divesting
an online magazine and solidarity collective – by and for cultural workers.
Under the stifling grip of neoliberalism, cultural labor - largely managed by institutions and mediated by self-serving institutional voices - has been repeatedly forced into precarity, leading to the exacerbation of the figure of the isolated worker which we understand as a by-product of systematic alienation. In this context, much of the contemporary gestures of solidarity have been commodified, assimilated, and mostly conveyed through discursive iterations of dissent that have not, so far, significantly threatened the status quo.
For us, divesting, in its capacity to feed into enduring forms of worker-to-worker solidarity, is both strategic and transformative. As such, we understand divesting as organized and active forms of withdrawal from entrenched hegemonic relationalities, administered by state apparatuses as well as non-state actors, that have divided, atomized, and compartmentalized our multiple yet tethered struggles throughout history. However, divesting is not merely about what we strive to separate ourselves from, it fundamentally concerns itself with what we are committed to. This is where “تعاضد” becomes central to the notion of divesting we avow. “تعاضد” is an Arabic term that encompasses mutuality/collaboration and holds the semantic affordance of “coming together against”. With this in mind, we hope to contribute to fostering sturdy movements towards global solidarity and insist on thinking together with other collectives, unions, and organizers who share our feminist abolitionist, anticolonial, and antifascist politics.
We seek to:
- Provide other avenues for writers to express themselves away from inaccessible formats often attributed to the protocols of academic publishing.
- Address the alienating precarity of our labor by establishing an internationalist politics of organizing between cultural workers.
on funding:
Being a small group whose members are either freelancers or unemployed, and since we are completely self-funded, we seek to sustain ourselves by inviting subscriptions to our content in the form of single or regular contributions, in addition to the option of purchasing our soon-to-be-available merchandise.
on language and form:
Notwithstanding the colonial bearings and reactionary takes on language, the latter has also harnessed its liberating potential across history. Since we aim to reach out to as many cultural workers as possible, we choose to work with both English and Arabic for now given their geo-social prominence and widespread use. Our text-based platform is necessarily open to free-form writing. We specifically encourage the practice of co-writing, which is why we will actively link people together, according to their interests and capacities, while leaving space for solo writing. Our multiple formats include but are not limited to: long essays, shorts essays, poetry, comics, letters, and interviews. We also welcome republishing already-published material, including manifestos, as we want to challenge the idea of “the genius writer” and the obsession with the original or new.
Last but not least, we believe that knowledge is fundamentally a site of struggle that shapes and is itself shaped by the ever-changing conditions it responds to. However, instead of moving away from theory, we embrace it collectively via a process that is materially grounded and necessarily open to testing, rethinking, and further devising our thinking and manifold practices.