You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
What Palestine has taught the world. (The Slow Factory)
It’s not complicated…
There is nothing complicated about colonialism, genocide, and occupation
Back home the shine is nulled
Just shades of a musical theme
Or it could also be said
That it’s night
[…]
May imagination always come before knowing
Like shadows of a musical theme, Tilsa Otta
Translated from the Spanish by Farid Matuk
Welcome to the world, Lennox!
“L’instrumentalisation du vaudou par François Duvalier est à la fois cynique et fascinante. Il a habilement exploité les croyances populaire”
Since 2010, the number of people sleeping rough in England has more than doubled and all other forms of homelessness (for instance, families living in temporary accommodation) are at record highs. Around eight hundred libraries have closed (a fifth of all libraries in the UK, most of them in deprived areas) and more than two hundred museums. In many cases, surviving institutions have reduced their hours and cut staff. More than a thousand publicly accessible swimming pools have been closed, and nearly 60 per cent of public toilets. So many bus routes have been cancelled that buses now cover 14 per cent fewer miles than in 2010. Councils face an estimated £14 billion backlog in road maintenance, with up to 50 per cent of roads judged to be at risk of complete deterioration within fifteen years.
[…]Why,? with this record, did the Tories keep on winning?
Carnival of Self-Harm, Tom Crewe in LRB
The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism (Harvard University Press, 2003),
The Practice of Diaspora is nothing short of a masterpiece. By looking at the way black life, thought, struggles and quite literally, words, are translated across the black Francophone and Anglophone worlds, Edwards reveals how Paris became a locus for the development of black modernism and internationalism during the crucial interwar years. Rather than search for some essential unity, he explores difference, creative tensions, misapprehensions and misunderstandings between key black intellectuals. The result is a spectacular interdisciplinary study that will profoundly change the way we think about the African diaspora.–Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
—just an ache that grew
until she knew she’d already lost everything
except desire, the red heft of it
warming her outstretched palm.
I Have Been a Stranger in a Strange Land, Rita Dove
“Every man must decide whether he will walk in the light of creative altruism or in the darkness of destructive selfishness.”
Like anybody, I would like to live a long life. Longevity has its place. But I’m not concerned about that now. I just want to do God’s will. And he’s allowed me to go up to the mountain. And I’ve looked over. And I’ve seen the promised land. I may not get there with you. But I want you to know tonight that we, as a people, will get to the promised land! And so I’m happy tonight. I’m not worried about anything. I’m not fearing any man! Mine eyes have seen the glory of the coming of the Lord!
Dr. Martin Luther King
Today is the federal holiday that honors Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. via DemocracyNow.
Radio Alhara (‘the neighbourhood’). Learning Palestine – Until Liberation, 12 hours of lectures, interviews, book presentation, talks, storytelling, music, songs, poetry and chants. Compiled by Learning Palestine Group.
Palestine, BLM & Boycott In The Arts: Conversation with Robin D.G. Kelley, Jasbir K. Puar, Amin Husain, Marz Saffore, Friday, November 4, 2016 at Artists Space.
A Convening of Civic Poets is a collaboration between KADIST Paris and Sharjah Art Foundation. Audio.
Boycott, Divestment, Sanctions (BDS) is a Palestinian-led movement for freedom, justice and equality. BDS upholds the simple principle that Palestinians are entitled to the same rights as the rest of humanity.
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.