#Katherine McKittrick

[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.

[protoslacker]

In Wynter’s work, she does this amazingly smart theoretical and intellectual leap, where she refuses to situate the human within the context of biocentricity. Biocentricity is the idea that we began life on this planet as a kind of blank and unformed biologic entity and then, as time moved forward, we acquired—we grew, we evolved toward—more sophisticated biological features, like language. This growth, too, is measured through race thinking, with “Caucasian” signifying supremacy. So, Wynter refuses this. She will not say, “humans moved toward storytelling,” or “… and then the humans told the story.” She will never fall into that trap: the one where the story, the act of languaging our existence, comes after humanity has biologically matured. The problematic and punishingly whitened and linear conundrum of scientific racism—apes-to-Aryans-to-cyborgs-to-robots—explodes. Instead, she insists that we are, and always have been, a simultaneously bios-and-mythoi species.

Katherine McKittrick in conversation with Chanda Prescod-Weinstein at Public Books. PUBLIC THINKER: KATHERINE MCKITTRICK ON BLACK METHODOLOGIES AND OTHER WAYS OF BEING

Thinking in public demands knowledge, eloquence, and courage. In this interview series, we hear from public scholars about how they found their path and how they communicate to a wide audience.

Dear Science and Other Stories by Kathereine McKittrick

[pajulie]

My heart makes my head swim

—Katherine McKittrick, Dear Science and other Stories

[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]

[fatehbaz]

When you tag things “#abolition”, what are you referring to? Abolishing what?

Prisons, generally. Though not just physical walls of formal prisons, but also captivity, carcerality, and carceral thinking. Including migrant detention; national border fences; indentured servitude; inability to move due to, and labor coerced through, debt; de facto imprisonment or isolation of the disabled or medically pathologized; privatization and enclosure of land; categories of “criminality"; etc.

In favor of other, better lives and futures.

Specifically, I am grateful to have learned from the work of these people:

Ruth Wilson Gilmore on “abolition geography”.

Katherine McKittrick on "imaginative geographies"; emotional engagement with place/landscape; legacy of imperialism/slavery in conceptions of physical space and in devaluation of other-than-human lifeforms; escaping enclosure; plantation “afterlives” and how plantation logics continue to thrive in contemporary structures/institutions like cities, prisons, etc.; a “range of rebellions” through collaborative acts, refusal of the dominant order, and subversion through joy and autonomy.

Macarena Gomez-Barris on landscapes as “sacrifice zones”; people condemned to live in resource extraction colonies deemed as acceptable losses; place-making and ecological consciousness; and how “the enclosure, the plantation, the ship, and the prison” are analogous spaces of captivity.

Liat Ben-Moshe on disability; informal institutionalization and incarceration of disabled people through physical limitation, social ostracization, denial of aid, and institutional disavowal; and "letting go of hegemonic knowledge of crime”.

Achille Mbembe on co-existence and care; respect for other-than-human lifeforms; "necropolitics" and bare life/death; African cosmologies; historical evolution of chattel slavery into contemporary institutions through control over food, space, and definitions of life/land; the “explicit kinship between plantation slavery, colonial predation, and contemporary resource extraction” and modern institutions.

Robin Maynard on "generative refusal"; solidarity; shared experiences among homeless, incarcerated, disabled, Indigenous, Black communities; to "build community with" those who you are told to disregard in order "to re-imagine" worlds; envisioning, imagining, and then manifesting those alternative futures which are "already" here and alive.

Leniqueca Welcome on Caribbean world-making; "the apocalyptic temporality" of environmental disasters and the colonial denial of possible "revolutionary futures"; limits of reformism; "infrastructures of liberation at the end of the world."; "abolition is a practice oriented toward the full realization of decolonization, postnationalism, decarceration, and environmental sustainability."

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten on “the undercommons”; fugitivity; dis-order in academia and institutions; and sharing of knowledge.

AM Kanngieser on "deep listening"; “refusal as pedagogy”; and “attunement and attentiveness” in the face of “incomprehensible” and immense “loss of people and ecologies to capitalist brutalities”.

Lisa Lowe on "the intimacies of four continents" and how British politicians and planters feared that official legal abolition of chattel slavery would endanger Caribbean plantation profits, so they devised ways to import South Asian and East Asian laborers.

Ariella Aisha Azoulay on “rehearsals with others’.

Phil Neel on p0lice departments purposely targeting the poor as a way to raise municipal funds; the "suburbanization of poverty" especially in the Great Lakes region; the rise of lucrative "logistics empires" (warehousing, online order delivery, tech industries) at the edges of major urban agglomerations in "progressive" cities like Seattle dependent on "archipelagos" of poverty; and the relationship between job loss, homelessness, gentrification, and these logistics cities.

Alison Mountz on migrant detention; "carceral archipelagoes"; and the “death of asylum”.

Pedro Neves Marques on “one planet with many worlds inside it”; “parallel futures” of Indigenous, Black, disenfranchised communities/cosmologies; and how imperial/nationalist institutions try to foreclose or prevent other possible futures by purposely obscuring or destroying histories, cosmologies, etc.

Peter Redfield on the early twentieth-century French penal colony in tropical Guiana/Guyana; the prison's invocation of racist civilization/savagery mythologies; and its effects on locals.

Iain Chambers on racism of borders; obscured and/or forgotten lives of migrants; and disrupting modernity.

Paulo Tavares on colonial architecture; nationalist myth-making; and erasure of histories of Indigenous dispossession.

Elizabeth Povinelli on "geontopower"; imperial control over "life and death"; how imperial/nationalist formalization of private landownership and commodities relies on rigid definitions of dynamic ecosystems.

Kodwo Eshun on African cosmologies and futures; “the colonial present”; and imperialist/nationalist use of “preemptive” and “predictive” power to control the official storytelling/narrative of history and to destroy alternatives.

Tim Edensor on urban "ghosts" and “industrial ruins”; searching for the “gaps” and “silences” in the official narratives of nations/institutions, to pay attention to the histories, voices, lives obscured in formal accounts.

Megan Ybarra on place-making; "site fights"; solidarity and defiance of migrant detention; and geography of abolition/incarceration.

Sophie Sapp Moore on resistance, marronage, and "forms of counterplantation life"; "plantation worlds" which continue to live in contemporary industrial resource extraction and dispossession.

Deborah Cowen on “infrastructures of empire and resistance”; imperial/nationalist control of place/space; spaces of criminality and "making a life at the edge" of the law; “fugitive infrastructures”.

Elizabeth DeLoughrey on indentured labor; the role of plants, food, and botany in enslaved and fugitive communities; the nineteenth-century British Empire's labor in the South Pacific and Caribbean; the twentieth-century United States mistreatment of the South Pacific; and the role of tropical islands as "laboratories" and isolated open-air prisons for Britain and the US.

Dixa Ramirez D’Oleo on “remaining open to the gifts of the nonhuman” ecosystems; hinterlands and peripheries of empires; attentiveness to hidden landscapes/histories; defying surveillance; and building a world of mutually-flourishing companions.

Leanne Betasamosake Simpson on reciprocity; Indigenous pedagogy; abolitionism in Canada; camaraderie; solidarity; and “life-affirming” environmental relationships.

Anand Yang on "forgotten histories of Indian convicts in colonial Southeast Asia" and how the British Empire deported South Asian political prisoners to the region to simultaneously separate activists from their communities while forcing them into labor.

Sylvia Wynter on the “plot”; resisting the plantation; "plantation archipelagos"; and the “revolutionary demand for happiness”.

Pelin Tan on “exiled foods”; food sovereignty; building affirmative care networks in the face of detention, forced migration, and exile; connections between military rule, surveillance, industrial monocrop agriculture, and resource extraction; the “entanglement of solidarity” and ethics of feeding each other.

Avery Gordon on haunting; spectrality; the “death sentence” of being deemed “social waste” and being considered someone “without future”; "refusing" to participate; "escaping hell" and “living apart” by striking, squatting, resisting; cultivating "the many-headed hydra of the revolutionary Black Atlantic"; alternative, utopian, subjugated worldviews; despite attempts to destroy these futures, manifesting these better worlds, imagining them as "already here, alive, present."

Jasbir Puar on disability; debilitation; how the control of fences, borders, movement, and time management constitute conditions of de facto imprisonment; institutional control of illness/health as a weapon to "debilitate" people; how debt and chronic illness doom us to a “slow death”.

Kanwal Hameed and Katie Natanel on "liberation pedagogy"; sharing of knowledge, education, subversion of colonial legacy in universities; "anticolonial feminisms"; and “spaces of solidarity, revolt, retreat, and release”.

[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)

[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.

[loneberry]

Body, Power, Politics

I've been having fun drafting my syllabus for my Body, Power, Politics graduate seminar happening in the spring. This is still just a draft of the readings... We will think through the body through the lenses of psychoanalysis, affect theory, biopolitics, social reproduction theory, black feminism, queer theory, new materialism, posthumanism, disability studies, and black studies. (I'm honestly tempted to do a whole semester of Sylvia Wynter...)

Seems like grad students from across the university have gotten wind that I'm now on faculty... my class was full within hours of registration opening. Departmental administrator: "This is a first that a class is full on the first day of the registration period." Now I have an inbox of students requesting to be let into the class. What to do!

Week 1: Introduction; Psychoanalysis and the Body

January 10

Course Introduction

Selection from The Routledge Critical and Cultural Theory Reader

2: Sigmund Freud, “A Note on the Unconscious in Psychoanalysis,” 1912, p 10

6: Jacques Lacan, “The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience,” 1949, p 57

Week 2: Race and Psychoanalysis

January 17 

Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks

Recommended

Lewis Gordon, “Through the Zone of Nonbeing A Reading of Black Skin, White Masks in Celebration of Fanon's Eightieth Birthday”

Week 3: Between Psychoanalysis and Neurobiology 

January 24

Catherine Malabou, The New Wounded: From Neurosis to Brain Damage

Catherine Malabou, Self and Emotional Life: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience

“Introduction: From the Passionate Soul to the Emotional Brain”

“On Neural Plasticity, Trauma, and the Loss of Affects”

Week 4: Sylvia Wynter and the Human

January 31

Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black'”

Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—an Argument”

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism”

Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations”

Recommended

Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Found: Towards the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition”

Week 5: Biopolitics, Bodies Without Organs

February 7

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia

“6. November 28, 1947: How Do You Make Yourself a Body Without Organs?” 149-166

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze (editor), Biopolitics: A Reader

Timothy Campbell and Adam Sitze, “Biopolitics: An Encounter,” p 1

Michel Foucault, “Right of Death and Power over Life,” p 41

Michel Foucault, “‘Society Must Be Defended,’ Lecture at the Collège de France,” p 61 

Giorgio Agamben, “Introduction to Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life,” p 134

Week 6: Entangled Matter

February 14 

Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement of Matter and Meaning

Monika Rogowska-Stangret, “Corpor(e)al Cartographies of New Materialism. Meeting the Elsewhere Halfway”

Week 7: Social Reproduction Theory 

February 21

Tithi Bhattacharya (Editor), Social Reproduction Theory

1. Introduction: Mapping Social Reproduction Theory - Tithi Bhattacharya 

2. Crisis of Care? On the Social-Reproductive Contradictions of Contemporary Capitalism - Nancy Fraser 

3. Without Reserves - Salar Mohandesi and Emma Teitelman 

4. How Not to Skip Class: Social Reproduction of Labor and the Global Working Class - Tithi Bhattacharya  

5. Intersections and Dialectics: Critical Reconstructions in Social Reproduction Theory - David McNally 

9. Body Politics: The Social Reproduction of Sexualities - Alan Sears  

10. From Social Reproduction Feminism to the Women's Strike - Cinzia Arruzza

Mariarosa Dalla Costa, “The Power of Women and Subversion of the Community” 

Silvia Federici, Chapter 2, “The Accumulation of Labor and the Degradation of Women” in Caliban and the Witch

Angela Davis, "The Approaching Obsolescence of Housework: A Working-Class Perspective"

Week 8: Gender, Sexuality, and Capitalism

February 28

Christopher Chitty, Sexual Hegemony: Statecraft, Sodomy, and Capital in the Rise of the World System  

Jules Joanne Gleeson and Elle O'Rourke (editors), Transgender Marxism

Nat Raha, “A Queer Marxist Transfeminism: Queer and Trans Social Reproduction”

Zoe Belinsky, “Transgender and Disabled Bodies - Between Pain and the Imaginary” 

Nathaniel Dickson, “Seizing the Means: Towards a Trans Epistemology” 

Recommended

Nat Raha, “Transfeminine Brokenness, Radical Transfeminism”

Week 9: Social Reproduction and the Family

March 7

Melinda Cooper, Family Values: Between Neoliberalism and the New Social Conservatism

Week 10: Resistance and the Body

March 21

Nayan Shah, Refusal to Eat: A Century of Prison Hunger Strikes

Week 11: Surrogacy

March 28

Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, Surrogate Humanity: Race, Robots, and the Politics of Technological Futures

Recommended

Sophie Lewis, Full Surrogacy Now!

Week 12: Black Feminism, Flesh, Labor, and Value

April 4 

Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book”  

Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors”  

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Towards a Black Feminist Poethics”

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “1 (life) ÷ 0 (blackness) = ∞ − ∞ or ∞ / ∞: On Matter Beyond the Equation of Value”

Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “Difference Without Separability” 

Week 13: Debility/Disabilty  

April 11

Jasbir Puar, The Right to Maim Debility, Capacity, Disability

Lauren Berlant, Cruel Optimism

“Slow Death (Obesity, Sovereignty, Lateral Agency)”

Week 14: Race and Technology April 18

Ramon Amaro, The Black Technical Object: On Machine Learning and the Aspiration of Black Being

Week 15: Antiblackness and the Human

April 25

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World

[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

[ijustkindalikebooks]

Some interesting things I read this week.

[littlebrownmushroom]

Recently Received Trick Not Telos by Katherine McKittrick

[alexandraunderthesun]

Firelei Báez: Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream)

Sueño de la Madrugada (A Midnight’s Dream) is an exhibition at South London Gallery, by the New Curators Fellowship.

Firelei Báez is an Afro-Carribean artist whose work explores themes of science, Black and colonial narratives, spirituality, mythology, and migration. She is a trans-disciplinary artist who utilizes paintings, installations, drawings, and sculptures in her practice.

I am a sucker for a good installation; walking into the gallery I passed their book shop (fantastic selection by the way) and stepped into Báez immersive installation. There was an immediate calming sense that took over me; as if the dark blue canopy was a night sky and the pockets of light were stars. According to the text, the blue tarps symbolize those used during hurricanes and a troubled relationship between refuge and calamity.

If this artwork was intended to be laid on, I 100% would have done so. Under this night time-esque canopy installation, I would love to lay in the position of this iconographic symbol-figure.

These creatures are Ciguapas, figures that are popular within Dominican folklore. Constructed out of aluminum silhouettes, they do not commit to one single form and are positioned intermittently throughout the exhibition.

"As in the myth, they evade straightforward interpretation. Two key traits persist: their backwards-facing feet, rendering them untraceable,and their flowing, lustrous mane. Recalling childhood stories, Báez envisions Ciguapas as fluid in gender, embodying diverse identities. By painting these mythical creatures, Báez prompts viewers to reconsider what it means to be human and to imagine freedom from earthly constraints."

This text makes me think of Katherine McKittrick's Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, which is a critical review of cultural theorist Sylvia Wynter and her ideas on how race, location, and time inform human identity. Within her scholarly research, Wynter incorporates her Caribbean identity politics, migration, science, and more.

The second part of the exhibition was at the "Fire Station", which is a part of the South London Gallery Space. I almost wish the space wasn't separated; it felt as if my immersive experience had ended in an abrupt manner.

Walking into the Fire Station, there are colorful floor to ceiling figurative-abstraction paintings. I used to thoroughly dislike abstract work, I just didn't understand it. As I have gotten older and more into conceptual and theoretical art/framework, it is now one of my top genres. Recently, I have also been enjoying figurative-abstraction. I like the practice of being able to identify some parts of an artwork, but I don't need to identify all. Within Firelei Báez's work, I enjoyed the colorful abstraction elements to be left up to my imagination.

More Ciguapas!

At the end of the exhibition in the Fire Station, there is an artist video where Báez discusses her artist practice. In the video, she cites the biggest competition in the art world is tech, which I 80% agreed with. There are so many ways to create work from digital technologies, even from your iPhone. I understand her point, but does the incorporation of tech in the art constitute as competition? From a techno-optimist perspective (quoting Veralyn) and to play Devil's Advocate, how can artists build off of technology to help them?

The rest of my notes from the video included:

This idea that there are ways of understanding visual language in its own has its own pathways

Abstraction like technologies allows us to step out what we expect to see and give us room to imagine what we see 

Main hope of the space is to bring you back on and connect you back to your senses

I love the room and space Firelei Báez gives within her work to imagine and create worlds of our own through subtraction. In response to the second bullet point, regardless of what I am expecting to see or understand when entering an exhibition, it is almost always debunked. Her abstraction allows visitors to create a world of their own.

If you are in London, I highly encourage you to check out the show. Read more here: https://www.southlondongallery.org/exhibitions/firelei-baez/

[librarycards]

I really like Caliban and the Witch by Federici, Psychiatric Hegemony by Cohen, King Kong Theory by Despentes, They Call it Love by Gotby and Seeing like a State by Scott. Have any recommendations for me? 😊

alas, you may be disappointed to know that federici is a terf. but this list still gives me a good idea of what to rec to you! <3

recs:

My Year of Meats, Ruth Ozeki

Heavenly Breakfast: An Essay on the Winter of Love, Samuel R Delany

Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartography of Struggle by Katherine McKittrick

Bonus: My People Shall Live, Leila Khaled 🍉