ethnographies of black life

columbia university spring 2017/19/20 prof. vanessa agard-jones

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In Chapter One, Professor Shange uses “The Parable of the Sower” by Afrofuturist author Octavia E. Butler as what she imagines as the future example of progressive dystopian literature. She states that for Black and Indigenous peoples, the apocalypse has already end, and participation in the progressive liberal state forces people to search for survival as opposed to liberation.

I think that the cover of the novel is also telling of that claim. The foreword is done by N.K. Jemisin, an amazing Black fantasy author famous for the Nebula-award winning “Broken Earth” series. However, the recommendation quote comes from John Green, a white YA author who presumably has nothing to do with Octavia E. Butler’s work. What does his recommendation say that N.K. Jemisin’s does not? Just as the progressive liberal appropriates the language of social justice, perhaps even this amazing book is at risk of appropriation as well.

-AH

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“... there has been a steady stream of working-class and middle-class people emigrating from the city [San Francisco], including a drain of up to a thousand children per year from the school district” (Shange 25).

Attached is an graph represented the results of a poll taken by residents of the San Francisco Bay Area, where an increasing number of residents are stating that they plan to leave the Bay Area within the next few years.

-AH

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Have you ever read a book and thought to yourself “I’m going to cite this in my senior thesis”? That’s how I felt reading “Progressive Dystopia.” My senior thesis concerns Indigenous representations in science fiction and currently I’m doing a lot of thinking about Indigeneity within the United Federation of Planets in Star Trek (I am not afraid to out myself as a Trekkie). Shange has managed to articulate the central conceit of the Federation and Star Trek which has perturbed me since I started watching a show- it imagines abolition within a liberal multicultural progressive state, something which never made any sense to me, and doesn’t even seem to work out in the show. I am doing this post simply to demonstrate how grateful I am to the work and how excited I am to have it in my hands!

-AH

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My final artifact for this week’s reading is the #BlackPeopleForBernie hashtag that was going around on twitter earlier this year. Here is an example: [x]. I bring it up because I was interested in Shange’s discussion of progressivism in the first chapter, where she talks about how it means to be on the left regarding political ideology as well as the idea that progressive politics are facilitative of a “statecraft” that actively serves to punish black people. Recently I’ve been thinking about the backlash Bernie’s campaign receives for being unrealistically progressive/socialist, when to me he’s just the best of the lot.

- GC

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Afro-pessimism: “Afro-pessimism is a field of thought which takes seriously the historical reality that blackness is politically and ontologically coterminous with slaveness. According to the 2018 Oxford Bibliography entry on Afro-pessimism written by Patrice Douglass, Selamawit D. Terrefe, and Frank B. Wilderson III, afro-pessimism can be understood as “a lens of interpretation that accounts for civil society’s dependence on anti-black violence—a regime of violence that positions black people as internal enemies of civil society.” - taken from the Wikipedia article

- GC

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“In the former, the role of the state is putatively to control resources in order to ensure the employment and well-being of the populace, while in the latter it is reversed: the role of the state is to control the populace in order to ensure the well-being of capital.” Shange, Savannah. Progressive Dystopia . Duke University Press. Kindle Edition. 

- GC

image source

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Prop 13 Reform Moves to the 2020 Ballot

This year, the TechEquity Collaborative joined a coalition of hundreds of grassroots groups across California to qualify the Schools and…

I wanted to learn a bit more about California Proposition 13 which Dr. Shange mentions as a reason for the underfunding of California public schools (and the subsequent school dependence on non-profits.)

In reference to Robeson’s dependence on nonprofits, Shange states, “Of course, what can feel like autonomy from the state comes at the expense of vulnerability to the shifting whims of private philanthropy” (33).

-ATG

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When faced with the chicanery of the nonprofit industrial complex, Black employees and clients of Robeson willfully defy the constraints placed upon them, and are sometimes punished with expulsion from both the school space and belonging in the just polity it anticipates building

(Shange 18)

-ATG

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165.9k Followers, 1 Following, 116 Posts - See Instagram photos and videos from Barbie Savior (@barbiesavior)

--ARTIFACT--

On page 236, Savannah Shange references “White Savior Barbie.” I actually learned of this Instagram a couple days ago while reading another article that discusses a lawsuit against an American missionary named renee bach.

-ATG 

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Comparing Shange and Solomon - notes on Black futurity and memory

Connections between Savannah Shange’s Progressive Dystopia and Marisa Solomon’s “The Ghetto is a Gold Mine” -- notions of temporality

So-called lack of Black futurity 

Solomon states, “It is this racialized temporality that conditions and shapes the way black spaces—the objects and people within them—are managed as places with no future on its own terms. By implying there was a different time when he belonged, Marvin implied that he is left out of the present.” 

Similarly, Shange also notes that “The trouble is that blackness is perpetually out of place, and constantly running out of time (Audre told us we was “never meant to survive,” remember?)”

Erasure of Black history -- amnesia

Shange states, “The erasure of neighborhood history is by no means exclusive to the Bay Area, but Rebecca Solnit and Susan Schwartzenberg make the argument that in San Francisco, increased material wealth and amnesia go hand in hand. ‘The new San Francisco is run for the dot-com workers, multimedia executives, and financiers of the new boom, and memory is one of the things that is being lost in the rapid turnover and all- out exile of tenants, organizations, non-chain businesses, and even communities.’”

Meanwhile, Solomon, as we know, focuses on the material traces of Black life in Bedstuy, which are written off as “trash” in their original environment but then repurposed as adornments for white Bedstuy: “The shop was full of doors that closed on black lives only to become decoration for whites. … Their circulation and appropriation move through a route produced by racial capitalism, which not only expropriates black labor, but turns blackness into a commodity when it is moved out of “the ghetto” and into adornment.” Most crucially, she closes that similarly to “Frisco” being re-imagined as a white space without a Black history, “Bed-Stuy’s materiality, produced by but disentangled from black history, becomes valuable for retrofitting and “preserving” “old New York”—an old New York curiously without a racial identity, or, more precisely, an imaginary “old New York” in which Bed-Stuy was always white.

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

Stop The Black-On-Black Hateration

Boxer Bernard Hopkins recently called football player Donovan McNabb a "house slave" — an insult that has gone viral. Michel Martin takes aim at the idea that you have to be a thug to be cool.

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When reading Thomas’ work, I was constantly reminded of Christina sharpe’s In the Wake as she too deals with the question of black life in the wake of slavery 

-YMA 

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We constitute ourselves through political activity in the everyday, both at the level of consciousness and at the level of embodi- ment. Assembling archives of affect thus should tell us something about how the sphere of the political has been imagined and felt at various junctures and about the kinds of politics that are possible at these junctures.

Deborah A. Thomas, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation

-YMA

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pictured here is a slave ship, the hold

“If we do not account for the ways Afro-descended people find themselves as objects in the midst of other objects, ontologically impossible without violence and exiled from the human relation, then we cannot fully account for subjectivity’s discursive entanglements” (Thomas 4)

-YMA

source: https://www.thesun.co.uk/tech/9135512/wreck-of-last-slave-ship-found/

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Religious responses to natural disasters..l

https://earthquake-report.com/2012/09/27/the-impact-of-cultural-and-religious-influences-during-natural-disasters-volcano-eruptions/

In ‘What the Sands Remember’, Dr. Agard Jones discusses the spiritual and religious attempts to make sense of the eruption fo Mount Pelée. She writes: “It was the kind of volcanic eruption that inspired divine interpretation” (329). I was curious to explore hoe and where religious and spiritual explanations to natural disasters varied, particularly when science cannot adequately make sense of occurrences. The above article explores these responses in reference to other natural disasters.

- Makeen

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“Like people, like places, like objects or ideas, sand as a history, a genealogy. The composition of sand varies, yet that variation is deeply dependent on its environment. Sand always carries a local imprint. … There are the sands that remember–– or at least they reference–– the eruption, and in doing so they call up all the associations we might have with the city that once was.”  - What the Sands Remember (page 334)

This quote was without a doubt my favorite from What the Sands Remember because it so wonderfully captured the duality or range of functions rather that sand, and people(s) can serve and carry with them.  It helped me to understand the central intervention in the piece as it helped me understand land as being carried in the same way that intergenerational lessons and stories might.

- Makeen