#Katherine McKittrick

[fatehbaz]

In 1833, Parliament finally abolished slavery in the British Caribbean, and the taxpayer payout of £20 million in “compensation” [paid by the government to slave owners] built the material, geophysical (railways, mines, factories), and imperial infrastructures of Britain [...]. Slavery and industrialization were tied by the various afterlives of slavery in the form of indentured and carceral labor that continued to enrich new emergent industrial powers [...]. Enslaved “free” African Americans predominately mined coal in the corporate use of black power or the new “industrial slavery,” [...]. The labor of the coffee - the carceral penance of the rock pile, “breaking rocks out here and keeping on the chain gang” (Nina Simone, Work Song, 1966), laying iron on the railroads - is the carceral future mobilized at plantation’s end (or the “nonevent” of emancipation). [...] [T]he racial circumscription of slavery predates and prepares the material ground for Europe and the Americas in terms of both nation and empire building - and continues to sustain it.

Text by: Kathryn Yusoff. "White Utopia/Black Inferno: Life on a Geologic Spike". e-flux Journal Issue #97. February 2019.

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When the Haitian Revolution erupted [...], slaveholding regimes around the world grew alarmed. In response to a series of slave rebellions in its own sugar colonies, especially in Jamaica, the British Empire formally abolished slavery in the 1830s. [...] Importing indentured labor from Asia emerged as a potential way to maintain the British Empire’s sugar plantation system. In 1838 John Gladstone, father of future prime minister William E. Gladstone, arranged for the shipment of 396 South Asian workers, bound to five years of indentured labor, to his sugar estates in British Guiana. The experiment [...] inaugurated [...] "a new system of [...] [indentured servitude]," which would endure for nearly a century. [...] Desperate to regain power and authority after the war [and abolition of chattel slavery in the US], Louisiana’s wealthiest planters studied and learned from their Caribbean counterparts. [...] Thousands of Chinese workers landed in Louisiana between 1866 and 1870, recruited from the Caribbean, China and California. [...] When Congress debated excluding the Chinese from the United States in 1882, Rep. Horace F. Page of California argued that the United States could not allow the entry of “millions of cooly slaves and serfs.”

Text by: Moon-Ho Jung. "Making sugar, making 'coolies': Chinese laborers toiled alongside Black workers on 19th-century Louisiana plantations". The Conversation. 13 January 2022.

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The durability and extensibility of plantations [...] have been tracked most especially in the contemporary United States’ prison archipelago and segregated urban areas [...], [including] “skewed life chances, limited access to health [...], premature death, incarceration [...]”. [...] [In labor arrangements there exists] a moral tie that indefinitely indebts the laborers to their master, [...] the main mechanisms reproducing the plantation system long after the abolition of slavery [...]. [G]enealogies of labor management […] have been traced […] linking different features of plantations to later economic enterprises, such as factories […] or diamond mines […] [,] chartered companies, free ports, dependencies, trusteeships [...].

Text by: Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (edited by Petitcrops, Macedo, and Peano). Published 2023.

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Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the [French] republic, threw his weight behind […] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive […], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire [...]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor. During the period of the early penal colony we see this search for new slaves, not only in French Guiana, but also throughout [other European] colonies built on the plantation model.

Text by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000.

---

To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals - and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. [Moseley was Black and had been a slave at a plantation in America before escaping to Britain, where he was charged with a crime and shipped to do convict labor in Australia.] […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [...] In the context of that widespread enthusiasm [in Australia] for the [American] South (the welcome extended to the Confederate ship Shenandoah in Melbourne in 1865 led one of its officers to conclude “the heart of colonial Britain was in our cause”), Queenslanders dreamed of building a “second Louisiana”. [...] The men did not merely adopt a lifestyle associated with New World slavery. They also relied on its techniques and its personnel. [...] Hope, for instance, acquired his sugar plants from the old slaver Thomas Scott. He hired supervisors from Jamaica and Barbados, looking for those with experience driving plantation slaves. [...] The Royal Navy’s Commander George Palmer described Lewin’s vessels as “fitted up precisely like an African slaver [...]".

Text by: Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.

[notchainedtotrauma]

If we do not do this work, if we do not collaboratively call into question a system of knowledge that delights in accumulation by dispossession and profits from ecocidal and genocidal practices, if we do not produce and share stories that honor modes of humanness that cannot and will not replicate this system, we are doomed.

from Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick

[blueneighbor]

an altar to those who have been dispossessed, those who are haunting, and anyone who has been affected by colonialism.

this project was deeply inspired by "Before Dispossession, or Surviving It" by Angie Morrill, Eve Tuck, and the Super Futures Haunt Qollective, "Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?" by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, Octavia's Brood, an anthology dedicated to Octavia Butler, DUB: Finding Ceremony by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, and Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler.

much gratitude for lexi, who helped me bring an idea into reality, and my critical race and ethnic studies professor micha cárdenas who challenged me greatly this quarter.

let us reimagine the future. a future with a free Palestine and an end to all colonial domination. a future where care and community is central to life.

[pajulie]

My heart makes my head swim

—Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and other Stories

[slayercain]

Within the bodily turn, fabrications of alterity are often advanced in the name of refusing the elisions, disavowals, or subordinations of corporeal entanglement that are replete in Western philosophy. Here the proper body, its ontic subterfuge of property and propriety appears the victim of its own displacements, assailed by a growing number of investigations into and celebrations of corporealities which are porous, affectable, malleable, or experimental, which are sensuous becomings or encounters with uncertain boundaries between self, other, and world. The body tends to emerge instead as a question, which, more often than not, takes the rhetorical form of “What can a body do?” And yet, almost without fail, when the speaker of such a question gazes toward black corporeality, the theoretical and aesthetic openness of this Spinozian-Deleuzian query—for which “the body is not a thing, even an extended thing . . . [but rather] a process of encounters”—immediately closes up, and we are left with the Fanonian echo chamber (Look! A Negro!). The declension from potentiative question to phenomenological injunction should prompt us to take heed of a rather glaring disjuncture: that while the rhetorical trope black bodies has become so utterly ubiquitous in both critical academic and left-progressive political spheres that it is almost impossible to avoid within the English-speaking world, the bodily turn has almost completely refused to engage blackness as a serious theoretical problematic for “moving beyond” the proper body. The bodily turn’s failure to escape “the relentless desire to pursue the black body . . . as an object of inquiry” has been astutely critiqued by Tiffany Lethabo King and Katherine McKittrick, among other black feminist theorists. This desire has largely reflected a “racialized erotics” (King) and the enduring “ideological currency of dispossessed black bodies” (McKittrick) rather than a genuine interest in the constitutive imbrications of raciality and embodiment within the modern world. I am not suggesting that the burgeoning interdisciplinary work on bodies, embodiment, and corporeality which comprises the bodily turn lacks richness or depth or that it has failed to advance crucial theoretical contributions to something like “moving beyond the proper body.” What I am suggesting is that the irreducible problematic of blackness and the body has been thoroughly provincialized within the bodily turn at the very same time that critical academic and left-progressive political spheres have come to rhetorically conflate black people and ‘black bodies.’ This conflation is neither coincidental nor paradoxical but rather symptomatic of the conjunctural modulation of an enduring discursive regime. This discursive regime is, in turn, embedded in a more general racial-corporeal organization of modernity that precedes the contingencies of historical conjuncture. Reckoning with blackness as an existence that is irreducible to ethnographic locality, as an existence that is more and less than epiphenomenal to the emergence, reproduction, and deconstruction of the proper body effects something far more radical than an indictment of the epistemic and ethical limits of the bodily turn: it exposes the body itself as a racial apparatus; it calls us toward an irreducibly gendered descent into a black aesthesis, given in the absence of a body.

Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

[librarycards]

In the excess is where becoming occurs, and becoming’s inherent nonconformity with being and its sedimented logics act as fertile (demonic) ground for those who might be. Trans/figuration is an ode to those who are not yet permitted to be here but insist on persisting anyway. It attests to not finding or discovering, but cultivating room for the unanticipated to emerge. We are given the honor of awaiting those holographic and hieroglyphic mobilities that might come.

We cannot anticipate subjectivities to come, or even rightly call them “bodies,” because it accosts our agreed-upon requirements for sufficient identification. Indeed, the subject as it might come, as it might emerge, cannot be known beforehand and thus might always—out of definitional necessity—be castigated for its inadequacy, its wrongness. But it is this gesture of subjective wrongness that we must embrace if we are to engender the onset of radically reorienting what might be.

Marquis Bey, Black Trans Feminism.

[emphasis added; breaks added for accessibility]

[metamatar]

Hey, that anon message sent to you. They were "surprised" that you spoke positively about Indigenous/Black methodologies and knowledge production. I just wanted to let them know that these discourses of knowledge production are taken very seriously, even and especially within "the Euro-American academy" or whatever for the past twenty-five years at least (so much so that it's very fashionable and influential, not that "legitimacy granted by the academy" must be the end-all measure of validity). It's not just that these ontologies/methodologies are compatible with US/European science, but they are actually actively now at forefront of US/European journals, universities, discourses, discussing environmental studies, coloniality, space/place, intellectual history, etc. You walk through hallways in a liberal arts building on campus and you'll see "Plantationocene" or "Indigenous pedagogy" printed on lecture fliers on the wall (so there are discussions about academia's consumption, appropriation, recuperation of these concepts). But I wanted to back you up, and also offer to that anon some places that might help them, to see not just the "rigorous intellectual method" of Black methodologies, Indigenous pedagogies, Caribbeanist/archipelagic thinking, etc., but also to show that there are whole "traditional" peer-reviewed journals that have been discussing this stuff for years too (from Small Axe, Antipode, and Journal of Postcolonial Writing to more-classic Transactions of the Institute of British Geographers and Annals of the American Association of Geographers). This stuff has been so prominent in "legitimate" arenas that it's been like almost ten years since Zoe Todd famously critiqued "the ontological turn" in academic anthropology.

But three basic accessible introductory resources:

E-flux (e-flux dot com): Specifically their e-flux Journal and e-flux Architecture section, which have published for years, pretty much daily, on knowledge production, pedagogies, epistemologies of space/place/land, historiography, architecture, environmental sciences, discourses within academy/sciences, etc. They also do many special issues, some which focus specifically on architecture of sickness/health; Anthropocene and Plantationocene; Black methodologies; race in European historiography; etc. you'll see mention of (and sometimes whole issues dedicated to discussion of) Achille Mbembe, Fanon, Indigenous ontologies, Eduoard Glissant, Orientalism, Sylia Wynter, Aime Cesaire, etc. Some of these scholars have also themselves written/published multiple essays/articles at e-flux, including Mbembe (necropolitics), Kathryn Yusoff (A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None), Katherine McKittrick (Black methodologies; plantation logic; carceral geography); Elizabeth Povinelli (geontopower). E-flux's site itself has a good tagging system for subjects (plantations; coloniality; postcoloniality; pedagogy; ecology; etc.).

About four journal issues each year from peer-reviewed Antipode Online (a project of Antipode: A Radical Journal of Geography). They also have various special issues, lecture series, interventions, workshops, roundtables, etc. about knowledge production, and have separate series for "Right to the Discipline grants" and "scholar-activist projects". (This kind of focus is also shared by the online portal of ACME: An International Journal for Critical Geographies, which also does special issues, roundtables, interventions).

Green Dreamer (greendreamer dot com): Transcripts for over 430 interviews/conversations between scholars, scientists, etc. which mostly focus on knowledge production, methodologies, "troubling the academy", pedagogy, intellectual history, historiography, etc. with specific foci in ecology, history, race, humanities, environmental sciences. They go out of their way to survey Black and Indigenous scholars. And by coincidence their latest interviews (2024) are with Nick Estes (Indigenous pedagogies of knowledge) and Sadiah Qureshi (she authored Peoples on Parade: Exhibitions, Empire and Anthropology in Nineteenth-Century Britain). But they've surveyed so much more.

Some scholars on this kind of stuff: Katherine McKittrick; Achille Mbembe; Pratik Chakrabarti; Macarena Gomez-Barris; Sharae Deckard; Kathryn Yusoff; Jonathan Saha.

But this is a tip of an iceberg.

wow!!! its so cool to receive a message from you as your blog has definitely shaped my perspective and even my style on sharing articles here. and yeah its true that black and indigenous knowledge production is very much on the forefront of liberal arts, esp in the sub fields you've pointed out. i personally perceived anon's critique as one to me bc i have spoken previously about the cynical deployment of decolonial studies as insulation from critique wrt fascist and ethnonationalist discourses like hindutva and i personally traffic in engineering depts that view themselves as immune to even studying their own histories. but these occupations of decolonial studies by high culture is only possible if such studies had currency in the academy! to reject this cynical deployment is not to make a return to euro american business as usual though. i think its a matter of grounding and local context to be capable of as ahmad says "the most delicate of dialectics to disaggregate these densities."

and most importantly, thank you for the bibliography. i have a zotero folder for your recs :)

[bfpnola]

nov 9 - nov 13 readings

hi! this is reaux (she/they)! as many of you know, BFP is slowly waking up and will be undergoing a full makeover in the coming months. in the mean time, to help get back into the pattern of posting and to continue to share resources, i want to start posting what i read each week!

without further ado, here is everything i've been learning from and engaging with so far just between last saturday night [nov 9, 2024] and right now [wednesday afternoon, nov 13, 2024]! i tried to post this on tiktok @/edgeofeden.17 (go check me out for cool political talks and reading recs!) with my reactions as well, but they said it violated community guidelines :(

journal article: The House on Bayou Road: Atlantic Creole Networks in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries

wikipedia: Plaçage

wikipedia: Signare

paperback book: Africans In Colonial Louisiana: The Development of Afro-Creole Culture in the Eighteenth-Century

article: Why Is Gen Z So Sex-Negative?: A prehistory of the Puriteen.

article: Policy-makers must not look to the “Nordic model” for sex trade legislation

article: Sex workers face unique challenges when trying to unionize: Anti-sex work stigma and labor status create roadblocks in sex workers’ fight against the industry status quo

wikipedia: Decriminalization of sex work

short youtube video: "Decriminalization of sex work does not mean the decriminalization of human trafficking."

short youtube video: What About Legalization? Decriminalization is the only solution

short youtube video: Dis/Ability and Sex Work Decriminalization

short youtube video: "Helping people through police is inherently coercive." - Gilda Merlot

wikipedia: Page Act of 1875

essay: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power by Audre Lorde

wikipedia: Erotic Capital

long youtube video: KATHERINE MCKITTRICK: Curiosities, Wonder, and Black Methodologies // 09.14.20

journal article: Black life is Not Ungeographic! Applying a Black Geographic Lens to Rural Education Research in the Black Belt

journal article: Black matters are spatial matters: Black geographies for the twenty-first century

journal article: Unspoken Grammar of Place: Anti-Blackness as a Spatial Imaginary in Education

short video: Chicago Works | Andrea Carlson: Shimmer on Horizons

zine: Evaluating What Skills You Can Bring to Radical Organizing

diagram + workbook?: The Social Change Ecosystem Map (2020)

essay: How to Build Language Justice

guide: Anti-Oppressive Facilitation for Democratic Process: Making Meetings Awesome for Everyone

radical resource library: Center for Liberatory Practice & Poetry

short essay: The Short Instructional Manifesto for Relationship Anarchy

essay/blog post: Access Intimacy: The Missing Link

i think that's everything? whew. let's see how i finish off the week! if you need PDFs for anything i didn't directly link, lmk and i'll find a way to get it to you. might upload it to my google drive or something!

--

topics: Louisiana Creole history + heritage, women of color + erotic capital, sex work decriminalization, Black geography, revolutionary organizing, language, relationship anarchy, disability, intimacy

[transmutationisms]

hi transmutationisms :-) i was wondering if you have any readings on the idea of tourism as occupation? i've been reading katherine mckittrick and she explores the idea of antiblackness via the lens of geography and i thought maybe you'd be a good person to ask for further readings. apologies if not!

Unpacked: A History of Caribbean Tourism by Blake Scott (2022) comes to mind and also The Carpathians: Discovering the Highlands of Poland and Ukraine by Patrice Dabrowski (2021) but this isn't an area i read much in and i know there's a lot more out there. i would definitely raid both those bibliographies and also do some research starting with tourism of directly occupying powers (eg, the USA and the idea of Cuba as 'America's playground', or French tourism in occupied Algeria, &c)

[fatehbaz]

The very same year that Moseley was imprisoned on the ship Scarborough bound for Australia, another British ship was also setting sail to the South Pacific: the Bounty. 

Embarking in 1787, the specific mission of the Bounty was to collect plants and seeds of breadfruit from Polynesia, so that the plant could be brought back and cultivated as a food crop at British plantations in the Caribbean to feed slaves. Plantation owners in Jamaica and St. Vincent were fighting against ongoing slave revolts, and imported food was now expensive due to embargoes on the North American colonies, and so the planters had petitioned renowned botanist Joseph Banks, president of the Royal Society and unofficial father of England’s esteemed botanical collections at royal Kew Gardens, to provide breadfruit - explicitly - as a cheap food product in the hopes that less hunger would quell rebellion among their enslaved workers. And so Banks and the Royal Society ordered the mission, and the motive for the Bounty expedition was to prevent rebellion.

In what must be one of the great poetic ironic twists of all history, that same ship experienced what is now infamously known as “the mutiny on the Bounty”. The ship that Britain sent to stop revolts had itself experienced a revolt.

---

And rebellion did spread. In 1789, the same year of the mutiny on the Bounty, the Haitian Revolution began, when the slaves of the Saint Domingue colony revolted against plantation owners and an empire, and by 1801 eventually achieved independence from France. British administrators in the Caribbean feared that this event would inspire slaves in other islands and colonies to also revolt, and they feared that the wider official legal abolition of slavery would harm profits.

Lisa Lowe describes “the intimacies of four continents”: hegemonic power built on simultaneous subjugation of people from Africa, the Americas, Asia, and Europe itself. In 1803, the administrator John Sullivan of the British Colonial Office sent a letter to the Chairman of the Court of Directors of the East India Company. Lowe draws attention to this letter, which reveals how British administrators very purposely sought to replace slave labor with indentured labor. It reads: “The events which have recently happened at St. Domingo necessarily awakes all those apprehensions which the establishment of a Negro government in that land gave rise to some years ago and render it indispensable that every practicable measure of precaution should be adopted to guard the British possessions in the West Indies as well against the the danger of a spirit of insurrection being excited amongst the Negroes in our colonies [....] no measure would so effectively provide a security against this danger as that of introducing a free race of cultivators into our islands who from habits and feelings could be kept distinct from the Negroes and who from interest would be attached to the European proprietors. The Chinese people unite the qualities which constitute this double recommendation.”

And thus began the tradition of importing indentured laborers to work Britain's plantations in the Caribbean, a tactic that they perfected in the Victorian era and then repeated across Asia. Britain technically abolished chattel slavery in the 1830s. But in fact, the empire could kill two birds with one stone: social and political activists in British-administered Bombay could be arrested and shipped to British penal colonies in the Malayan peninsula. So that local resistance could be crushed by removing people from their community and shipping them thousands of kilometers away where they were forced to work on plantations, roads, canals, and other infrastructure projects. In the following years of the nineteenth century, the Empire expanded control in India, in Africa, and at home. The 1834 Workhouse Act. The 1832 Vagrancy Act. The 1793 Permanent Settlement Act which provoked mass dispossession amidst ongoing famines and solidified British control in Bengal, implemented by the governor Lord Cornwallis, who in just a few years served the Empire as military commander in North America, Commander-in-Chief of India, and Commander-in-Chief of Ireland. Power across multiple continents.

And thus, while Regency-era aristocrats spoke about the supposedly outdated cruelty of formal slavery, proclaiming to be a more modern and “civilized” society, the "beautification" of England in the nineteenth century was still achieved through forced labor, yet now masked in reformist language. The expansion of railroad infrastructure, manufacturing, and other industries which saw the dramatic transformation of England, propelling the empire into the spectacular prosperity of Victorian Britain, were still built on the “old money” wealth that father and grandfather had wrought from their Caribbean plantations (profits from which were re-invested in English infrastructure) and the “new money” wealth taken from industrial labor domestically (poor people forced to work in England) and “indentured” "coolie" and "convict" labor abroad in colonial India and Southeast Asia (poor people forced to work in Bombay, Assam, Bengal, Malaya, Singapore, etc.). These are the intimacies of four continents.

Obscure, disguise, re-name, hide the violence.

Various different ways of effectively legalizing slavery. All on display in different regions colonized by England. Including the formal system of chattel slavery at plantations in the United States; the criminalization of poverty and enforced labor regimes of urban factories in the British metropole in London; and the prison labor of penal colonies in Australia.

Reading about how some people were victims of all of these ways of de facto enslavement. For example, all of these conditions of imprisonment were experienced by one man named John Moseley.

Around the year 1800, this forced labor existed across the British Empire. At the time of the American Revolution, Moseley had been enslaved in tobacco fields under the chattel slavery system in the Tidewater region of colonial Virginia. When Britain offered emancipation to slaves willing to join the military campaign against the Americans, Moseley joined the British forces. When Britain conceded and surrendered, Moseley feared that he would be re-enslaved in the United States, where chattel slavery remained legal, so he fled to London. However, around this same time, in England, rural livelihoods were being made more difficult; during this so-called Industrial Revolution, many were forced to move to cities or accept manufacturing jobs. And authorities were beginning the tradition of criminalizing poverty, rounding up “vagrants and vagabonds” in urban areas, as debt and poverty were forcing people to work in brutal labor conditions in factories. So Moseley sought income through criminal fraud. Moseley was arrested. He was sentenced to death. However, a death sentence could be commuted if the prisoner submitted to “transportation” and labor. And thus Moseley was once again imprisoned in chains, once again forced to work, and shipped to the convict colonies of Australia.

As Jeff Sparrow puts it: 

To control the desperate and the jobless, the authorities passed harsh new laws, a legislative program designed to quell disorder and ensure a pliant workforce for the factories. The Riot Act banned public disorder; the Combination Act made trade unions illegal; the Workhouse Act forced the poor to work; the Vagrancy Act turned joblessness into a crime. Eventually, over 220 offences could attract capital punishment - or, indeed, transportation. […] [C]onvict transportation - a system in which prisoners toiled without pay under military discipline - replicated many of the worst cruelties of slavery. […] Middle-class anti-slavery activists expressed little sympathy for Britain’s ragged and desperate, holding […] [them] responsible for their own misery. The men and women of London’s slums weren’t slaves. They were free individuals – and if they chose criminality, […] they brought their punishment on themselves. That was how Phillip [commander of the British First Fleet settlement in Australia] could decry chattel slavery while simultaneously relying on unfree labour from convicts. The experience of John Moseley, one of the eleven people of colour on the First Fleet, illustrates how, in the Australian settlement, a rhetoric of liberty accompanied a new kind of bondage. […] The eventual commutation of a capital sentence to transportation meant that armed guards marched a black ex-slave, chained once more by the neck and ankles, to the Scarborough, on which he sailed to New South Wales. […] For John Moseley, the “free land” of New South Wales brought only a replication of that captivity he’d endured in Virginia. His experience was not unique. […] [T]hroughout the settlement, the old strode in, disguised as the new. [End quote. Text by Jeff Sparrow. “Friday essay: a slave state - how blackbirding in colonial Australia created a legacy of racism.” The Conversation. 4 August 2022.]

[notchainedtotrauma]

Indeed, so trusted and commonsense are studies that begin with black dehumanization and/or social death and accompanying methods of proving abjection or saving the objectified figure that any burst of rebellion against that assigned place is almost (not totally) obliterated. Description is not liberation.

from Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick

[blueneighbor]

"...the earth is also skin and that a young girl can legitimately take possession of a street, or an entire city, albeit on different terms than we may be familiar with." —Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds

[easays]

Violence Engines and Improvisation

Hi! This an actual play mini-essay. I use these mini-essays to practice writing about the shows and systems I spend so much time listening to and playing. In this essay, I discuss the distinct contribution improvisation and actual play make to contending with systemic violence. Below are spoilers for the most recent Worlds Beyond Number episode (29) as well as discussions of grief, anger, systemic violence, and brief references to chattel slavery.

As always, thanks for reading. Feel free to drop me a line if there’s an actual play you think I should listen to and discuss or if you have thoughts to share!

I know I’ve posted about this ad nauseum at this point, but the way @worldsbeyondpod pulls at my grief heart strings is unbelievable. I also think it’s part of a larger creative distinction in actual play worth exploring more deeply.

Most recently, Aabria Iyengar’s character Suvi has a moment where the truth of her parent’s real names give her a chance to pull on an endless web of scenes and stories they were in, tuck them away, and take them with her. These are memories she would never have access to otherwise, from parents she’d never be able to speak to. My heart raced in the moments of lead up here: I could feel my own grief in my throat, coated with names I would’ve screamed into that well of memories.

And she doesn’t do it. Iyengar says it’s too much for Suvi, and she pulls back. I was driving to work on my first listen, and I screamed “no” at my empty car before I even realized it. It vaulted out of me, like it was my own chance to know my parents taken away. I had to pause the show and spend the rest of my drive in silence because I surprised myself at how real it had felt.

How could it feel so real? Why does it matter that it felt so real? I stewed in my own thoughts. Violent war tore Suvi’s parents away; systemic governmental neglect and homophobia killed mine. It was not a 1-to-1, so the feelings bubbling in my chest had taken me by surprise. I began to think about the violence in both worlds, and how they act as containers for lives and stories. I think it’s more complex than violence begets violence, going beyond feeling the unfair grief at Suvi’s losses and my own.

There’s a quotation in Katherine McKittrick’s /Dear Science/ where she discusses improvised musical performance as a way to harness a glimpse of violent lived reality. She’s positioning it through the lens of chattel slavery, illustrating that improvised performance using waveform sound is a momentary way into the storm of the Middle Passage.

“I read Drexciya [the band] not as necessarily emerging from a narrative of the Middle Passage toward an Afrofuture aquatopia, but instead a collaborative sound-labor that draws attention to creative acts that disrupt disciplined ways of knowing…[They] create a signal with different sounds, thus taking waveform, synthesizing them, to provide a soundtrack to the storm: they electronically harness the storm…They harness the storm and then let it go. Improvisation demands practice and structure—it is not a natural process, it is practiced creative labor that is physiologically enacted.”

The importance of the improvisation here is the implicit acknowledgement that it cannot be the “real” thing. But that recognition is a freedom to create through and with rather than as, to show us all that creative labor is a necessary component to imagining a future otherwise without an abandonment of realities both historical and present.

There are one hundred ways to take this an apply it to the improvisation actual play creates, but the one I’m most interested in at this moment ties to the continual question of why Dungeons and Dragons for WBN? The racist and colonial violence’s historically baked into the system have led me, at other points, to lean more into viewing DnD based actual plays as mirrors of our own worlds. They are tales of inescapable violence and dominion that we must see and learn from. But is that all they are? Are those stories using DnD simply replicating violence, so that we can see and think maybe this is the time that the lesson sticks? I now think “not always.”

Charlie Hall recently spoke with the cast about this choice, and his conclusion draws on the fact that DnD is ultimately a system based on what the players and DMs choose to do rather than a pre-set violent outcome. This excerpt from Brennan Lee Mulligan sticks out:

I agree with Hall, and I also wanted to think more about what this work does at the audience level. What are we let in to when we are folded into this intimate, illuminating creative labor that we did not help build? I am not suggesting that this work is directly equivalent to what McKittrick examines. Her work deals with the horrific reality of chattel slavery and its innumerable legacies of violence and horror. What I am suggesting is that her interpretation of improvisation is critical because it acknowledges the distinct creative labor improvisation requires that leans into historical and contemporary realities, violent or otherwise, rather than flinching away. More importantly, these creations do not pretend to be simulacrum or representations.

I draw this quotation because I think it incredibly illustrates how to draw on something historically violent and the way it’s seen to reformulate it into something new. The “food” of Iyengar, Ishii, Wilson, and Milligan’s performances, like Drexciya’s waveforms, are the main vehicle. Taylor Moore’s sound design anchors their work, perhaps acting as the baking container if we extend the metaphor. We are drawn into the soundscape of the world, until we forget for a moment it is not our world.

For me, I think the most incredible element is that split second where I go “it’s not our world, but what if it is? what if it could be?” That is the power of improvisational creative labor, and the moment from this most recent episode I referenced at the top is only one of a thousand moments given so far. The cast distinctly push against the 1-to-1 reading of our world into theirs and vice versa, and my reading here is part processing the creative liberty and power when we loosen the reigns to see fictive worlds as mirrors. We seem to gain new perspectives, introspectively and externally, on the ingredients making up our world when we seem them used, rearranged, and made in the same crucible of violence our own lives exist within.

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Some interesting things I read this week.

[littlebrownmushroom]

Recently Received Trick Not Telos by Katherine McKittrick