Womb as Blindspot: Reproduction as Usual

The Womb of Space: The Cross Cultural Imagination, Wilson Harris, 1983
"Sound Effects: Tricia Rose interviews Beth Coleman", 2001
"Black Secret Technology: Detroit Techno and the Information Age", Ben Williams, 2001
"Tales of an Asiatic Geek Girl: Slant from Paper to Pixels" Mimi Nguyen, 2001
"Bandung is Done: Passages in AfroAsian Epistemology" Vijay Prashad, 2006
"Complicating Racial Binaries: Asian Canadians and African Canadians as Visible Minorities", Eleanor TY, 2006
"One People, One Nation? Creolization and Its Tensions in Trinidadian and Guyanese Fiction, Lourdes Lopez Ropero, 2006
"Chutney, Mestissage and Other Mixed Metaphors: Reading Indo Caribbean Art in Afro Caribbean Contexts", Gita Rajan, 2006
"Performing Postmodernist Passing: Nikki S. Lee, Tuff and Ghost Dog in Yellowface/Blackface", Cathy Covell Wagner, 2006
"Toward a Black Pacific", Gary Okihiro, 2006

As usual, reading breeds reading. After reading these essays (and monograph) I ordered Paul Beatty's TUFF from the library..and I'm halfway through it already. Not to say the real sick truth which is that it seems that the way that I am celebratingt he fact that I have passed my prelim exams and am technically free from the reading list that I have been reproducing for you here by exuberantly creating another reading list. Lilly library had a crate of books waiting for me before the ink had even dried on my committee's signatures. So yes. It's sick. I am obsessed with books and no one knows how I got this way. Or do they?
It's my use of the term "breeds" unqualified in the first sentence of this entry that should tip you off. I'm up to something. As usual. Breeding as usual. What interests me about this set of readings is the way that feminized space becomes the place where a meeting of cultures--even creolization perhaps---can happen on terms that are somehow no longer gendered...even though they are happening...supposedly in my womb...which is the ocean, which makes the nation, and a profit somehow. Right. So in the case of Wilson Harris's book the space of possible cultural mixing is a womb. Though I am intrigued by this idea of making space through relationships I am confused about how Harris's analysis of Ellison's Invisible Man requires that the protagonist be Anansi and Odysseus struggling through episodic voyages introduced by a feminized (and he admits)debased muse. I am not arguing that this observation is incorrect. Unfortunately one of my favorite books (Invisible Man) and one of my least favorite movies (Hustle and Flow) share the same narrative crutch. The possibility of democracy is based on the ability of a man to express himself (every man gets a verse right), but somehow this journey towards democracy depends on the availability of a slappable woman, usually as the bridge across which men of different cultures can meet. (Aside: I mean think about it Triple Six Mafia actually got an academy award (even THEY thought they were being punked) for "It's Hard Out Here for Pimp"--and OF COURSE the majority white men who are members of the academy voted for that, because they understand. Maintaining a violent patriarchy in which the bodies of all women are property is HARD. It requires constant violence and the work through which lies about equality become believable. Of course 36M is also really is being punked (pun(k) intended, because in that economy violence against women is just the sketching pad for the violence against the feminized black man and feminizable everyone else. Maybe it helps if you wear bright colors, hang out in miami and stay high. But you best believe if Ashton can appropriate the word punk into a household term, an academy award only makes you a houseslave (sorry Forrest Whitaker, Jaimie Foxx, Halle Berry and Officer Denzel...but you know I'm right---Hattie McDaniels backs me up), and they will use the violence you earn on my body to enslave you too...so can we just stop?)

Anyway, as I am saying I don't disagree with Harris's observation that cross cultural imaginings between men (or the action of hybrid greco-yoruba man creations)
happens in Ellison over the debased body of some woman everytime. I am just asking why that's okay. And not only does Harris seenm to portray this as a necessary and minor evil in his reading of Ellison...his entire thesis (that there is such a thing as the womb of space...where the cross-cultural imagination is produced) seems to say that this is the way that it should be! Harris doesn't exclude women from his analysis, he doesn't debase the work of female novelist to uplift the work of men, he doesn't do any of the things that during the same period Ishmael Reed and Amiri Baraka were engaged in...but in the version of the academy that I would want to create that is not grounds for any award. What I am saying is that brilliant as Harris's analysis is, the thing that I am left with is that "womb" remains an available and unproblematic term for him to use. Some part of a body of a woman remains neutral as a space, operizational as a machine (see Benitez-Rojo) and this is a problem.

Maybe this availability of the disembodied womb is related to Ty's ability to assume the nation in an analysis of race in Canada that while seeking to displace the black white binary, produces a US Canada binary that only reinscribes the hegemony of the US in deciding what race really means (which is expendability---Foucault would say...which is the production of death---Mbembe would say after). And though Bandung is supposed to be Done, a creolization that can generate a unified nation is the best case scenario in the Ropero even though one could argue that the logic of nation provides no technology for transcending imagined/inherited? heritages...in fact allit providesisa narrative in which some kind of supremacy must narrated on racial terms or otherwise. Does the nation..when feminized (so usually) become another womb in which creolization must happen? And in that case does this strange ability for a womb to operate on its own without any human being being invoked pass on to the nation in a way that erases the culpability of the state that narrates the nation through its structural violences? Does this same thing happen with an ocean that can be feminized...the atlantic, the pacific...whichever it is most convenient to normalize penetration through? My baseline question is what kind of spatial production is the invocation of the disembodied womb enabling? What would happen if we were to make space for the possibility of women, not just reproducing whatever men decide to insert into them, not just creating a landscape upon which men of different cultures meet..made one through the magic of noticed and excluded gender difference, but space where women could actually make anything, make something.
Thus the importance of Mimi Nguyen's piece on zine production from paper to pixels. Nguyen includes some of the hatemail that she recieved through which white men tried to deny her process of creating something by bringing the conversation back to their descriptions of her as exotic, rapeable, site for their continued masculinization of themselves through imagined and enacted violence. Nguyen herself is actually more interested in interrogating the means of production, denying the logic in which she would be the means through which the status quo could be reproduced. Nguyen is interested in what the difference between a love object called copy machine (the access to which she negotiates sometimes through the false possibility of sex) and a love object (or less loveable object) called laptop means. What, she asks, is the difference between stolen copywritten images and stolen pieces of html code...google searched images transplanted for other uses. Which is a good question, similar to Laura Wexler's question at the Feminist Theory Workshop this past weekend about what the difference between photography as metaphorized through light and flash and the now digital photographic relationship means. These are questions that I will show my love for by reasking and not answering completely. One thing that all these questions require is an attention to the act of making and the politics of production (see what beth coleman says about dj pedagogies)...so I'll only know if I get to make stuff..with you.
love,
lex (your official phd candidate...what what!)

Presence, Prophecy and Reproduction: (Y)our Words Will Be (T)here

“So Who’s Giving Guarantees?: An Interview with Audre Lorde, Anita Cornwell,
“Showing Our True Colors”, Audre Lorde, 1990
“What is At Stake in Lesbian and Gay Publishing Today” , Audre Lorde, 1990
“Of Generators and Survival—Hugo Letter”, Audre Lorde, 1990
Selected Poems (in Callaloo), Audre Lorde, 1991
“Above the Wind: An Interview with Audre Lorde”, Charles H. Rowell, 1991
Healing Narratives: Women Writers Curing Cultural Dis-ease , Gay Wilentz, 2000
“Cruel Enough to Stop the Blood” Global Feminisms and the U.S. Body Politic, Or: “They Done Taken My Blues and Gone”, Karla Holloway, 2006

mama audre
how did you no
facing gale
force consent

to plant letters
like collard seeds
who new how
to ride wind
dispersing into
breath
?

who did you
make
a line with no birth
certificate
tracing from
Grenada
to St. Croix
to New Orleans
a bee-line
designed to clog machine guns
an oracle
fashioned from scraps
of cloth and ink
?

'i wish
you were
living

(up the road)"
and
i
no
that
you
are

Nobody's Home: Body, Nation, Moment

Some Changes, June Jordan, 1971
Dry Victories, June Jordan, 1972
Fannie Lou Hamer, June Jordan, 1972
New Life New Room, June Jordan, 1975
"South Africa: Bringing it All Back Home", June Jordan, 1981
"Report from the Bahamas", June Jordan, 1982
"Black Folks on Nicaragua: "Leave Those Folks Alone!", June Jordan, 1983
"Love is not the Problem", June Jordan, 1983
"The Blood Shall Be a Sign Unto You: Israel and South Africa", June Jordan, 1985
"Columbia Students Protest Against Apartheid", June Jordan, 1985
"For My American Family", June Jordan, 1986
"Don't You Talk About My Momma", June Jordan, 1987
"Talking Trash: Late Capitalism, Black (Re)Productivity and Professional Basketball", Gitanjali Maharaj, 1997
“Aliens Who Are of Course Ourselves”, Alondra Nelson (2002)
“Bitter Nigger Inc.”, Tana Hargest, 2002
“The Revolution Will Be Digitized: Afrocentricity and the Digital Public Sphere”, Anna Everett, 2002
“Future Texts”, Alondra Nelson, 2002
"The Genres of Postcolonialism", Brent Hayes Edwards, 2004
“Harlem”, Gayatri Spivak, 2004
“The University and the Undercommons: Seven Theses”, Fred Moten and Stefano Harvey, 2004
“Who Owns the Genome?”, Misha Agrist and Robert Cook-Deegan, 2006
Biocapital: The Constitution of Post-Genomic Life, Kashik Sunder Rajan, 2006
“The Science Commons in Life Science Research: Structure, Function and Value of Access to Genetic Diversity”, Robert Cook-Deegan and Tom Dedeurwaerdere, 2007


So technically I have stopped reading. The above list is either a mirage or absolute proof that I have no will power. June Jordan makes much of our rights to say YES and NO, but I want to remain a person who is far more likely to say yes. I want to live in a world where a tendency towards yes does not cause one to consent to drowning or exploding. We'll see. The themes of this weeks secret illegal reading (which has now made the exam lists I sent to my committee members on Wednesday obsolete) are reproduction (as always in the social, and in the genes), spatial relationships (to harlem, to the university, to the revolutionary socialist state, to the south african black freedom movement, to the "inner-city" and the NBA, to the nation as a possible frame) and about time (networks, futurity, black techno-mobility and digital diaspora). I haven't made up an order in which to address these, but why not start with time.

In June Jordan's brilliant book Dry Victories, addressing and ventriloquizing black children in black english is anachronistic in much the way that Alondra Nelson says Ishmael Reed is in Mumbo Jumbo. Interspersed with dialogue about and images of black soldiers in the civil war, Jordan places images from Vietnam, photos ofblack leaders assasinated in the 1960's (Medgar, Martin, Malcolm) etc. marking not only the Civil War and Vietnam as parellel losses, but also narrating the failures of the civil rights movement through the failures of reconstruction and making the point that any kind of victory that does not enable a different relationship to land itself is "dry" or bankrupt. I would recommend this book to the contributors to the "AfroFuturism" issue of Social Text edited by Alondra Nelson. The contributors seem convinced that proving the techno-savvyness of black folk (in response to the blanket assumptions of a racialized "digital divide")is a valuable thing to do, because it allows the kind of techno-mobility that must be a good thing. I would compare this imperative to prove that we(black people..and yes I am blogging as I say this) are sufficiently model is akin to the earlier imperative to prove the same through a particular narrative of "black manhood" (see the "Men of Color Call to Arms" in the Civil War...which Jordan reproduces in Dry Victories) "if we would be considered men becomes "if we would be considered nerds" or at least "if we could be considered 21st Century" and the push to narrate mobility as virture (as through the figure of the black soldier, black seaman, black scholarship boy in exile) becomes digitized (the fact that DOS is still speaking the language of master and slave disks at the time of the publication of the issue notwithstanding). The first narrative, that of black manhood at all costs meets its bankruptcy at Moynihan most visibly. As Jordan points out in "Don't You Talk About My Momma!" alongside her injunction to Danny to clean his own house, the call to want the black family to look like the supposedly modern and supposedly functional white patriarchal family means a gendered violence already...requiring the fabrication of a mythical"female-headed" sociological monster. So the question for me (through the Afrofuturists), as someone deeply committed to dispersal as digital publication through my million blogs and emails is what terms get reproduced in this technology that I participate in? Who does this pathologize? What does my compulsion topost collages and poems and essays and lists on these blogs say about what it means NOT to be web-enabled?

If the lesson of genomics is any marker (remember Gilroy's somewhat irresponsible celebration of difference of multiplied penetrability made by the mapping of the genome in Against Race...while forgetting that some of us are already interpellated into a logic of penetration justified Against our will---in the moment where is insists that Micheal Jordan is now more penetrable than Sara Baartman), then we have to be in a mode of creation that subverts the persistant narratives through which racial and gendered violence (for example) reproduces itself (or how we help reproduce it by telling it the same way). As Rajan argues convincingly in BioCapital...the genomic moment proves some of the ways that captialism operates THROUGH change and is therefore flexible enough to persist even through radically different technologies of relation.

What I am trying to say here is that as we inhabit, this place, this moment, this body newly but always visible we have to be finding ways to describe our relationships (and in describing...produce our relationships)such that we can be creating a present of reach (maybe Pat would call this a post-present...I am more reluctant to use the prefix) that acknowledges a break from our pain and realizes our unending desire.

My Subscription: On Recurrent Issues...

The Black Woman, Toni Cade Bambara (pictured above), 1970
We Walk the Way of the New World, Don L. Lee (Haki Madhubuti), 1970
Conditions: Five The Black Women’s Issue Barbara Smith and Lorraine Bethel, 1979
This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, Gloria Anzaldua and Cherrie Moraga, 1981.
“Your Silence Will Not Protect You: A Tribute to Audre Lorde” Barbara Christian, 1993
Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality, Evelyn Hammonds, 1994
Reproductions of Reproduction, Judith Roof, 1996
"Making History: An Interview with Barbara Smith by Terrence Heath", 1998
“Here’s the Movement, Let’s Start Building: An Interview with Barbara Smith” Color Lines, 2000
"Building Black Women’s Studies", Barbara Smith, 2000
"Charting a Personal Journey: A Road to Black Women's Studies", Nellie McKay, 2000
"Other Mothers of Women's Studies", Beverly Guy-Sheftall, 2000
No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive, Lee Edelman, 2004
Big Momma's House 2, Don Whitesell (sic!), 2006


My grandfather taught me the difference between the words "continious" and "continual". My grandfather had a mind for memorizing poems, dictionary entries and duppy stories. For "continuous" he recited "without cessation", but continual slips into vernacular in my memory of how he must have spoken it, again and again and again and again. Periodical, like breathing, like waves, like the naturalized return of the same issues. But you see...this is the place where subscription becomes conscriptions. We are drafted into the reproduction of the status quo through narrative, through faith, through the machines performance of itself as moon, but mostly through our own belief. Another one of Pop-pop's quotables came with the unforgettable sensory aid of Rendezvous Bay ("God's Swimming Pool" they say...and it's true...my grandparents did swim there more than anywhere else in their lifetimes...direct action desegregation of the Perth Amboy pool notwithstading). Pop-pop explained the changing shape and depth of the beach in the way that I needed during the last years of his life. "Each day is the world made new." New. Each day. The contradiction is in the process. What is so new about something that happens each day? Is it made new in the same way? Basically my question remains, does the WAY of making change or is it only the products that change, or is it only what we think the products (our very own lives) mean that changes. Are we the ones that make it new?
I bring these questions to thoughts of publication this week. After Don L. Lee published We Walk the Way of the New World, definining New World as a new black subjectivity produced by African liberation movements and Afro-American consciousness and black historians and singers and psychiatrists and poets and (though he doesn't say this with more than his life's work) the apparatus of black publishing for an ostensibly black audience. Is the creation of a new world the act of making an audience? The act of making something audible (Barbara Smith says that making the invisible visible is a plitical act)? Is making a new world the making of a sound? (I used to imagine, while blowing bubbles that the bubble itself might be a whole planet with its whole system of wet continents complete in the second before popping. I used to imagine that people lived there. For a while I became obsessed with actually eating the bubbles as they popped. I must have wanted to be a place to live.) For Don L. Lee in 1970 (and maybe even as Haki Madhubuti now...but I doubt in the same way), of course, black women are indeed a place to live. In fact the three sections of his book are (by this logic) geographic. He begins with a section of Blackwoman Poems which opens with an epigraph of Negritude poet Leopold Senghor's poem to Africa as black woman as mother lover something or other, moves on to a section entitled Africa and then to a section entitled New World. We (he makes clear in the introduction) are black men with cameras and cars and a hip way of walking. Black modernity here includes community accountability defined as a something which is directly juxtaposed with supposedly white-taught homosexuality. This issue recurs in Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman, which while responding to the objectification of black women in nationalist ideologies (through Don's black nationalist compadres and Moynihanian sociology, retains the black man as the most immediate and directly addressed audience of the text and (with the exception of an interesting suggestion by Bambara herself that we (men and women) should not be afraid of becoming androgynous because gender role are something that can only be created IN the revolutionary process..not assumed and enforcedfrom the outset) is soldily heterosexist and sometimes outright homophobic in its insistence that the women's empowerment it is demanding is the solution to (not the advancing of) Amazonianism and Faggotry (to refer to terms).

*Aside here. Under strange circumstances I saw one of the many black male actor as mammy-esque elder black obese woman films on television last weekend. The ideology was clear. This black man, becomes a black woman (easily, but hilariously) in order to nurture the white family and protect the state (us quo), revealing that this (the buildling up of the white middle class nuclear family--which Pat Parker by the way wants explicitly to destroy---IS the protection of the state. So a black FBI agent dressed as a fat black mammy who actually is willing to take a bullet while his pregnant wife and growing son wait a home for him in order to save the white patriarch actually makes sense. Judith Roof says that the move from analog to digital (from metaphor to metonymy) causes an anxiety about the reproduction of the patriarchy. In response the sperm gets a heroic narrative and Arnold Swarzenegger gets pregnant and the mario brothers save the world. How..though does race play out here. Does it matter which black person reproduces the patriarchy? If, as Spillers points out the actual physical reproduction of slaves is not sufficient to reproduce enslavement as a state, and therefore an ideological narrative of black women as legally productive of enslaved status is necessary, then in the genetic age (with the use of Henrietta Lacks's racialized overproductive cells in labs worldwide) how do black women get narrated? How important does it become that DNA evidence proves that black women cannot be raped around the corner of my house...for example....

And Conditions 5 (which I described to Nia this week as "the most important periodical publication ever"...mostly because it created and imagined me within a possible audience) addresses THESE of heterosexism and audience production issues becoming the bridge between the full inhabitation of the space of the periodical Conditions of white mainstream middle class feminism and the creation of different apparatus for the (re?)production of that audience in Kitchen Table Press. So between the "special issue" and the anthology there is a dialogic process going on. There is a rejection of the coherence of the so called whole...the so-called united front presented in anthologies during the black arts movement, a mode of production that depends on the marginalization of certain queeries..shall we call them. But at the same time there is definitely a desire for something that will last, a relationship in the making that can still be monumentalized. Thus This Bridge Called my Back , for example is made up largely of journal entries (you know...old school blogs) and letters to moms, to sisters in struggles, conversations with biological and chosen sisters, but at the same time as the "movement", the literary world and academic institutions all remain relevant and necessary spaces for these "radical women of color", something that transcends this moment of relations and remains as a legacy is in mind. Barbara Smith when she sees the "movement" says it outright "let's start building!" and in her essay on her role in founding what could be called Black Women's Studies she calls black women's studies her "legacy" and is pleased that it will be something that will last. Now this all comes on top (in my temporality as reader/listener) of Wahneema Lubiano's statement that black studies is always unfinished and that is a good thing. Each. Day. Is. The World. Made New. Though unborn at the time I situate myself in the audience that these women were creating with their poetics of the moment. So does that make their acts of publication reproductive? Or just productive? Or is it me, making them relevant everytime and asking you to make them relevant as a I shape my relationship to you now.
Lee Edelman of course is suspicious of this futurity and for him it is so not queer. But isn't it a queer thing (see Audre Lorde's Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986) for black lesbians to think that they have some stake in creating a future, that they have some long-lasting audibility given that the status quo was a structure for their extermination? When Barbara Christian says that it is THIS (a long this) generation that needs and uses Audre Lorde's words (and Nia and Aishah and Alexis say yes. yes. THIS is US.) isn't that a queer thing? A better thing, than the abandonment of the social that hurts, the concession to the drive FOR our deaths that would tell the story in a way that denies that we are here screaming even now? Is it not a queer thing to make a promise, make love, knowing that each is impossible, not only because of the gap between the sign and the signified, but also because of the ways in which certain racialized "non-reproductive" bodies are made to BE that gap (see Hammonds). Isn't it a queer thing then...to build a bridge?

Your Mama's UnCreolizable: Cultural Debates on the Post-Creole

"Journey to the Center of the Earth: The Caribbean as Master Symbol", Aisha Kahn, 2001
"Atlantic Genealogies", Ian Baucom, 2001
"Creolization and Its Discontents", Stephan Palmie, 2006
"Theorizing World Culture Through the New World: East Indians and Creolization", Viranjini Munasinghe, 2006
reponses to the Munasinghe:
"Theorizing through the New World? Not Really", Ulf Hannerz, 2006
"Feats of Engineering: Theory, Ethnography and other Problems of Model Building in the Social Sciences", Aisha Kahn, 2006
"Mixed Metaphors", John Tomlinson, 2006
"New Savage Slots", Deborah A. Thomas, 2006
"Creolization and Indigeneity", Vicente M. Diaz, 2006
"Circulation, Transpositions and the Travails of Creole", Daniel A. Segal, 2006

Almost all of these readings come from Cultural Anthropologists and though some of my BEST friends:) and most generous mentors are anthropologists and aspiring anthropologists, I have to be honest. I have an unfairgut equation between anthropologists and white people. That is just as I don't trust "white people" as a category based on the effects of the actions attributed to their historical constitution of themselves as a group, I don't trust anthropologists as a group because of what seems like an inescapable (however self-reflective and critical) complicity with colonialism. As with the former case...I choose to trust anthropologists who I know as people and I continue to dehumanize anthropologists who I don't know (lest they classify me first). I know that this is not fair and it may not even be necessary or useful...but I may as well put my biases on the table since they will influence this response either way.

So. Before this session of readings my familiarity with the concept of creolization was based on a reading of Kamau Brathwaite's Roots, in which I was more concerned with his characterizations of windborne Caribbean Africanisms and its influence on the discourse of diaspora, a reading of Edouard Glissant's Caribbbean Discourse and Poetics of Relation in which creolization seemed to be aneverending strategic approach to relation that refused the absoluteness of differencebut also refused its dissolution...something like a reading of conditions (through culture?) that required continued engagement across (something like the diasporic mode of production that I imagine) a reading of Kobena Mercer's Diaspora Culture andthe Dialogic Imagination in which creolization become the mode of production through which critical diaspora thinking presences representation and rejects mere reproduction and a particularly critical reading of Eloge de la Creolite (In Praise of Creoleness) by Bernabe, Confiant, Chamousieu...i.e. the Maryse Conde-hating Creolists from Martinique, which I found to be violent in its patriarchal claim to own the process that these earlier writers had been describing explicitly as a process and NOT a product in a way that made it into a biologized PROPERTY which made the violence of colonialism and the unacknowledged sexual violence thereof somehow acceptable and worthwhile.

Of course all of these anthropologists are interested in these mostly literary theorizations of creolization from the Caribbean. And some of them (Ulf Hannerz) believe that (as usual) whatever is produced in the Caribbean can and should be exported and sold back to its disadvantage. This is also the case with terms like "caste" he makes clear. He is absolutely willing to risk that these appropriations make the theorizations or the descriptions of the local through the globalized will be somewhat "less subtle". This seems to ask for a Edwardian :) question about translation. Do the different local contextsnow described by Creolization (James Clifford's much cited "We are all Caribbeans now") assume a tranlatability that is deferred if not impossible? Does the infinite applicability of the idea of creolization by anthropologists actually kill the relation that creolization is producing/describing? If these concepts are infinitely applicable then what is the "cultural" difference across which we address each other. Where are the preconditions for that which is called creolization? Aisha Kahn points out that in a certain sense "all theories of culture and society are local" in such that they can only be engaged (certainly in the anthropological frame) through investigations of particular relations and logics operating somewhere. And Deborah Thomas (with Jennifer Brody) reminds us that this thing about address across difference as the precondition of creolization also reproduces the purity and essential differentness of whatever these (2?) subjectivities must be. And yes it is usually imagined as multiple...but still through a logic of the 2. In the case of the Anglophone Caribbean, as Kahn and Munasinghe point out, the two are the euro-creole and the afro-creole and the East Indian in the Caribbean is characterized as uncreolizable. Kahn and Munasinghe disagree however whether this blindspot proves the inadequacy of creolization as a mode of inquiry that can be applied universally or whether addressing this blindspot (more study of East Indian people worldwide)will activate creolizations upward mobility by making it a purer theory (she later admits...after the responses...that using the word "pure" here was probably a bad choice...after creolization..buy more pure she seems to mean more abstract).

For Palmie creolization is reproductive at best and symptomatic of the unequal relations that give rise to it and should be thrown out. And indeed books are already in the works (if not out) describing something called a "post-creole moment" (see M. Crichlow forthcoming---Notes on Fleeing the Plantation...)

But what about the body of water through which all of this cultural contact is happening. Does creolization seek to manage cultural difference across cultural difference as such or is the Atlantic and economic interface that the Atlantic has been (at least since the transatlantic slave trade) that which this address of the other occurs across? This is complicated because as some would argue (Baucom included) the Atlantic as an body of water and an interface of capitalist relations exists even in our minds as we relate to each other in any of the places that this ocean bleeds into, but this Atlantic has also been biologized (by Benitez-Rojo among others) into some kind of vaginal space (invaginated relation of impossible maternity for Moten) and even Omeros and Baucom's reference to it Achille finds his father in the Atlantic...his ancestor is the ongoing temporality of the Atlantic which is also the absenting of the subjectivity of the mother that provides access to the literally absent father. I will say more about this after I reread Jamaica Kincaid's Mr. Potter which may revise Omeros along these lines.

In conclusion (!!!) all of this reading about creolization (and its discontents indeed) makes me wonder how exactly I historicize and make specific my interrogation of diaspora. (I think this must happen literally through the moments of address and dedication that I am so attracted to in both my reading and my writing). It makes me wonder whether there is a possibility for diasporic relation evident in my archive that doesn't require the invisbilization of the feminine...the absenting of the sexuality and sexual violence against the mother in order to make "cross cultural" relation between men possible (i mean really this goes back through the incest taboo that doesn't prevent incest to the rape of the sabine women in the western imaginary). This is what I cannot afford,

neither to assimilate nor to reproduce.

Re: Making each Other

"Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe": An American Grammar Book, Hortense Spillers, 1987
"Cultural Identity and Diaspora", Stuart Hall, 1990
"Diaspora Culture and the Dialogic Imagination", Kobena Mercer, 1990
The Black Atlantic: Double Consciousness and Modernity, Paul Gilroy, 1993
"Whiteness as Property", Cheryl Harris, 1993
"Diasporas", James Clifford, 1994
"The Diasporic Mo(ve)ment: Indentureship and Indo-Caribbean Identity, Sean Lokaisingh-Meighoo, 1994
"Out Here and Over There: Queerness and Diaspora in Asian American Studies", David Eng, 1997
"The Uses of Diaspora", Brent Hayes Edwards, 2001
"The Time of Slavery", Saidiya Hartman, 2002
"The Crowded Space of Diaspora: Intercultural Address andthe Tensions of Diasporic Relation", Tina Campt, 2002
The Practice of Diaspora, Brent Hayes Edwards, 2003
"Diaspora Circulation", R. Cheran, 2003
"Call Centers, India and a New Politics of Hybridity", Reka Shome, 2006

What is (not) diaspora today? To be honest, despite my intense attraction to the term, I hesitate to use it in public. I fear we may have reached a moment where it is impossible for me to mean what I say when I say it. ButI hesitate to throw it away because it remains the most generative category for my thought process. This impossible relation "diaspora". It could be that the impossibility of what diaspora is supposed to narrate across has led to its being appropriated, used, imported (you see the ironies) for the purposes of the nation-state, for the purpose of a knowability that it forecloses. This is the problem that Katherine McKittrick points out when she spoke at the Diasporic Hegemonies II (back and more hegemonic than ever) Conference in Toronto last fall about the difficulty of writing an geographic encyclopedia entry for the term diaspora without reproducing the relationship to space and knowability that term would allow us to escape from (maybe). Maybe it is simply that a diasporic relationship is impossible. But if so, it is also irresistible. I want to steal it.
I am supposed to write about this somewhere else, but this week Fred Moten came to school and talked, poeisized, about stealing away. About the importance of fugitivity, the need for a certain homelessness in order to acknowledge the fact that though we "the black subjects" are before that (the processes of our subjectification/abjection) we can never trace this back to an origin. This, in fact is where Saidiya Hartman, in Lose Your Mother ends up in that final chapter "Fugitive Dream", where for her the members of this community built by escapees of the internal slave trade in West Africa are the ones who can sing to and for the diaspora. Moten mentioned those who stole away AS modern art, bringing up this impulse towards freedom in the context of limited representation. My question seems to be then, does a diasporic framework help me to keep imagining (being present to) and distinguishing between the types of relations that will reproduce the violent system of rape that we are living in and those that offer another mode of production, that allow us another way of making that lets us make something else (or that doesn't require us to make anything at all? that lets us predict and notice and embrace what is present?)? I think so.
Hall especially seems to be concerned with this process of production (predictably). He is committed to an idea of diaspora that acknowledges the PRESENCES of what he calls the African, European and the American...and I would argue that these presences do not necessarily need to be continentalized or spatialized at all each time...and which also, in a Derridean way, is always in the play of producing subjectivity and positionality newly. Diaspora he says is a process of making and remaking. It is the "re" that I am concerned with here and in the rest of these reading. I wonder if the "re" functions as an again that assumes a system of production (a machine)or reproduction as we know it that this remaking happens through (which it seems to me will continue to produce the same...therefore the continuing presence of slavery that Hartman convincingly depicts) or if this "re" can actually function in the way that I think Hall means it: to make differently. In a certain way to unmake or to notify about to respond to (like the "re:" in an email subject heading) what is being produced and how, in order to give us the opportunity to re?late to each other in the too?late now.
Gilroy seems to follow in this tradition, but I am suspicious that the "re"functions like perpetual reproduction to a further extent in Gilroy's TheBlack Atlantic because instead of this "making and remaking" Gilroy will talk about identity "always being remade" (passive and automatic) or the "infinite contruction of identity" (timeless and monumental). Brent Edwards asks a parenthetical question as to whether "adaptation", the term that Gilroy uses to describe black atlantic "exchange" (another term that troubles me...I have a parenthetical question as to whether Tina Campt can mean the same thing by Intercultural Address (which makes the scene of address present) and diasporic "exchange" (the term which she uses to talk about Audre Lordes encounterswith Afro-Germans)) but Edwards asks whether adaptation can be the same as "remaking". I think no. I think adaptation has something to do with both appropriation and that process that turned beloved the book into beloved the movie. That is a move between ways of producing that assumes something basic about production nonetheless (maybe that assumption is that there are things that can be exchanged..that the opacity doesn't stand, that the "other" can be escaped, that we can be made the same without suffering this same shit.)
That said I demand (and must provide) a greater attention to this "reproduction" because I think that it gets played out, even by these Marxist influenced cultural studies people, in a same old way..and I think that gender has something to do with that. The Spillers piece is especially helpful with this because sheis very specific about the distinction between the genetic reproduction of people who will be enslaved and the epistemological, narrative, legislative project that it takes to reproduce the state of enslavement (Harris too), to (re)subjectify the human who exceeds and preceeds this narrative into slave status, which requires a narration of mother that is not mother. The "remotest posterity" of the enslaved woman is narrated to share her "condition" (a powerful claim through which to read "Conditions Five: The Black Women's Issue...which in fact I am doing this weekend). Spillers also does this in a way that is present (the remotest posterity) by invoking the power of that narrative "even now".
So if, as Spillers says, and I believe our project (whoever we are now) is to break apart the logic that make this syntax of enslavement possible (normal even as a global neoliberal logic of use) and to create another narrative, how can "diaspora" or even "critical black diaspora studies" help with this? I think that the questions that Lokaising-Meighoo and Shome raise are helpful with this. What does doubled-diaspora mean for the Afro-Caribbean person in Canada or the US? Are call centers some type of internal diaspora? Is prison a diasporic space? I think that the impossibility of diasporic relation calls us to be present and to be creative and to be listening for the way of creating that will allow us to keep attempting to make this impossible ethical responsible relation to each OTHER.

Free Looks Like (for Sarah)

Epistemology of the Closet, Eve Sedgewick, 1990
Beloved Sisters and Loving Friends, Farah Jasmine Griffin (above), 1999
Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity, Sharon P. Holland, 2000
If You Can’t Be Free, Be A Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin, 2001
Degrees of Freedom: Lousiana and Cuba After Slavery, Rebeccas Scott, 2005.
Black Sexual Politics: African Americans, Gender and the New Racism, Patricia Hill Collins, 2005
“Blood and Stories: How Genomics is Rewriting Race, Medicine and Human History”, Priscilla Wald, 2006
“My Father Was and Anonymous Sperm Donor”, Katrina Clark (washingtonpost.com), 2006

On a snow day I had a meeting with Michealene Crichlow, a member of my exam committee, at her home. At the door I was greeted by a sprite of summer, ringleader of abandon, dj of laughlines named Sarah. Sarah explained that she was a whole hand old, and guessed (correctly) that I must be about three hands (fifteen years) old. Sarah explained to me that she is from Jamaica (“the best place where you don’t have to wear a jacket and people can ride bicycles everwhere”) and also from her mother. She was also excited to tell me that her mother, believe it or not, came from HER mother. This seemed to be an important discovery. She seemed pleased to learn that I was from my mother who was serendipitously also from this jacketless place of bike riding. Like the immigration lines (but not at all) in the Kingston airport she also wondered whether I was a visitor and explained that she was kind of but not really but kindof a visitor, here in this place where there is such a thing as snow day. While my meeting with Michealene was rewarding and enjoyable (and gleefully interrupted by Sarah and her computer game and joke offerings until bedtime), I think that I want to add Sarah as the sixth member of my committee. She seems to be an expert on the things that I am trying to explain, or explore:
*what it means to come from where I come from...to kindof but not really be a visitor in any here
*what it means to come from where I comre from...mothers who come from mothers who come from infinite mothers
*what it looks like (with the assistance of a day off school) to be free
The texts I read this week were also concerned with positionalities and freedoms. Rebecca Scott was interested in the comparative "degrees of freedom" achieved through interracial or white supremacist narratives of public propriety in Cuba or Lousiana. Freedom as she imagined it had not much to do with Sarah virtuosity, sharing or questions. Freedom was the right of men to vote and participate in militaristic activities (accompanied by some exceptional women who sometimes could be almost citizens by participating in these public actions...and either way embodying the threat or farce of what it not said about interacial homosocial proximity.) Empress Farah was interested in the renarration of Billie Holiday's legend in order to make more possible for people who share some of Holiday's positionalities, (surviving sexual abuse, growing up quickly, suffering from drug addiction, expressing creative genuis in a society that can and cannot hear that, being a black woman, being beautiful at all.) With "be a mystery" Griffin and Rita Dove beforehand seem to be suggesting that a certain relationship to access, a strategic unreadability may be called for "if you can't be free". This connects with my question for Madhu Dubey last week as to whether making black women's texts "readable" is a relevant task. Is that what I am doing? Making black women's texts...needable...
It occurs to me, as I avoid rereading the black male caribbeanist exile classics (Minty Alley, In the Castle of My Skin, Growing Up Stupid, Banana Bottom) that though I am interested in the ways that the objects of my inquiry create relationships to a black literary canon, maybe I am not so interested in the specifics of how they do or do not revise or continue the projects of the scholarship set. Maybe it is enough that the objects of my inquiry refuse to be realist(ic), refuse to discuss landscape in a way that seems to be about claiming and owning it. (Jurina picked up the overdue copy of Earl Lovelace's The Dragon Can't Dance on my nightstand and put it back down because the descriptions of landscape were taking forever. What are they wanting her to do, she asked, recreate Trinidad from scratch after we leave this planet? Make a movie of this text from memory?) So while I realize that I may have to go back to these texts to talk about exactly what is so different about the ways that they are relating to (owning/leaving/revealing/loving) the land, I also want to say that Kincaid, Lorde, Brand, Nourbese Philip, Cliff, Jordan etc are also interested in addressing colonialism and capitalism and racism and neoliberalism even directly. Not that they are unaware of the ways in which they are read inside of a tradition of black writing, but that reproducing the coherence of a black literary tradition, a caribbeanist literary tradition through ironic aping or more properly the practice of signification may not be quite what they are interested in, or what I am interested in. That could be what's queer about it. (Though I must say...the ways that they trope off of each other do deserve a lot of attention, and many syllabi). What I mean to say is that maybe if these writers are truly anti-nationalist they are also more outcast than the exiles. They refuse to inhabit the tradition. They as Karla Holloway does, wear it loose (the terms that bind us) while keeping it close (the confrontation that frames them). So...Alissa Braithwate does a great job of comparing the relationship to reading that the exile male Caribbeanists enact to the relationship to reading that the Caribbean Women Writers make in one of the chapters of her dissertation. Belinda Edmonson does a great job comparing this Victorian Gentlemanhood stuff to the different class subjectivity and gendered position of the CWW's who come after. Michelle Stephens explains the ways that the United States figured in the imaginaries of the black internationalists from the Caribbean who were dealing with the global hegemony of the nation as colonial subjects.
So maybe what I have to say backwardsly critiquing and distinguishing between exile and "diaspora" is only a small small part of what there is for me to do. Maybe that is not something that I necessarily need to reproduce. Maybe making free is not so much about making the texts and lives of Brand, Lorde, Kincaid et al readable in relationship to a known tradition (and in the meantime making myself readable to the people trying to hire me) maybe making free is about audience in a different way...like the addressee of a love poem. Like a letter to, song to, poem to somebody that makes the scene of address more visible and the relationship something in the making (not something simply being described or even signified on) a responsibility (as distinguished from a response). Because there is something about writing a poem for somebody...Phillis Wheatley was even almost always doing this...there is something even about writing a conference paper for some somebodies. There is an energy there that is a poetics, another possible means for another possible production. Something not about owning, or knowing but a represencing of the fact that we are making it up now. (Griffin also says something beautiful about loving her students because they continue to believe in her capacity to grow. Teaching in that sense is reproduction not in the sense of indoctrination, but rather in th sense of being remade by the possibility of relating to someone.) Sarah leads an invisible carnival with a breaking breadstick. Sarah (and Seneca too at that age) is constituted by the audience and is constituting the audience (a vistor? a 15-year old? me?). I think the reason that I am interested in the publishing and teaching practices of these writers is because they are trying to create an audience, theirs is exactly a poetics of relation. So now I can change my assignment to myself and go back to reading all of the dedicated pieces and using a 5-year old burst's worth of energy in the pursuit of entertaining a visitor.
Thanks Sarah.

Accumulation: A Lot of Writing to Do

"What is Critique", Michel Foucault, 1978
Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, Edouard Glissant, 1989
Black Women Novelists and the Nationalist Aesthetic, Madhu Dubey, 1994
Every Woman I've Ever Loved: Lesbian Writers on their Mothers, Catherine Reid and Holly Iglesias eds , 1997
Remaking Eden: How Genetic Engineering and Cloning Will Transform the American Family, Lee M. Silver, 1998
Impossible Purities: Blackness, Femininity and Victorian Culture, Jennifer Brody, 1998
Black Women Writers and the American Neo-Slave Narrative: Femininity Unfettered, Elizabeth Ann Beaulieu, 1999
Giving and Account of Oneself, Judith Butler, 2005
"What is Critique: An Essay on Foucault's Virtue", Judith Butler, 2006
Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country, Sharon Holland and Tiya Miles, 2006
When "Free" Means Losing Your Mother: The Collision of Child Welfare and the Incarceration of Women in New York State, 2006
Justice Now Statement Opposing Prison Expansion and Eugenics, 2007
Center for Genetics and Society (Egg Extraction and Sex Selection), 2007

I have
a lot of writing to do. And when I finish writing this I will be more (behind) than when I started. Glissant makes me feel like I am underwater, crafting chains into words in a language I don't know. Breathing somehow. I have a lot of wrting to do and the only thing I do is make more. I am trying to explain the place where "put your hands on the hood of the car" becomes "throw your hands in the air" becomes "alexis. say something deep. we aint got much time." Deep is actually the right word. My hands are reconnecting with air, afraid of what it means to have fingers heavy enough to type this. At some point I must have raised my hand. My hands are being hailed before my knowledge with similar amounts of urgency, but different qualities of audience derived need. I am hearing the hails of haters, fame and family all at once. I insist the the last one be the loudest. I insist that the last one be the loudest. But I can't stop wanting the crowd to move and the haters (those who would make me stranger, those who would make me enemy) are persistant as hell. They are more likely to respond to this blog than you are.
Yeah. Hell is persistant. And deep and wet. Glissant quotes Walcott "The unity is submarine." Chain links thicker than my fingers ring me round as I sit here typing on this little banged up titanium computer. Daughterhood in the face of death is present for me like a stone necklace. I just sent the "layout" for the words (my fathers rhyming words, my grandparents hollowing names) to someone who will scratch them into stone and lay them on my chest. Will lay them on whatever's left. And this week I've been thinking about genetic futurity, about whether it really matters that I leave some genes here...in case those genetic heirs decide that they won't let my body fuel the ground and grow in the radioactive mess we're making. Lee Silver talks about genetic enhancement as a free market choice inevitable and normalizable for a privileged married set of somebodies (gay or not) who will make a new species in their attempt to escape class difference, a difference which he manages to completely cement and at the same time ignore throughout his interesting book. The Center for Genetics and Society would ask what about the source of these egg donations, what about the sexism that everyone is getting born into (they ask and I come in on the chorus) what about what we make? What about the way are using "reprogentics" already through sex selection and stem cell extraction to reproduce a way of being born that feels much like hate. And Justice Now would ask yes. What about the social conditions? What about the women in prison who are being sterlized..while "gender responsive" prison expansion passes through legislative bodies. What is it we are reproducing? Monsters, not in the sense of the green skinned photosynthesizing but in the sense of people who really refuse to see each other and continue to use each other. People who really think that we can become immune to each other or at least to death.
Judith Butler, who also came to visit this week (see my summary one day soon in the Women's Studies Newsletter) emphasizes in her essay on Foucault's talk on critique emphasizes the impossibility of this immunity. I wonder though if Butler and I think up and coming art historian Ignacio hinted at this during our seminar with her, maybe...I wonder what the power of discourse becomes for her and whether it does the universalizing thing that even Adorno says is violent because it can be (has to be) indifferent to the specific, to the human, to the now. I wonder how one (say this one) could address a need for specificity. Queen Karla this morning admitted wanting to ask Butler (while we were sharing how beautiful and personally salient we found Precarious Life and Giving and Account of Oneself) "how do you know?" Who is it that made you have to learn mourning in the way that resonates so deeply here. Not that she should be forced to write an autobiography...but to what extent am I called to do speak in the first person (something I just advised one of the Women's Studies Honors Thesis Writers to do this week). How much do I have to disclose? In what kind of way do I have to listen to myself? In what kind of way do I have to edit myself?
As you see the Women in Prison Project released a report last year with almost the same title as the Saidiya Hartman book that I spent almost the whole last entry on. Women in Prison Project, a reform organization (and a bright green copy of Rosa Luxembourg's "Reform or Revolution" glares into the corner of my eye. And I wonder if it shares the tactic that I find confusing or disturbing in Hartman...and empahsis on the child that makes the mother literally and the means of production more generally harder to see. I am not satisfied completely with the readability narrative that Dubey gives (why should black women writers be more Readable...why should access be granted yet....but then how can it not be? How I mean is readability something with a value that can be asked for from a reader and actually answered. But I am more dissatisfied with Beaulieu in a book deceptively subtitled "femininity unfettered" when it should be entitled femininity assumed to be a privilege an then not discussed. For next time I insist that I must be able to say what femininity is or can be since I haven't been able to find it. Brody as well talks about the "feminized" as I think some sort of violence and uses it in her title...but I want to ask her (and maybe I will tomorrow) what she means.
Alright. I am late as usual. Holler back that you don't hate me.

Use it or Lose It: Back to Reproduction

Illuminations, Walter Benjamin, 1966
Reflections, Walter Benjamin, 1976
Turning the Beat Around: Lesbian Parenting 1986, Audre Lorde, 1988
Interrogating Caribbean Masculinities, Rhoda Reddock, 2004
Dexterity, Julie Dexter, 2002
Real Women Have Curves, Patricia Cordoso, 2002
Born into Brothels Zana Briski and Rob Kauffman, 2003
Conscious, Julie Dexter, 2004
Memoirs of a Geisha, Rob Marshall, 2005
Tsosti, Gavin Hood, 2005
Game Theory, The Roots, 2006
Lovers, Dreamers and Me, Alice Smith, 2006
Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman, 2007

Saidiya Hartman's book Lose Your Mother, came in the mail and held me captive. Including breaks for a planning meeting about a curriculum for a mother/daughter program (seriously) and reluctant sleep, I was in Saidiya's hold for two days. It would be unfair and innappropriate to say, based on the critique that Hartman offers of love, of kinship, of brith of everything to simply say that my interpretation of these of other items was born out of Hartman's analysis. But as Hartmant herself is the first to point out: everything is unfair.
I have been listening to Hartman read excerpts from this book for four years now. Thus my concession to pre-ordering the book on Amazon months in advance. It's the first book that I have bought new in quite some time. This book, titled in the form of an impossible command, Lose Your Mother, commands more than my attention. It demands a certain rigor from me in every articulation I make from now on about race, about Africa, about the differences between the ways in which I am needed by my family (an institution) and needed by my university (an institution). It calls into question every voice I myself heard screaming while I was in the slave dungeons at Elmina. It makes me ask exactly what it was that knocked my voice out of me afterwards...and what exactly brought it back.
Alongside her memoiristic and rhythmic account of her time in Ghana as a "stranger", alongside her rehistoricization of a past that has become mythic: an economic system of violent and a logic in which certain humans were expendable that preceded and constituted race instead of the tragic story through which a race split apart from itself...alongside this challenge to what diaspora could be (she explains that when her African colleagues mentioned "the diaspora" they might as well have been saying "stranger" which meant "slave", she explains that for them the African in African American (the Afro in Afro-Caribbean?) was not the same African they meant when they said themselves, she explains that for them Africa ended at the boundaries of the continent. Period.) Alongside this problematization of a dreamt of black solidarity based on race that she must replace with a logic of fugivity (flight, failure and huntedness with an oppositional dream of connection as the basis for a politics) she places a narrative about her mother. About losing her mother. About rejecting the (slave?) name that her mother gave her, rejecting the job (slave) that her mother wanted (her) to have, rejecting every rule that her Mississippi raised mother tried to use to save her from the ravenous Brooklyn police. (Her father was not loss...he is loss itself. She describes Caribbean migration as something with no time for dreams of Africa, explaining that their own loss of landedness or belonging was too recent on that side, inadvertently (or intentionally?) cementing the diachronic break between those transatlantic points on the Triangle trade). And at the same time, Hartman haunts us with a new mother, a means of intellectual and economic production through which "a slave is born". The historical narrative is mother inasmuch as it produces subjectivity and longing. Capitalism is mother, as it produces slaves as a thing to possibly be. Most challenging, most disturbing, slavemaster is mother creating a bond of bonds and bondage impelling the slave which he has "made" to stay within the network that sustains him.
Because the metaphor of birth, that painful pushing out of something that was not there before from a womb and shitting, the pushing out of something that was not there before through the colon is never quite distinguished in this text. Like a racist joke about black maternity and bowel movement, this radical demythification of the affect of motherhood makes this text a fulfillment of its command and a challenge to she (to me) who would theorize motherhood, who would theorize love, who would look there for some miracle of being related. For Hartman the possibility of the fungible slave (called odonkor--"love" "don't go") changes forever what love can mean. Calls into question whether love can mean. At all. Because the mother wants the child to stay in the mortal world...not to be possessed by the spirits...not to return into death and the slavemaster wants the slave to stay too. Because need (like the colon pushed up against the uterus) is right up under, right there next to love. Right there.
So Hartman's text reminds me of why I need Lorde's theorization of difference. Because though difference (already existing) was used to justifiy raiding and selling Other humans into slavery for no real return, for no possible return, Lorde insists that difference is a creative energy, challenging us to create relationships to each other, across it. Challenging us to be impossible parents against the extermination that AIDS, racism, apartheid etc threaten.Hartman's revelation of the links between kinship and enslavement is also a challenge to create relationship in a different way (for those of us who love in doorways)...because I cannot believe it is refusal of relationship as such. I do not believe that Hartman's text gives up. Hartman is not, in this text, teaching me to give up.
Benjamin says that the author who does not teach writers teaches no one, and so these writers become teachers as they inform my action. And I heed Benjamin's call (not) to (be a) hack author. To make art that in itself is a different relationship to production. I wrote the proposal for my part of the forthcoming Love Production project of the International Black Youth Summit while listening to Julie Dexter and foreshadowing my own renewed reading of what is for me the essential and classic Benjamin, "The Author as Producer". So in fact the only thing that I should write about is that. Is the way that writers, the writers that teach and (re)produce me do that, make that relation. In the age of cybernetic reproduction. And at the same time I have to ask what reproductions make the same.
Does Born in Brothels...countering the unaccepted (always pathologized in this film) non-reproductive sex work of mothers with the reproductive training of photography really produce something new. Is a crusade to get eight kids "out of the brothels" reproducing the abjection that their mothers are already facing? As if the still images that the kids make and that win the directors an Academy Award can actually stop the cycles of impoverishment on a global scale that make life unsafe or miserable or whatever it is besides colorful in a brothel. In fact the project of the film itself repeats Hartman's command, "Lose Your Mother", this children MUST be admitted to boarding schools. Must not live with their contaminated mothers. Must be given up towards the dream of a "holistic" environment on land bought for a school funded by the photos that these children have taken away from the grief of their mothers.
Does Tsotsi, with its compelling story of an infantalized grown up street child in South Africa who is attracted by fate and failed maturity to baby from the black upper classes do more than reinvoke the family as the only thing, as the site of failure and the reason for criminality. What do these fetishizations of children and demonizations of poor families do to condone a structure that can fund more and more film so long as the status quo gets reproduced? Tsotsi runs away from home as his mother lies of her death bed as his father quardrapeligiazes a dog because he can. Tsotsi raises his hands into a cross...gives back the baby, gives himself up to the cops.
And Memoirs of a Geisha are you kidding me? What bankruptcy to relationships between women become when the institutionalized version of a predominant production of women as commodities becomes a cinderella story where the deserving bluest eyed girl can become the top commodity and be saved by the CEO and only the CEO of a power plant. Another story of dubious salvation that has to begin with the death of a mother.
And how do we put it back together the Roots put this historicization of violent relationships in context when they say "Pilgrim, Slave, Indian, Mexican...it looks real fucked up for your next of kin." Indeed the dominant kinships, disavowed and denied again and again are those of violent use, where women and children and the affect they can bring become commodities, make surplus...are expendable. It looks real fucked up. This is the imperative we have to change relationships to refuse reproduction or to listen to the teachings that the writers have been making and make something different out of the difference we relate across. Julie Dexter does this by insisting on some kind of diasporic home ('home' she says 'is who you know') and the Roots do it again on the way out. With their voicemail, piecemeal mixtape of tributes to J Dilla taken, like Flannery O Conner and so many other genuises by lupus, with their beautifully orchestrated gut bass, crashmixed tribute to he greatest composer contemporary, heartbeat to hiphop stopped, the Roots are trying to put it back together Benjamin and Hartman repeat it. Even the dead are not safe if we ignore them. If we lose.

What a Free People Would Look Like

Is Freedom We Making: Revolutionary Grenada, Merle Hodge(above), 1982
"The Site of Memory", Toni Morrison, 1990
"Cotton and Iron" Trinh T. Min-ha, 1990
"Talking Back" bell hooks, 1990
"marginality as site of resistance" bell hooks, 1990
"Castration or Decapitation?", Helene Cixous, 1990
"Reflections on Exile", Edward Said, 1990
"Explantation and Culture: Marginalia", Gayatri Spivak, 1990
"Thoughts on Nomadic Aesthetics and the Black independent Cinema: Traces of a Journey", Teshome H. Gabriel, 1990
For the Life of Laetitia, Merle Hodge, 1993
Female Masculinity, Judith Halberstam, 1998

I've been quoting Ralph Ellison to an excess. "This society is not likely to become free of racism." And there is proof everywhere. My school is more committed to the supposed 'innocence' of rich young white men with histories of violence than it is to my basic well-being. "So it is up to Negroes to become their idea of what a free people would look like." And Hallelujah Holloway...one of my mentor has left the obviously inconsequential Campus Culture Commission to spend her time (i'm sure) on something more beautiful, valuable and real for all of us. I mean what is the point of a campus commission against racism when the bottom line is that wealth and the myth of racial innocence are more important than whether I continue to survive. Worst case scenario: some crazy black woman (me) who shouldn't be here anyway...throws off all pretenses of well-adjusted tokenism when she is forced to teach some flagrantly murderous student and bites hishead off (literally). Worst case scenario the next day the chronicle runs a headline "See? See how they are?" Not likely to become free of racism...
So what does a free people look like. What is the visual poetic act that Ellison is calling for? (plug: www.listeningproject.blogspot) What would a free people look like? That question goes beyond the terrain of most of the essays that I read from the Out There anthology, and I mean terrain literally. That question goes beyond dsicussions of the margin and the center...the power of inhabiting the margin, having a priveleged view of "both" spaces (hooks),or nomad sensibility (Gabriel), or the ethics of (possibly inherited) exile (Said), or privatized public silencing (Spivak), or the school of hard knocks (Morrison). But freedom is still a spatial relation and a gendered one. And space requires specificity. And it is key that our bodies not become the reservations, the ghettoes, the camps, the prisons that make the "normal" world profitable. Collective childcare does not look the same in NYC as it does in Durham NC (as I noticed this weekend). The creation of kinship through cell phone top-5 is not the same as a village drum circle. The flight from home (and nationalist false hopes) over the Caribbean Sea to Miami, New York, Toronto is not the same as a reverse transatlantic boat trip from Trinidad to England. That difference matters. As Audre Lorde says again and again...difference is what pushes us to consciously create our relations, our tellings. And some things remain at stake across technological eras, bodies of water, residential housing set-ups. And that matters too the same (but different?) with our voices.
So what I am trying to say is directed to you and to me and also to all of the activists that I'm working with their shared desires to share in the glamour of "creating a model". I want to say that yes...somethings like our well-being, our self-determination, our ability to create nurturing relationships, our self-expression, the sacred and lewd love that we can have for our own bodies, the millions of ways that we are and can be connected to each other...are at stake...across and across and across. But difference that which prompts us to speak...that which makes relation (telling) relevant to begin with is also a warning not to turn our visioning, our activism, our best things, our "us" into products. Into the new slaves of the information age where our silence (or co-optation) our affect is more important than our labor (wild paraphrase of Lorde again).
Right. I promise to be more engaged with the specifics of the texts nexts time. And did I say...check out the listening project. My archive (back to this thing about margins)is not bound by the strategy. My archive is alive (and I'm making a beautiful book about it.) www.listeningproject.blogspot.com
peace.