“Red wine had been spilled on the floor; it had been allowed to dry and it made the air in the room sweet and heavy. But it was not the room’s disorder which was frightening; it was the fact that when one began searching for the key to this disorder, one realized that it was not to be found in any of the usual places. For this was not a matter of habit or circumstance or temperament; it was a matter of punishment and grief. I do not know how I knew this, but I knew it at once; perhaps I knew it because I wanted to live” (Giovanni’s Room, 87).
Khadija Saye: artist on cusp of recognition when she died in Grenfell in Wednesday’s fire, was being exhibited at Venice Biennale and had caught eye of influential director
The day before she died, Khadija Saye had met an influential gallery director who was blown away by the young artist’s work and wanted to meet her. After years of striving to create her work while studying and holding down a job as a care worker, it felt like her moment to shine had come.
Her work was being exhibited as part of a showcase of emerging artists at the Venice Biennale, and now an important gallery was offering to show her art. The director had wanted to meet at her studio, not knowing she worked out of the 20th-floor flat she shared with her mother.
But by Wednesday morning, instead of her name being discussed as one of the most exciting young artists to emerge out of London, it was stories of her desperate Facebook messages sent from the top of that tower that were being shared.
Marlon James: Why I’m Done Talking About Diversity; Or, Why We Should Try an All-White Diversity Panel
You’d think with the rise of Donald Trump in the US, Marine Le Pen in France, the newly energized Neo-Nazi and KKK movements, and with people from all over the world (but particularly Europe) suddenly emboldened to be public with their racism, anti-Semitism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, and xenophobia, that now would be the perfect time to raise the banner high for diversity. Now would be the time to have discussions, and raise awareness. And yet now seems like the perfect time to stop talking about it.
Or at least stop talking about it in the way we always have. Why now, when that voice seems to be needed most? The problem is all this talking. Liberals, in particular love to talk. We debate issues, we explore the conservative angle (despite them never returning the favor), we talk about solutions, we even try to tolerate those who would not tolerate us. The problem with all this conversation, is that it is all we do. We have diversity panels and invite writers of color, perhaps Roxane Gay (who has long called out the lit establishment on this habit, and who inspired me to write this piece), or Junot Diaz, or an Indigenous American and/or Australian so as to not ignore original peoples. We invite a gay man or woman, with extra bonus points if the homosexual is a person of color. Then we invite a few white persons who claim to get it, even if they are mystified by the racial arguments breaking out on college campuses (aren’t they all rich kids?) or Black Lives Matter.
Soon after dusk fell on August 29, 1974, a group of around 200 female prisoners seized control of two buildings and a recreation yard at the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility, a maximum-security state prison for women 45 miles north of New York City. An 18-year-old named Cindy J. Reed, known...
In contrast, the August Rebellion, as the 1974 Bedford Hills uprising has been called, has received little attention beyond sparse reports that appeared in local newspapers shortly after the incident, and in underground feminist literature. Yet the women’s revolt eventually led to prison reforms that still protect female prisoners from arbitrary and excessive segregation in solitary confinement.
The story of the August Rebellion begins and ends with Crooks, who was born October 12, 1947, in Brooklyn, New York. Her father died when she was seven or eight. According to court records, Crooks “was forced to fend for herself and a younger sister,” named Shirley.
In a 1974 interview with the Patent Trader, a local newspaper in Westchester County, Crooks detailed a Dickensian childhood. At age 11, she was playing cards and shooting dice with men and stealing food to help support her mother and sister. “When I started getting in trouble,” Crooks then said, “was when people started bothering my sister.”
In 1972 Crooks was running a heroin distribution ring in Downtown Brooklyn when, she claims, a former associate tried to blackmail her. Police found the man shot to death.
Crooks was arrested for the killing, pled guilty to first degree manslaughter, and was sentenced to the Bedford Hills Correctional Facility for 0 to 15 years.
On Sunday morning, February 3, 1974, Crooks woke up, walked past a guard, and walked down a flight of stairs to the mess hall for a glass of milk. The guard ordered her to stop, but she ignored her. According to the female corrections officers who later testified against her, Crooks returned to her cell, took off her glasses, and attacked four guards, knocking two of them out with her fists, and striking two others with a flower pot and two table legs.
Sergeant Elizabeth Roggy tried to get to the scene to help, but was blocked by other prisoners. She said that when she finally made it through, Crooks was calmly strolling to her cell.
“I came forward, and I said to Crooks, ‘What on earth is the matter? What are you doing?’ Carol looked at me, and she said to me, ‘This woman isn’t going to fuck with me,’” Roggy testified, referring to CO Helen LaPay – who had first ordered Crooks to stop and was now bleeding from her face.
When the Voice asked Crooks about the brawl she replied, “I never attacked them. Only defend myself when they came to me. They training wasn’t all that sufficient.”
Male COs were, at the time, generally not permitted in the prison, but administrators were empowered with the discretion to allow it in extraordinary circumstances. Officials at Bedford Hills determined Crooks was an extraordinary circumstance.
A half-hour or so after the fight, Crooks said, she was sitting in her cell when several male COs came for her. They used a mattress as a shield, pushed their way into her cell, wrapped a white sheet around her neck, tackled her to the floor and used a leather harness to restrain her arms behind her back.
Then the guards dragged her across the snow-covered grounds to the solitary confinement cell-block, where they stripped her, and put her in a dank cell, with only a toilet, and a broken window. “It was very cold. I didn’t have a blanket. I didn’t have a mattress,” Crooks said.
For what happened that day, Crooks was convicted of three counts of felony assault, sentenced to an additional 2 to 4 years in prison, and condemned to solitary confinement until the expiration of her now 19-year prison sentence. In solitary, Crooks said, the male COs showed the female COs at Bedford Hills how to manage her.
“Mens was telling the women how to control me they way they would do their men in their box,” Crooks said, adding that they would gradually give her necessities like food, or blankets based on her behavior. Crooks’ comrades helped her survive.
One of them was Sid Reed, who arrived at Bedford Hills 2 years before, in 1972, when she was 16, with a 5-year sentence for robbery. Reed and Crooks became lovers.
In solitary confinement, Crooks’ cell was on the ground floor, in a building where, she said, “everyone had to walk past. And they would sneak up to the window to talk. And sneak up and stick cigarettes through a hole.” Women on the outside helped too.
Crooks was friends with Efeni Shakur, who was a Black Panther. Shakur used her connections to make Crooks’s case a Leftist cause célèbre and covered in the first issue of DYKE, which summarized Crooks’s struggle as part of a fight “against this mindfucking white male bullshit.”
Crooks and her attorney, Stephen Latimer, filed a precedent-setting civil rights lawsuit that established the right of all women at Bedford Hills to due process of law before they are sent to solitary confinement, which Crooks had been denied.
Can you identify the designer of this circa 1980 poster?
Let us know!
This work was donated to MoMA by Steven Heller and Karrie Jacobs. It bears a resemblance to other posters the pair donated which have been attributed to cheap art. We’d love to know more about the creator/s of these posters.
“It is important to remember that blackness is defined here in terms of social relationality rather than identity; thus blackness incorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations among blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial difference. Blackness marks a social relationship of dominance and abjection and potentially one of redress and emancipation; it is a contested figure at the very center of social struggle.”—Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 56–57
Since its 1997 publication, Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America has proven to be a scandal, unsettling the claims of recuperative studies that hinge upon sentimentality to understand a distinctive break between the horrors of chattel and the jubilee of emancipation. Instead, Hartman suggests that the historical continuity between slavery and Reconstruction can best be traced through the black body, which itself inhabited and performed the very relations of freedom and violence calcified by racism within liberal humanist frameworks. From the slave coffle to the pastoral landscape to the courtroom, these sites stage the quotidian and spectacular scenes of violence against enslaved and freed black people. Crucial to Hartman’s project is how black corporeality throws the subject position of the autonomous individual (liberal humanism’s desired ideal) into crisis. This crisis appears through a series of juridical and social performances that destabilize and eventually reinscribe the captive’s status as a being vacated of sentience. The performing black female body demystifies how this particular formulation of the subject denies the recurring violences enacted against her flesh. Hartman’s analytic of black performance reveals the enduring violences of the chattel system, and its particular constraints on black female embodiment and performances of self-possession.
Scenes of Subjection marks a turning point in theories of performance, indicative of a broader gesture in the field that sought to reorient itself in relation to its objects. Hartman’s approach dislodges blackness, and specifically the black female body, from technologies of visibility and disappearance tied to identitarian politics. Such a move clarifies how blackness reformulates the relationship between practices of violence and theories of embodiment. This intervention enabled a cohort of emerging and established scholars who credit their own research on black performance and theories of embodiment to Hartman’s seminal text. For example, we can think of Fred Moten’s In the Break, where he is enabled by Hartman’s argument about the reproduction of black performance as it is carried by Aunt Hester’s scream. Or, Daphne Brooks’s uptake in Bodies in Dissent of Hartman’s invitation to consider the centrality of minstrel performance in the production of the grotesque, abject body and all its engendered pleasures. As these studies build upon and thereby extend Hartman’s influence, they demonstrate how Scenes is an invitation to take the work of black performance seriously.
Some of our guiding questions include: How does Hartman’s work resonate within contemporary scholarship on black performance? In what ways has Hartman’s work offered occasion to rethink the intersections of performance theory and black feminist thought? How do pain and pleasure mark the black body in performance? How do theories of embodiment rely upon the pained black body in order to remain conceptually intact? How are sight and vision constructed through spectacular and quotidian black performance? How does Hartman’s work trouble and extend current frameworks that address surveillance and policing? Does Hartman’s work resonate in a global context? What does Hartman offer by way of a method and methodology for understanding black pain and pleasure in the contemporary moment? To mark the 20th anniversary of this groundbreaking study, this special issue of Women and Performance is dedicated entirely to the lasting effects of Scenes. We invite contributions that engage Scenes within broader black feminist genealogies of performance and aesthetics, including analytical, methodological, pedagogical, and practice-based frameworks. Of particular interest are trans-disciplinary approaches attentive to the following topics:
Black Studies
Black Performance
Black Feminism
Queer of Color Critique
Feminist Theory
Performance Studies
Queer Theory
Media Studies
Diaspora Studies
Legal Studies
Art History/Visual Studies
Blackness
Blackness & Gender
Subjectivity & Objectivity
Sentimentality & Sentience
Embodiment
Body/Flesh
Desire
Slavery
Trans-Atlantic Movement
Surveillance
Policing
Submission Guidelines: Article submissions should be no longer than 3,000 words in length and adhere to the current Chicago Manual of Style (CMS), author-date format. Performative texts should be no longer than 2,000 words and in any style the author chooses (same CMS style as above if using citations). Photo essays and creative work accompanied by artist’s statements are welcome. Questions and abstracts for review are welcome before the final deadline. For consideration, please send articles as a Microsoft Word document to [email protected].
Tuesday marks the beginning of my summer teaching session. This year, I am taking on two courses: Psychology of the Criminal Mind (retitled: Science of the Law: Race, Gender, and Criminality) and Intro to Philosophy. Both are experiments in course planning for me. I have never taught a philosophy course and Science of the Law is a complete reworking of a course I taught last summer. Both have me feeling a bit nervous about the next few weeks, particularly as I am simultaneously preparing for my qualifying exams in November. As such, both of these courses attempt to bridge (for my own thinking) a history of aesthetics and philosophy with an understanding of the material conditions of confinement in the 19th and 20th centuries.
The connections are tenuous, at best. However, some of the work I have shared here and kept to myself has been dedicated to these very questions. Therefore, over the next several weeks, I am producing a series of posts that attempt to broadly understand the relationship between teaching and the preliminary examination for a PhD in the humanities. At the same time, in an effort to work through this relationship, I will be reporting more specifically on the content and discussions emerging from these two courses.
It is generally my sense that the connection between teaching and the preliminary exams is a necessary one. While the hazing ritual known as your exams produce a narrative of monastic life, my approach has tried to be much more social. What are the preliminary exams if they are not the opportunity to construct an archive for teaching? With this in mind, I am taking these summer courses as an opportunity to rigorously prepare for these exams in the setting that will more closely mirror the rest of my career (as opposed to five of us in a room eating muffins and talking about why we still don't like Orlando Patterson).
Until then, here is an excerpt from the first week of the Intro to Philosophy syllabus:
Notes on the Syllabus: No doubt, many of you are familiar with course schedules. They appear useful and often necessary in courses with a set curriculum. However, this is not one of those courses. In fact, I despise planning and scheduling. The micromanaging propensity of teachers, while I am sure is well intentioned, tends to suck the life and fun out of learning (and teaching). The reason I include this document in your course reader is to offer a rough sketch of the next three weeks. The order makes sense at the moment, but as we go, we may find this schedule either unsatisfactory or just boring. If that is the case, I am completely open to altering our course. (Having said that, we will read the materials included in the course packet. Any alterations will occur in relation to our methods, approach, and setting.)
We will engage EXCERPTS from the readings list below. To make our way through the texts in their entirety would be pointless and ultimately counterproductive to an introductory course. However, should you desire to explore them further, I have included the entire chapter, article, etc. Along these extremely rigorous philosophical texts, we will explore the oft-understated philosophical nature of art, literature, and music. They will accompany and aid in our study.
Day 1: What is Philosophy?
Introductions
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks, “Study of Philosophy”
Day 2: The Dialectic, Violence, and Relationality
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (excerpts), pt. 1
“Intro to Dialectics”
Visualizing the Dialectic (Group Activity)
Day 3: Revisiting the dialectic and becoming:
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (excerpts), pt. 2
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Ch. 1
Race and Philosophy
Freedom
Day 4: Beyond either/or: into the logic of binaries:
Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil or Genealogy of Morals (TBD)
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kaledo-art
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