As a compromise I am moving our investigation of “Falling Between the Cracks” to accompany our discussion of the Spread Magazine Piece and Natasha Tretheway’s Bellocq’s Ophelia next week.  For this week I am re-posting two  posts that I wrote while rereading Michelle Cliff’s Free Enterprise almost a year ago to provide you with some info as to my relationship to the text, alongside these questions which came up in my more recent rereading:

What does this work of historical fiction by Michelle Cliff tell us about history? What connections does she make between the repressed histories of black women freedom fighters, Arawak ancestors and repressed memories of sexual violence in this text?

What does this text have to say about the political function of art?

What does  “free” mean in this text? What does “enterprise” mean?  What is Mary Ellen Pleasant’s argument with John Brown? What do you think about her assertion that black people have a capital right to ownership of the United States?

What do you think of the intergenerational relationship between Malcolm X and Mary Ellen Pleasant here?

What is Cliff doing with space (bedrooms, bottletrees,  caves, quarantine camps, holds of ships, maroonages on cliffs, asylums…) in this text?

December 24th 2006

Specters of the Caribbean (See?): The Ghost of Annie Christmas

Roots, Kamau Brathwaite, 1957-1973
Soulscript, June Jordan, 1969
Beyond Master Conception, Sylvia Wynter, 1992
Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Talpade Mohanty, 1993
Free Enterprise, Michelle Cliff, 1993
Black Girl Talk, The Black Girls (SisterVision Press), 1994
Bread Out of Stone, Dionne Brand, 1994
Culture as Actuality (The Pope Must Be Drunk), Sylvia Wynter, 1995
Immigrant Acts, Lisa Lowe, 1997
Ghostly Matters, Avery Gordon, 1997
Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman, 1997
Q&A: Queer in Asian America, David Eng and Alice Y. Hom, 1998
Time Square Red, Times Square Blue, Samuel R. Delaney, 1998
The Prisoner’s Wife, Asha Bandele, 1999
Refasioning Futures, David Scott, 1999
Thinking Space, Mike Crang and Nigel Thrift, 2000
Queer Diasporas, Cindy Patton and Benigno Sanchez-Eppler, 2000
Wayward Reproductions, Alys Weinbaum, 2004
Specters of the Atlantic, Ian Baucom, 2005
Black Empire, Michelle Stephens, 2005

Writing in a letter, in the wet air framed by her bottle tree, with her other hand holding her piece of a tapestry to the battle lost, Caribbean born conspirator for an armed revolution by enslaved people in the US, Annie Christmas (in Michelle Cliff’s imagining/relating of her story) writes “This is the story I do not tell.” And indeed all was lost. The plot was discovered and Annie cross-dressing and blacked up was attached to a chain gang of about to be enslaved fugitives and marched through the woods I type this from. And when she was discovered to be who she was, a light skinned black woman, her captors forced her fellow captors to gang rape her. Her vagina her mouth. All was lost. The enslaved masses never recieved the weapons. All was lost. The “war to free the slaves” happened…on some very different terms, and as one of the unnamed characters in Free Enterprise explains, “there is ‘free’ and then there’s free”. The one that this character…cooking some wild animal in an alley got is clearly the lesser of the two. And Annie Christmas never went back to the Caribbean, and Annie Christmas never joined her mentor Mary Ellen Pleasant who continued to work for the other freedom. And nobody told Malcolm X that when he talked about “by any means necessary” when he talked about “self-defense” he was citing these women…(and Ida B. Wells too) and so Black Power came to mean some masculinist militarist raping thing. So all was lost.
Or was it? David Scott says that our freedom is not a sham…but that the liberal project..the moving back and forth between economic individualistic “expression” and political restraint is what have come to know as freedom. That we may as well either admit it or fight the normalization of such a definition of freedom that needs scare quotes and needs waking up. Lisa Lowe and Ian Baucom both invoke Benjaminian emergency…to reveal the normal as deadly and to make something new emerge. And I say..something is lost. What is lost is present in what Avery Gordon would call a haunting. What cannot fit into coherence is my presence here speaking Annie Christmas’s name, nativity in her desecrated mouth. Because I too have a story that I do not tell.
If the drowning of slaves, jumping overboard or being dumped for insurance money is the thing that haunts the Glissantian project and the thing that indeed haunts the characters of Free Enterprise and Beloved and on and on and down and down. Floating up is another set of questions for me. First what about this haunted water and how specific can I be about it. Because here is the thing. I am fine with these transatlantic hauntings. Or at least I admit them and rage against them. I have stood in Ghana and shuddered at the cruel persistance of the gray waves at the walls of Elmina. I have even rejected the Atlantic side of Anguilla (not the side where I learned to swim) as the place where people drown. Of the coarse sand and crude waves, of the time where I remember once sinking unnoticed and sputtering betrayal while my parents turned away secure in my ability to get over (if not to vanquish) my fears. But the only reason that I have afforded this rage articulation, the only moments that I can afford to reject that dominant ocean are while loving to a fault the Caribbean sea. I have made the Caribbean sea into the place where I am held, floating watching while Grandma paints faith into the sky above Rendevous Bay. I have made the waves that embrace and release my legs during thousands of long walks talking to myself into the refrain of a song about something that lasts forever. If the Atlantic brought slavery, the Caribbean embraced survival. If the Atlantic threatens to break me and then forget about it, the Caribbean is a ritual, is a sacrement to my breathing. A simply binary non dialectical that I stay sane by not problematizing.
But I know the story of the Zong. I know that slaves, named with a certain value (Wynter calls it the pieza Baucom traces as the impetus of the finance capital that the novel trains us to believe in) were dumped off of the coast of Jamaica. And I know (momma says ‘you better know’, exactly where Jamaica is. Jamaica is surrounded on all sides by the Caribbean Sea. Which means if they emptied the Zong of the coast of Jamaica those bones, those chains, those screams, those exploding lungs are there, are here are in the Caribbean Sea. So I see that I have tried to deny the fluidity of water, to make walls, to do violence to the Caribbean Sea by making it a nation-state, by making it a thing that will always affirm me, always make me feel at home, provide continuity and somehow not leak out into the the world that I have been trying to defend it from.
This desire for a myth has made me very specific. It has made me ask Michele Stephens if when she talks about conversation between the Caribbean and North America if that is neccessarily “trans-atlantic”. Because though C.L.R. James and Marcus Garvey and Claude McKay may have taken boats up the Coast..now the American Eagle stops in Puerto Rico for immigration and flies up over the Caribbean Sea (maybe over the Gulf) to the US. And insane protectionism over the Caribbean Sea aside…i still think this makes a difference. I am completely convinced by the story that Stephens tells about masculinity and black internationalism at the time of the hegemony of the nation…when the US was a place from which Caribbean Intellectuals could think about a ship of state as a response to Europe when there were no Caribbean nations. Which is different from flying away (besides the class differences that Belinda Edomdson and Carole Boyce Davies point out) FROM these actual nations, after the failure of federation…haunted by the joke of CARICOM…knowing the violence that nationalism means and knowing the US’s policies to make nation mean that rape will keep turning into a metaphor about land that gets re-enacted on the bodies of women. There is a difference…if stil haunted. Flight from the nation means we can make something new…means we don’t have to keep making the same thing…because when water can’t even be water, the world is a prison. And as Asha Bandele makes clear love in the face of prison means “everything has to change. everything.” So that means that I have to take on the challenge that Mohanty and Alexander make in the name of transnational feminist solidarities. The nation is not the name of my limits, my birth is not seperate from my embattlement. And baptism, for me and for the world I’m questioning. Is still a dangerous thing.

December 25th 2006

Annie Christmas

Today (for some reason) I am thinking of Annie Christmas, the name taken by a revolutionary black woman survivor who was an instrumental part in the radical black freedom mission (1859) that is usually attributed to John Brown. The orignal Annie Christmas was a legendary black woman warrior (a cross between a momma-messiah and John Henry as the story goes), and this Annie Christmas took on her name and called herself inheriting an imperative to struggle for her people. Annie Christmas moved to the United States from the Caribbean after surviving incest and conspired with Mary Ann Shadd and Mary Ellen Pleasant (and yes, John Brown) to arm US slaves and create a free black state. After the plan was discovered she suffered further sexual abuse at the hands of her captors. She finally escaped. And her story has passed on (and been passed over) And here.

In Michelle Cliff’s brilliant work of historical fiction about Annie Christmas, Mary Ellen Pleasant et. al. “Free Enterprise” (read it!) she insists that we have to become “talking books”. Our stories of resistance, our dreams and the visions that we act upon…like our experiences of violence are often repressed. Today I am proud of and waiting for and in love with our stories, our visions, our actions, our histories. “Talk it on

     https://www.documentthesilence.wordpress.com

          Today, Wednesday October 31st 2007, women of color and allies around the country are wearing red as part of a collective healing and revealing process in response to sexual violence against women of color. This collective red is meant to be antidote to shame, a warning sign to those would continue to blame women of color for the outrageous abuses that our society condones against us. This collective red is meant to fill in the missing frame of the black and white of Jena. This red is an invocation of gendered wounds and demands that we remember what Ida B. Wells told us, which is that the lynching of black men and women and the rape of black women and men are twin tools of the same repression. And blood is red.

In 1973, when Toni Morrison published her second novel Sula, she changed black feminist literary criticism forever. In fact, I like to day that black feminists created black feminist literary criticism to deal with Sula, the character and the text. In partnership with her first novel The Bluest Eye, Morrison’s Sula does more than insert black female characters into a literary scene that had ignored and caricaturized them. With these two novels Morrison insists that the very form of the novel must bend and bow and breathe and move to witness the experiences of black women and girls. The Bluest Eye could have been the first contemporary black female bildungsroman (coming of age story), except that Pecola, the main character (but not necessarily the protagonist) never grows up. Incestuous rape and violent racism shatter anything that would dare look like growth in that novel. Even the flowers. One could argue that in The Bluest Eye white supremacy (in the voice of the falling apart Dick and Jane reading primers) is the protagonist, and Pecola herself is the antagonist, criminalized for a small attempt at existence and vanguished by the pervasive triumph of racism, as patriarchalism, as capitalism and the death of a soul, the splitting of a mind. The Bluest Eye is Morrison’s first major study of what it means to be re(a)d. What happens when we are excluded from the very language we learn to read in? What are the dreadful consequences of an agreed upon social reading of black girls that spells us “worthless”?

Sula could have been the first contemporary black female bildungsroman, except that whereas The Bluest Eye leaves the main character with a split mind, witnessed by the black girls who survive, Sula is an intersubjective novel with two protagonists that cannot exist without each other, Sula and Nel grow apart, but the love between girls is the miracle, hope and home of this novel (a theme Morrison will return to in her most recent novel Love).

Sula arrived well placed in time to become the catalyst that it was and is for black feminist literary criticism. The book was published right when the first black women’s lit courses were being taught in newly formed Black Studies and Women’s Studies programs in colleges in the NorthEast. The two foundational texts of black feminist literary studies, Mae Gwendolyn Henderson’s “Speaking in Tongues: Dialogics, Dialectics and the Black Women Writer’s Literary Tradition” and Barbara Smiths “Towards a Black Feminist Criticism” both read Sula as their primary text and as an instance through which to imagine what black feminist literary criticism could be. Even though Morrison wouldn’t achieve national recognition until she “manned” up…or won the National Book of the Month Club selection for Song of Solomon (a radical and beautiful and rich book in it’s own rite), Sula was the book black feminists clung to. Audre Lorde mentions in an interview that she doesn’t care that it was Song of Solomon that Morrison won the award for…it is Sula that “lit me up like a Christmas tree”.

And indeed one of the topics we can discuss is why Morrison gained national recognition once she wrote a novel that centered around a black man. It might be helpful to realize that when Morrison won the National Book of the Month Club selection she became the first African-American writer since Richard Wright to do so.

The passages that cause black feminists to canonize Sula are the passages about mutual self invention that occur between Sula and Nel. The most cited passage is the one where the narrator explains the destined friendship of the two girls noting that “having long ago realized they were neither white nor male…they went about creating something else to be.” This is a proposition as far reaching as to appear in Afro-Scottish Maud Sulter’s description of a art exhibit she curated in England and as long lasting as to reappear as the “different sort of subject” that Hortense Spillers asks for in her 1987 essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe”. The two other moments of the text that black feminists theorists drew in the sky are Sula’s insistence when her grandmother suggests she should settle down and have some babies that “I don’t want to make someone else. I want to make myself.” This challenge to motherhood completes the critique of heteropatriarchy that allows Barbara Smith to claim Sula as a “lesbian” text alongside the books final revelation that the loss of a husband is nothing compared with the loss of a girl friend. And the book ends with the word that has framed all of my days. Girl, girl, girl, girl, girl.

Spiraling out into this moment, the desperation in that one word, girl speaks the prayer to the only thing that I believe can save us, and that is the love between women and girls of color that fills us with the bravery to make a new world language. When the Irish boys in the novel attempt to attack Nel and Sula, with designs on sexual abuse, Sula cuts of the tip of her finger…shifting the boys’ reading of her from prey to predator. Re(a)d is the color of threat. Is the color of blood, of nothing to lose, of everything born to be remade.

So today as I dress myself in re(a)d on behalf of my sisters and my own survival take me as a sign.

 I’m still not over my first encounter with James Baldwin on video.  The technique was the same (repetition, pentacostal rhythm), the outrage was the same (unblinking, indelible) and the message was the same. “Love is the only thing that can save us.  Love is the only thing that we have.”  Baldwin was screaming, his eyes themselves were about to fall into tears.  He was railing against the murder of the girls in the 16th Street Baptist Street church…blown to bits “In a church.  On Sunday morning.  In a Christian nation,” he said, “and we do nothing!”   And I recognized my own definition of the sacred scared and the political and the possible.   James Baldwin never blinked.  He never pretended things weren’t as bad as they were.  He saw the deadliness of the American status quo every second and still he was surprised, and never did he accept what he himself had prophesied and still he formed his mouth into the word love.   Desperation and hope can be the same thing.

The essays that you will be reading by Baldwin were mostly written in the late 1950’s and they are about what it means “to be here”.  Baldwin is famous for being an black American writer in exile, but always present to the urgency of American politics.  For Baldwin to even identify as American as often as he did is bravery worth monuments.  As you read his essay on what it means to be an American (a distinction he learns or sees from across the Atlantic) think about who you are? And when?  When are you American? When are you Southern? When are you African? If ever.  What of the political moves with you, replicates itself through small battles in your chest…

As you read Baldwin’s essay on his “home” Harlem meditate on what it means to be trapped.  What it means to be home.  What it means to be gentrified away.  What place marks the stopping point of your soul? What map reflects the limit of your imagination.  If Kameelah asks, “what is the choreography of death”, let us ask ourselves about the geography of survival.   What does it look like. What are the building?  (Only a few years later June Jordan would create an architectural plan for Harlem designed to make love, hope, thought and health more possible.   If you have been to Harlem you might have noticed that this plan has not been implemented.)

   Audre Lorde looks different in every picture.  I think that means that Audre Lorde grew and grew, I think it means her face, like her vision was incompatible with a box, I think it means her defiance was successful.   By the time Audre Lorde wrote “Scratching the Surface: Notes on Some Barriers to Women and Loving” it was a decade after “Nobody Knows My Name”, black people on the African continent had waged and were waging irreversible revolutions.  Take some time to contrast and compare Baldwin’s use of Europe as a place for a different vantage point, and Lorde’s use of particular tribal practices in Africa to disrupt the binary between heterosexuality and homosexuality, to open possibilities for what could be natural and freedom making for black people…remember that Lorde is speaking in the language of, but away from the limits of black cultural nationalism as it was being practiced at the time.

Whereas Baldwin is interested in the dynamics and relationships between different groups of people that he can name (between Black people and white people…between Americans and Europeans…between the American Negro and the Algerian subject) Lorde is interested in what happens “Between Ourselves”….how does the practice of “lesbian baiting” foreclose freedom WITHIN a black intellectual community (Lorde first published this essay in The Black Scholar)?  And what is at stake.  I see this essay as a study for what Lorde will express in the poem Need (which we read already…but which she wrote later) and for what she will express in Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred and Anger.  I love the fact that the title is honest.  In this essay Lorde scratches the surface of something that she will deeply inhabit and investigate in her later work.  She kept that promise.   What does Lorde teach us about how we can lovingly and critically inhabit a struggle that we are IN.

I’m glad you’re here.  Let me know what you think.

Love,

Prof/Lex

For those of you unfamiliar with the Negritude movement it was basically a literary, theoretical and political movement developed by black people from French colonies in the Caribbean and Africa who had access to the highest levels of French education. The Negritude movement was a response to racism and colonialism, and while the Negritude poets and writers were in conversation with black American writers such as Langston Hughes and Richard Wright “Negritude” was a conversation that happened mostly in French. Though most histories of Negritude neglect the role of women, preferring to focus on the “holy trinity” mentioned above, I think it is important to remember that Paulette and Jane Nardal hosted the “salon” events that allowed these conversations to exist (and they introduced these young french students to the harlem renaissance writers) AND they founded some of the most important publications to the movement. Without the Nardal sisters the black french literary scene may have never emerged. Remember that.

Fanon, a Martincan psychoanalyst and former student of Cesiare wrote “On the Lived Experience of the Black” while living in France and experiencing the difference between racism as colonialist exclusion experienced via the poverty and self-hatred on the majority black island of Martinique and the everyday contact with white supremacist racism in the majority white “mother country” of France. Later, when Fanon moved to Algeria (also a French colony at the time) to work with mental patients who were being traumatized by the explicit colonial repression excercised during the long war of colonial resistance he would write about collective anti-colonial experience more explicitly in his most widely read work The Wretched of the Earth.

“The Lived Experience of the Black”, written in the first person reveals the struggle to describe black interiority…the fact that black people are indeed people with complex emotions…in a racist context that would assume all black people to be the same because of their status OUTSIDE of the human…while also trying to develop a viable black collectivity. Fanon’s narrative seems stream of consciousness, but it is actually highly structured walking the reader through a set of attempts at subjectivity that are all thwarted by acts of white racism.

Fanon starts with the insistence that he is a person. He attempts to define his personhood as his physical relationship to his surroundings…but as soon as this is articulated Fanon’s experience of himself “in triplicate” because white passengers refuse to sit near him on the train and therefore change his relationship to public space makes this theory untenable. Fanon further attempts to counter the irrationality of racist hatred with the rationality of humanism, but he no sooner articulates this than he remembers the countless works of scientific racism that attempt to use enlightenment science to prove the inferiority of black people (think of The Bell Curve as the latest work in this genre).

Fanon seeks to apply Sartre’s resistance to anti-semitism in the wake of World War II to the situation of black people but realizes that unlike ethnic hatred anti-black racism operates at the level of the body. Anti-black racism means Fanon is “enslaved upon sight”.

Finally Fanon embraces the ideology of Negritude, he cites poets and writers from the Harlem Renaissance and the Negritude movement and revels in the bodacious boldness of the words, he celebrates black people’s essential closeness to nature until he remembers what Sartre has said in his intro to Black Orpheus, which is basically that Negritude’s primitive and childlike power will remind (white) humanity of it’s roots and save them from the vulgarity of progress. Fanon cannot accept this appropriation. He can no longer celebrate a “primitivism” that only reinforces white assertions that black adults remain “childlike” and that black existence represents some earlier moment on the path to civilization that white people have already marched past.

So here we are. Every attempt to create a black subjectivity that is not limited by white racism has failed. Time and again Fanon constructs an impermeable strategy that gets shattered by the lived experience of racism. Ultimately Fanon says “I define myself as an absolute tension of opening,” which I take to mean that the “black” experience is not something that Fanon can define, but is rather a necessary critique, a possibility of life and transformation in the face of hatred and violence. Blackness is actually this process of falling apart again and again but building a next moment somehow.

I am excited to know what you think of this essay (and what you think of my reading). Is Fanon’s “Lived Experience of the Black” specific to a historical moment? Is it radically changed in a post-colonial/neo-colonial moment? Is this “opening” a viable definition of blackness. I.e. is it okay for blackness to never congeal into a fixed definition?

My eyes and hands wait (open) for your responses.

Peace,

Prof/Lex

My reading of Paul Beatty’s The White Boy Shuffle is that the author’s incisive humour and uncanny ear for a number of dialects distracts our flight reflexes so that we can face the brutality that he depicts…and that we live.   Beatty addresses police brutality, childhood abuse, poverty and chronic racism in a way that most contemporary novelists have shied away from.   It is my sense that ultimately this is a book about life IN death and the ways that class inflected racism in the United States fundamentally change the supposed relationship between the two paradigmatic opposites: life and death themselves.

      This is also a book about culture and education and an ironically multicultural critique of multiculturalism itself.  It is a satirical adventure that uses stereotype to breathe life into spaces killed by ideological neglect.  I thank Beatty for encouraging us to think the supposedly unthinkable.  If laughter opens our hearts the depth of what he will portray hear expands them past the point where we thought they would break.

     I encourage you to pair your reading of the White Boy Shuffle with a selective viewing of Aaron McGruder’s cartoon “The Boondocks”.   While the life of the Boondocks as a comic strip presented small (indeed daily) doses of race critical irony, the life of the Boondocks as a television show has created a dystopic space in tune with Beatty’s project.   The Boondocks (again using humour as a critical device) uses stereotype and extremes to accurately display just how crazily racist our society is and just how horrific and senseless the consequences can be.   Narrating the actual plot in what most cartoonists would marginalize into a dream sequence, McGruder leaves viewers (or at least THIS viewer) with a “damn”.    I am left fully complicit, dissatisfied and awake at the end of every episode.  Laughlines charting out pathways for tears.

 I am interested to know what you all think about the use of stereotypes and the n-word by both of these authors.  What do you feel the function of humour is in race critique?  What do these texts make possible? What do they reinforce?  What narrative (race, war, death, education, responses to homophobia, protesting anti-asian nativism) within the complex matrix of Beatty’s novel struck you the most?  To what extent d these works of fiction steal/shift/remake what it means to be real?

Eagerly,

  Prof/Lex

P.S.  Please read Kinohi’s extended analysis of White Boy Shuffle in this paper whiteboyshuffle.doc which he has so generously shared with us.  (And the thinking continues…) 

Last week we thought about responses to racist, gendered and homophobic violence in terms of what is “at stake” in this class.  This week I want to extend that to think about health or lack of access to healthcare as a specific form of institutional violence that manifests itself along familiar lines of oppression.  I find political scientist Cathy Cohen’s work especially helpful here.  (That is probably because from the first time I heard Cathy Cohen speak…she has been my hero.)  I refuse the violence of stalking, but I strongly recommend that we all follow the groundbreaking, brave and radical work that Cohen (now Director of Africana Studies at University of Chicago) is doing.

 Cathy Cohen’s The Boundaries of Blackness, published in 1999 is an important analysis of a specific failure of racialized politics.  By investigating why despite the fact that African American communities in the United States were disproportionately impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic mainstream African American institutions and political leaders were slow to respond, Cohen looks at the limits of “racial consensus” politics when the “consensus” about who is black (and by consensus she means not the true consensus but rather the percieved consensus created by those within the African American community with the privilege of defining “the consensus)  excludes queer black folks, black mothers on medicaid, black folks in prison and black sex workers and black folks suffering from drug addiction.

In other words, the black people MOST impacted by the HIV/AIDS epidemic were (in)conveniently narrated out of black subjectivity.   Cohen argues that the extreme class differences between black people with access to wealth and the majority of black people who (as Cohen investigates in her earlier work with Micheal Dawson) are disenfranchised (i.e. denied the social, economic and political resources necessary for basic decision making power in their communities) have led to a situation where the “black leadership” imagined to consist mostly of people with economic and educational privilege is MORE concerned with presenting a “respectable” face to the dominant culture and reaping the rewards of proximity with white folks than with being accountable for the lived experience of the majority of black folks.    This narrative about respectability is what Cohen argues made mainstream black leaders afraid to center the needs of queers, prisoners, single mothers, sex workers and drug users.

However (and this is what makes her my hero), Cohen demands that this scary, non-respectable centering is exactly what needs to happen.   She argues that shaping a “black community” on terms catered towards white acceptance can only result in continued dehumanization…namely the dehumanization by black people with privilege of “other” black people who are marginalized…twice.  What Cohen describes as “advanced marginalization” is the deadly situation where marginalized people (for example black folks) because of racism and poverty are denied certain levels of access to mainstream institutions (say schools, hospitals, and voting booths that work).  Because of this situation of anti-black racism black people who have the most NEED for HIV treatment and  preventative healthcare services are MORE dependent on institutions WITHIN the black community (i.e. clinics at black churches, NAACP representation, Urban League advocacy etc).  HOWEVER because the consensus about who “counts” in the black community excludes the folks with the most need this black institutions are not serving the people who need it most.

So our people are dying.

Cohen demands that a movement to effectively end the AIDS epidemic must CENTER the needs of those who are usually demonized in the black community…and not only that…but the actions of sex workers, drug users, prisoners, single mothers on medicaid, queer folks must be seen as the new place of POLITICAL LEADERSHIP.  Michele Berger (Women’s Studies professor at UNC) elaborates on what this looks like in the fight against HIV in her book Workable Sisterhood (which I HIGHLY recommend).

So in 1999 Cohen says that if there is going to be a viable “black politics” (and “black” seems to have some major slippage with “African American” in this use) it MUST center around the leadership and needs of sex workers, queers, drug users, prisoners, and welfare mothers.  The bogeypeople of mainstream American Politics.

Interestingly, when I discussed this in the “in person” version of To Be A Problem with about a dozen 17-19 year old Duke Students, most of whom identify as “black” the students reflected much of the discourse that has come along in the decade since Cohen’s book was released.

Now…they insist AIDS is a “black issue”. (Though we did not reach “consensus” on whether this was because people had taken up work like that of Cohen and Berger or because so many black people had died from AIDS and are living with HIV that it has become undeniable). BET, Essence, Tavis Smiley and the crew have all jumped on board.

BUT…they also insist…it shouldn’t be.  AIDS should be a “human issue” since all human beings are succeptible to AIDS.   They elide Cohen’s demand for a radical black politics centered on the most silenced subjectivities by remembering that in their generation they have learned that AIDS is a “human rights issue”…..that just happens to disproportionately kill black people.

In some sense the move to “human” is also part of a discourse that transports AIDS “back” to Africa where it supposedly “started”. That is the point that the ONION article

https://www.theonion.com/content/node/40976

parodies.   The students were surprised to learn however that the rates of HIV in the Bronx in NYC are HIGHER than the rates of HIV infection in Uganda.

While we ran out of classtime (which we always do) I questioned whether the new “human rights” discourse on AIDS wasn’t reproducing racism:

see up and coming scholar Alisha Gaines on Kate Moss’s anti-AIDS minstrelsy here .

Do the new “I am African” campaign and the exploits of Bono seem likely to truly impact the disproportionate effect of HIV on black communities everywhere? Or do they make the grim statement that the Onion amplifies: African life is not valuable.  We now admit that all people come from Africa. Blackness is a “style” we can all appropriate.  Therefore it is okay if all of the black people actually living in Africa die…because we have stolen their subjectivity already.

Maybe that wasn’t the best note to end class I was profoundly disturbed that my students had more faith in  white “human rights” activists to impact the lives of the people most impacted by HIV/AIDS than in the people (queer/sex worker/single mother/prisoner/drug user) themselves.   I know that Cohen wasn’t suggesting that since black mainstream leadership had failed to address the problem early on we should just give up on black leadership altogether and put our faith into multinational initiatives controlled by white folks so this  leaves me with some urgent questions for you all.

How do you imagine we could collectively respond to HIV/AIDS?  Do you think that a “black politics” like the radical one that Cohen recommends could be viable?  Do we think that what Cohen says about “centering deviance” is possible?  Could/should it be applied on broader terms than “the African American community”?  Could we read Cohen to be saying that due to political changes and the unpredicted class divisions enabled by integration that there is no coherent “black community”?  What does this mean for “black scholars”, “black community organizations”, “black rebels”, anti-racist allies, people of color coalitions?

On what scale(s) do you see this next necessary phase of response to the deadly injustice of which AIDS is merely one salient example? Local? Global? Glocal? What kinds of community institutions could turn around the dynamic of “disenfranchisement” that Cohen points out?

Or as June Jordan asks in “Nicaragua: Why I Had to Go There”

“When will we seize the whole world with our freedom?”

Looking forward to your responses,

Prof/Lex

   Enjoying and looking forward to more of your feedback and energy as we adjust to the rhythm of these weekly posts.   (By the way…feel free to check out my other blog www.thatlittleblackbook.blogspot.com to see what ELSE I’m reading and thinking about at any given time.)

    We started with DuBois and Wynter because I see their work as foundational to the conversations that we’ll be having in this class.  I think that their work and our inspiration by/disagreement with/contemplation of their work creates a theoretical framework for thinking about what it means to be a problem. 

     If last week was about the foundation, this week is about what is at stake in the work that we are doing together in this class.  Last week we discovered that the “other” or the “problem can be a radical place to speak from.   As problems we challenge the norms, change the game, etc. etc.  And while all of that is very sexy (and true) I think it’s important to remember how the boundaries of normalcy are enforced.  In fact, to paraphrase Sylvia’s post last week…while the position of the “other” may be a way to create power, domination is operating through FORCE.   Being “a problem” can very literally mean expendability.  It can, for example, put you in a position where state and individual violence against your person is legally acceptable (and yes…I am thinking of the examples of the Newark 4 and the Jena 6…and yes I am also thinking about the countless instances of sexual violence that are silenced in our communities everyday).  In other words when i say “To Be Game” in the title of the post I mean simultaneously “to be hunted” and “to be ready.”

     So this week we’ll be reading an Ida B. Wells pamphlet published in 1900 in response to racist mob violence in New Orleans (more than one hundred years before Kathleen Blanco’s post-Katrina “shoot on sight” national guard order).  Please think about what the examples of police brutality and mob violence Ida B. Wells spoke out against offer us in our current moment of legalized racist violence.  Pay close attention to Wells’s portrayal of the local meda in New Orleans.   If you are going to watch the new series K-Ville that premiers sometime this week, do it with Wells in mind.  

 You may notice that Ida B. Wells (like Sylvia Wynter) makes much of the way that the access to guns changes interracial interpersonal encounters.  Remember that Wells was famous for advocating that every black person should have a rifle on the mantle.  She believed that racist violence would only stop through a militant practice of self-defense.  As the cases of the Newark 4 and the Jena 6 remind us black people still do not have the legal right to self defense in the United States. 

Most importantly,  remember that Ida B. Wells’s first pamphlet “Southern Horrors” (which I HIGHLY RECOMMEND) was published as the result of an amazing effort.  The event to fund the publication of Southern Horrors was the biggest convening of Negro Club Women in the whole era of such clubs.   Ida B. Wells dedicates the book to the black women of Brooklyn who organized the funding event.  Is there a contemporary version of this?  How can we support each other in presenting alternative views that respond to racist violence?

  People often forget that while Wells is memorialized as the international leader of the anti-lynching movement (which she certainly was), she was just as strongly vocal about the twin phenomenon of unpunished rape and sexual assault experienced by black women.  

        Three quarters of a century later the black lesbian feminists in and around the Boston-based Combahee River Collective (we’ll be reading their founding document later in the course) were responding to 12 murders of black women during 3 months in the blac neighborhoods of Roxbury and Dorchester in Boston.   In (what I think of as a) Wellsian spirit, the collective published a pamphlet about the murders after the 6 victim was discovered.  They had to keep changing the title as more and more black women were found dead.  In fact, on April 28th, the morning of a march that they had planned to protest the killings of what were then 8 black women,  a 9th victims body was found.   I imagine that the easiest part was changing the signs at the last minute. I imagine that the hardest part was continuing the struggle in the face of a violence that seemed only to grow. (This is what is at stake in this class.  Those of us in Durham-having experienced our own more recent April 28th march may have an easier time imagining what that felt like.)

     In response to these murders Audre Lorde wrote “Need: A Chorale for Black Woman Voices” which is also available for you in the google-files. The only question that I leave you with after reading Need is the question that Lorde herself leaves us with: “How much of this truth can I see and still live unblinded?  How much of this pain can I use?”

         Along with Wells and Lorde we will be looking at the work of A Long Walk Home (alongwalkhome.org).  Please take a look at their site  their press packet and take a look at it.    I was first introduced to the work of A Long Walk Home while I was working in the rape crisis center at my college (at the time I was also in denial about a sexual assault that I had experienced at school).  The creative approach that A Long Walk Home took, in addition to the powerful fact that black survivors of sexual assault were speaking out about it together meant a lot for me then.  It still does.   What does this work, pioneered by Scherezade  Tillet and taken on by a beautiful collective of survivors and co-survivors teach us?  Is there something that the stories of survivors makes available that can be available no other way?  How do we connect to this approach to healing from and ending sexual assault?

    Finally, we’ll also be looking at Mendi Obadike’s web-installation entitled “My Hands/Wishful Thinking” (https://obadike.tripod.com/Adiallo2.html).  I challenge you to respond to these readings in a form that is in conversation with the form that Mendi used here.   Who would you create a list of wishes for? What would those wishes be?

Know that all week long, I am wishing for your brilliance:(which is) the answer to my need.

Blessings, 

    Prof. Lex

First off…don’t feel overwhelmed by 1. Sylvia Wynter’s brilliance. This is the most dense article we’ll be reading together…but it’s so packed with brilliance that I’ll be referring to it all fall/winter long. or 2. by me! I am going to pose about a million questions below but feel free only to address the one or two that speak to you the most when you respond (also feel free to address any question that comes up for you as you read…whether or not I’ve mentioned it.) These posts are just my way of helping to start the conversation.

Feel free to post by Friday 9/14 in the comment section here or via the email list or on your own blog (or all three). If you are only posting on your own blog please send a note and a link to the email list when you’ve posted.

I should be up front about the fact that I am prioritizing the Sylvia Wynter essay because, while DuBois is equally foundational, Wynter’s work is not read as often. (Plus I have a huge level of excitement about brilliant black women from the Caribbean who are ALIVE!-Wynter is a distinguished professor at Stanford, maybe Kameelah will visit her office hours and tell her about us So that is to say PLEASE READ THE WYNTER FIRST (even though DuBois obviously wrote his about 73 years earlier).

To give you some background on the Wynter essay: She first presented this essay as a talk at a 1976 conference on Ethnopoetics. In fact it was the first conference on Ethnopoetics, though I don’t know whether the series continued. As you will see Wynter was openly critical of the conference’s mission to “return to the primitive”, but the editors of the journal Alcheringa may not have been so critical (judging from the vague statue that appears on the cover with no explanation). This “First Conference on Ethnopoetics” was also the first place where Martiniquean theorist Edouard Glissant presented his most famous essay “Free and Forced Poetics” (also sometimes translated as “Natural and Forced Poetics”). Another speaker at this conference was Frederic Jameson, noted Marxist theorist, Durham resident and Duke University Professor of Literature. I see it as a testament to Wynter’s effect on her audience that Jameson’s paper title is a direct quote from Wynter’s paper AND that the function of his talk seemed to have been to underline the second-to-last paragraph of Wynter’s. When in the presences of greatness…smart people nod their heads.

Now we get to imagine that we are part of Wynter’s audience and participate with her in the main two aims of her paper which are

1. To define the term “ethnos”. As Wynter will explain the term “ethnos” has moved from defining “us” to designating an “other” that makes “us” possible. Wynter is interested in whether we can find a way of defining community WITHOUT depending on exclusion. Is there an “us” with out a “them”? If so…for Wynter this would be the true “ethnos”.

So let’s see. I’m interested in what you all think about this question. After reading the piece think about these things in the context of your own life/work. Do you find it effective to define community against something that is recognizably NOT your community? Can you think of any examples of community or connection that you have experienced that don’t require exclusion? Wynter suggests that jazz is an example of black people creating an “us” that doesn’t require a “them”. Do you agree? How does art or a creative process change our relationships to community?

2. The second thing that Wynter is concerned with defining is “poetics”. For Wynter every truly creative process is a “poetic” process. She is not limiting her definition to words or rhyming or anything like that. Wynter is asking us to imagine a poetic process that allows people to create and articulate their relationships to their environments. She is asking for this in order to replace what she sees as the “cultural racism” which she believes is “organic to western capitalism” in which people are defined as man or subhuman based on their relationships to objects (most importantly guns…in the colonial moment).

Do we agree with this definition of “poetics”? Does a creative process allow us to CREATE our relationships to each other instead of CONSUMING them? What are we creating anyway. My dad says that he thinks about what Wynter is calling a “poetic” approach as a “purposeful” approach…an approach that acknowledges a divine purpose in each individual life. How do you think about this? Do you have other names for what Wynter is calling the “poetic”?

Now on to DuBois. The major idea that DuBois launches in the section of Souls that we will be reading together (though I recommend reading the rest of the book someday) is “double consciousness” a constant “two-ness” that characterizes the difficulty black people face in the United States. He also laments the dilemma of the educated black person in the United States who is constantly “between” the black majority which in his time (and I would add to this day) has been denied access to validated forms of education and the dominant culture. This dilemma seems especially poignant to me…because DuBois is actually writing this text FROM the position he describes.

How does DuBois’s navigation of audience strike you? Does the fact that he seems to be addressing a predominantly white audience (“men”) on behalf of “black folk” shape your interpretation of his narrative? (Also…how do you navigate similar dilemmas? I know of women of color who blog and make zines who worry about what it means for their work to mostly be read by white bloggers and zinesters. I know of community organizations dedicated to serving communities of color who worry about what it means when they are accountable to foundations that are NOT controlled by people of color for grant reports. DuBois seems to share this worry.)

Does DuBois’s choice to use poetry and music to frame each of his chapters have an effect of the potential of his text?

Finally…what do you think Sylvia Wynter would have to say about this section of DuBois’s text? Does DuBois’s idea of “between-ness”challenge the heirarchy (animal-savage/black -man) that Wynter points out…or does it reproduce it?

Wynter points out that within western culture large sections of the mind and spirit are trapped “on reservations”, making the point that the oppression inflicted on indigenous people costs everyone their soul. (Though on the other hand issues of Essence magazine around the time period when Wynter gave her talk suggested that surest way to lose your soul was to lapse your subscription to the magazine. Which was full of ads for hair-taming products…but I digress.) What about DuBois’s soul? Do we sense that he had to put it on lock-down to address his audience…or did he perform a liberatory feat that allows us to have this conversation right now?

Blessings,

Prof. Lex

While during the course I hope we will be practicing (and defining) “literary production”, my intention is NOT to reproduce the other topic of the course, “Outcast Subjectivity”, through our new and growing relationships to each other.

To that end in addition to introducing yourselves, I would like for everyone to read over the following “ground rules” that poet/teacher/journalist/activist June Jordan created for her course “Poetry for the People”.

It is copied below, but if you’d like to print your own copy (for reading purposes…or to use in your communities) click here: p4p-groundrules.pdf
Comment and let us all know how you think these ground rules may or may not apply to this online course. How is what you hope to do here similar to the vision of Poetry for the People? How are our circumstances different? What ground rules will be necessary for you to participate fully here? Looking forward to hearing from you soon!

Peace,

Alexis
Poetry for the people is a program for political and
artistic empowerment of students. It is motivated by
the moral wish to mitigate the invisibility and the
imposed silence of those less privileged than we.
Originating inside a public institution, and enjoying
full academic accreditation, there are certain ground
rules that must be respected inside this experimental
and hopeful society:
1. “The People” shall not be defined as a group
excluding or derogating anyone on the basis of
race, religion, ethnicity, language, sexual
orientation, class or age.
2. “The People” shall consciously undertake to
respect and encourage each other to feel safe
enough to attempt the building of a community of
trust in which all may try to be truthful and
deeply serious in the messages they craft for the
world to contemplate.
3. Poetry for the People rest upon a belief that the
art of telling the truth is a necessary and healthy
way to create powerful and positive, connections
among people who, otherwise remain (unknown
or unaware) strangers. The goal is not to kill
connections, but rather to create and to deepen
them among truly different men and women.
All teaching and writing within this program shall seek
to honor this belief.
-June Jordan, Poetry for the People, 2000