chad black

@chadblack.bsky.social

1137 Followers 2759 Following

Impostor. Latin America, Theory, Marx, Freud, Lacan, Horror, Monsters. Cycling, trail running, music. RDU, TYS, UIO, ABQ, BAL, SAN

Capricho 6 by Francisco Goya, inscribed in Spanish "Nadie se conoce." The image shows a masked man bowing before a masked woman, as if at a masquerade ball. Behind are weird and frightening visages in tall striped hats, one of whom looks down upon the scene.
Ecuador’s national flag
Roast My Listening AI-generated playlist from Spotify.
Caravaggio's painting 'Narcissus' from the 1590s, in which the title figure stares at his reflection in the pond.
Holding a pen, a highlighter, and a copy of Joshua Gooch’s Capitalism Hates You: Marxism and the New Horror Film (2025)
A Tale of Two Hydras Chad Thomas Black, University of Tennessee Knoxville In 1766, during the dramatic crisis known as the Rebellion of the Barrios, a Quiteño priest named Pedro Joseph Milaneso published a veritable jeremiad titled La hidra de muchas cabezas, denouncing the causes of the uprising. The many heads of the fabled beast that sought to devour the audiencia were vices, an explanation at home in early-modern moral theology. Some sixty years later in 1824, on the other side of the Atlantic, after yet another restoration of Ferdinand VII's absolutist rule, an anonymous author published El monstruo mas deforme, mas feróz y venesoso que han visto jamás los siglos denouncing other heads for another crisis of royal authority. This tract was purportedly written by a repentant liberal looking to hold accountable the ideas responsible for the failed Trienio Liberal. His was not a monster conjured of vice, but instead one made by liberal philosophy, its heads named materialism, popular sovereignty, freedom of the press, Jacobins, radicals, carbanari, and liberals. This paper compares these two works and argues that the arc between monstrous vice and monstrous liberal philosophy marks a shift in the symbolic order of Spanish rule from the mediation of composite sovereignty to the abstractions of the nation-state, a displacement of the old judicial order with politics. In tracking this shift, we can see how fundamentally the age of revolution reordered the metaphorical frames through which social meaning was structured. In other words, it is not only the move between signifiers such as vecino --> ciudadano or indio --> indígena that mark the new age, but also the transformation within seemingly stable discourses such as the monstrous or the apocalyptic.
Bottle of Conejos Malditos rose wine
Ablum cover art of Ryo Fukui's Scenery (1976) with the artist's profile, red color tone, and writing in English and Japanese.
Album cover art for Gyedu-Blay Ambolley's Simigwa (1975).
Album cover art of Gil Scott-Heron 'Pieces of a Man', originally released in 1971, centered on a close in portrait of the artist.
Album cover art for Cat Stevens Greatest Hits.
Week 1: Introduction¶ Welcome to class! This week, we will cover the expectations of the course and then dedicate one day to discussing the impact of so-called artificial intelligence (the statistical plausibility machine) on the university endeavor. Tuesday, January 20, 2026 Read: - The whole website. Every word. Thursday, January 22, 2026 Read: Hsu, Hua. (July 7 & 14, 2025) "Annals of Education: End of the Essay." The New Yorker, pp. 21-27. (Web Version. Also available on Canvas.) Purser, Robert (Nov/Dec 2025) "AI is Destroying the University and Learning Itself." Current Affairs. (Web Version.) Wolf, Maryann. (2023). "'Success in Circuit lies': How do we cultivate deep reading processes in a digital age?" Religion and Ethics, Australian Broadcasting Corporation.
David Brooks, EJ Dionne, and Robert Siegel cover image from a youtube video podcast in which they ask "Is This What a Trump Decline Looks Like" as three white haired balding dudes.
Jacob Savage Compact articles listed: The Lost Generation and The Vanishing White Male Writer. The same story told twice.
Title page of Yoshihiko Ichida’s “The Ethics of the Agitator”. Includes long quotes from Mario Toronto, Louis Althusser, and Nagasaki Hiroshi.
Wallace Shawn as Vizzini in The Princess Bride with the text "Never go against a Sicilian when death is on the line."
Chart of the uses of monstruo in 216 articles from the late Spanish empire in the Americas
Image of the first page of an article titled “On private and public violence: Joseph Garcia de León’s ideology of rule (1780)
Screenshot of the ProQuest dissertation reading page of my dissertation, "Between Prescription and Practice: Governance, Legal Culture, and Gender in Quito, 1765-1830" with an "AI" ResearchAssistant alongside the pdf.
A big red tailed hawk looking back at me perched outside a window.
Hummingbird with blurred wings in front of a purple flower
A graphic visualization of nodal connections between notes and categories from Obsidian App
Screen shot of the title and abstract of a forthcoming article, "On private and public violence: Joseph García de León y Pizarro's Ideology of rule (1780). On 7 January 1780, officials of the audiencia of Quito gathered in the court’s main salon for the first meeting of the new year. President don Joseph García de León y Pizarro addressed the ministers and their functionaries to explain his vision of sovereignty, the state, and juridical rule. He valued the speech so much that he ordered the city’s printer to publish the text as a pamphlet, the Discurso elocuente pronunciado en la renovación del Tribunal de la Real Audiencia. This article accepts García de León’s assertion of the speech’s importance. It provides a symptomatic reading of the pamphlet, attentive to its evocative and metaphorical language of violence and monstrosity in a demand for obedience in the judicial bureaucracy and argues that García de León’s admonition to obedience inadvertently revealed the erosion of the pillars of a symbolic order that structured colonial rule for generations.
Photo of the University Heights arch, with logo shaped like a trolley, on Park Blvd in San Diego, CA
Ernie Barnes's painting titled 'Ballroom Soul'
Men and women dressed in white coats, face masks, white hats, seated and assembling computer control boards.
Shirtless blond male worker creating red hot steel beams from his bare hands.
Photo of the Texas Rangers new overlap hat, with the team T imposed over Texas, which makes it read as TETAS.
US Dept of State forecast shows largest spend to be $400M on Armored Teslas.
1. Herbert Marcuse, *One-Dimensional Man: Studies in the Ideology of Advanced Industrial Society* (Beacon Press, 1991) 2. Franz Fanon, *The Wretched of the Earth* (Grove, 2005) 3. Anne Garland Mahler, *From the Tricontinental to the Global South: Race, Radicalism, and Transnational Solidarity* (Duke University Press, 2018) 4. Jaime Pensado, *Rebel Mexico: Student Unrest and Authoritarian Political Culture during the Long Sixties* (Stanford University Press, 2015) 5. Susana Draper, *1968 Mexico: Constellations of Freedom and Democracy* (Duke University Press, 2018) 6. Christopher Gerteis, *Mobilizing Japanese Youth: The Cold War and the Making of the Sixties Generation* (Cornell University Press, 2021) 7. Gavin Walker, ed. *The Red Years: Theory, Politics, and Aesthetics in the Japanese '68* (Verso Books, 2020) 8. Jeffrey James Byrne, *Mecca of Revolution: Algeria, Decolonization and the Third World Order* (Oxford University Press, 2019) 9. Kristen Ross, *May '68 and its Afterlives* (Univ. of Chicago Press, 2004) 10. Quinn Slobodian, *Foreign Front: Third World Politics in Sixties West Germany* (Duke University Press, 2012) 11. Andrew Ivaska, *Cultured States: Youth, Gender, and Modern Style in 1960s Dar Es Sallam* (Duke University Press, 2011) 12. Tanisha Ford, *Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul* (University of North Carolina Press, 2017) 13. Guy Hocquenghem, *Gay Liberation after May '68* (Duke University Press, 2022) 14. Luc Boltanski and Eve Chiapello, *The New Spirit of Capitalism* (Verso Books, 2016)
Cover of Alenka Zupančič’s new book, Disavowal (Polity Press, 2024)
Still photo from Trainspotting with the lads in the countryside
Image of Camila Townsend's Fifth Sun in the VitalSource book reader. It isn't exactly... readable.
Capitulo I. De la significación de la palabra Monstruo. Summario.
Image of the chess playing automaton of Johann Nepomuk Maelzel, 1769.
Modes-Of-Exchange Matrix Mode B: Plunder and redistribution Mode A: Reciprocity (Domination and protection) (Gift and countergift) Mode C: Commodity exchange Mode D: X (Money and commodities) From Karatani's Structures of World History
White board with discussion notes on Marx and Freud.
Fortune Mag headline: "Lucid dream startup says engineers can write code in their sleep. Work may never be the same." Imagine of a woman sleeping in an eye mask.
Image of a tweet, "Arizona and Jedd Fisch are in negotiations on a contract that would make him the highest paid football coach in school history.
Why Is Stanley Fish Teaching at Florida's New College? An interview about politics, academic freedom, and "ideological odor." Headline from a CHE interview.
Photo of a Tesla Cybertruck with a mountain bike in its pathetic “truck” bed.