grounded in a matrix of intersecting oppressions. While this matrix includes race, gender, sexual identity, class, age, and ability among its primary axes, anti-Blackness has unifed and transcended them as the core exclusion against which “universal” humanity has been measured (Jackson 2020, 33). As Zakiyyah Iman Jackson phrases it in her essential book Becoming Human, “Blackness has been central to, rather than excluded from, liberal humanism: the black body is an essential index for the calculation of degree of humanity and the measure of human progress” (2020, 46). Racial capitalism has thrived on this systematic dehumanization of Black people, in which chattel slavery served as “a geologic axiom of the inhuman in which nonbeing was made, reproduced, and circulated as fesh” (Yusoff 2018, 5). Jackson’s key term for understanding racial capitalism’s irreducible anti-Blackness is “plasticity”—a term that indicates how Blackness is equated with an animalistic lack of humanity that defnes the essence of non-white bodies as “infnitely mutable” (Jackson 2020, 11). Therefore, since liberal humanism has been grounded in the exclusionary abjection of Blackness, its cultural traditions continue to cast Black people’s essence as fundamentally malleable and thereby “sub/super/human at once” (Jackson 2020, 3): simultaneously superhuman in their physical abilities as laborers, and mere subhuman fesh that can be molded by those whose whiteness automatically grants them fully human subjectivity (Weheliye 2014, 27). Black utopian speculation has countered this projection of Black plasticity with speculative narratives of freedom that are fundamental building blocks for our collective ability to imagine postcapitalist futures. For as we move through the latter-day stages of a capitalist system that has fallen into a chronic state of disrepair (Streeck 2016), we require utopian visions grounded in true solidarity and liberation from oppression more than ever (Miéville 2018, 6). And the utopias that derive from the Black radical tradition are more suitable to this context than any other: Our dystopian postdemocratic political moment requires imaginative thoughts. We need more rather than fewer utopian ideas about radical democracy and social freedom, more rather than fewer antiutopian critiques of American faith in free-market utopianism, religious fundamentalism, technological determinism, and racial progress. Black utopia can add to this chorus trying to generate them. (Zamalin 2019, 144) Once we recognize the profoundly racial organization of capitalism, we also understand why Black utopian sf is best equipped to illuminate our precarious postcapitalist horizon. Since race operates in the frst place as a mode of oppression, moving toward a future that will “expand the principles of fairness and opportunity to all members of society” is a process that should be driven and inspired by those voices with the most intimate knowledge of social inequality (Marable 2016, “Black Studies, Multiculturalism and the Future of American Education”). Janelle Monáe’s world-building has explored new theoretical approaches to Black futures that emerge from Afrofuturism’s chronopolitical approach to history. On Dirty Computer, this has yielded a ferce critique of racial capitalism grounded in the rich tradition of Black radicalism. But where the despairing non-futures that have come to typify Eurofuturist sf lack any true hope for a better future, Black anticapitalism continuously “advances as each generation assembles the data of its experience to an ideology of liberation” (Robinson 2000, 317). This ideology of liberation is what ultimately binds together all of Dirty Computer’s complexly networked components, which celebrate the queerness of postcapitalist futurity as much as they condemn the cruel and exploitative history of racial capitalism.

Put simply, Afrophantasm is a rhetorical state of being that adequately recognizes the lived states of Blackness and disability together with the understanding of the invisibility that accompanies that position, and the specific decision to weaponize said state in either a positive or a negative way. It’s not enough to know that for example, I am both Black and disabled because how this information is relayed and understood is also equally important. Oftentimes, race and disability are “correlated…with violent and oppressive overtones,” and are “conceptualized as being analogous to each other,” (Erevelles, 1); and the idea that people can simply switch one for the other, when talking about the realities of oppression, considered as a moment of a lesser state, often puts me into a position of having to pick a side. But Kimberle Crenshaw, Theri Pickens and others have instead, made it a point to constantly rebuke this idea. Her concept of intersectionality as “the interconnected nature of social categorizations…[and how they are] regarded as creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination or disadvantage” (Merriam-Webster, 1) sums up the overall point. But the nuance regarding disability (as 15% of the world’s population according to the World Health Organization) and the language we use to talk about it, hasn’t caught up. As a rhetoric scholar, the concept of Afrophantasm is made up of four distinct methodologies including critical race theory, rhetorical theory, disability studies, and Afrofuturism. By combining the four ideas together, it allowed me to think about not only about the conception of the word, but also its potential uses and applications which I have drawn together in an Afrofuturist audio novel that I call Spectre: AV about a wheelchair user who gains the ability to turn into a digital ghost. It was important for me not only to suggest the ways that such an idea could operate, but also to think out loud about how it could be twisted and allocated as a rhetorical concept. Subsequently, such an idea ultimately has perfect merit in the realm of agency and embodiment relating to both the wider world and the individual. As the first research method, by looking at critical race theory and my use of “afro” it roots the experience specifically in the realm of Blackness. As a counternarrative to Black negativity mentioned earlier, it’s important for me that the work call out the way that Blackness has been misused and pushed aside in favor of capital, and the work of empire. No one does this better than W.E.B. Du Bois, and I focused on his seminal work The Souls of Black Folk when he wrote, “It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others…One ever feels his two-ness – an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings, two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder.” Though he is referring to the two-ness of being an American Negro in 1903, such views have never gone away. To that, I add a third layer which I consider “three-ness” of disability which makes up the concept of Afrophantasm where you are considered for your Black disabledness in the space of Americana. // All of these ideas are combined and worked through my audio novel Spectre:AV, which showcases Black disability through the ideas of a futuristic Neo Orleans in the year 2135. In the story, Kyrie Di’allo goes from college student, to public enemy #1 after a racist medical organization kidnaps him to harvest his unique DNA but accidentally grants him the ability to change the world around him through his invisibility. I combine the various aforementioned methods with the keystone concept of critical fabulation coined by influential scholar Saidiya Hartman, and it talks about how to build creative worlds on top of slave archives full of missing information, in order to achieve narratological research. Hartman details the difficulties in trying to maintain power of historical agency when juxtaposed against death and archival erasure, and using her technique, Spectre is built from the real records of five disabled Black slaves who lived in historical New Orleans in 1870. However instead of focusing on their deaths and limited information given by the hospital during the time in which they lived, I reexamine the spectacle of what it would’ve meant to be a Black disabled person in the far future under a different set of rules where the world has removed the need for disability completely. // In conclusion, I created the idea for Afrophantasm as a way to give Black disabled people more autonomy over the words we use to describe ourselves. The ideas of marginalization and deficit continue to leave derogatory aftereffects attached to real people’s lived experiences when the people who inhabit them, may not feel this way at all. So this was a way to honor those lives and to expound on the near limitless resilience that Black disabled people inhabit on a daily basis. Further, it’s a way to call out the ignorance and macroaggression we receive all the time and to use such views in order to improve our own lives. Through Spectre:AV, I am presenting a different reality where Black disability features prominently in the dead center, while pulling in all the threads that reimagine the lives of people who are overlooked. It’s a high concept piece of creative scholarship that combines Black rhetorical theory with Afrofuturist dreams of disability and power, to show off the idea that stigma and performance can be weaponized through Black art. I wanted a Black power fantasy of high speed chases, gunfights, queer love stories, and historical research to show how powerful Afrophantasm can be when it’s designed, created by, and starring Black disabled people; ultimately because we recognize that we are invisible, but I want people to know that that if we are, it’s only because we choose to be.

As a young person, Kim was “taught to believe” that sound was “not a part of her life,” as she explained in her 2015 Ted Talk “The Enchanting Music of Sign Language.” Yet deafness contains a spectrum of acoustical and sonic experience, spanning those who hear some to those who do not hear, and those who have always been Deaf to those who experience gradual or sudden hearing loss. Regardless of one’s individual cochlear ability, Deaf and HoH people experience sound both physiologically and socio-culturally, including physical vibrations and through the biased cultural values (and resulting barriers) that define and enforce norms of sound-making and listening in public and private space. Despite cultural presumptions that Deaf people live in a silent world, few are likely to consider sound, noise, and the politics of listening as carefully as Deaf and HoH people, whose lives are circumscribed by barriers to acoustical information. Kim’s works, such as (LISTEN), portray the complexity of Deaf life—and Deaf culture—in and beyond society’s ableist sonic infrastructures and ideologies, envisioning encounters with listening through memory, affect, and non-acoustical perceptual modes that integrate sight, touch, taste, and smell. In this process, they activate sound as a category unbound from a single aesthetic or social modality and challenge ideologies that privilege certain ranges and abilities of hearing over others.

(LISTEN) subverts dominant histories and theories of sonic art that center the experiences and values of hearing people. Rethinking the soundscape as a site for social critique, this article critiques modes of soundwalking that perpetuate oppressive systems of power, especially those that naturalize and normalize hearing and/or interpret sonic environments as neutral spaces of perception and consumption. Engaging contemporary soundscape theory in a consideration of deafness, power, and control, this article frames (LISTEN) as a critical soundwalk, challenging the discursive and phenomenological barriers that constrain contemporary sonic art theory and history. These barriers, such as embracing socially-constructed values of normalcy in hearing, are identified by Christopher Kentz as reinforcing a broader “hearing line,” theorized as an “invisible boundary separating deaf [sic] and hearing people” in society (18).32