In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a ... more In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a new guest, Derrais Carter, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. The trio discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs‘ forthcoming M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke UP, March 2018), the second book of her “planned experimental triptych.” M Archive is a speculative documentary project that chronicles the end of the world from an unspecified position of futurity. We sit with the ways Black poetics enact forms of knowledge that resist grammar and structure, and how Gumbs’ work exceeds genres and disciplinary boundaries. We also tease out the polemical strains of Black feminist metaphysics and ecocriticism that resonate throughout the imagined otherwise world that Gumbs conjures for her readers. What happens after the world ends? How can we take the act of breathing as the project of Black feminism? Take a listen and discover the ways that Afro-pessimism, Black optimism, and Afro-futurism fold into each other and open onto other dimensions of Black life in the Anthropocene.
The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on k... more The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on key Black historical figures who have been memorialized in wax. W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Duke Ellington stand out. The final wax figure, a Black man, sits with an empty card box in his right hand and a lit cigarette in his left. The film’s narrator appears: a slim, afroed Black man. He sits to the right of the figure. The only living person in a room full of bodies, he reaches over to grab the cigarette. To his inanimate companion he nonchalantly says “Oh. Thank you very much. Needed that” and ashes the cigarette.The afroed, cigarette-ashing narrator is poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron. The film is Black Wax (1982), directed by Robert Mugge. Black Wax is equal parts concert film, social documentary, and political statement by the poet. Set in Washington, D.C. and released in the midst of singer Stevie Wonder’s long campaign...
This essay explores a nostalgia that is and is not my own. It asks after the ways we listen to al... more This essay explores a nostalgia that is and is not my own. It asks after the ways we listen to album covers and hold music quietly. It is a reflection on Black interior life that honors the slow sway you do by yourself when only you can hold you. This is an essay for that self-embrace that sustains you, especially when the world cannot.
In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a ... more In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a new guest, Derrais Carter, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. The trio discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs‘ forthcoming M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke UP, March 2018), the second book of her “planned experimental triptych.” M Archive is a speculative documentary project that chronicles the end of the world from an unspecified position of futurity. We sit with the ways Black poetics enact forms of knowledge that resist grammar and structure, and how Gumbs’ work exceeds genres and disciplinary boundaries. We also tease out the polemical strains of Black feminist metaphysics and ecocriticism that resonate throughout the imagined otherwise world that Gumbs conjures for her readers. What happens after the world ends? How can we take the act of breathing as the project of Black feminism? Take a listen and discover the ways that Afro-pessimism, Black optimism, and Afro-futurism fold into each other and open onto other dimensions of Black life in the Anthropocene.
The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on k... more The film opens in an unidentified wax museum. The camera pans from right to left, zooming in on key Black historical figures who have been memorialized in wax. W.E.B. Du Bois, Marian Anderson, Booker T. Washington, Frederick Douglass, and Duke Ellington stand out. The final wax figure, a Black man, sits with an empty card box in his right hand and a lit cigarette in his left. The film’s narrator appears: a slim, afroed Black man. He sits to the right of the figure. The only living person in a room full of bodies, he reaches over to grab the cigarette. To his inanimate companion he nonchalantly says “Oh. Thank you very much. Needed that” and ashes the cigarette.The afroed, cigarette-ashing narrator is poet, novelist, and musician Gil Scott-Heron. The film is Black Wax (1982), directed by Robert Mugge. Black Wax is equal parts concert film, social documentary, and political statement by the poet. Set in Washington, D.C. and released in the midst of singer Stevie Wonder’s long campaign...
This essay explores a nostalgia that is and is not my own. It asks after the ways we listen to al... more This essay explores a nostalgia that is and is not my own. It asks after the ways we listen to album covers and hold music quietly. It is a reflection on Black interior life that honors the slow sway you do by yourself when only you can hold you. This is an essay for that self-embrace that sustains you, especially when the world cannot.
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