Disrupt Knowledge Production

Black Feminist Quotes (Academic & Non-Academic). This page is dedicated to various quotes, references, etc. related to WOC & representation, but also working to complicate knowledge production and resistance.

[disruptknowledgproduction]

If we go down that road, we're headed toward a society that's run on the basis of mass imprisonment. And that's not just about making the prisons bigger and fuller, making them engines for making money for private corporations, but it's also about turning your schools into prisons, and turning your streets into prisons, and turning your community into something that's much more like a prison. And we do not want that society based on mass imprisonment. That's not our future. We are not Americans, we are not Americans.

[disruptknowledgproduction]

When we feel the impact of our poverty of the imagination, we reach for what we think is the future, and that's always the United States of America.

http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-2011.html?spref=fb

[disruptknowledgproduction]

The difference between 1981 and now is that the relationship between information and power has been changed, and our tactics for understanding our defence of our communities have to take those changes into account. And that means that we have to think very carefully about how we engage with the media. I'm very happy that there are people here who are independent distributors of information and news, who are circulating what goes on here and circulating interpretations of what's happened in this country. We have to get it to people outside of our country--we have to internationalize it. We have to think about how technology can work for us. And media is not something transparent.

http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-2011.html?spref=fb

[disruptknowledgproduction]

When you look at the layer of political leaders from our communities, the generation who came of age during that time thirty years ago, many of those people have accepted the logic of privatization. They've privatized that movement, and they've sold their services as consultants and managers and diversity trainers. They've sold their services to the police, they've sold them to the army, they've sold them to the corporate world...go to some of their websites and you'll see how proud they are of their clients. And that means that, in many areas, the loss of experience, the loss of the imagination is a massive phenomenon. So that the young people in the courts today don't have a defence campaign. They don't have one yet, but I hope that one will develop.

http://dreamofsafety.blogspot.com/2011/08/paul-gilroy-speaks-on-riots-august-2011.html?spref=fb

[disruptknowledgproduction]

move beyond race and towards violence

[disruptknowledgproduction]

[queeraspie-deactivated20140222]

I think marriage in general is not a healthy institution in our society. If people want civil rights, then that’s what I feel we should be fighting for. Couples, people who are each other’s kin or primary intimacies, a friend who takes care of a friend for 30 years in the same household—all should have basic civil rights. To bring that whole movement for social justice under the rubric of ‘gay marriage’ seems to me just to reinforce patriarchal notions of who is worthy of care and support. It also lets down the gay people who don’t want to be married. The movement for gay marriage has had a strong push among very class-privileged people, because they are the people with trusts and with property and with health care. If you’re gay, black, poor and you don’t have any access to insurance, the question of whether your partner can be included on your insurance is not just relevant to the health needs of your life. What would be more relevant is national health care!

bell hooks (via queeraspie)

[disruptknowledgproduction]

I am thinking, as I write, of my young, black, poor, single mother of four who raised me and my three younger sisters, amidst intimate partner violence, alone in the city of Camden during its media heyday in the 80s—the days of looming welfare reform—in one of the most “dangerous” and economically distressed cities in the country. My mother—not unlike other poor black and brown women in Camden, Trenton, Paterson, Newark and elsewhere—was imagined as the amoral, non-married, capital-sucking, welfare queen who raised children alone, without a man/head of the household. I am certain that the “institution” of marriage as conjured in the national imaginary, in all its moral splendor, did more to instantiate my mother’s presumed inferiority than the possibility of difference. And, that ain’t representative of a feminist, left, or radical queer politic even though “mothering [with or without a man or woman] is the most feminist act of all” as beautifully articulated by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. But, I digress…though, not really.

[disruptknowledgproduction]

That's what I see missing in our discussions today about race, gender, class, sexual preference. We talk a lot of stuff about openness and plurality and diversity and so on, but what's the practice? What is the actual practice between one subject and another, between one leftist and another? There are troubling conclusions you have to draw about the generation of the '60s and its actual practices, what we actually do when we get home or when the television cameras are not there. You can't believe that Clinton ought to come out more strongly for children's rights, one asserts out of his mouth if you don't take care of your own children. Women should have access or rights, but you don't treat your women colleagues very well, the women around you, and the same relating to men. What's the practice? The question is: Is there a place in theory today for us to to be critical of various gaps or lapses or aporias in the theoretical?

[disruptknowledgproduction]

The psychoanalytic might in fact offer a way to remain critical, and to secularize that value that had its center in the religious, in religiosity. Perhaps the psychoanalytic is a strategy or a mechanism for finding some dimension of self-criticism that one needs when the stakes are now : recognition, affluence, degrees of access and accessibility, when it is no longer about literacy because we are talking about people who've crossed a frontier in that regard. When you talk about the learned classes of African-Americans today, you're talking about people who have a whole different set of needs. How do those people behave? And what I'm suggesting is that we're not behaving in ways that I would consider exemplary. That's what I'm trying to find a discourse to talk about because it's larger than me; it's bigger than a generation and it's not just my being unhappy and complaining. This really has to do with resources, who has access to them, how access is granted, how that whole question of access is configured, by whom, to whose benefit.

What do you think about psychoanalysis?

[modernandmaterialthings-deactiv]

[disruptknowledgproduction]

modernandmaterialthings:

It may be tempting for religious studies scholars to take advantage of this historical moment by deploying one-dimensional explanations of religion to justify our own usefulness to the academy and to the nation. But even if we have to admit our ignorance, or just say that it’s complicated, it is better to resist further propagating or reinforcing simplistic conceptions of Islam, or of religion in general. Instead, we should spend more time exposing the political contexts in which popular understandings of Islam and religion more broadly are generated, disseminated, and used. And if we must produce a sound-bite about Islam’s role in making violence for the media, then let it be this: “Islam is not the cause of violence, but it does offer one means of resistance to U.S. political, military, and economic domination in Muslim lands.”

Via The Immanent Frame (A fantastic blog about religion and public life)

[disruptknowledgproduction]

I think we, as black women, need to just create the media ourselves. If you have an idea, get a crew or get your friends together and make it happen. Right now, pitching your idea to a network exec or an industry liaison just isn’t working, because they have this limited perception of black women and what they THINK black women want to see on screen. I think the web is the best way to go right now, and I’ve seen a lot of GREAT shows come off of the internet.

[beautone]

In a sense, if there is no black culture, or no longer black culture (because it has “succeeded”), then we need it now; and if that is true, then perhaps black culture—as the reclamation of the critical edge, as one of those vantages from which it might be spied, and no longer predicated on “race”—has yet to come. Hortense Spillers, The Idea of Black Culture

Hortense Spillers,  The Idea of Black Culture (via beautone)

[disruptknowledgproduction]

Within current debates about race and difference, mass culture is the contemporary location that both publicly declares and perpetuates the idea that there is pleasure to be found in the acknowledgement and enjoyment of racial difference. The commodification of Otherness has been so successful because it is offered as a new delight, more intense, more satisfying than normal ways of doing and feeling. Within commodity culture, ethnicity becomes spice, seasoning that can liven up the dull dish that is mainstream white culture. -bell hooks (1998)