#keguro macharia

[protoslacker]

I do not yet have a word for what places hold, what places transmit, how places remember, how places transmit what and how they remember. I am amused by the hubris that imagines a single term could do all of this. My hubris.

Keguro Macharia at Gukira With(out) Predicates. Reading Ordinary Notes: Note 32

Ever since I was a boy I felt places. In some way I felt that places remember and can transmit what they remember. I don't have words for this iand even as a child I wondered how that could be. As an adult I've pushed aside such mysteries. Reading this post I question why have?

Ordinary Notes is a extrodinary book of explorations of Black life in 248 notes by Christina Sharpe. Keguro expands upon some of these notes using Sharpe's method.

[notalexus]

"History does not disclose the name of the first black person dragged onto a slave ship, the first black person held in newly constructed prisons, or the first black person forcibly recruited to work on a colonial plantation. But black people have been arriving late ever since, hoping that the slavers have left, the ships traveled beyond the horizon, the whip silenced, the work done, the suffering gone.

Black time—whether you call it colored people time (CPT) or African timing (AT) or the deliciousness of syncopation—black time is about delay, interruption, break: strategic lateness.

Black time is long time, deep time, waiting time, excavated time, time around time. The not-here, the not-yet-there, the it-will-be-coming, the it-has-been-to-come, the it’s-not-wasn’t-yet, the it-was-just-here-yet-to-be-now. The fold, the crease, the wrinkle, the tick that does not tock. The tock that does not talk. The silence that does not break. The breaking that will not be broken. The.

You-just-missed-it.

Black time is hungry time. Ravenous time. Gluttonous time. Cannibal time.

Black time is waiting time, time after the reservation, time after other people’s time, time cut by other people’s time, time as didn’t-see-you, time as can-you-wait, time as you-again, time as I-don’t-have-time-for-this-shit.

Black time is dropped consonants, slipped sounds, skipped beats, don’t-wanna-ain’t-gonna-coz-it-don’t-make-no-difference time. Black time is learned time, doing time, time done, time-to-do, time-never-done, time-undone. Time-served, time-to-serve, time-serving, time-unserved, time-put-off, time-for-time, pipeline-time, skipping-time, cut-time, time-cut, cutting-time.

I haven’t seen you for a minute.

Sorry I’m posting this late. I was running behind."

– Black Time, Keguro Macharia

[kunthug]

These are the stakes. Too often, in discussions of decolonizing knowledge or decolonizing the university--vernaculars that are now circulating--we lose sight of what is at stake. It's not "transforming universities." It's not "increasing diversity." It's not "making universities safe spaces." These are worthy goals, but they are partial. The goal is to alter being and relations, to create "new humans." That is what decolonization does. That is what freedom does.

—toward freedom, keguro macharia.

[blackskintrillmask]

“Love demands critique; love is a duty to critique.”  - Keguro Macharia, “Love” 

[socraticclementines]

o boi o boi, hortense spillers got me fucked up on this day in this room. can we love if we are unfree? Does it matter? Can love and intimacy exist in conditions of unfreedom? Maybe not. But, I think Keguro Macharia is right, is on track, with the will then to the condition of possibility of freedom, rather than freedom itself as a goal. our goal is to clear the ground and to begin architecting worlds. if we dont have love, at least we have brief moments of tenderness, of curative touch, of the erotic.

[endlessandrea]

“I found nice sentences about the author’s self-consciousness, about the complexity of those who profited from colonialism’s terror, about the value of white ambivalence, and the complex emotional states of white people who did bad things to Africans. And as I read these sentences, I was thrown back to every bad faith discussion about Conrad and every single colonial-era white writer who we’re supposed to read with “complexity” and “nuance” because they “depicted” the “truth” of the colonial situation, and “did not shy away” or “hide” the “full horrors” of colonialism.

I don’t have time for that shit.

I don’t.

I cannot be invited to a scene of African unhumaning and be told to recognize the complexity of the white people at that scene.”

[robertogreco]

Strict Forms

This is a thread from last month that I've been thinking about ever since, but never got around to posting here. It starts with a series of tweets from Guillermo del Toro:

Tweets on why I am interviewing Michael Mann and George Miller (2 weeks each) about their films this Sabbatical year.

I sometimes feel that great films are made / shown at a pace that does not allow them to "land" in their proper weight or formal / artisitic importance...

As a result, often, these films get discussed in "all aspects" at once. But mostly, plot and character- anecdote and flow, become the point of discussion. Formal appreciation and technique become secondary and the specifics of narrative technique only passingly address[ed]

I would love to commemorate their technical choices and their audiovisual tools. I would love to dissect the narrative importance and impact of color, light, movement, wardrobe and set design. As Mann once put it: "Everything tells you something"

I think we owe it to these (and a handful of filmmakers) to have their formal choices commemorated, the way one can appreciatethe voigour and thickness and precision of a brushtroke when you stand in front of an original painting.

Aaron Stewart-Ahn responds, in particular to the final paragraph above:

Our media literacy about movies tends to prioritize text over subtext, emotion, and sound vision & time, and it has sadly sunk into audiences' minds. I'd say some movies are even worth a handful of shots / sounds they build up to.

To which I added:

Our education system prioritizes text. Deviation from text is discouraged.

“To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity.”

“Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order.”

That comes from “Commitment from the Mirror-Writing Box,” by Trinh T. Minh-Ha in Woman, Native, Other (via):

Nothing could be more normative, more logical, and more authoritarian than, for example, the (politically) revolutionary poetry or prose that speaks of revolution in the form of commands or in the well-behaved, steeped-in-convention-language of “clarity.” (”A wholesome, clear, and direct language” is said to be “the fulcrum to move the mass or to sanctify it.”) Clear expression, often equated with correct expression, has long been the criterion set forth in treatises on rhetoric, whose aim was to order discourse so as to persuade. The language of Taoism and Zen, for example, which is perfectly accessible but rife with paradox does not qualify as “clear” (paradox is “illogical” and “nonsensical” to many Westerners), for its intent lies outside the realm of persuasion. The same holds true for vernacular speech, which is not acquired through institutions — schools, churches, professions, etc. — and therefore not repressed by either grammatical rules, technical terms, or key words. Clarity as a purely rhetorical attribute serves the purpose of a classical feature in language, namely, its instrumentality. To write is to communicate, express, witness, impose, instruct, redeem, or save — at any rate to mean and to send out an unambiguous message. Writing thus reduced to a mere vehicle of thought may be used to orient toward a goal or to sustain an act, but it does not constitute an act in itself. This is how the division between the writer/the intellectual and the activists/the masses becomes possible. To use the language well, says the voice of literacy, cherish its classic form. Do not choose the offbeat at the cost of clarity. Obscurity is an imposition on the reader. True, but beware when you cross railroad tracks for one train may hide another train. Clarity is a means of subjection, a quality both of official, taught language and of correct writing, two old mates of power; together they flow, together they flower, vertically, to impose an order. Let us not forget that writers who advocate the instrumentality of language are often those who cannot or choose not to see the suchness of things — a language as language — and therefore, continue to preach conformity to the norms of well-behaved writing: principles of composition, style, genre, correction, and improvement. To write “clearly,” one must incessantly prune, eliminate, forbid, purge, purify; in other words, practice what may be called an “ablution of language” (Roland Barthes).

See also Keguro Macharia on strict academic forms (and various other posts on linearity and academia):

Proposals for radical ideas in strict academic forms. Radical thinking requires radical forms. It’s an elementary lesson. Perhaps more academically inclined people should co-edit with poets. Figure out why form matters. I am most blocked when I resist the forms ideas need to emerge.

Update [7 January 2018]: To go with the above, I think it makes sense to add this passage from Ryan Brown’s “Fred Moten: A look at Duke's preeminent poet”:

As for how he thinks of his own writing, Moten explained to the literary journal Callaloo that he doesn’t see poems as neatly wrapped ideas or images. Instead, he believes that “poetry is what happens… on the outskirts of sense.” What do you think?

This unorthodox approach to writing extends beyond Moten’s own projects, spilling over into his teaching philosophy. In a Fred Moten English class, a standard essay on a piece of literature might be replaced by a sound collage or a piece of creative writing reacting to the reading. It’s an attempt, he said, to get his students to write like they actually want to write—not the way they think they need to for a class. What do you think?

“School makes it so that you write to show evidence of having done some work, so that you can be properly evaluated and tracked,” he said. “To me that degrades writing, so I’m trying to figure out how to detach the importance of writing from these structures of evaluation.” What do you think?

Second year English Ph.D student Damien Adia-Marassa said this means that Moten’s classes are never the same. Last Spring, Marassa worked as a “teaching apprentice” in one of Moten’s undergraduate courses, “Experimental Black Poetry,” for which he said there was never a fixed syllabus. What do you think?

“He just told us the texts he wanted to study and invited us all to participate in thinking about how we might study them,” Marassa said. What do you think?

But is Professor Moten ever worried that students will take advantage of his flexibility with structure and content? What do you think?

Actually, he said, he doesn’t care if students take his courses because they think they will be easy. What do you think?

“I think it’s good to find things in your life that are easy for you,” he said. “If someone signs up for my class because they think it will come naturally to them and it won’t be something they have to agonize over, those are all good things in my book.” What do you think?

In the Spring, Moten will switch gears as a professor, teaching his first creative writing course since arriving at Duke—Introduction to Writing Poetry. But whatever the course title may imply, he won’t be trying to teach his students how to write, he said. Instead, he hops they’ll come away from his class better at noticing the world around them. What do you think?

And he hopes to teach them to that, in order to write, you first have to fiercely love to read. That’s a skill he learned a long time ago, out in the flat Nevada desert, when he first picked up a book of poems and started to read, not knowing where it would take him.

Update [23 February 2018]: Here come several more passages that fit with this theme of breaking forms.

First, Fanta Sylla on “Metrograph Celebrates the Inventive Truth-Telling of St. Clair Bourne”:

Let the Church is so free of form and spirit that, presented without context, it could easily be seen as a fictional piece. It is not clear how much the scenes are staged, or, indeed, whether they are staged at all. Right from the first interaction, in which what seems to be a religious teacher laboriously explains the purpose of a sermon, there is a distance with the people filmed (broken on occasion by extreme zooming and direct address), as well as a writtenness and theatricality in the dialogue that can be delightfully confusing. What one learns while watching Bourne is that there are many ways to enter a subject, and one mustn’t refrain from exploring them, especially not in the name of nonfiction convention.

And now “Hilton Als on Writing,” in an interview with T. Cole Rachel:

T. Cole Rachel: Your essays frequently defy traditional genre. You play around with the notions of what an essay can be, what criticism can be, or how we are supposed to think and write about our own lives.

Hilton Als: You don’t have to do it any one way. You can just invent a way. Also, who’s to tell you how to write anything? It’s like that wonderful thing Virginia Woolf said. She was just writing one day and she said, “I can write anything.” And you really can. It’s such a remarkable thing to remind yourself of. If you’re listening to any other voice than your own, then you’re doing it wrong. And don’t.

The way that I write is because of the way my brain works. I couldn’t fit it into fiction; I couldn’t fit it into non-fiction. I just had to kind of mix up the genres because of who I was. I myself was a mixture of things, too. Right? I just never had those partitions in my brain, and I think I would’ve been a much more fiscally successful person if could do it that way. But I don’t know how to do it any other way, so I’m not a fiscally successful person. [laughs]

[…]

I believe that one reason I began writing essays—a form without a form, until you make it—was this: you didn’t have to borrow from an emotionally and visually upsetting past, as one did in fiction, apparently, to write your story. In an essay, your story could include your actual story and even more stories; you could collapse time and chronology and introduce other voices. In short, the essay is not about the empirical “I” but about the collective—all the voices that made your “I.”

From a profile of Lorna Simpson, by Dodie Kazanjian:

Lorna graduated early from SVA and was doing graphic-design work for a travel company when she met Carrie Mae Weems, a graduate art student at the University of California, San Diego. Weems suggested she come out to graduate school in California. “It was a rainy, icy New York evening, and that sounded really good to me,” Simpson says. “I had no idea what I was getting myself into.” She knew she’d had enough of documentary street photography. Conceptual art ruled at UCSD, and in her two years there, from 1983 to 1985, Lorna found her signature voice, combining photographs and text to address issues that confront African American women. “I loved writing poetry and stories, but at school, that was a separate activity from photography,” she says. “I thought, Why not merge those two things?”

Arthur Chiaravalli in “It’s Time We Hold Accountability Accountable”:

Author and writing professor John Warner points out how this kind of accountability, standardization, and routinization short-circuits students’ pursuit of forms “defined by the rhetorical situation” and values “rooted in audience needs.”

What we are measuring when we are accountable, then, is something other than the core values of writing. Ironically, the very act of accounting for student progress in writing almost guarantees that we will receive only a poor counterfeit, one emptied of its essence.

“How to Teach Art to Kids, According to Mark Rothko”:

“Unconscious of any difficulties, they chop their way and surmount obstacles that might turn an adult grey, and presto!” Rothko describes. “Soon their ideas become visible in a clearly intelligent form.” With this flexibility, his students developed their own unique artistic styles, from the detail-oriented to the wildly expressive. And for Rothko, the ability to channel one’s interior world into art was much more valuable than the mastery of academic techniques. “There is no such thing as good painting about nothing,” he once wrote.

Update [10 July 2018]: Here’s a great thread from Dr. Lucia Lorenzi on form in academia, but also on the value of silence and pause.

I have two academic articles currently under consideration, and hope that they'll be accepted. I'm proud of them. But after those two, I am not going to write for academic journals anymore. I feel this visceral, skin-splitting need to write differently about my research.

It just doesn't FEEL right. When I think about the projects I'm interested in (and I have things I want desperately to write about), but I think about writing them for an academic journal, I feel anxious and trapped. I've published academic work. It's not a matter of capability.

I think I've interpreted my building anxiety as some sort of "maybe I can't really do it, I'm not good at this" kind of impostor syndrome. But I know in my bones it's not that, because I'm a very capable academic writer. I know how to do that work. I've been trained to do it.

This is a question of form. It is a question of audience, too. The "what" and the "why" of my research has always been clear to me. The "how," the "where," and the "who," much less so. Or at the very least, I've been pushing aside the how/where/who I think best honours the work.

In my SSHRC proposal, I even said that I wanted to write for publications like The Walrus or The Atlantic or GUTS Magazine, etc. because this work feels like it needs to be very public-facing right now, so that's what I'm going to do. No more academic journal articles for now.

With all the immobilizing anxiety I've felt about "zomg my CV! zomg academic cred!" do you know how many stories I could have pitched in the past year alone? SO MANY. How much research and thinking I could have distilled into creative non-fiction or long-form journalistic pieces?

It's not like I haven't also been very clear about the fact that I probably won't continue in academia, so why spend the last year of my postdoc doing the MOST and feeling the WORST doing my research in a certain way just for what...a job I might not get or even want? Nah.

Whew. I feel better having typed all that out, and also for having made the decision to do the work in the way I originally wanted to do it, because I have been struggling so much that every single day for months I've wanted to just quit the postdoc entirely. Just up and leave.

In the end, I don't think my work will shift THAT much, you know? And I've learned and am learning SO much from fellow academics who are doing and thinking and writing differently. But I think that "no more scholarly journal submissions" is a big step for me.

I also feel like this might actually make me feel less terrified of reading academic work. Not wanting to WRITE academic articles/books has made me equally afraid of reading them, which, uh, isn't helpful. But now I can read them and just write in my own way.

I don't want to not have the great joy of sitting down and reading brilliant work because I'm so caught up in my own fears of my response having to replicate or mirror those forms. That ain't a conversation. I'm not listening if I'm already lost in thinking about how to answer.

That's what's so shitty about thinking as a process that is taught in academia. We teach everyone to be so hyper-focused on what they have to say that we don't let people just sit back and listen for a goddamn moment without feeling like they need to produce a certain response.

And we wonder why our students get anxious about their assignments? The idea that the only valid form of learning is having something to say in response, and in this way that is so limited, and so performative, is, quite frankly, coercive and gross.

As John Cage said, "I have nothing to say and I am saying it." When it comes to academic publications, I am saying that no longer have anything to say. I do, however, have things to say in other places to say them.

My dissertation was on silence. In the conclusion, I pointed out that the text didn't necessarily show all the silences/gaps I had in my years of thinking. I'd wanted to put in lots of blank space between paragraphs, sections, to make those silences visible, audible.

According to the formatting standards for theses at UBC, you cannot have any blank pages in your dissertation. You cannot just breathe or pause. Our C.V.s are also meant not to have any breaths or pauses in them, no turns away, no changes in course.

I am making a course change!

Update [7 March 2019]: Maya Weeks makes this point on Twitter:

i'm so over the fetishization of language!!!! not every1 is ~good~ at formulating thoughts thru words & we need systems that reflect ppls' various strengths! prioritizing work done in words (rather than literally any other action, like dance, or organizing) is elitist as hell!!!

u might think i'm kidding about this but i'm a professional writer with 2 degrees in language (linguistics & creative writing); i have been thinking about this for 12 years

[yanagibayashi]

“To plead for your life in a language that slices your tongue. Or, the work of survival. * I am writing this after an election where some did not survive. Others did not survive unscathed. And yet others are still trying to find the breath to survive. We are wrapping our tongues around the dense, nettle-feel of legalese, invoking a constitution that does not know how to see us, to try to clear some ground for something else, to survive as we work toward freedom.

From Lorde, I learn that survival toward freedom requires holding on to those who did not survive, to those not surviving, to those who might not survive. Fresh nettle stings on too-tender tongues. Still, we open our mouths to attempt something.”

— Keguro Macharia, ‘Survival in Audre Lorde’ | TNI

[theteej]

On Black Autonomy and Responding to Abstract, Genteel Contempt

I originally wrote this as a series of tweets, and I'm going to try my best to clean it up slightly and put it here. ----- What really HURTS about the James Sweet AHA piece is the profoundly casual way he dehumanizes black people. We aren't full actors or agents, we are people he studies, and informants to be corrected for our too emotional responses.  I feel invisibilized, dismissed--politely. Of course, in moments like this, I think of people I admire.  I try to channel the almost uncomprehending unbothererdt-ness of Keguro Macharia.  Part of me wants to emulate the cool, collected response of indifference to white American certainty I see in Keguro's words. I think of how Osiame Molefe would respond cleverly, incisively, and yet with a slight frisson of anxiety.  I think of his polite contempt for the arrogance and entitlement that would happen in his finely turned phrase, the rage delicately interwoven with erudition. I can picture how Xavier Livermon would just raise an eyebrow and give me one of those nearly imperceptible head shakes with a half-smile before reminding me that these ofays have been here before and we'll still be here, living beyond their nonsense. I can see the momentary grimace flash across Michelle Moyd's features before she straightens it behind a tired smile, adjusts her glasses, and reminds me that this is the space they take up, every day, and how we gracefully, invisibly write past and beyond and through them. I imagine the way that Kwame Otu would flash the most brilliant of smiles, wave a hand away, laugh loudly, and say in the most dulcet of high society tones, "what trash is this that they are bringing to us?"  I imagine just a brilliant, dismissive disdainful smirk afterward. I imagine these things with these beautiful black scholars, because they remind me that we are humans, that we are real, and have always been. Foolish men like Sweet and Lawrance erase us, see us only extensions of their noble projects.  They don't SEE black people.  They see objects of study. They see informants. They see things to be spoken over or for or abstracted.  They dismiss the 'presentism' of history because they cannot, will not, shall not see what it means to be autonomous black people. Their autonomy has always been reassured. Their sense of self has always been known. Their ease and composure and entitlement to our lands and bodies and art and space is regular; and the sense in which we are erased, background people in their stories, is so total. When Sweet decries the historical 'presentism' creeping into 'his' discipline, what he's doing is advocating for a 'pure' history, that is abstract and intellectual, one that doesn't 'do' things--doesn't unpack or attempt to liberate or declare autonomy of freedom. What he is offering, loves, is a dead thing. A masturbatory exercise of drone like figures in hermetic archival spaces.  It presumes the work is holy by itself, and blithely ignores that to have a black body in this space is to ALWAYS FEEL YOU DO NOT BELONG. Because articles like Sweet's are tiresome salvos, not unlike Conrad's infamous steamer firing uselessly into the Congolese bush. They are attempts to claim they own the narrative, that they own history, and that we cannot declare them irrelevant. But girl, you are. You are irrelevant with your papier-mâché constructions, your tiresome analysis pretending to be objective, your confusion at black liberation or queer thought or feminist analysis challenging your claim to centeredness. I will always return to Keletso Atkins when I think this. As I said, ironically to the AHA, Keletso's 1993 book on Zulu labor practices transformed me as a person. Because she openly spoke that her work was designed to emphasize black humanity and autonomy to OTHER BLACK FOLK who long felt erased.  It was not the tiresome pantomime of intellectual curiosity in stuffy seminar rooms filled with overeager white man flexing their intellectual acumen over dusky bodies and exotic lands.  It was a declaration that we were real, that we mattered, and that we existed. I read her the same week one of my future committee members told me he studied Tanzania but for him it was the same as if he'd studied Sweden, just a place.   What breathtaking white arrogance. What astonishing legerdemain, the vanishing of coloniality under a cape of objectivity. What white scholars of Africa like Sweet forget, wish to not think, can never fully grasp, is that all of us black folk writing about these places? They are declarations of who we are in a field and a world that told us we did not matter, belong, or deserve to be printed. And so for Sweet to denigrate (intentional choice) Ghanaian guides or African-American history making (like the 1619 project) to emphasize his objectivity, under the guise of disciplinary concern? That's a colonial swipe at us as certain as the ASR's cowardly editorial letter that excoriated African scholars who dared to critique the overwhelming whiteness of their autoethnography piece published earlier this year.  And lest we forget, James Sweet is none other than the former advisor of the pinnacle of white entitlement and appropriation, now disgraced scholar Jessica Krug. And if the best the AHA can do to include African history is that of insufferable patriarchal white boors like Jim Sweet? We don't need to be there.

If the best the ASA can do is its ever present white navel-gazing, a motion only occasionally given energy when Jean Allman reminds them that everything in that organization is about continuing colonial power relations, only for them to not actually make any changes? Fine.  I'm well and truly tired of the same masturbatory facebook posts from senior white scholars wringing their hands about their complicity while not doing anything, not even really taking to task fellow members of their academy like Sweet or Lawrance or others. I'll leave, yet again. Because what *I* do? My work? It's modeled after people like Keletso, and shaped by people like Kwame, Xavier, Keguro, Michelle, Osiame. Like Marius Kothor--folk who are interested first and foremost in their own humanity and *know* what it's like to be erased everyday in the disciplines they have to work in. And that? That's history for me. And history that isn't 'presentist'? Concerned with the abstract study for intellectual gratification? That's just glorified antiquarianism, and I'm glad that the original Victorian hobbyists who made the 'rules' of studying us are dead, even if their work lives on with Sweet.  

[danileyakosover-ayala]

Theorizing Frottage

"I use frottage, a relation of proximity, to figure the black diaspora, for doing so unsettles the heteronormative tropes through which the black diaspora has been imagined and idealized. Frottage captures the aesthetic (as a term of artistic practice) and the libidinal (as a term of sex practice), and so gestures to the creative ways the sexual can be used to imagine and create worlds. 

...

The evidence frottage provides creates the grounds for speculation, and takes seriously the work speculation does in enlarging our apprehension of the world and our possibilities for being in the world. 

...

"...a term that keeps the body seeking sexual pleasure in view. Frottage feels less freighted than terms like fucking and sucking and fisting, terms that, as they have circulated within queer studies, have become identified as gay male sex practices, even when, as with fisting, they have the power to disrupt gendered and sexed positions... an awkward term, one that hinted at strangers rubbing themselves against others in public spaces, at the ways the public pursuit of pleasure can often be uncomfortable and coercive... to foreground their ongoing rubbing, leading, at times, to pleasure, and, at other times, to irritation, and even possibly to pain.”

...

“... frottage to foreground this intense longing for intimacy. By foregrounding desire and longing, I depart from genealogical models that anchor that definite article within a logic of kinship, whether that be biogenetic or fictive kinship. More precisely, I explore how blackness emerges and what it comes to mean without anchoring it to a genealogical tree. Instead of searching for kinship, I privilege conceptual and affective proximity: the rubbing produced by and as blackness, which assembles into one frame multiple histories and geographies.” 

...

“...frottage to suggest diaspora as a multiplicity of sense-apprehensions, including recognition, disorientation, compassion, pity, disgust, condescension, lust, titillation, arousal, and exhaustion. I want to approximate as much as possible the range of bodily sensations produced by the insistent touching that is diaspora.” 

...

(excerpts from Macharia Keguro’s Introduction to “Frottage: Frictions of Intimacy Across the Black Diaspora”)

[oumaimas]

what are some of your favorite essays? i’m looking for new ones to read, and I really enjoy your taste 💖

hello! here are a few i can think of: 

upstream by mary oliver, which contains collected essays from previous publications

winter hours by mary oliver

the lonely city by olivia laing (i can only vow for the first hundred pages or so here but it’s great so far) 

the female body by margaret atwood (which you have probably read along with a room of one’s own by virginia woolf but both are still some of my favourites!) 

le rire de la méduse by hélène cixous

i know what you think of me by tim kreider the “if we want the rewards of being love we must submit to the mortifying ordeal of being known” quote is from here and the entire essay is worth reading if you haven’t yet 

sick woman theory by johanna hedva

try a little tenderness by gordon marino which i keep coming back to this year

on quitting by keguro macharia

elif batuman’s piece about a little life which gave me great insight into my own feelings about that book 

i’m sure there’s more but i can’t recall anything more precise right now!

[anniekoh]

We could not think besides what existed, unless it was to aspire to be like other spaces. This continues today: we want to have call centers like those in India; we want our tourism to be like Singapore’s; we want our oil to be like Nigeria’s. And so on. We want “development” to be “like” somewhere else, somewhere “developed.” And while some of these goals, perhaps all, are incredibly ambitious, I am struck by how short-sighted they seem. Where is the wild thinking? The innovation? The worlds we fear to imagine? Why, instead, do we have “scenarios” of what “might happen” couched in the most “realistic” of ways: we will have violence or we will not have violence. What happens when our thinking stagnates, making it impossible to think beyond need, pain, hurt, injury, and cessation? If my geographies have shifted, and they have, it is because I want to think about what imagining in black might be: the particular and peculiar way that black imagining is so often managed, so often maligned, so often truncated. And the way that black subjects too often take up these truncated possibilities as their only possibilities. Yes, one wants hurt to stop. But that can’t be the only thing. What I��ve taken to calling the problem-solution model—central to NGO work across Africa and to certain political imaginings in the U.S.—is, I think, a model of dream-management. It arrests any sense that the world might be otherwise by insisting on “fixing” what’s broken, refusing to contemplate that truncated imaginations and frustrated fantasies are also problems. And because I’m frustrated by what I think of as “report realism,” that mode of writing that understands the literary as being in service to the NGO-defined reality, I’ve been turning to SF more recently. Delany captures what interest me: “Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.”

Keguro Macharia (2013), “Imagine In Black”

[blackskintrillmask]

form “On Quitting” -  Keguro Macharia

[bd-mp285]

undefined

:: Spaces of Possibility & :: Spaces of Impossibility

Macharia, Keguro. “Blackness, Mathematics, Fabulation: Speculation.”  Gukira (blog), September 27, 2014. https://gukira.wordpress.com/  2014/09/27/blackness-mathematics-fabulation-speculation/. 

Moten, Fred. In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition.   University of Minnesota Press, 2003.

James, C.L.R. “Lectures On The Black Jacobins.” Libcom, libcom.org/files/c-l-r-james-lectures-on-the-black-jacobins.pdf.

[thesublimeselfie-blog]

Morrison’s chapter, “Facebook and Coaxed Affordances,” reminded me of Keguro Macharia’s article, “black (beyond negation).” Where Morrison writes of “gleefully databas[ing] ourselves” (p. 116), Macharia interrogates the “theoretically interesting.” “The autobiographical,” considers Morrison, “trespass into the public domain,” (122), and in this, I believe, one ushers forth, also, the banal, the quotidian, the otherwise uninteresting, which is precisely what Macharia is interested in turning toward.