Chronicle of the Girls’ Bureau for Freedom and Uplift

• Author: Ainsley LeSure,Jill Locke
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221129610
• Published date: 01 February 2023
• Date: 01 February 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00905917221129610

Political Theory

2023, Vol. 51(1) 146 –161

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00905917221129610

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Article

Chronicle of the Girls’

Bureau for Freedom and

Uplift

Ainsley LeSure1 and Jill Locke2

Abstract

This essay is part of a special issue celebrating 50 years of Political Theory. The

ambition of the editors was to mark this half century not with a retrospective

but with a confabulation of futures. Contributors were asked: What will

political theory look and sound like in the next century and beyond? What

claims might political theorists or their descendants be making in ten, twenty-

five, fifty, a hundred years’ time? How might they vindicate those claims in

their future contexts? How will the consistent concerns of political theorists

evolve into the questions critical for people decades or centuries from

now? What new problems will engage the political theorists (or their rough

equivalents) of the future? What forms might those take? What follows is

one of the many confabulations published in response to these queries.

Corporations are investing in girls and women as a means to ending poverty as

they seek to create the conditions for development and economic growth. In

doing so, they are investing in, rather than transforming, existing inequities

across multiple axes of difference—gender, racial, class, religious, and

geographic—even as they claim to be ameliorating them.

—Kathryn Moeller, The Gender Effect: Capitalism,

Feminism, and the Corporate Politics of Development

1Africana Studies and Political Science, Brown University, Providence, RI, USA

2Political Science, Gustavus Adolphus College, St. Peter, MN, USA

Corresponding Authors:

Ainsley LeSure, Africana Studies and Political Science, Brown University, Providence, RI 02912, USA.

Email: ainsley_lesure@brown.edu

Jill Locke, Political Science, Gustavus Adolphus College, 800 W College Ave, St. Peter, MN

56082, USA.

Email: jlocke@gustavus.edu

1129610PTXXXX10.1177/00905917221129610Political TheoryLeSure and Locke

research-article2022

LeSure and Locke 147

Why are formations of the oppressed deemed liberatory only if they resist

hegemony and/or exhibit the full agency of the oppressed? What deformations

of freedom become possible in the absence of resistance and agency? . . . [I]

hope we will be able to pose the problem of subjection qua agency and

resistance in different, heretofore nonexistent ways. How might we go about

thinking and living enfleshment otherwise so as to usher in different genres of

the human and how might we accomplish this task through the critical project

of black studies?

—Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages,

Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human

In the spirit of Derrick Bell’s Chronicle of The Space Traders (1993), we

tell the story of the Girls’ Bureau for Freedom and Uplift. The story begins

with the carving up of the formerly United States into two main territories, the

Wastelands and the Stablelands, racially marked as Black and white, respec-

tively. Within this racially bifurcated landscape, a group of wealthy white lib-

erals plan to abandon earth and develop sky pods so they can live, worry free,

in a celestial City in the Sky (SkyCity™). Following a long tradition of corpo-

rate investment in girls and young women, SkyCity™ settlers try to assuage

the social and physical costs of their project by founding programs for Black

girls from the Wastelands; their most ambitious project is the Bureau of

Freedom and Uplift, a bureau that sponsors 501 girls with education and eco-

nomic training. As the Bureau girls go deeper into the work of the Bureau and

its corporate sponsor, SkyCity™, they draw on their training in the Black tra-

dition of the Undercommons and the power they are building among them-

selves to realize the existential threat posed to their families in the Wastelands.

They plot to take back The Wastelands from the ravages of SkyCity™, orga-

nizing a politics that emphasizes the sharing of power that comes from their

particular locations as Black girls and the knowledges they hold.

Racial Cartographies, 2072

To paraphrase W. E. B. Du Bois, the central problems at the end of the twenty-

first century are the triangulation of climate catastrophe, white democracy,

and racial capitalism. The devastation and displacement following Hurricane

Katrina (2015), the end of the post–Civil Rights era of the Obama administra-

tion (2008–2016), and the consolidation of public goods into private corpora-

tions like Amazon (founded 1994) were just the beginning. Today, white