In Co-Motion, theorist Paola Bacchetta proposes a new lexicon for analyzing power, subjects and alliances. Employing what she calls ‘theory-assemblages’ to describe how diverse theoretical and political approaches inspire movements and produce different kinds of alliances, Bacchetta engages the inseparability of power relations—such as colonialism, capitalism, racism, caste, misogyny, and speciesism—and how their combinations, operability, and the analyses they require, shift in different contexts and lives of subjects. Focusing on France, India, Italy, and the US from the 1970s to the present, Co-Motion addresses a wide activist, artivist, and social movement archive— group statements, banners, pamphlets, graffiti, posters, poetry, sit-ins, films, art exhibits—to think and feel with the many ways that people, historically and today, come together to act. Through her expansive engagement with varied bodies of scholarship, sites of analysis, and kinds of reading, Bacchetta offers new approaches to analyze, confront, and transforming power, and to enact freedom.
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction. Openings 1
1. Co-Motion at Present 33
2. Imaginings Otherwise 70
3. Co-Formations, Co-Productions 103
4. Situated Planetarities 139
5. Other Sensings in Praxis 175
Appendix A. “Our Queer Pride Is Anti-Racist” 217
Appendix B. Pride for Whom? Pride for What? The Opportunism of Alliances and Visibility 219
Appendix C. Racialized Queers and Trans Against Homonationalism 223
Notes 225
References 231
Index 265
