Publications in the World Already
“Authors Response,” Book Symposium on Remapping Sovereignty in Review of Politics (submitted/forthcoming)
“Wages for Earthwork” is featured with Author interview in Grist: Taylar Dawn Stagner, “Indigenous Peoples’ Climate Labor Benefits Everyone: Should it be Paid?” April 2, 2024, https://grist.org/indigenous/indigenous-peoples-climate-labor-benefits-everyone-should-it-be-paid/
Manuscripts in Progress
Temin, David Myer. Wages for Earthwork (book under contract with Pluto Press)
Temin, David Myer and Adam Dahl. “The Need for Roots: Luther Standing Bear and Simone Weil on the Problem of Settler Rootlessness.”
Abstract:
What drives the “need for roots”? We ask this question by bringing together an unlikely pair of thinkers, Luther standing bear and Simone Weil. In their mutual reflections on the social pathologies inherent to settler colonization, both draw attention to what we refer to as the problem of “rootlessness” in colonial modernity. Whereas many have associated modernity with a generalized narrative of the disembedding of practical reason from its once-secure grounding in metaphysical authority and place-based tradition (Arendt, Habermas, McIntyre), we argue that such accounts eschew an analysis of the colonial processes that produce differential hierarchies and pathologies of relations to place at work in colonization—-not the disorienting groundlessness intellectuals have cast as generic to the modern condition as such.
We instead conceptualize rootlessness in each of their work as a kind of alienation that is specifically characteristic of settler-colonial conceptions of mobility and belonging. Rootlessness is a domination-seeking pathological detachment from place that helps to sustain the structured practices of colonial dispossession most typical of settler-colonial violence. Far from a generically modern condition, rootlessness in this sense is tied directly to the uprooting of colonized peoples from their lands. We contextualize these thinkers—one Lakota and one French—as engaged with these globally interconnected practices of settler colonization in their respective inquiries into roots, rather than figures representing quintessential metaphysical or normative differences between indigenous and western political thought. This interpretation then allows us to argue that the pathologies of settler colonization lie not just in the settler imposition of foreign ideologies and forms of life onto Indigenous peoples. Instead, we describe the problem in a different way: the imposition of a fundamentally alienating attempt to hierarchically universalize the conditions of rootlessness accruing to settler subjects. Colonization is pathological, in our account, by virtue of its erasure of alternative rooted practices that directly avow the project of building responsible and relational attachments to people and place.
Temin, David Myer, “Against the ‘Degrees of Sovereignty’ Thesis”
Temin, David Myer. “Third World Developmentalism as/in Basic Needs: Mahbub ul-Haq and Radical Liberal Developmentalism.”
This paper focuses on the Pakistani economist Mahbub ul Haq, one of the originators of the “basic needs” development paradigm and most famous for authoring the “Human Development Index” of the 1990s. I interpret Haq through an ideological amalgam I term “radical liberal developmentalism.” For Haq, the unjust and hierarchical qualities of the world order inherited from empire ought to be theorized as forms of “systematic discrimination” that denied the Third World “equality of opportunity.” He imagined a kind of New Deal for the Third World implemented on a global scale, a project that (he hoped) would head off both extremes of impoverishment and revolutionary mass uprisings. In doing so, I contrast his writing and policy and advocacy activity with more deeply radical Marxist critiques of capitalism and commitments to autocentric development, such as those of Rodney and Samir Amin. At the same time, I aim to show contra Moyn and others that his thinking is very profoundly imprinted with the debates and concerns of Third Worldism—and specifically the project of rethinking developmentalism—in ways that may register as surprising for a “liberal” thinker.
David Myer Temin 