Postcolonial Astrology Quotes

“Authenticity is a symptom of liberalism because, within liberalism, individuals are self-governing, self-regulating, and self-surveilling.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“In a landscape that sees the spectacle of financial theater as more real than production or natural resources - a landscape afraid that drops in the value of gold stock would be more detrimental to the nation than the real exploitation of Black laborers in the mining industries - capital is more real than life.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“In liberal societies where identities are performative and surveilled, you’re never sure that what you see is what you get. Within liberal societies, authenticity becomes elevated to morality.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“If the Sun stands for the future, then it also stands for s specific type of future that is carefully engineered, omnipotently surveilled, and designed to break society away from its own histories and traditions.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Astrological ideas about where planets are allowed to be at home are also sociopolitical ideas about who is allowed to be at home.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Sorting subjects into any classification can force patterns to show up, and when these patterns are reinforced by political realities, they become institutionalized.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“The only way to communicate with the white world is through the dead.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Money is a metaphor for the foreigner because money is used in the exchange between the known and the unknown. It is the sign that becomes emancipated from representation. If money is a symbol, it is one that mediates relationships between the familiar and the foreign—the imagined and the unimaginable. Money is a theater.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Moreover, because the mercenary is often a stranger, the market became the means through which exotic objects were introduced into a community, and exoticism became defined. The Moon is the market, and the market is the foreign. Money, far from being neutral, is actually an inherently antinationalist symbol of exchange. The interests of money work to redefine those of the nation.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“If the utopianism of American agrarianism is a dream of land liberated from commercial interests, then whiteness is also the dream that workers can become liberated from having class interests.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“Liberal critiques of sex work often frame it within questions relating to consent. Does a sex worker consent to work? These critiques ignore issues of consent within other industries. Does any worker consent to work?”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor

“The public sphere invented during this time period, which Habermas writes is “always already oriented to an audience,” even in its moments of reading and private media consumption, is not observed by an eye that watches from above. Rather, it is inspected and scrutinized by other self-governing actors within the public sphere, creating the feeling of having to perform for invisible eyes while in public spaces all of the time.”
― Alice Sparkly Kat, Postcolonial Astrology: Reading the Planets through Capital, Power, and Labor