can the origin
story be re-told
transfigured …
Category: language
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Walter Rodney’s ‘Groundings’
Via Verso, On Walter Rodney‘s concept and practice of ‘Grounding’ as Critical Pedagogy by Kevin Okoth.
“A collection of public lectures held by Rodney in Jamaica and at the Congress of Black Writers in Montréal, Groundings provides a pedagogical framework for intellectuals fighting to undo the epistemological distortions of imperialism.”
“To truly ‘ground’, Rodney believed that the revolutionary intellectual must go anywhere to reason with their people. […] ‘I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of black people were prepared to sit down and listen’, he writes. ‘It might be in a sports club, it might be in a school-room, it might be in a church, it might be in a gully […] – ‘dark dismal places with a black population who have had to seek refuge there. You will have to go there if you want to talk to them.’ […] For Rodney, the revolutionary Black intellectual cannot hide in the university and challenge the status-quo within the boundaries of academic respectability. These intellectuals, he argued, do not pose a threat to the neo-colonial elites; only when these same intellectuals break out of academic isolation and engage in the mutual exchange of knowledge with those struggling on the ground, do they begin to challenge oppressive and exploitative systems of power.”
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To live—that is all.
From Triquarterly issue 156 Summer/Fall 2019,
Joanna Fuhrman‘s video poem …
Also, …
Pantoum with Lines from Katherine Mansfield’s Journal by Angela Narciso Torres.
And …
Desire [even in the time of the tyrant] by Leah Umansky (also, Come, Pioneer)
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Liberty and Love
Maria Popova on Harriet Taylor and John Stuart Mills via Adam Gopnik‘s A Thousand Small Sanities:The Moral Adventure of Liberalism.
“With an eye to the perilous erasures with which history is often rewritten — history, I continue to insist, is not what happened, but what survives the shipwrecks of judgment and chance” – Popova
“Recognizing that intimate life is an accommodation of contradictions, they understood that political and social life must be an accommodation of contradictions too. The accommodation was their romance. That meant that social accommodation could be romantic, too. Love, like liberty, tugs us in different directions as much as it leads us in one. Love, like liberty, asks us to be only ourselves, and it also asks us to find our self in others’ eyes.” – Gopnik
There are echoes of blackness’s moral underpinnings, here, as found in Moten and in Glissant.
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Boris Vian
Alexandra Schwartz on Vian for the newyorker (August 2014). Article is on Vian’s “L’Écume des Jours” and “I Spit on Your Graves,” Michel Gondry’s “Mood Indigo”, James Baldwin’s remarks on Vian in “The Devil Finds Work,” and some of Vian’s contemporaries – Curzio Malaparte’s “The Skin” and Vladimir Pozner’s “The Disunited States.”
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Nouns & Verbs
Campbell McGrath‘s newest book of poetry, Nouns & Verbs.
“…poetry is not going to save anybodies life…”
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An interview with Other Suns
Amirah Mercer interviewed me, for her new venture– Other Suns, concerned with the aesthetics in black culture. Here is the article.
One definition of heaven is a place of utmost happiness, something enjoyable and pleasant. If you had heaven here on Earth, in this very moment, would you even recognize it? Because you do—we all do—have access to creating utopia in our everyday lives. For proof, look no further than the photography and collages of Miami-based artist Adler Guerrier.
