#black studies

[theneptunianmind]

[whatevergreen]

Black Studies - Emory Douglas, from The Black Panther (newspaper), c1970

"We Want Education for Our People That Exposes The True Nature Of This Decadent American Society. We Want Education That Teaches Us Our True History And Our Role in the Present-Day Society. We believe in an educational system that will give to our people a knowledge of self. If a man does not have knowledge of himself and his position in society and the world then he has little chance to relate to anything else."

(No5 from The Black Panther Party Ten-Point Program of October 15, 1966)

PDF archive of The Black Panther news:

[fuckyeahmarxismleninism]

San Francisco State College 1968: On strike, shut it down!

The strike, which lasted 5 months, was the longest student strike in U.S. history. The International Longshore and Warehouse Union played a significant role in the Strike. William “Bill” Chester, International Vice President of the ILWU, was part of the Select Committee, which was responsible for negotiating with student leaders to reach a settlement that resulted in establishing a Black Studies Department and a School of Ethnic Studies.

[trans-axolotl]

"How to Go Mad is animated by deep concern for black people, mad people, and other beleaguered beings. If this project brings attention to people who have been persecuted because of their blackness and/or/as madness; if it alerts rationalist readers to the grave repercussions of demeaning the mentally ill; if it teaches techniques for practicing ethical, radical, critical, and beautiful madness; if it instigates righteous rage in the interest of social transformation; if it broadens understanding of who and what comprises a black radical tradition; if it encourages black studies to more carefully address madness; if it prompts mad studies to think more rigorously through blackness; if it urges black studies and mad studies to join forces; if it testifies to the possibility of bearing fruit in a "fruitless expanse" and finding home "nowhere at all"; if it models radical compassion; if it urges us toward liberation; or if it simply contributes to someone's relief or healing, then, to my mind, this book succeeds.

For some, healing might mean banishing madness. For others, healing might mean harnessing madness and putting it to good use--a readiness to rally the voices inside one's head rather than silence them. "

-How To Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity, 2021. By La Marr Jurelle Bruce, pg 34.

[caribbeanart]

I have known about Victoria Santa Cruz's work about as far back as secondary school but this is truly the most thorough and comprehensive article I've read on her work that does a great job of situating her in a broader, cross-cultural context; or in other words the "why" her work matters beyond borders.

Some powerful quotes that struck me:

"In a 2007 interview, Santa Cruz described how as a little girl, she had been playing with a group of friends when a new girl with blond hair joined them and stated that if Santa Cruz remained, she would leave. Her friends promptly told Santa Cruz to leave, which to her, exemplified who held power and who had the right to wield that power."

The author does a great job building context with this line:

"In the 1960s and 1970s, Black activists in the United States, like Santa Cruz in Peru and Paris, redefined and recreated what it meant to be Black. Black with a capital 'B' is about self-naming, self-defining, and self-determining, which can be seen in the work of Santa Cruz. It is, at times, biographical, exhibiting the arduous process she has endured to form an identity that isn’t controlled or concerned with outdated stereotypes and instead honors a rich heritage inherited and a [sense of self] not founded in shame."

Victoria Santa Cruz is originally from Perú, not the Caribbean, but as I touched on in a previous post, sharing this work is a part of a broader personal initiative to expand the narrative when talking about Latin America and the Caribbean and its diáspora.

[racefortheironthrone]

On a previous ask, someone asked about racial capitalism and like what makes it different from regular capitalism

Yeah, I didn't explain what the term meant, although I wasn't asked that before.

To start with, according to Cedric Robinson in Black Marxism (1983), there is no difference because all forms of capitalism are racial capitalism, that capitalism by its nature produces racial oppression when it produces inequality.

So why coin the term?

The main thing that Robinson was trying to do was to shift the focus of Marxist thought on capitalism towards the way that capitalism extracts value specifically from the racially marginalized.

This has a lot to do with fights within Marxism about how to think about capitalism - for example, Robinson isn't a fan of the idea from Marx that capitalism was a progressive force vis-a-vis feudalism, and argues that capitalism simply displaced caste systems from Europe to Europe's colonies in the Americas, Asia, Africa, etc. through slavery and colonialism and later systems of racial oppression.

[religion-is-a-mental-illness]

==

From the article:

"I am only one of the millions of Gen X-to-Gen Z women who have endured a seemingly endless array of miserable relationships with men."

Have you considered the possibility that the single common denominator in all of your miserable, failed relationships... is you?

"It's not that I'm a pretentious, spiteful, unlikeable, unmarriable cunt, it's that..." *flips card* "... 'romance' is white supremacy."

"Everything I'm mad about is white supremacy."

Ridiculous assholes like this - and people taking them seriously - are why we can't have nice things.

[ordinaryfailure]

…TV and movies advertise killing as a very easy thing—how simple to blow somebody away. If it is that easy it shouldn’t be, and I didn’t want my character to be someone who felt the need to murder somebody.

Octavia E. Butler on writing Kindred (1979), interviewed by Frances M. Beal for The Black Scholar (1986)

[theneptunianmind]

[librarycards]

I think that “trans” is one word for it that is not just one word among others. You know what I’m saying? I have all these shorthand ways of putting shit that I steal from other people, but what I mean is that there are other words that one could use, but none of those words is replaceable. Not only are they not replaceable, they are not substitutable. . . . I’m beginning to think that these things [blackness and transness] converge in an irreducible way. They can’t be thought separately from one another, because both manifest themselves in regard to ritual practice. I don’t think about blackness as an identity. I think about blackness as a ritual practice, and I feel like I should think this about transness too.

Fred Moten, "All Terror, All Beauty."

[emphasis added]

[tjeromebaker]

Home Girls, 40th Anniversary Edition: A Black Feminist Anthology

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become essential text on Black women's lives.

Home Girls, the pioneering anthology of Black feminist thought, features writing by Black feminist and lesbian activists on topics both provocative and profound. Since its initial publication in 1983, it has become an essential text on Black women’s lives and contains work by many of feminism’s foremost thinkers. This edition features an updated list of contributor biographies and an all-new…

[trans-axolotl]

"Thus primed, I propose that madness encompasses at least four overlapping entities in the modern West.

First is phenomenal madness: an intense unruliness of mind--producing fundamental crises of perception, emotion, meaning, and selfhood--as experienced in the consciousness of the mad subject. This unruliness is not necessarily painful, nor is it categorically pleasurable; it may induce distress, despair, exhilaration, euphoria, and myriad other sensations. In elaborating this mode of madness, I favor a phenomenological attitude attuned to whatever presents itself to consciousness, including hallucinations and delusions that have no material basis. Most important, phenomenal madness centers the lived experience and first person interiority of the mad subject, rather than, say, diagnoses imposed by medical authority.

Such diagnoses are the basis of medicalized madness, the second category in this schema. Medicalized madness encompasses a range of "serious mental illnesses" and psychopathologies codified by the psy sciences of psychiatry, psychology, and psychoanalysis. These "serious" conditions include schizophrenia, dissociative identity disorder, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, and the antiquated diagnosis of medical "insanity," among others. I label this category medicalized madness, emphasizing the suffix -ize, meaning to become or to cause to become--to signal that mental illness is a politicized process, epistemological, operation, and sociohistorical construction, rather than an ontological given...

...Even forms of medicalized madness that are measurable in brain tissue physiology, neuroelectric currents, and other empirical criteria are infiltrated (and sometimes constituted) by sociocultural forces. The creation, standardization, collection, and interpretation of psychiatric metrics take place in the crucible of culture. Likewise, clinical procedures are designed and carried out by subjective persons embedded in webs of social relations. And furthermore, psychiatry is susceptible to ideology. Exploiting that susceptibility, various antiblack, proslavery, patriarchal, colonialist, homophobic, and transphobic regimes have wielded psychiatry as a tool of domination. Thus, acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been pathologized by Western psychiatric science. Beyond these overt examples of hegemonic psychiatry, I want to emphasize that no diagnosis is innocently objective. No etiology escapes the touch and taint of ideology. No science is pure.

The third mode of madness is rage: an affective state of intense and aggressive displeasure (which is surely phenomenal, but warrants analytic distinction from the unruliness above). Black people in the United States and elsewhere have been subjected to heinous violence and degradation, but rarely granted recourse. Consequently, as singer-songwriter Solange Knowles reminds us, black people "got the right to be mad" and "got a lot to be mad about." Alas, when they articulate rage in American public spheres, black people are often criminalized as threats to public safety, lampooned as angry black caricatures, and pathologized as insane. That latter process--the conflation of black anger and black insanity--parallels the Anglophone confluence of madness meaning anger and madness meaning insanity. In short, when black people get mad (as in angry), antiblack logics tend to presume they've gone mad (as in crazy).

The fourth and most capacious category in this framework is psychosocial madness: radical deviation from the normal within a given psychosocial milieu. Any person or practice that perplexes and vexes the psychonormative status quo is liable to be labeled crazy. The arbiters of psychosocial madness are not elite cohorts of psychiatric experts, but rather multitudes of avowedly Reasonable people and publics who abide by psychonormative common sense. Thus, psychosocial madness reflects how avowedly sane majorities interpellate and often denigrate difference. What I have already stated about medicalized madness can also be adapted to psychosocial madness: acts and attributes such as insurgent blackness, slave rebellion, willful womanhood, anticolonial resistance, same-sex desire, and gender subversion have all been ostracized as crazy by sane majorities who adhere to Reasonable common sense...

...Yet it seems to me that psychosocial madness reveals more about the avowedly sane society branding an object crazy than about the so branded. When you point at someone or something and shout Crazy!, you have revealed more about yourself--about your sensibility, your values, your attentions, your notion of the normal, the limits of your imagination in processing dramatic difference, the terms you use to describe the world, the reach of your pointing finger, the lilt of your accusatory voice--than you have revealed about that supposedly mad entity."

-How to Go Mad Without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity by La Marr Jurelle Bruce, 2021, pg 6-8.

[caribbeanart]

Themes in Contemporary Caribbean Art

This blog is mainly focused on art before the 1980s but if you're interested in exploring themes in contemporary Caribbean art this article by Tatiana Flores (available in English and Spanish) looking at the theme of water is a great place to start.

This idea of water as something so essential for all life and the interconnectivity it represents of both living and non-living things (like water itself) is exemplified here by the hydrocommons, a term that looks to connect environmental movements with historical inequalities and the reclaiming of ancestral memory among other things; exploring how the arts can help us reimagine newer, more sustainable relationships with ourselves, other living beings and our natural environment (with a strong interest in performance, as a historically undervalued art form).

You do have to subscribe to their newsletter in order to access this article, a great resource if you're interested in larger contemporary trends across Latin America and the Caribbean. But rest assured, you can always unsubscribe if it's not what you're looking for.

(See also: Key Themes in Caribbean Art)

[libraryben]

A different kind of Star Trek television series debuted in 1993. Deep Space Nine was set not on a starship but a space station near a postcolonial planet still reeling from a genocidal occupation. The crew was led by a reluctant Black American commander and an extraterrestrial first officer who had until recently been an anticolonial revolutionary. DS9 extended Star Trek’s tradition of critical social commentary but did so by transgressing many of Star Trek’s previous taboos, including religion, money, eugenics, and interpersonal conflict. DS9 imagined a twenty-fourth century that was less a glitzy utopia than a critical mirror of contemporary U.S. racism, capitalism, imperialism, and heteropatriarchy.

Thirty years after its premiere, DS9 is beloved by critics and fans but remains marginalised in scholarly studies of science fiction. Drawing on cultural geography, Black studies, and feminist and queer studies, A Different Trek: Radical Geographies of Deep Space Nine (University of Nebraska Press, 2023) by Dr. David Seitz is the first scholarly monograph dedicated to a critical interpretation of DS9’s allegorical world-building. If DS9 has been vindicated aesthetically, this book argues that its prophetic, place-based critiques of 1990s U.S. politics, which deepened the foundations of many of our current crises, have been vindicated politically, to a degree most scholars and even many fans have yet to fully appreciate.

This interview was conducted by Dr. Miranda Melcher whose new book focuses on post-conflict military integration, understanding treaty negotiation and implementation in civil war contexts, with qualitative analysis of the Angolan and Mozambican civil wars.