You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
Judith Butler: The Force of Nonviolence, streamed live on Jul 23, 2020. Whitechapel Gallery .
Non-violence as mandate, vulnerability, interdependence, “intertwining mode of world sharing,” breath, state violence via police and via denial of universal medical care, mask, shelter, a politics of life, radical equality.
“What is still to be achieved is the struggle to grasp the surface effects of the present through concepts that articulate the abstract forces that produce them, forces that are not eternal and are not an essence. It can’t be done by means of words alone. Words have to connect to everyday life in all its vulgar glory and idiocy, and right at the point where the emerging forces of production are shaping that everyday life, [d]riven perhaps by quite distinctive forms of class struggle and experience. The means to live and endure otherwise may already have come into existence, fettered though they are by outmoded relations and forms.”
Mckenzie Wark’s The Struggle to Live in the Present in Verso blog.
“… art allows us to revisit and remember life by forgetting its linear narrative and by proposing the artwork’s experience as life in a more monumental dimension.”
via Chus Martinez’s text accompanying Raffaela Naldi Rossano‘s I Confess.
Zoe Samudzi‘s A Caribbean Present Steeped in a Colonial Past reviewed Coffee, Rhum, Sugar & Gold: A Postcolonial Paradox for Hyperallergic. The show curated by Larry Ossei-Mensah and Dexter Wimberly , currently, at the Museum of the African Diaspora, through August 11, 2019.
The emergent themes of the show can be broadly cast into three categories (though none of the artists fit singularly into any one): corporeality (interpretations of politics around the body), place (examinations of place, space, and time), and religion and spirituality.
From this interview of J. Michael Dash with The Public Archive (2012).
You were a close friend and translator of the late Edouard Glissant. What is his enduring legacy – as a person and as an artist?
The Public Archive | Published: March 4, 2012.
I remember reading recently that prophets are often defined by what they are not. I am not saying that Edouard Glissant was a prophet but he does represent an intellectual watershed in the Caribbean intellectual landscape. For the time being though, there is a tendency to regret what he was not. There has been a rash of criticism aimed at what critics call “the late Glissant” who is seen as blindly following Deleuzean nomadology in his apolitical celebration of global creolization. Even his defenders have tried to construct him as a “warrior of the imaginary” or pointed to the various political pamphlets written with Chamoiseau before his death. I think in both cases, critics are still haunted by the example of Frantz Fanon as a model for Caribbean writing. Glissant had never felt that literature should be put in the service of political causes – certainly not in a narrow, utilitarian way. He began writing at a time when a decolonized world heralded by politically committed writing was coming into being. These new nation states were flawed and there but there was no way of imagining alternatives. This was where literature as a new mode of cognition came in. As I have written elsewhere, Glissant, from the outset, proposed that writers and thinkers should be approached and frequented like towns. He said this about Faulkner and later about the figure of Toussaint Louverture. I think his thought should be approached in this way – an urban space of diversity, open to all and facilitating various intellectual itineraries. Perhaps, in accordance with the creole saying quoted in one of the epigraphs of Caribbean Discourse, “An neg se an siec” ( a black man is a century), the Glissantian century has only just begun
Figures of note as place, which can be “frequented like towns.” Psychogeography into poetry, paraontology, and imagined reality.
A related thought, not from the interview.
“L’imaginaire de mon lieu est relié à la réalité imaginable des lieux du monde, et tout inversement.”
Edouard Glissant
An article and interview with Tamara K.E. via atelierbesuche.
The figures in my images do not develop from already existing comic characters, but develop as random data. In this context, an obsessive, not clearly definable language is important. A language, which takes the dynamics of our cultural memory on board and therefore defies any final interpretation.
Walking While Black – Literary Hub, July 8, 2016 by Garnette Cadogan. PRI’s The World.
From Linda Gregg‘s essay (2006) :
There are two elements in “finding” a poem: discovering the subject matter and locating the concrete details and images out of which the poems are built. In this instance, I do not mean the subject matter to be the ideas or subjects for poems. Instead, I am referring to finding the resonant sources deep inside you that empower those subjects and ideas when they are put in poems. For example, I am made of the landscape in northern California where I grew up, made of my father’s uninhabited mountain where my twin sister and I spent most of our time as small children with the live oak trees, the stillness, the tall grass, the dry smell of the hot summer air where the red-tailed hawks turned slowly up high, where the two of us alone at ten did the spring roundup of my father’s twenty-six winter-shaggy horses. Down below there were salmon in the stream that ran by our house, the life of that stream and the sound of it as we lay in our bunks at night, our goat and the deer standing silently outside in the mist so many mornings when we awoke. The elements of that bright world are in my poetry now when I write about love or Nicaragua or the old gods in the rocky earth of Greece, just as the Greek islands where I lived for almost five years resonate in the poems I write now about the shelter for abused women in Manhattan or how a marriage failed in New England—but not directly. They are present as essences. They operate invisibly as energy, equivalents, touchstones, amulets, buried seed, repositories, and catalysts. They function at the generating level of the poems to impregnate and pollinate the present—provoking, instigating, germinating, irradiating—in the way the lake high up in the Sierra mountains waters the roses in far away San Francisco.