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Manomation

Kuwasi Balagoon and James Boggs’s Notes on Automation and the Habit of Freedom

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  05 September 2025

Vincent Pisters Møystad
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Abstract

Anarchist, Black Liberation Army member, and “Gender Rebel” Kuwasi Balagoon spent a lifetime performing a practice of resistance and autonomy—“freedom as a habit”—given kinetic, embodied form in his Exercise Book. Kuwasi Balagoon’s writings, as well as recollections from friends and comrades, are placed in dialog with James Boggs’s writings on automation to explore the tensions and frictions in the encounter between automation as a social formation and the insistent enactment of freedom as habit.

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Article
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TDR , Volume 69 , Issue 3: Performance, Possession, and Automation Brown University TDR Consortium Issue , September 2025 , pp. 122 - 138
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of New York University Tisch School of the Arts

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TDReading

Capobianco, Sophie. 2025. “Utopia in D Yard: Prefigurative Politics and the Attica Prison Uprising of 1971.” TDR 69, 2 (T266):5–24. doi.org/10.1017/S1054204325000073CrossRefGoogle Scholar