Description
In 2024, Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Not Like Us’ brought his 10 years of ‘beef’ with Drake into the spotlight. While pop culture pundits ruminated on years of coded exchanges (aka ‘subliminals’), a deeper engagement unravels a clash between a key voice of hip hop’s black empowerment project and the subsequent neoliberal incursion into the genre. Their ‘beef’ lays bare the multiple conjunctures between culture as emancipatory possibility and its counter-revolutionary cooptation. It also becomes our point of departure for a roundtable exploring the frayed junctures in/of movements, clashes between artists, organisers and writers, even splinters in intellectual traditions, as inherent in attempts to create, build and generate other radical possibilities, when these relationships are structured by violence. We trace the “beefs” between Mahatma Gandhi and Martin Buber, Huey Newton and Eldridge Cleaver, June Jordan and Adrienne Rich, among others, through anti-colonial and liberationist lenses, asking what the curious stories of broken alliances, friendships, solidarities and shared visions can tell us about the corrupting and coopting power of racial, capitalist, imperial and gendered relations. And, thus, what are the stakes of building movements that can contend with, learn from and perhaps 'trouble' the structures that shape beefs in the first place.
