#waywardness

[thetendertongue]

waywardness — from Saidiya Hartman: the practice of wandering, deviation, nonconformity, especially by Black girls and women who cannot or will not follow the rules of a world that harms them; a method of survival and invention; both a theoretical orientation and a lived Black feminist praxis

[endlessandrea]

"In writing The Anarchy of Colored Girls Assembled in a Riotous Manner what I wanted to make visible is a long history, a long tradition of Black women’s radical anti-state struggles. There is a way these struggles fall out of view, because they are illegible to the interpretive grids of a Marxist tradition and even to the grid of a certain Black historiography, that is looking for signs of activity and agency under the aegis of the Black worker. Very much in the spirit of Fugitive Feminism, I am looking at forms of practice that are trying to flee certain organised terms for making sense of them. One might be the category of 'woman', another might be the category of 'worker', another might be the category of 'citizen'. So, I am thinking about The Anarchy of Colored Girls as really trying to unearth and tap into an imagination of freedom that is so much more capacious than what we usually imagine: the desire for a radical other way of being in the world. The desire for a different planetary set of arrangements. For the most part, people don’t imagine that ordinary folks have that capacity for imagination. That they don’t have desires that are that enormous. Looking at everyday practice, I try to attend to and unearth those dreams that fueled their waywardness. A waywardness that could only be understood as criminality, or pathology, or disorder, or feeble-mindedness, as opposed to waywardness as the latent text to a practice of creating the social otherwise, of living the social otherwise.”

— Hartman, Saidiya V. (2018b): "Saidiya Hartman on Fugitive Feminism." Video-Interview mit dem Institute for Contemporary Arts, London. Gefilmt von Jason Hirata. Transkript: A.P. n.p. URL: https://vimeo.com/281249079. (letzter Zugriff: 21.1.2019)

[anarkittyy]

Wayward was so resonant with other terms – detour, errant, fugitive – and it is a word that brings to mind this practice of variance or deviation, so it seemed richly suggestive. In the chapter ‘Wayward: A Short Entry on the Possible’, it’s connected to all of these other words like anarchy and queer and unruly, but there was something about the gendered character of it that was exactly right, it seemed both old-fashioned and absolutely contemporary. The wayward girl is the girl who won’t succumb to or obey the gender script. The challenge when describing black women’s lives, black women’s radical practices, is that they’re always subsumed or asterisked to a larger category. I just needed to say no, their practice is the category, you know? And this notion of being a footnote to everything else is what waywardness enabled me to challenge, it seemed an organic term for describing the radical and disobedient imaginary of young black women – so that’s why I liked it. How do we understand black radical imaginaries without understanding how central girls and women are to those projects?

[…]

Under capitalism there are so many forms of pleasure that are reproductive of the order. The forms of pleasure and joy and beauty that are also the focus here are those moments that are refusals and ruptures with the order. Again, the important question is: what does it mean to love that which can’t be loved? What does it mean to even imagine, as a poor black girl, that you might have something like a beautiful life – one that’s not about your self-annihilation, that’s not about your conformity with norms or the meagre existence to which you have been confined. That requires – is conditioned by – a certain refusal. It’s to know yourself in the world you’re a part of in radically different terms. For me that’s the miracle of everyday survival.

— Saidiya Hartman. [1]

[loneberry]

You know, they straightened out the Mississippi River in places to make room for houses & liveable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places. “Floods” is the word they use, but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. Remembering where it used to be. All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that… Like water, I remember where I was before I was straightened out.

—Toni Morrison, “The Site of Memory”

[asfaltics]

words. 300 plays, where, see

detail (90ºcw, erasured) ex Mrs. Henry Pott (1833-1915), her Obiter Dicta of Bacon and Shakespeare on Manners, Mind, Morals (1900) : 300 University of California copy, digitized December 11, 2007 source scan (jpg)

its index

—

for information on Mary Fearon Pott, see Alan Stewart, “The Case for Bacon,” in Paul Edmondson and Stanley Wells, eds., Shakespeare Beyond Doubt : Evidence, Argument, Controversy (2013) : 16-28 (25) and the (fascinating) wikpedia entry for her daughter Constance Mary Pott (1862–1957)

from a wayward search landing on “Imagination produces eloquence, rhetoric” 164-165  

[lucjan]

waywardness