TOPIA Special Issue Summary
The essays in this special-themed issue were presented at the May 2023 Strategies of Critique conference, convened under the theme of Care and Cure. Strategies of Critique is an annual graduate student organized conference hosted by York University's Social and Political Thought Programme, and has formed a key part of York’s intellectual landscape since the 90s. Dovetailing with the fifty-year anniversary for the Social and Political Thought Programme, the 2023 Strategies served as a gathering point for an interdisciplinary and international group of emerging, senior, and independent scholars all committed to an unflinching critique of the purchase of care and cure in contemporary theory. Developed particularly by way of engagements with Black critical thought, the conference demonstrated the necessity for challenging taken-for-granted concepts in Marxism, Black studies, political theology, feminist theory, disability studies, and more. Starting with the premise that care is mired in violence, the conference asked provocative questions about the risks and benefits of holding onto care, even and especially as we render care a problem for thought. The contributions of the conference became the basis for TOPIA49, a special issue guest edited by the conference organizers further responding to Strategies’ prompt. This point of departure takes authors across varied disciplinary terrains, from political theory to literary criticism to philosophical anthropology, but despite their points of difference, each demonstrates, in their singularity and collective elaboration, the urgent and necessary stakes for theorists attempting to think through the impasses of our present state of intellectual disrepair.
Tapji Garba
Tapji Garba
Tapji Garba is a PhD student in Social and Political Thought working in the areas of political theology, history of philosophy, and critical theory. Their research concerns the relationship between racial slavery and self-ownership in early modern political thought, with specific attention to the way that the late antique and medieval prohibition on voluntary slavery gives way to a conception of freedom consisting of the capacity to rent oneself for periods of time determined by contract. This shift can be found in the work of 16th century Spanish and Portuguese theologians and jurists writing about newly emergent ethical and political problems in the Atlantic world-system. Theologians and jurists at the University of Salamanca were at the forefront of debates on law and politics, as the emergence of the Spanish empire and a trans-atlantic economic system raised new questions regarding freedom, slavery, ownership, political authority. Building on both Thomist and Franciscan approaches to natural right, an implicit theory of self-ownership can be found in the writings of Salamanca school theologians Francisco Suarez (1548-1617) and Luis De Molina (1535-1600) for whom political authority takes on an increasingly contractual character. By highlighting the dissemination of Molina and Suarez concepts of contract and volition in Early modern law, Tapji’s dissertation aims to reconstruct a genealogy of the modern state and the modern interstate system, as a system where state actors are conceived us as large-scale private individuals bearing the capacity to contractually alienate their freedom.
Tapji has published peer-reviewed articles in Antipode, Political Theology, TOPIA, and Philosophy Today. They also contributed a chapter to the edited volume Words Made Flesh: Sylvia Wynter and Religion published by Fordham University Press and is currently working on a book tentatively titled Voluntary Slavery: A Contribution to the Critique of Political Ontology (co-authored with Sara-Maria Sorentino). Tapji is also a recipient of The Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council’s (SSHRC) Canada Graduate Scholarship and the Chancellor Bennett Doctoral Scholarship for Liberal Arts.
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