The Social Contract and the Game of Monopoly: Listening to Kimberly Jones on Black Lives

A short essay by Debarati Sanyal posted on In the Midst, blog of the journal Critical Times, June 29, 2020

In the piece, Sanyal discusses an impromptu monologue by activist Kimberley Jones that has since gone viral. She writes, “Jones challenges us to examine a social contract that has always been rigged, that remains grounded in property rights instead of human rights.”

Debarati Sanyal is professor of French at the University of California, Berkeley, and a member of the Representations editorial board. The author of The Violence of Modernity: Baudelaire, Irony, and the Politics of Form (2006) and Memory and Complicity: Migrations of Holocaust Remembrance (2015), translated in French as Mémoire et complicité: Au prisme de la Shoah (2019), she is completing a book on borders, race and aesthetics in the European refugee “crisis.” Her essay Calais’s “Jungle”: Refugees, Biopolitics, and the Arts of Resistance appeared in Representations 139.