“A life lived under a dome, in an artificially generated atmosphere, is still a life” (or a still life)
“I’ve been thinking a great deal about time and motion lately […] about being a still point in the ceaseless rush.” (ESJM)
“the time of evening when the women sit around telling stories with one eye on the sky, looking out for that strange white bird that perches on the tallest trees and watches them with a look that seems to want to tell them something.” (FM)
Station Eleven is an American post-apocalyptic dystopian fiction miniseries created by Patrick Somerville based on the 2014 novel of the same name by Emily St. John Mandel. The miniseries premiered on HBO Max on December 16, 2021, and ran for ten episodes until January 13, 2022. (Wikipedia)
Doctor Eleven composed by Dan Romer.
“Life can be different; it can be better or worse. Just not simple […] prefer the inconclusiveness of life in ellipsis […] They have different concepts of what freedoms other forms might entail: that is their conflict” (LB)
may heaven be filled
with literate men
may they bed you
with respect.
here rests by Lucille Clifton
“un homme d’abres, un homme de fleurs” (mirrors the surreal “hummingbird-women, tropical flower-women” in Suzanne Césaire, The Great Camouflage)
Césaire explains, “I’m not going to entomb myself in some strait particularism. But I don’t intend either to become lost in a fleshless universalism…. I have a different idea of a universal. It is of a universal rich with all that is particular, rich with all the particulars there are, the deepening of each particular, the coexistence of them all.”
Negritude was bigger even than Africa, that we were part of an international moment which held the promise of universal emancipation, that our destiny coincided with the universal freedom of workers and colonized people worldwide—all this gave us a bigger and more important identity than the ones previously available to us through kinship, ethnicity, and race–Manthia Diawara
Robin Kelley, Freedom Dreams
Gala Speech composed by Daniel Pemberton. Amsterdam, 2022.
Wifredo Lam … sought to represent “the Negro spirit, the beauty of the plastic art of the blacks. In this way I could act as a Trojan horse that would spew forth hallucinating figures with the power to surprise, to disturb the dreams of the exploiters. I knew I was running the risk of not being understood either by the man in the street or by the others. But a true picture has the power to set the imagination to work, even if it takes time.”
Fanon–“I belonged to a race that had already been working in gold and silver two thousand years ago.”
Discourse was less concerned with the specifics of political economy than with a way of thinking. … It is poetry and therefore revolt. (RK)
Amsterdam, a film by David O. Russell. Among its many themes are friendship and camaraderie, surrealism (without naming it and slightly too early) and its commitment to freedom, working together to fight fascism and hatred, and love.
Richard Brody thought it was a hoot and half.
The Good Part (Amsterdam), Daniel Pemberton
Doucement, Doucement · Luc Kleiner
Robin D.G. Kelley defends Black studies; a version of this essay appears in Our History Has Always Been Contraband: In Defense of Black Studies, edited by Colin Kaepernick, Robin D. G. Kelley, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, available now from Haymarket Books as a free ebook.
Most state laws prohibiting enslaved Africans from learning to read and write were introduced after 1829, in response first to the publication of David Walker’s Appeal to the Colored Citizens of the World—an unrelenting attack on slavery and US hypocrisy for maintaining it
[…]
Who’s afraid of Black Studies? White supremacists, fascists, the ruling class, and even some liberals. As well they should be. Not everything done in the name of Black Studies challenges the social order. Like any field, it has its own sharp divisions and disagreements. But unlike mainstream academic disciplines, Black Studies was born out of a struggle for freedom and a genuine quest to understand the world in order to change it, presenting political and moral philosophy with their most fundamental challenge. The objects of study have been Black life, the structures that produce premature death, the ideologies that render Black people less than human, the material consequences of those ideologies, and the foundational place of colonialism and slavery in the emergence of modernity. Black Studies grew out of, and interrogates, the long struggle to secure our future as a people and for humanity by remaking and reenvisioning the world through ideas, art, and social movements. It emerged as both an intellectual and political project, without national boundaries and borders. The late political theorist Cedric J. Robinson described it as “a critique of Western Civilization.”
[…]
No serious scholar believes that someone is “inherently racist, sexist, or oppressive, whether consciously or unconsciously,” solely “by virtue of his or her race or sex.” We teach the opposite: that race is neither fixed nor biological but socially constructed. Modern categories of racial classification were Enlightenment-era European creations that relied on a false science to claim that discrete “racial” groups share inherent traits or characteristics. We reject such claims as essentialist and recognize that behaviors and ideas attributed to race, gender, class, and sexuality are not inherent but ideological, and therefore dynamic and subject to change. We use evidence-based research to show that policies that further racial, class, and gender inequality need not be intentional, and that anyone can be antiracist, regardless of their race.
[…]
The point of these attacks is to turn antiracists into enemies and the people identified as “white” into victims. Marginalized white working people, who are victims of stagnant wages, privatized health care, big pharma, and tax policies that redistribute wealth upward, are taught instead that they live in what was once the perfect country until woke forces took over and gave their hard-earned income to the Negroes and immigrants who are now trying to take their guns. It would be a mistake to think of such rhetoric as a “culture war.” This is a political battle. It is part and parcel of the right-wing war on democracy, reproductive rights, labor, the environment, land defenders and water protectors, the rights and safety of transgender and nonbinary people, asylum seekers, the undocumented, the unhoused, the poor, and the perpetual war on Black communities.
