#vagabondage

[marejadilla]

Eric Roux-Fontaine, "Vagabondage"

[meta-holott]

1981 France, on the road

[photo-by-thomas]

Beat your voodoo drums people! I gotta slip back into China tonight or I could be stateless and broke! Not successful yesterday and it cost me a thousand bucks! Hopefully second time is the charm! o_0

[vicstoyold]

Le geste doit être doux, tendre, caressant, courtois. Il doit éveiller les sens du corps et de l’esprit, faire battre le cœur et la libido, entre sourire et désir.

@VicStoy

[dandanjean]

Manifeste vagabond

L’éphémère est un garant d’intensité. * Le destin d’un homme dépend de ce qu’il pense de lui-même. Il a le choix de ne pas subir sa vie. * On ignore nos liens tant qu’on ne les a pas arrachés. * Plus nous avançons sur la route, plus les êtres chers semblent appartenir à un autre monde. Seuls restent ancrés en nous ceux qui ne sont ni d’ici, ni d’ailleurs, mais en nous, déjà éternels. Ces…

[foone]

Happy trans day of volume

Happy trans day of victory

Trans day of variety

Trans day of verisimilitude

Trans day of virtualization.

Trans day of viscosity

Trans day of venerability

Trans day of vexillology

Trans day of vaudeville

Trans day of ventriloquism

Trans day of vagabondage

Trans day of validation

Trans day of vandalism

Trans day of vampirism

Trans day of vagueness

Trans day of vanity

Trans day of valor

Trans day of vellum

Trans day of veldt

Trans day of vengeance

Trans day of verbs

Trans day of void

Trans day of vows

[evilvillain123456789]

in my noble pursuits i roam the streets of oregon, writhing, throbbing hard and wet and deep in vagabondage, scrawling in shit, sharpie, blood, gel pens- whatever i can find, upon the walls of the commons such delightful designs i invented of dog girls with big sparkly eyes and their wet mouths open. and their tongue sticking out. and I draw dragon girls with big sparkly eyes and their wet mouths open, and cat girls too. but i'll reveal to you a trade secret- i make them all look like the dog girls. i do. and its good that they look the way they do.. because i'm conserving my precious brain power for what's really important things- i need to writing a speech bubble coming out of their wet mouths that reads, Were here, were queer, or, Smash, the fash.. Vaccines save lives... of course there are other slogans, but i cannot think of any more at the moment. but this work i do is important. i do this to mark my territory. in the sense that i pray a beautiful goddess will come, see me huddled. within my impressive collection of vintage lego sets and empty coffee cups, and candy wrappers. and see how many twitter likes my graffiti and opinions got and accept me into her, multi partnered sexual relations, and her home, where i may roam freely with both her and the beasts that flock to lap up my taint wounds, and sing to me beautiful songs on their ukeleles... where we may paint nude torsos covered in all manner of jagged surgical scars... where monster energy flows freely as water... i dream of it, my paradise, i'm hoping, i'm coming, i'm coming.... but i digress.. i'm getting a bit ahead of myself, ha, me and my dreamers soul. i also do it to make sure any people of color passing through my turf know that they are not welcome here.

[fatehbaz]

"Abolition forgery":

So, observers and historians have, for a long time, since the first abolition campaigns, talked and written a lot about how Britain and the United States sought to improve their image and optics in the early nineteenth century by endorsing the formal legal abolition of chattel slavery, while the British and US states and their businesses/corporations meanwhile used this legal abolition as a cloak to receive credit for being nice, benevolent liberal democracies while they actually replaced the lost “productivity” of slave laborers by expanding the use of indentured laborers and prison laborers, achieved by passing laws to criminalize poverty, vagabondage, loitering, etc., to capture and imprison laborers. Like, this was explicit; we can read about these plans in the journals and letters of statesmen and politicians from that time. Many "abolitionist" politicians were extremely anxious about how to replace the lost labor. This use of indentured labor and prison labor has been extensively explored in study/discussion fields (discourse on Revolutionary Atlantic, the Black Atlantic, the Caribbean, the American South, prisons, etc.), Basic stuff at this point. Both slavery-based plantation operations and contemporary prisons are concerned with mobility and immobility, how to control and restrict the movement of people, especially Black people. After the “official” abolition of slavery, Europe and the United States then disguised their continued use of forced labor with the language of freedom, liberation, etc. And this isn't merely historical revisionism; critics and observers from that time (during the Haitian Revolution around 1800 or in the 1830s in London, for example) were conscious of how governments were actively trying to replicate this system of servitude..

And recently I came across this term that I liked, from scholar Ndubueze Mbah.

He calls this “abolition forgery.”

Mbah uses this term to describe how Europe and the US disguised ongoing forced labor, how these states “fake” liberation, making a “forgery” of justice.

But Mbah then also uses “abolition forgery” in a dramatically different, ironic counterpoint: to describe how the dispossessed, the poor, found ways to confront the ongoing state violence by forging documents, faking paperwork, piracy, evasion, etc. They find ways to remain mobile, to avoid surveillance.

And this reminds me quite a bit of Sylvia Wynter’s now-famous kinda double-meaning and definition of “plot” when discussing the plantation environment. If you’re unfamiliar:

Wynter uses “plot” to describe the literal plantation plots, where slaves were forced to work in these enclosed industrialized spaces of hyper-efficient agriculture, as in plots of crops, soil, and enclosed private land. However, then Wynter expands the use of the term “plot” to show the agency of the enslaved and imprisoned, by highlighting how the victims of forced labor “plot” against the prison, the plantation overseer, the state. They make subversive “plots” and plan escapes and subterfuge, and in doing so, they build lives for themselves despite the violence. And in this way, they also extend the “plot” of their own stories, their own narratives. So by promoting the plot of their own narratives, in opposition to the “official” narratives and “official” discourses of imperial states which try to determine what counts as “legitimate” and try to define the course of history, people instead create counter-histories, liberated narratives. This allows an “escape”. Not just a literal escape from the physical confines of the plantation or the carceral state, an escape from the walls and the fences, but also an escape from the official narratives endorsed by empires, creating different futures.

(National borders also function in this way, to prevent mobility and therefore compel people to subject themselves to local work environments.)

Katherine McKittrick also expands on Wynter's ideas about plots and plantations, describing how contemporary cities restrict mobility of laborers.

So Mbah seems to be playing in this space with two different definitions of “abolition forgery.”

Mbah authored a paper titled ‘“Where There is Freedom, There Is No State”: Abolition as a Forgery’. He discussed the paper at American Historical Association’s “Mobility and Labor in the Post-Abolition Atlantic World” symposium held on 6 January 2023. Here’s an abstract published online at AHA’s site: This paper outlines the geography and networks of indentured labor recruitment, conditions of plantation and lumbering labor, and property repatriation practices of Nigerian British-subjects inveigled into “unfree” migrant “wage-labor” in Spanish Fernando Po and French Gabon in the first half of the twentieth century. [...] Their agencies and experiences clarify how abolitionism expanded forced labor and unfreedom, and broaden our understanding of global Black unfreedom after the end of trans-Atlantic slavery. Because monopolies and forced labor [...] underpinned European imperialism in post-abolition West Africa, Africans interfaced with colonial states through forgery and illicit mobilities [...] to survive and thrive.

---

Also. Here’s a look at another talk he gave in April 2023.

[Excerpt:]

Ndubueze L. Mbah, an associate professor of history and global gender studies at the University at Buffalo, discussed the theory and implications of “abolition forgery” in a seminar [...]. In the lecture, Mbah — a West African Atlantic historian — defined his core concept of “abolition forgery” as a combination of two interwoven processes. He first discussed the usage of abolition forgery as “the use of free labor discourse to disguise forced labor” in European imperialism in Africa throughout the 19th and 20th centuries. Later in the lecture, Mbah provided a counterpoint to this definition of abolition forgery, using the term to describe the ways Africans trapped in a system of forced labor faked documents to promote their mobility across the continent. [...]

Mbah began the webinar by discussing the story of Jampawo, an African British subject who petitioned the British colonial governor in 1900. In his appeal, Jampawo cited the physical punishment he and nine African men endured when they refused to sign a Spanish labor contract that differed significantly from the English language contract they signed at recruitment and constituted terms they deemed to be akin to slavery. Because of the men’s consent in the initial English language contract, however, the governor determined that “they were not victims of forced labor, but willful beneficiaries of free labor,” Mbah said.

Mbah transitioned from this anecdote describing an instance of coerced contract labor to a discussion of different modes of resistance employed by Africans who experienced similar conditions under British imperialism. “Africans like Jampawo resisted by voting with their feet, walking away or running away, or by calling out abolition as a hoax,” Mbah said.

Mbah introduced the concept of African hypermobility, through which “coerced migrants challenged the capacity of colonial borders and contracts to keep them within sites of exploitation,” he said.] [...] Mbah also discussed how the stipulations of forced labor contracts imposed constricting gender hierarchies [...]. To conclude, Mbah gestured toward how the system of forced labor persists in Africa today, yet it “continues to be masked by neoliberal discourses of democracy and of development.” [...] “The so-called greening of Africa [...] continues to rely on forced labor that remains invisible.” [End of excerpt.]

---

This text excerpt from: Emily R. Willrich and Nicole Y. Lu. “Harvard Radcliffe Fellow Discusses Theory of ‘Abolition Forgery’ in Webinar.” The Harvard Crimson. 13 April 2023. [Published online. Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me.]

[alaynestone]

FIC RECS for @spnficrecfest - august 13-15 poly ships or rare pairs

i'm attempting to limit myself to just one small sample of the fics that could be recced in every category so that my list is more easily digestible. it's a given that many good fics will be left out but if we keep this up they will have their turn later.

sam/dean & others, various levels of consent.

it's not a question of want by dragonspell (sam/dean, john/dean, sam/dean/john) It's not a question of want; it's a question of need. So when John brings a hurt Dean back to the motel room at one in the morning after a botched hunt, Sam's going to do whatever's needed.

laying claim by bloodkisses (sam/dean, john/dean, sam/dean/john) Sam has no idea how he's ended up here, in bed with his father and his brother. All he knows is that Dean is his.

the air moves in by britomart_is (sam/dean, sam/dean/others) It's not about Dean. Really.

kissing in the blue dark by tebtosca (sam/dean, sam/dean/omc) Rick's not quite sure what to expect when he goes home with a couple of hot strangers.

vagabondage by rivkat (sam/dean, dean/omc, sam/dean/omc) A transient life means that sometimes improvisation is called for.

sloppy seconds by anonymous (sam/dean, dean/others) 5 times Sam gets sloppy seconds and one time he has Dean all for himself.

something deadly within arm's reach by trojie (sam/dean, dean/castiel, sam/dean/castiel) What's between them is a big, messy knot of control issues, and Sam needs Cas's help to cut through it all.

the shortest distance between two points by trojie (sam/dean, dean/castiel, sam/dean/castiel) Castiel watches over the Winchesters, which means he hears a lot of things he probably shouldn't, sees a lot of things he wishes he didn't, wants a lot of things he was never even meant to know about.

there and back again by deadlybride (sam/dean, dean/benny, sam/dean/benny) Benny came back with Sam from Purgatory, after the trials, and set up a quiet life in a cabin up in the Kentucky hills. Sam and Dean visit, sometimes.

you don't have to be an angel by amiwritesthings (sam/dean/mary) She feels her cheeks heat at the hazy memory of the night before, a drunken mistake if she’s ever made one.

in the valley of the shadow by fleshflutter (sam/dean/jess/madison) Their voices are pitched too low for Dean to catch the words but he figures it’s just girl-talk interspersed with the occasional soft, throaty giggle. He doesn’t think there’s enough in their heads for them to be saying anything important. Probably just dust and maggots.

[gacougnol]

Sandra Fontenas

Vagabondage de pensées

[transparentgentlemenmarker]

LE TEMPS QUI PASSE

Un matin on se lève et on a soixante ans. Le temps nous a trompé, c'est un vrai charlatan et l'on se sent floué, dépassé, hors du champ. On observe soudain la vie comme un enjeu. En découvrant des rides juste aux coins de nos yeux sans avoir vu l'horloge sonner comme un adieu. On revisite alors le fond de nos mémoire repensant aux personnes croisées dans un miroir. A celles qui ont compté ou d'autres sans histoire. On se souviens ensuite des moments de bonheur des auteurs, des acteurs d'une vie en couleur. Mais aussi de nos rêves, quel qu'en soit la valeur. Et dans ces moments-là, on évalue la chance, d'être toujours présent, avec reconnaissance. Entouré par les nôtres, soucieux de nos silences. Quand dans l'âge on avance sur la pointe des pieds. On ressasse l'existence au passé composé. Avec nos souvenirs sur du papier glacé. Du livre de la vie, on tourne toutes les pages. Evocations fragiles de nos vagabondages et de ces émotions dont on a fait usage...

[haveyoulistenedtothisalbum-poll]

Tracklist:

Going To The Country • Musical Friends • One Day I Walk • It's Going Down Slow • Up On The Hillside • Feet Fall On The Road • Mama Just Wants To Barrelhouse All Night Long • All The Diamonds • Burn • Silver Wheels • I'm Gonna Fly Someday • Vagabondage • Free To Be • Laughter • Wondering Where The Lions Are • Tokyo • Fascist Architecture • The Trouble With Normal • Rumours Of Glory • The Coldest Night Of The Year • Wanna Go Walking • You Pay Your Money And You Take Your Chance • Tropic Moon • Candy Man's Gone • Lover's In A Dangerous Time • If I Had A Rocket Launcher • Making Contact • Peggy's Kitchen Wall • People See Through You • Call It Democracy • See How I Miss You • Stolen Land • Waiting For A Miracle

Spotify ♪ Bandcamp ♪ YouTube

[majestativa]

His was a poet’s voice. […] It is the poet’s licence to espouse the cause of vagabondage.

— Ernst Toller, Seven Plays by Ernst Toller, ‘The Machine-Wreckers’, transl by Ashley Dukes, (1935)

[de-gueules-au-lion-d-or]

« Du point de vue amoureux Véronique appartenait, comme nous tous, à une génération sacrifiée. Elle avait certainement été capable d’amour ; elle aurait souhaité en être encore capable, je lui rends ce témoignage ; mais cela n’était plus possible. Phénomène rare, artificiel et tardif, l’amour ne peut s’épanouir que dans des conditions mentales spéciales, rarement réunies, en tous points opposées à la liberté de mœurs qui caractérise l’époque moderne. Véronique avait connu trop de discothèques et d’amants ; un tel mode de vie appauvrit l’être humain, lui infligeant des dommages parfois graves et toujours irréversibles. L’amour comme innocence et comme capacité d’illusion, comme aptitude à résumer l’ensemble de l’autre sexe à un seul être aimé, résiste rarement à une année de vagabondage sexuel, jamais à deux. En réalité, les expériences sexuelles successives accumulées au cours de l’adolescence minent et détruisent rapidement toute possibilité de projection d’ordre sentimental et romanesque ; progressivement, et en fait assez vite, on devient aussi capable d’amour qu’un vieux torchon. Et on mène ensuite, évidemment, une vie de torchon ; en vieillissant on devient moins séduisant, et de ce fait amer. On jalouse les jeunes, et de ce fait on les hait. Cette haine, condamnée à rester inavouable, s’envenime et devient de plus en plus ardente ; puis elle s’amortit. »

Michel Houellebecq

[verver]

Épisode 7

Gabin vida son verre, il adorait ce vin, il avait du tonus et lui dynamisait le cerveau.

Il repensa à la première fois ou ils avaient couché ensemble, il lui avait proposé un massage, il se souvient très bien qu'il avait commencé par les épaules puis la colonne vertébrale, il massait le long de son dos, il avait fait sauter les agraphes de son soutien gorge, il avait une érection pas possible, il disjonctait, il l'avait pénétré.

- doucement ! doucement !

avait-elle chuchoté

Il avait jeté la culotte d'Amelie sur la moquette, Gabin s'était collé sur son dos, il l'avait embrassé doucement dans le cou, il aimait bien ce genre d'étreinte.

Gabin lui avait écarté les cuisses pour recommencer, sa tête chavirait, c'était comme une souffrance à expulser.

Couchés côte à côte, détendus , Gabin se souvenait qu'ils avaient discuté du film de Truffaut, la femme d'à côté.

Ils parlaient à voix basse sans doute pour mieux écouter la pluie qui tambourinait sur les vitres de la fenêtre.

- t'as aimé ce film ? demanda t-il

- beaucoup

- c'est un beau film dit Gabin

Il se souvient des propos d'Amelie...

- toi à la place de Bernard et moi de Mathilde, imagine un amour passionné, une séparation de sept ans , symbolique quand même ! mariés et le hasard fait qu'on se retrouvent habitant l'un en face de l'autre ...

Il avait dit en souriant :

- il y a de quoi réveiller des vieux souvenirs, des envies cachées

- Tu as raison

Elle avait continué...

- On se croisent et se recroisent dans le village, on s'épient derrière nos fenêtres, on s'observent puis on se rapprochent.

Gabin avait renchérit :

- puis entre eux ce sera

ni avec toi

ni sans toi

Amelie dit que c'était un des meilleurs films de Truffaut, c'est un peu lui...

Elle avait continué à parler du film .

- c'est peut-être une interprétation arrangée de lui et de son artiste préférée

- c'est certainement exact , les sentiments, la passion dit Gabin enthousiaste, il a le souvenir qu'il avait ajouté :

- je crois que c'est le miroir inversé de Peau d'âne, il passe à l'adultère caché à presque pas caché, il y a toujours de la passion , de l'amour quasiment impossible et dans les deux films cela finit tragiquement en séparation douloureuse ...

Amelie lui avait serré très fort la main. Elle l'avait embrassé.

Il avait reçu ce baiser avec bonheur.

Ils avaient plongé dans un sommeil profond et réparateur.

Gabin ouvrit une autre bouteille, il continua à boire, continuant à laisser libre court aux vagabondages de ses souvenirs. L'ivresse commencait à s'emparer de son esprit. Gabin se sentait à l'aise dans ce film intérieur qui passait comme une bande magnétique incontrôlable.

[cliozaur]

I find it symbolic that we're reading the chapter about abandoned, abducted, and vanishing children on International Children's Day. And as for today, I am already quite depressed with the news about children being killed and abducted in the real world to fully appreciate the chapter.

It's interesting how Hugo contrasts the presence of "a policeman at the corner of every street" as a perceived benefit at the beginning of the chapter with the villainous guards (who are essentially policemen) of the ancien régime who snatch children and turn against their fathers in the end.

Finally, Hugo is getting realistic about the gamins, “the most disastrous of social symptoms”, and he recognizes that “All crimes of the man begin in the vagabondage of the child.” However, he still views the situation in Paris as exceptional and relatively positive. For some reason (I don’t get this point) Paris makes the street children intact inside (remember the “pearl” of innocence in their heart from one of the previous chapters?) In a peculiar way he connects this incorruptibility with propensity to popular revolutions and some idea “which exists in the air of Paris, as salt exists in the water of the ocean.” But at least, he acknowledges that this incorruptibility does not make the life of these children less miserable.

There is the whole section on how much worse the life of these children was under the ancien régime! I absolutely get it why it is important for Hugo to show the rotten and inhuman nature of the monarchy, but retrospectively, I know that the plight of the street children in the nineteenth century was not much better than in the eighteenth.

I know the story about the vanishing children of Paris (1750) very well: all the conspiracy theories behind them, the grim role played by the police (they were paid per arrested kid), and the ensuing series of riots (involving four to five thousand people, including many women) with furious people lynching the guards – this event is often interpreted as a precursor of 1789. However, the main theme of this story contradicts Hugo's main idea in this chapter, as there the children are a matter of their parents' care and concern.