Battle cry of freedom iraq war free#

I argue that freedom can be ugly, and also that ugliness can be a resource for unconventional, worldmaking freedoms.

At the same time, the book locates an unexpected second type of ugly freedom in practices and situations often dismissed as demeaning, offensive, or gross but that also reveal emancipatory potential. These “ugly freedoms” legitimate the right to exploit and subjugate others. J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?ĮA: Ugly Freedoms reckons with the difficult legacy of freedom in liberal democracy, showing how individual liberties are entangled with white supremacy, settler colonialism, climate destruction, economic exploitation, and patriarchy. In the second it is a generative resource for identifying alternative freedoms in practices rejected or disparaged by the first version of ugly freedom-freedoms otherwise deemed too inconsequential, gross, or compromised to qualify as such. In the first it is a critique of certain freedoms understood as unproblematic political ideals. Alongside practices of freedom like individual sovereignty and human exceptionalism that further climate destruction, I locate experimental freedoms in toxic waste zones and dank bodily guts, which showcase different creatures collaborating to remake decimated worlds.

I highlight how Black emancipation generates new forms of white supremacy, while also exploring the unsettling actions that thwart structures of antiblack domination, even when these activities do not look like resistance or agency.

Battle cry of freedom iraq war free#

In this second definition, ugliness opens up different understandings of what free action might be.įor instance, in the context of neoliberal freedom’s violent takeover of politics, I show communities carving out scrappy ways to live habitably with others off the radar-ways otherwise seen as too uninspiring to be interpreted as freedom. These freedoms showcase undervalued and uncelebrated modes of freedom that could otherwise be dismissed as ugly, deflating or “uncivilized”. So I reworked ugly freedom to have a second definition: it also names alternative freedoms overlooked as unworthy or demeaning by conventional standards of freedom’s exercise, but that still demonstrate the capacity for shared participation in making a world where all can flourish-my own definition of freedom. To demote freedom as a collective aspiration is not to be unburdened by freedom’s legacy but to relinquish a vital resource to fight for a better world. Yet I did not want to conclude that freedom should be discarded altogether. I use the language of ugliness to push past the idealized practices of freedom to see what forms of damage they legitimate or incorporate. What I began to call “ugly freedom” names this dynamic in which practices of freedom produce harm and subjugation as freedom. Yet I realized that history showed us something different: freedom has been exercised as brutality, dispossession, and slavery for centuries. I began to see how throughout western modernity, freedom had been expressed in the capacity to harm another.īy continuing to idealize freedom, scholars had missed the ways in which practices of freedom have included enslavement and exploitation as much as independence and emancipation. These responses seemed problematic to me, as they continued to invest in freedom as always ideal-as if any form of freedom that justified harm could not be real freedom. Critics on the left responded that these claims of freedom were not “real” freedoms but a sham, a perversion of an ideal, or manipulation of an unblemished virtue. “Freedom” justified such brutal exercises of power.

Jadaliyya ( J): What made you write this book?Įlisabeth Anker (EA): I started to notice violently aggressive forms of freedom in American politics over the past twenty years-in which freedom has entailed invading Iraq and Afghanistan, deregulating pollution, fetishizing guns, and defunding social support.

Elisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (New Texts Out Now)Įlisabeth Anker, Ugly Freedoms (Duke University Press, 2022).