Michael Nyampetas Det var vackert ibland skulle kunna kallas en avkoloniserande essäfilm. I stil med många hemetnografisk filmer talar den in-ledningsvis inte direkt till det som är smärtsamt med Sveriges och Europas koloniala arv, eller... more
Michael Nyampetas Det var vackert ibland skulle kunna kallas en avkoloniserande essäfilm. I stil med många hemetnografisk filmer talar den in-ledningsvis inte direkt till det som är smärtsamt med Sveriges och Europas koloniala arv, eller dess kvardröjande spår i nuet. Den placerar sig vid sidan om, och talar bredvid, och ibland förbi det som är ett av dess huvudföremål, Sven Nykvists etnografiska, dramatiserade dokumentaristiska kortfilm, I fetisch-mannens spår (1948). Nykvists kolonialbejakande film spelades in i dåvarande belgiska och franska Kongo, vid Svenska Missionsförbundets stationer, och kan väl närmast Hur kan svart erfarenhet gestaltas i framtiden?
Ylva Habel har sett en film som försöker gå i dialog med Sven Nykvists koloniala Kongobilder. Svart existens i sin egen rätt beskrivas som en propagandistisk framställning, där vit, svensk upplysning och biståndsgivande mission ställs i skarp kontrast mot "skrämmande svartkonst", det vill säga det som var en del av re-gionens spiritism. Genom den svenska missionen får en liten kongolesisk pojke gå i missionsskola, och är senare till hjälp i att behandla de sjukdomar som finns bland den lokala befolkningen. För att få det behöver han, enligt de vita, anamma deras civilisation och förkasta sitt eget samhälles föregivna "primitivitet". Känns retoriken igen?
(Informal description) This paper begins to build a bridge between theoretical physics, black studies, and black literature in order to 'map' what I envision the Black Imagination to be. I theorize it as a universe unto itself, with its... more
(Informal description) This paper begins to build a bridge between theoretical physics, black studies, and black literature in order to 'map' what I envision the Black Imagination to be. I theorize it as a universe unto itself, with its own physics (distorted, relative to the antiblack world/universe's physics). So in a fundamental way, I'm interested in how this Black imagination and its physics might tell us something interesting about the Black Position (Wilderson). In this essay, I'm interested in building toward a serious question about the Black imagination's temporality, and how that might reveal something instructive and fundamental about Blackness's relation to time. I understand this relation to be gratuitously violent, nonlinear, and unethical, and I call it "untime."
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly... more
This essay reads Richard Wright’s speculative novella, “The Man Who Lived Underground” (1941), as an anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading. By anagrammatical, I invoke Christina Sharpe’s understanding of how Blackness singularly “exists as an index of violability and also potentiality” in its foreclosure from the World’s grammar of anti-Blackness. With allegory (of reading), I draw attention to both 1) how Wright recasts Plato’s allegory of the cave in modern America and, following Paul de Man, 2) how Wright’s text is an allegory of un/readability. Finally, with liturgy, I draw on Giorgio Agamben’s understanding of mystery as a performance that (re-)enacts the text. This leads me to theorize that Wright’s anagrammatical allegory of liturgical reading brings the reader into speculative attunement to the Black messianic, which is a radical mode of fidelity to the Black’s singular positionality in aspiring to the un-veiling [apo-kalyptein] of the katechontic anti-Black World—toward gratuitous messianic freedom.
Ausgehendvon der sekundären Viktimisierung der NSU-Opfer, die im Zuge der polizeilichen Ermittlungen als Täter identifiziert wurden, beschäftigt sich der Artikel mit den affektiven Dimensionen struktureller Rassismuserfahrung.D urch die Täter-Opfer-Umkehrungen und dief ehlende Bereitschaftz uu mfassender Aufarbeitung des NSU-Komplexes schalteten sich rassistische Mechanismen in den Prozess der Trauer ein, sodass diese selbst enteignetw urde. Entlang des Verhältnisses von rassistischerG ewalt und migrantisch situiertem Wissen im Kontext des NSU-Komplexes werden die Begriffe des "Außer-Sich"-Seins (Butler), der wake work (Sharpe) sowie der undercommons (Harney/Moten)herangezogen, um nach Konzepten für eine Politik der Trauer zu suchen.
Workshop postponed due to Covid. The Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop seeks to create a space for junior scholars and graduate students to engage in rigorous discussions of seldom-read figures in feminist decolonial theory. This... more
Workshop postponed due to Covid.
The Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop seeks to create a space for junior scholars and graduate students to engage in rigorous discussions of seldom-read figures in feminist decolonial theory. This 4-day intensive workshop provides an opportunity to enrich participant’s research and pedagogy through sustained engagement with the work of a given author. In the past, we have read the works of Audra Simpson, Saidiya Hartman, Sara Ahmed, Trinh T. Minh-ha, and Sylvia Wynter.
The focus of the 2020 Feminist Decolonial Politics Workshop is Dr. Christina Sharpe! The workshop is scheduled to take place Wednesday, May 20th to Saturday, May 23rd 2020 in Charlotte, North Carolina.
Applications are due February 17th, 2020, and should include (a) a CV, and (b) a statement of interest. Travel funding is available on a first come, first serve basis. To be considered for a travel grant, in addition to the materials above, submit (a) a statement of need, and (b) a travel budget. Late applications will not be considered for the travel grant.
This essay focuses on Derek Walcott's depiction of the historical journey of the breadfruit across the Pacific. The British Empire collected breadfruit plants from Tahiti in the eighteenth century to provide a staple food for enslaved... more
This essay focuses on Derek Walcott's depiction of the historical journey of the breadfruit across the Pacific. The British Empire collected breadfruit plants from Tahiti in the eighteenth century to provide a staple food for enslaved Caribbean laborers, and, by extension, to bolster the system of plantation slavery. Yet in Walcott's poem "The Bounty," the breadfruit plants engage in a Glissantian act of détour in the Pacific Ocean. They collaborate with the human mutineers aboard the ship to subvert the imperial transplantation project. While the poem dilates this moment of vegetal agency, it also references the breadfruit's ultimate arrival in Saint Lucia. Christina Sharpe's notion of "wake work" sheds light on the symbolic status of the breadfruit plants that eventually landed in the Caribbean, which continue to live in the wake of plantation slavery, the wake of the Bounty, and the wake of their own vegetal mutiny in the Pacific.
In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt’s death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as... more
In 1899, diphtheria claimed the life of W. E. B. Du Bois’s son, Burghardt. How can Burghardt’s death help us to understand the racialized consequences of the present coronavirus pandemic? This article considers what Du Bois described as the “phantasmagoria” that ensnares racial structures. I examine COVID as the latest iteration of a distinctly racialized American trauma narrated in the grammar of Du Bois’s reflections on disease, extrajudicial killings, and kinship. This fever dream of conflagration and asphyxiation has haunted Black lives since slavery. Du Bois gave meaning to this racial spectre in religious terms as a story of perpetual death but eventual emancipation. By situating Du Bois in relation to the work of Christina Sharpe (2016. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham, NC: Duke University Press), this essay ruminates on the orthography of slavery’s inheritances with regard to disease and its symbiotic relationship with lynching. I conclude by considering Du Bois’s invocation to darkwater as a demand for Black healing.
When Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung asked me for a text for the 12th Bamako Biennale’s reader, my plan was to keep on our conversation around the body as an archive but also talk about those around me who had no space to catch their... more
When Bonaventure Soh Bejeng Ndikung asked me for a text for the 12th Bamako Biennale’s reader, my plan was to keep on our conversation around the body as an archive but also talk about those around me who had no space to catch their breath and build their world. While I was correcting this text with Chiara Figone, editor of Archive Books, Mohamed, writer of the collective Rester. Etanger (based in Saint-Denis, outskirts of Paris), was forcibly placed in a plane for Italy by the French authorities while his last appeals had just been rejected - according to the famous principle of Dublin. When I wrote “Those who hold a wake for negro Images”, I was thinking of him, of those who are producing this restless and secret archive of our time. Chiara took care of this text and her friends in Milan welcomed Mohamed. Let them all be thanked here. (Translated by Ibrahima Cissé / edited by Shela Sheikh)
