Post-Exploitation

Description

Jonathan Rowson:

"The need to be post-exploitation refers to a reckoning with history, with power, with class, with race, with patriarchy, with colonialism, and with coercion of all forms. The long history of St Giles House includes both slavery (for example the first Earl had plantations in the Bahamas and in South Carolina until about 1713) and the abolition of slavery (the seventh Earl, along with William Wilberforce, was a strong proponent of the abolition of slavery and other social reforms in the nineteenth century). Slavery is the rawest and most brutal form of exploitation, and enforced servitude is still widespread today in many forms. The Realisation Festival is committed to a meaningful and genuine reckoning with how colonial history still informs the present. We believe that this discussion is an essential part of the unlearning and reimagining that informs the gathering. For instance, exploitation can be relatively subtle and includes conscious and unconscious bias against people of colour; it also includes the unpaid mental, emotional and domestic labour undertaken mostly by women that is often taken for granted. To consider exploitation systemically, Roberto Unger’s definition of a progressive is helpful: “someone who wants to see society reorganised, part-by-part and step-by-step, so that ordinary men and women have a better chance to live a larger life’. By larger life he means a “a life of greater intensity, of greater scope, and of greater capability’."

(https://jonathanrowson.substack.com/p/post-conventional-imperatives)