#black subjectivity

[ethnographiesofblacklife]

Lil’ Kim - No Time featuring P.Diddy

“Throckmorton says to the youths, ‘Your shirts bespeak a bit of a familiar paradox. The quest for the real nigger within us and the simultaneous hatred for that selfsame nigger as other. As in I’m a real nigger, but I hate all other niggers who don’t fit into my idiosyncratic perception of essentialist niggerdom’ (Beatty 2000:87)” in NIGGA: The 21st-Century Theoretical Superhero by Mark Anthony Neal 

Backstory of this track:

“The song was recorded in the midst of a virulent exchange of threats between Combs, head of Bad Boy Entertainment, and Shug Knight, head of the Death Row Recording company. While the latter camp embodied what was percieved as a more authentic hardcore ghetto identity, Combs roots Bad Boys’ authenticity in economic productivity---the distnction between performative gesture (”talk shit”) and productive labor (”counting bank figures”)”  in NIGGA: The 21st-Century Theoretical Superhero by Mark Anthony Neal

[processedlives]

If black people are the subconscious of the Western mind, where is "the black subconscious," both individually and collectively articulated? My interest is not in psychotherapeutic culture and African American literature—though what a fascinating topic that is—but rather the marker such language offers for identifying complex and often unexplored interiority beyond the face of the social self. If black people in the mainstream imaginary exist as fixed properties deemed "real," what is possible in the space we might call surreal?

Elizabeth Alexander, The Black Interior

[processedlives]

As black people we exist metaphorically and literally as the underside, the underclass. We are the unconscious of the entire Western world. If this is true, then where do we go? Where are our dreams? Where is our pain? Where do we heal?

Ntozake Shange, Moon-Marked and Touched by the Sun: Plays by African American Women

[processedlives]

But this is not a positive program. This is a politics without claim or name. You won’t even concede that it’s negative dialectics. It is much worse than that, or much better, depending on the vantage, and the wish. You do everything “with the acknowledgment that conditions will most likely remain the same.” No bullshit. The slogans are for the press, and that imaginary audience you say you must address, but in your heart you know they aren’t true, performative contradictions all. You mask that knowledge because you think you need allies to protect against isolation, because you think solidarity is always and only engendered by coalitions, because you think you need friends beyond those whose raised hands like yours make no earthly difference, except to elongate the target, because you think you have some already. You need to be reassured that you have not fallen prey to resignation or fatalism or irresponsibility, that you have not given up on struggle as a way of life, as living. No, you cannot but recognize, if no one else will, “the enormity of the breach instituted by slavery.”

Jared Sexton, Unbearable Blackness

[processedlives]

Thinking about black joy beyond Ferguson, beyond the continual pain of being denied basic human rights, beyond, and perhaps outside of, structural racism, anti-blackness, white supremacy, and state-sanctioned terror have allowed black people to continue on, despite every reason to not. In addition, black joy, a real and imagined site of utopian possibility, must also be an important part of Alexander’s “bottom line blackness” and Moten’s radical “freedom drive that animates black performances.” More than a method to endure, however, black joy allows us the space to stretch our imaginations beyond what we previously thought possible and allows us to theorize a world in which white supremacy does not dictate our everyday lives. House parties, backyard cookouts, and other spaces  where  black  bodies  gather  in  celebration  produce  rich  and  profound moments in which black love and laughter “lifts everyone slightly above the present” and allows to feel, to know in our bones, what black utopia might be like.

Javon Johnson, Black Joy in the Time of Ferguson

[processedlives]

Unleashing the potential of black subjectivity to speak from the dead exposes the end-point of governmental policies and programs which materially and psychically “kill” the nation’s black subjects. When black artists flirt with the culture of death, it puts us all at risk, for to critique such a performance would require an admission that blackness has a special relationship with the dead—that the distance between speaking subject and (in)tangible place is not so vast at all.

Sharon P. Holland, Bill T. Jones, Tupac Shakur and the (Queer) Art of Death (x)

[allslost]

The political character of one's actions is inextricably bound to the political status of ones subjectivity

Frank B. Wilderson III on why the BLA are Gramscian theorists but could not become Granscian subjects.

[so-treu]

Abstract: This article offers a reading of Fanon’s mythopoetic imagery of hell and damnation to illuminate the question of violence in the context of disastrous subjectivity.