DOI: 10.1177/13505084251348684 ISSN: 1350-5084

For a poetics of rage in the business school undercommons

Chahrazad Abdallah

Drawing on the poetic work of Audre Lorde on anger and inspired by recent expressions of collective anger against the many regimes of inequality and injustice in the neoliberal business school, this essay aims to delineate the contours of a reinvented minoritarian critique that emerges through the undercommons, a fugitive, non-reformist collective mode of relating to this oppressive institution. I first discuss the concept of Lordean rage, a collective and transformative form of anger at intersecting social injustices, and I reflect on its role as an affective self-defense for those in oppositional presence to the business school. I then discuss how through the undercommons, we can think differently about how we relate to the institution, and how Lordean rage manifests an uncompromising and generative presence-in-anger for those who want to exist in dignity within and against the business school. This essay aspires to reinvigorate spaces of critique in MOS with a stronger poetic, inventive, and oppositional spirit nourished by a capacious collective rage at the neoliberal business school and its multiple regimes of injustice.

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