Katherine McKittrick - Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries) - Duke University Press Books (2021)
Katherine McKittrick - Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries) - Duke University Press Books (2021)
Katherine McKittrick - Dear Science and Other Stories (Errantries) - Duke University Press Books (2021)
ERRANTRIES
A series edited by Simone Browne,
Deborah Cowen, and Katherine McKittrick
Katherine McKittrick
DUKE UNIVERSIT Y PRESS DURHAM AND LONDON 2021
© 2021 Duke University Press
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America on acid-f ree paper ∞
Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan
Typeset in Arno Pro and Trade Gothic by Copperline Book Services
T H E R E S U LT O F A C L I N I C A L E R R O R
I have been experimenting with these and other stories for a long
time. Thank you to the many students, faculty, staff, who invited
me to share these ideas, as well as colleagues and friends who par-
ticipated in panels, symposia, workshops, conversations. The feedback
has been, and is, invaluable, admired, and appreciated. Many thanks to
all those who administered and arranged travel, accommodations, and
day-to-day activities during visits elsewhere. The referee comments are
cherished. The readers encouraged me to think with and through this
project and imagine sites-citations unseen. My parents, Valerie Brodrick
and Robert McKittrick, have provided decades of support and love for
which I am grateful. In addition to camaraderie and an indescribable criti-
cal eye, Simone Browne read a few iterations of Dear Science — thank you
for taking the time to support these stories in a world that effaces black
time. Ruthie Gilmore offered generosity, notes, time, stories, space, fu-
tures, friendship. Sylvia Wynter’s conversation, kindness, and commit-
ment to black intellectual life is admired, always. Zilli, endlessly curious
and studied, provided scaffolding, contexts, walls, shelves, books, writ-
ings, ideas, love, photographs, songs, codes, mechanics, guitar tabs, nota-
tions, grooves that are immeasurable. Shortcomings weigh; the imper-
fections within are all mine. There are songs and musicians referenced
throughout these stories and, still, the blap-zomp-tonk is unsatisfactorily
The title of this story, “My Heart Makes My Head Swim,” is from Frantz Fanon’s Black Skin,
White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; rpt., New York: Grove, 1967), 140.
1. The title of this collection of stories, Dear Science, is borrowed from tv on the Radio,
Dear Science, Interscope, 2008.
2. June Jordan, “Inaugural Rose,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jor
dan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2007),
297.
3. I shy away from black science fiction and Afrofuturism and, for the most part — when
addressing science specifically — settle on exploring the ways black creatives engage science
outside these genres. Although this list is a too-small sample of the expansive work in black
science fiction, black speculative fiction, and Afrofuturism, see Kodwo Eshun, “Further
Considerations of Afrofuturism,” cr: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (Summer 2003):
by ongoing research on Sylvia Wynter’s “demonic model,” which she dis-
cusses in her essay “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” and the concepts of
“autopoiesis” and “science of the word,” which she takes up in a number
of her essays. The demonic model, taken from physics, is used by Wynter
to think about the intellectual and conceptual ground through which Ca-
ribbean women recalibrate the meaning of humanity. “Autopoiesis” is a
term developed by biologists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela.
It is used by Wynter to show that we invest in our present normative mode
of existence in order to keep the living-system — our environmental and
existential world — as is. This is a recursive logic; it depicts our presently
ecocidal and genocidal world as normal and unalterable. Our work is to
notice this logic and breach it. Wynter’s extension of Aimé Césaire’s “sci-
ence of the word,” speaks to interdisciplinarity, dislodging our biocentric
system of knowledge, and showing that the natural sciences, the humani-
ties, and the social sciences are, when thought together, generative sites
of inquiry.4 In using concepts such as these — scientific terms that are not
cast as purely and objectively scientific yet retain within them traces of
the hard sciences — Wynter theorizes race outside raciology and positions
blackness and black studies as an analytics of invention. My curiosity led
me to think about the humanizing work black creatives illuminate in their
scientifically creative and creatively scientific artworlds, while also draw-
ing attention to the disruptive work that black feminists and black schol-
387 – 402; André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); and Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimag
ined: (Dis)ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Durham, NC: Duke
University, 2018).
4. Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’
of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole
Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 355 – 372; Syl-
via Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to
Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as
Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 9 – 89. See
also Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, trans. Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990), xlii – lvi.
A biocentric system of knowledge that assumes we are, totally and completely and purely,
biological beings, beholden to evolution and its attendant teleological temporalities, rather
than humans who are physiological-story-makers, both bios and mythoi, who produce fic-
tive evolutionary stories about our biological selves. “Biocentric” is defined numerous times
throughout this text, although the explanation in the story “(Zong) Bad Made Measure” is
the most comprehensive.
5. Dear Science works with scientia (knowledge) in its most general sense. Science (biol-
ogy, math, physics, and so on) animates scientia, but science (testable materials, systematic
methods that result in explanation, experiments and predictions and discoveries) is not the
central preoccupation of Dear Science. Science is a shadow, a story, a friendship. Science re-
veals failed attachments.
6. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 140.
7. Malini Ranganathan, “Thinking with Flint: Racial Liberalism and the Roots of an
American Water Tragedy,” Capitalism Nature Socialism 27, no. 3 (2016): 18.
8. Danyel Haughton, your question still sits with me. See also Katherine McKittrick,
“Plantation Futures,” Small Axe 17, no. 3 (November 2013): 1 – 15; Billie Holiday, “Strange
Fruit,” Commodore, 1939.
STORY
The ideas and curiosities gathered in Dear Science are bundled and pre-
sented as stories. Telling, sharing, listening to, and hearing stories are re-
lational and interdisciplinary acts that are animated by all sorts of people,
places, narrative devices, theoretical queries, plots. The process is sus-
tained by invention and wonder. The story has no answers. The stories
offer an aesthetic relationality that relies on the dynamics of creating-
narrating-listening-hearing-reading-and-sometimes-unhearing. The sto-
13. VèVè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Hérémak
honon,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and
Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 308 – 309.
14. Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy,” 308 – 309.
15. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (1903; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1990); Robin
D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Beacon, 2002); Au-
dre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” in Sister Outsider (Berkeley, CA: Cross-
ing Press, 1984), 53 – 59; M. NourbeSe Philip, She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks
(Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed Press, 1989), 51 – 53.
16. Barbara Christian writes: “I am inclined to say that our theorizing (and I intention-
ally use the verb rather than the noun) is often in narrative forms, in the stories we create,
in riddles and proverbs, in the play with language, because dynamic rather than fixed ideas
seem more to our liking. How else have we managed to survive with such spiritedness the
assault on our bodies, social institutions, countries, our very humanity?” Barbara Christian,
“The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998): 68. See also Saidiya Hart-
man on “critical fabulation,” in “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2 (June 2008): 1 – 14.
Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands (London: Verson, 2019) is, for
me, a beautiful and creative work that offers a mode of storytelling that captures and bends
disciplined-i nterdisciplined genres.
17. Listen to Prince, “F.U.N.K.,” NPG Digital, 2007.
18. Kevin Young, The Grey Album: On the Blackness of Blackness (Minneapolis: Gray-
wolf, 2012).
19. Dina Georgis, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (New York: suny
Press, 2013), 1, 18.
20. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Glob
alizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007).
SIMULTA NEI T Y
Sylvia Wynter writes that we are a “storytelling species,” while also ob-
serving that our stories — especially our origin stories — have an impact
on our neurobiological and physiological behaviors.22 Her observations
draw attention to the natural sciences as well as interdisciplinarity, em-
phasizing a dynamic connection between narrative and biology (stories
have the capacity to move us). In addition to contesting a teleological-
biocentric genre of the human, the dynamism between biology and nar-
rative affirms the black methodologies noted above: science and story are
not discrete; rather, we know, read, create, and feel science and story si-
multaneously.23 Or, we tell and feel stories (in our hearts), and this telling-
feeling tells-feels the empirics of black life. Reading across our curiosities,
the story and imagination are testimonies grounded in the material ex-
pression of black life. The story has physiological components. And sto-
ries make place.24 This means the metaphoric, allegorical, symbolic, and
other devices that shape stories also move us and make place. These nar-
rative devices, so thick and complicated in black studies, demand think-
ing about the interdisciplinary underpinnings of black studies beyond
an additive model.25 Conceptualizing stories and attendant narrative de-
26. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,”
in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge,
1993), 67 – 83.
27. Smith and Katz, “Grounding Metaphor,” 80.
28. Rhetorical wealth, telegraphic coding, overdetermined normative properties.
Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black,
White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chi-
cago Press, 2003), 203.
29. Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Journal
of Social and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947 – 963.
30. We cannot risk exclusively and solely relying on metaphors or analogies or symbols
as literary devices that advance our argument about blackness. We cannot drop blackness
into the realm of motif, and depart, disguising the difficult and complicated and extraliter-
ary worlds that animate and are relational to black life.
31. Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Strug
gle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 16 – 19; Tanya Titchkosky, “Life
with Dead Metaphors: Impairment Rhetoric in Social Justice Praxis,” Journal of Literary and
Cultural Disability Studies 9, no. 1 (2015): 1 – 18. Read, too, Toni Morrison on metaphor in her
“Disturbing Nurses and the Kindness of Sharks,” from Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the
Literary Imagination (New York: Random House, 1990), 62 – 91.
COLLAPSE
The task is, I believe, to get in touch with the materiality of our analyti-
cal worlds, draw attention to how black studies thinks across a range of
places, times, genres, texts, shadows, grooves that are punctuated with
diasporic literacy, and collectively think-k now-l ive black life as curious,
studied, and grounded. The analytics, as story, allows us to learn and
share, and get in touch, without knowing totally. Thus, as we grieve long-
standing racial violences, as we are punched by memories of those we
have lost, as we archive the most brutal of punishments, as we are weighed
down by losing her, them, over and over and we know her and we do not
know her and we did not know their name until it happened (we did not
know his name until he was gone, I did not know his name, I cannot know,
I found the name, I came across her after she was gone) and we feel heart-
break and we see it again and again, as we study the severity of plantation
temporalities (then-now), as we are weighed down, and the loss is there
beside us, as we grieve and collapse, we do not know absolutely. Still. Los-
ing her. Dear Science seeks to tell and live and generate an ethical distance.
I hope to write an ethical distance while recognizing that our collective
histories of racial violence put pressure on how we live, now.33 I found her
picture. I hope to write an ethical distance and grieve what I, we, can-
not know without industry-of-objecthood enveloping her. I kept your
secret.
32. Teju Cole, “Double Negative,” in Known and Strange Things (New York: Random
House, 2016), 71.
33. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015); Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging
(Toronto: Vintage, 2002).
In Dear Science, I write and study stories about algorithms, lists, science,
footnotes (references, citations), plantations, consciousness, grooves and
beats, poetry, geography, methodology, and theory. The stories are inter-
disciplinary narratives that use and amend the academic form to wade
through complexities of black intellectual life. This project shares what
I have learned from friends, colleagues, students, musicians, writers, and
poets, and it also includes some photos of texts, images, stories, and songs
that have helped me work out what I have and have not learned. This
book is very much indebted to the writings of Édouard Glissant and Syl-
via Wynter — two very different thinkers who have inspired me (many
of us) to keep reading and sharing and wondering. The stories are con-
nected but can be read in any order. These are stories about black life. The
stories begin from the premise that liberation is an already existing and
unfinished and unmet possibility, laced with creative labor, that emerges
from the ongoing collaborative expression of black humanity and black
livingness.
2. I have thought about this, often. The exertion she puts into her intellectual projects is
ineffable. Her intellectual work cannot be tracked on the page. What she does to get there
requires tremendous physiological and intellectual effort.
3. Avery Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological Imagination (Minneapo-
lis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 24; Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 19.
4. June Jordan, “My Sadness Sits around Me,” in The Black Poets, ed. Dudley Randall
(New York: Bantam, 1971), 248.
5. I do not know everywhere. My privilege is gaping. My geographic bias is obvious and
objectionable. I will do better. I add slides weekly, monthly. I keep reading. I am ashamed.
Adding more slides is shameful. Vulgar. This note, all notes, are vulgar.
6. Cheryl I. Harris, “Whiteness as Property,” Harvard Law Review 106, no. 8 (June 1993):
1715.
7. Dina Georgis, A Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (New York: suny
Press, 2013), 73.
8. Here we can also reference referencing in black musics: See, for example, Betty Davis’s
“They Say I’m Different,” from They Say I’m Different (Seattle: Light in the Attic Records,
1974): “I’m talkin’ bout Big Momma Thornton / Lightning Hopkins / Howling Wolf / Al-
bert King / Chuck Berry / Chuck Berry / Chuck Berry.” See also Stevie Wonder, “Sir Duke,”
from Songs in the Key of Life (Detroit: Tamla, 1976). On referencing place, see Murray For-
man, “ ‘Represent’: Race, Space and Place in Rap Music,” in That’s the Joint! The Hip-Hop
Studies Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Murray Forman and Mark Anthony Neal (New York: Routledge,
2011), 247 – 269. On referencing place, see Mark V. Campbell, “Connect the T. Dots —
Remix Multiculturalism: After Caribbean-Canadian, Social Possibilities for Living Differ-
ence,” in Ebony Roots, Northern Soil: Perspectives on Blackness in Canada, ed. Charmaine
Nelson (Cambridge, MA: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2010), 254 – 276. On referencing,
sampling, and mentions in hip-hop (thank you Mark Campbell for sharing this article), see
Justin A. Williams, “Theoretical Approaches to Quotation in Hip-Hop Recordings,” Con
temporary Music Review 33, no. 2 (2014): 188 – 209.
9. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Global
izing California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 28 – 29.
10. Gilmore, Golden Gulag, 28.
11. “If she wants to meet me that’s fine if she doesn’t / that is also fine.” Jackie Kay, “Chap-
ter Five: The Tweed Hat Dream,” in The Adoption Papers (Newcastle upon Tyne, UK:
Bloodaxe Books, 1991), 19.
12. “In a way, the ethics and methodologies of encounters, anecdotes, conversations and
storytelling I am invoking through radical vulnerability, strive to achieve in the realm of
research praxis, a politics of indeterminacy, or a politics without guarantees.” Richa Nagar,
Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and Activism (Urbana: Uni-
versity of Illinois Press, 2014), 13.
13. “Mastery is never complete. . . . We are always living in excess of what we know about
our motives, our actions, and what we say we value.” Dina Georgis, The Better Story: Queer
Affects from the Middle East (New York: suny Press, 2013), 106. “The different subjectivi-
ties and material conditions of those who produce and exchange knowledge continue to be
erased under the sign of mastery. Yet these different conditions have everything to do with
what knowledge is produced and how it is handled.” Cindi Katz, “Towards Minor Theory,”
Environment and Planning D: Society and Space 14 (August 1996): 497.
14. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; rpt., Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997), 115.
15. See also Kobena Mercer, “Decolonization and Disappointment: Reading Fanon’s Sex-
ual Politics,” in The Fact of Blackness: Frantz Fanon and Visual Representation, ed. Alan Read
(Seattle: Bay Press, 1996), 114 – 130.
16. In childhood development studies, referencing signals social engagement; it is a
specific developmental milestone (typically achieved by neurotypical children when they
are between eight and fourteen months old). The interaction is between a child and a par-
ent/adult and an object (e.g., a ball): the parent shows interest in the ball and encourages
the child to observe and to do the same; the reference is the child’s nonverbal look to the
adult, who is talking about, pointing to, providing information about the ball; the nonver-
bal look (the reference, which shows shared interest in the ball) and other cues (referenc-
ing the ball by following the finger that is pointing to the ball, or perhaps referencing by
mimicking and also pointing to the ball) indicates that the child is watching and learning
about the world. The adult will perhaps reinforce the interaction and referencing by nar-
rating the activity (“Look! a ball!”). The child is referencing the adult/parent and learning
about the world by showing an interest in what the adult/parent is interested in; the inter-
action is joined. The focus is not on the child, per se, but on the child receiving social and
emotional attention from the interaction and learning from that attention (such as the adult’s
voice of encouragement or facial expressions); referencing is acknowledging the ball-as-a-
shared-site-of-i nterest and, at the same time, recognizing that the social relationship (the
connection between the parent and child) is meaningful and garners social and emotional
attention. When a child does not reference, the assumption is that they are slower at develop-
ing social skills and/or are not “information seeking.” Neuroatypical children — who do not
reference in the same way as neurotypical children — may find normative referencing very
difficult. This does not mean, in my view, that these children are not adept at information
seeking; rather, it means that they are seeking information (normative and nonnormative in-
formation) differently! The level of social engagement referencing demands is high; it takes
some neuroatypical children outside of themselves, requiring they step onto a normative
path (a path they may consider nonnormative), which is laborious. Some working in the field
that studies autism spectrum disorders might say, then: referencing does not come naturally
to neuroatypical kids . . . in the way it comes so naturally to normal kids. This developmental-
milestone-skill perspective on referencing, for me, opens up an important challenge: what
does it mean, and to whom are we signaling, when referencing (citation practices) comes
easy? I am not, to be sure, conflating (neurotypical-neuroatypical) social referencing with
academic citation practices; rather, I am underscoring how the term “referencing” carries in
it the clinical normalization of referencing practices (developmental milestones, which are
tracked biological, psychological, and emotional changes in children) that can provide a way
for us to notice that, for some people inhabiting our worlds, referencing is tough and awfully
hard. If we rotate the script, and understand the hardness not as unusual but as a way of liv-
ing and a way of being and navigating our messed-up world that rewards all kinds of norma-
tivities, then we can learn that engaging with the materials we read to show how we know can
be (ideally, I would argue) a painful undoing of who we think we are and, as well, how we
come to share what we know differently. The neurotypical are not, throughout the referenc-
ing process, becoming neuroatypical or autistic of course; rather this example gives us a way
to notice and engender conditions of relation wherein we refuse normative authenticating
processes. Lauren Cornew, Karen R. Dobkins, Natacha Akshoomoff, Joseph P. McCleery,
and Leslie J. Carver, “Atypical Social Referencing in Infant Siblings of Children with Autism
Spectrum Disorders,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 42, no. 12 (December
2012): 2611 – 2621; Erin Manning, The Minor Gesture (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2016); Jonathan Alderson, Challenging the Myths of Autism (Toronto: HarperCollins, 2011).
17. Vladimir Nabokov, Pale Fire (New York: Vintage, 1989); David Foster Wallace, Infi
nite Jest: A Novel (Boston: Little, Brown, 1996); Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents
(Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015); Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); on Sylvia Wynter, see n. 25 in this story. See also
Anthony Grafton, The Footnote: A Curious History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 1999).
18. Carrie Mott and Daniel Cockayne, “Citation Matters: Mobilizing the Politics of Cita-
tion toward a Practice of ‘Conscientious Engagement,’ ” Gender, Place and Culture: A Journal
of Feminist Geography 24, no. 7 (2017): 954 – 973; Lauren Berlant, The Female Complaint: The
Unfinished Business of Sentimentality in American Culture (Durham, NC: Duke University
Press, 2008), 40 – 41.
19. “In this respect, it is always interesting to carefully read Fanon’s footnotes. To be-
gin with, Black Skin, White Masks contains more footnotes than any of Fanon’s later texts.
Some of those footnotes run two or three pages. In Black Skin, White Masks’s footnotes,
Fanon often engages himself in a conversation with an imagined opponent or appeals to per-
sonal memories and thus reveals more about his thoughts than he does in the text. Fanon’s
footnotes are like the repressed, unconscious foundations of his text. Or, in the words of
Gayatri Spivak, they are the marginalia of Fanon’s texts, his way of separating his public from
his private self.” Françoise Vergès, “Creole Skin, Black Mask: Fanon and Disavowal,” Critical
Inquiry 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997): 582 – 583.
20. Worn Down (Fall 2017). NourbeSe Philip’s long-c ycle-poem Zong! (2011) swirled in
my head. I was alerted to the award-w inning art installation by Rana Hamadeh (The Ten
Murders of Josephine and On Proxy Bodies: A Script in Progress, Rotterdam, 2017), a piece that
attends to the Zong massacre — specifically the Gregson v. Gilbert case — and ongoing (his-
torically present) racial violences. I was curious about the ways in which the work of Philip
was, for the most part, not present in the images, ideas, and theories Hamadeh used in her
work (those I could access from afar, to be clear). From what I understand, Philip’s Zong! is
given a nod within the exhibition (as “phonic substance”) and is also noted to be an “inspira-
tion.” Reviewing the exhibition from afar, I wondered about how the intellectual effort of a
black woman poet undergirds The Ten Murders yet is also, for the most part, removed from the
visual and textual work that is presented. What is the work of citation here? And uncitation?
A scanning of an exhibition review, along with an interview, would lead one to think that
perhaps the legal archives from the Zong massacre were sought out, reviewed, and studied
by Hamadeh and then visually built into her installation. However, a trip to the archives is
not required. Gregson v. Gilbert can be found within Philip’s Zong! itself: it serves as the nar-
rative through which her poetics emerges; the case is also reproduced within the book and is
retold in the “Notanda.” The legal case anchors Philip’s 2008 long-c ycle-poem and is intensi-
fied by the creative work she did with and to those legal narratives to produce Zong! in order
to poetically express her political obligation to the black-u nnamed who were murdered. In
Zong! the fragments of the legal archive are reworded to reconceptualize the weight of unre-
membered loss. In Zong! the unnamed and the forgotten are named in trace. In Zong! poet-
ics are the analytics of black life. With Zong! we learn to unread and reread unspeakability.
In 2017, just six weeks before the exhibition was launched, Hamadeh contacted Philip
and requested permission and blessings to use Zong! in her installation. In addition to detail-
ing how Zong! would be presented and archived in the exhibition , Hamadeh wrote to Philip
explaining that the book, long in her hands, was “a daily ritual that grew slowly through-
out my working process into becoming an important theoretical and affective scaffolding
within the work.” The artist intended to use Philip’s work and ideas in the exhibition (and
perhaps the work and ideas were already integrated before permission was requested, given
that Philip was contacted only six weeks before the launch . . . of course, tracking time is al-
ways unhelpfully awful).
Philip did not provide permission. She did not agree with the conditions under which her
work would be used and, as well, made clear that she was also very busy and worn out. Her
sister was dying and needed care.
Without permission and sweeping aside Philip’s care-work and mourning, it seems Hama-
deh reimagined the work of Zong with scraps of Zong! The nod to Philip within the exhibi-
tion itself is coupled to the kind of documents many, in theory, have access to (e.g., the legal
archives from the original case, Gregson v. Gilbert, available in Zong! as noted above). But in
some ways this coupling—the nod and the archive that is already there —establishes a kind
of alibi for rewriting and forgetting the creative-intellectual work Philip expresses in Zong! In
one interview Hamadeh presents her engagement with the Zong massacre as her own intellec-
tual work and theoretical intervention—Philip is not mentioned. Instead, she explains: “This
archive of horror shall not be understood as the trace of the massacre, but rather as the frag-
mentary, unspoken, and unspeakable phonic materiality that is captured and trapped within
the trace—that subsists because of and despite of that trace” and “I treat the Gregson vs. Gilbert
document in the exhibition as a primary document that defines the notion of documentality
as a whole.” Hamadeh also includes her own poetics in her exhibition:
For, thought is made in the mouth. / Let’s talk about the voice / of the record / as the
record / Not of the captured, but of capture / Not of weight, but the modality of measure /
The voice of the killer
The records, the mouth, the weights and measures, the voice. Bad made measure. Cu-
rious. It seems to me — from afar — that Hamadeh is, at least in part, working with and re-
working the long-c ycle-poem (not necessarily the original archival documents): scratching
it out and scraping it up and remaking it into something else. In the process of rewriting,
the creative labor of Philip — the intellectual effort of her monumental rehumanizing black
studies project, Zong! — wears down.
I will not reproduce all of Zong! in order to provide textual proof of Hamadeh’s reword-
ing and revising of Philip’s long-c ycle-poem. I view this from afar. How Hamadeh under-
stands and writes the Zong massacre is on her shoulders, as is Philip’s clear, exhausted,
unwillingness to be a part of the project. I ask, though, that we dwell on the politics of per-
mission. I ask that we dwell on the politics of permission in relation to black women. And, I
want to underscore and centralize and illuminate the effort Philip put into the long-c ycle-
poem. I was told to cite black women. We are told to cite black women. Sometimes the words
and ideas of black women, when cited, become something else. Sometimes the ideas of black
women wear out and wear down even though these narratives provide the clues and instruc-
tions to imagine the world anew. Often the words and ideas and brilliance of black women
remain unread. The words and ideas of black women go uncited. The intellectual effort is
unnoticed and stepped over and swept aside. Worn down, sometimes the intellectual work
of black women is unmentionable. We must continue to cite their words and ideas well. We
must read them well. I cite and site Zong! and NourbeSe Philip as brilliant intellectual effort.
I want to engage this text as labor. It is not a nod, gesture, signal, or inspiration. It is poetic
infrastructure — black women’s work — that radically repoliticizes black life.
I viewed images of the exhibition that were shared by a colleague who saw it in Rotter-
dam in 2017. See https://frieze.com/article/rana-hamadeh and http://moussemagazine.it
/rana-hamadeh-carolina-r ito-2 017. Other quotations are from an email correspondence be-
tween Philip and Hamadeh (emphasis in the original and permission granted by Philip) and
my personal email communication with Philip (permission granted); “Bad made measure”
is from M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Toronto: Mercury Press, 2008), 5. See also Katherine
McKittrick, “Diachronic Loops/Deadweight Tonnage/Bad Made Measure,” Cultural Geog
raphies (December 2015): 1 – 16.
21. Sara Ahmed, “White Men,” Feminist Killjoys (blog), November 4, 2014, https://feminist
killjoys.com/2014/11/04/white-men/. In the above blog post, Ahmed is thoughtful about
her citation practices before Living a Feminist Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2017), noting her referential relationships with scholars such as Immanuel Kant, G. W. F.
Hegel, Edmund Husserl, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
22. Where and when do we cut those purveyors of dreadful feminism? When do we re-
fuse to cite the bourgeois feminists, or the left-leaning feminists, or the Western feminists
who write about Third World “culture” or who adore a two-sex system or who despise and
abuse their black administrative assistants or who fail their black students or who publicly
humiliate and threaten nonwhite women and men? How do we cite those who stole and steal
our work, our ideas? When do we refuse to engage those feminist scholars who despise those
who clean their homes and tend their gardens and care for their children? When do we refuse
to cite or read or talk about dreadful awful brutal feminism? How do we cite the feminists
who call other feminists “terrorists”? Where and when do we stop citing the nonwhite, in-
cluding black, patriarchal scholars who, heckle, cut down, plagiarize, kick about, ignore, talk
over, interrupt, demote, demean black women? (Suddenly, the unraveling: out with the non-
white capitalists who smartly write of ecofeminism, out with the boring female identified
white liberals who write of political theory and the saccharine promises of equality, be gone
nonradical nonqueer nonanarchist nonfeminist women who write of community gardens.)
“Dominant forms of feminism that fail to address the rapacious qualities of corporate capital
or ‘predatory capitalism’ can be legitimately criticized for ideological limitations that render
some feminisms complicit in dehumanizing systems and in mystifying the convergence of
corporate wealth and repressive state policies.” Joy James, Shadowboxing: Representations of
Black Feminist Politics (New York: Palgrave, 1999), 182.
25. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the
Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5 – 57; Sylvia Wynter, “Africa, the West and the
Analogy of Culture: The Cinematic Text after Man,” in Symbolic Narratives/African Cinema:
Audiences, Theory and the Moving Image, ed. June Givanni (London: British Film Institute,
2000), 25 – 76; Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/Silencing the ‘Demonic
Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’ ” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature,
ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990),
355 – 372; Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Categories of the Master Conception: The Counter-
doctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in C. L. R. James’s Caribbean, ed. Paget Henry and Paul
Buhle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1992), 63 – 91; Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond the Word
of Man: Glissant and the New Discourse of the Antilles,” World Literature Today 63, no. 4
(Autumn 1989): 637 – 647; Sylvia Wynter, “Ethno or Socio Poetics,” Alcheringa/Ethnopoetics
2, no. 2 (1976): 78 – 94; Sylvia Wynter, “New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bar-
tolomé de Las Casas: Part One,” Jamaica Journal 17, no. 2 (May 1984): 25 – 32; Sylvia Wynter,
“New Seville and the Conversion Experience of Bartolomé de Las Casas: Part Two,” Jamaica
Journal 17, no. 3 (August – October 1984): 46 – 55; Sylvia Wynter, “Novel and History, Plot and
Plantation,” Savacou 5 (1971): 95 – 102; Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Mi-
nority’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse,
ed. Abdul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990),
432 – 469; Sylvia Wynter, “Rethinking ‘Aesthetics’: Notes towards a Deciphering Practice,”
in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press,
1992), 238 – 279; Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must Be Found: After Humanism,” bound
ary 2 12, no. 3, and 13, no. 1 (Spring/Fall 1984): 19 – 70; Sylvia Wynter, “The Eye of the Other,”
in Blacks in Hispanic Literature: Critical Essays, ed. Miriam DeCosta (New York: Kennikat,
1977), 8 – 19; Sylvia Wynter, “The Pope Must Have Been Drunk, the King of Castile a Mad-
man: Culture as Actuality and the Caribbean Rethinking of Modernity,” in Reordering of
Culture: Latin America, the Caribbean and Canada in the Hood, ed. Alvina Ruprecht and Ce-
cilia Taiana (Ottawa: Carleton University Press, 1995), 17 – 41; Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the
Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience,” in National
Identities and Sociopolitical Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and An-
tonio Gómez-Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001), 30 – 66; Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the
Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, after Man, Its Over-
representation — an Argument,” cr: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 257 – 337.
26. Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings,” 365.
27. As well and at the same time some citation practices show how black intellectuals and
other social theorists are differentially sourced (through erasure, through quick and fast and
understudied referencing, through detailed and thorough engagements, and so on) in the
(economic and otherwise) production of academic knowledge. Excised from, and despised
within. The academy needs the figure of the black: we are the analytical sites, the data, the
experiment, the security guards, the cleaners, the administrative assistants, the nonnorma-
tive teachers, through which so much scholarship moves. In books and articles, the figure of
the black moves in tandem with citations that are, at times, animated by desperation: if I/we
cite Claudia Rankin, if I/we cite Frantz Fanon, if I/we cite James (C. L. R., Joy, Baldwin . . . ),
I/we are, theoretically, “doing” race and blackness.
The desperation, exasperated, often goes sideways.
To do race I will cite . . .
Gloria Anzuldua.
Toni Morrison.
Zadie Smith.
Buchi Emecheta.
Donna Haraway on situated knowledge which is built on the words of Buchi Emecheta.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari.
Borderlands.
The bookend to this is citation advice. Pages and pages. I have noticed that each year
our graduate students present their thesis proposals, during the question and answer pe-
riod, only the black students are asked if they have read x or y or z. The nonblack students
are asked about their research and the black students are given reading lists. This happens
to me, this happens to us, too. Have you read [insert name of theorist] on animals? Oh! You
must. You need this. Your project on black things will suffer if you have not read what I have
read. Here is a list of what I have read and what I know you have not read. Here is a list of what
you do not know. Here is a list of what I am reading for you and your book on black things.
Look! Look!
De temps à autre, on a envie de s’arrêter.
From time to time you feel like giving up.
From time to time one would like to stop.
Sometimes citation practices do not take the time to feel and recognize liberation. Some-
times referencing signals allusion rather than study. “Doing race” is not the same as undo-
ing racism. Citations are economized. Some citations are unfreeing. Some citations objectify
black people. Works cited are not always about the work in which the works cited appears.
See Frantz Fanon, Peau noire, masques blancs (Paris: Les Éditions du Seuil, 1952), 145;
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Richard Philcox (1952; rpt., New York: Grove,
2008), 116, 136. Many thanks to Yasmine Djerbal for assistance with translations (English-
toward-French and French-toward-English).
See also Analogue University, “Control, Resistance, and the ‘Data University’: Towards
a Third Wave Critique,” Antipode Interventions, March 31, 2017, https://antipodefoundation
.org/2017/03/31/control-resistance-a nd-t he-data-u niversity/.
“But suddenly racism and ‘women of colour’ appear as phrases or topics thrown into
books as chapters, producing tight little breathless paragraphs or footnotes . . . ” Himani
Bannerji, “Returning the Gaze: An Introduction,” in Returning the Gaze: Essays on Racism,
Feminism, and Politics, ed. Himani Bannerji (Toronto: Sister Vision, 1993), xiv. Thank you,
Ellyn Walker.
See also Katherine McKittrick, “bell hooks,” in Key Contemporary Theorists on Space and
Place, ed. Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine (London: Sage, 2004), 189 – 194;
and Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2006), 154, 146.
28. “Did you ever read my words, or did you merely finger through them for quotations
which you thought might valuably support an already conceived idea concerning some old
and distorted connection between us?” Audre Lorde, “Letter to Mary Daly,” in Sister Out
sider: Essays and Speeches (1984; rpt., Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007), 68.
29. Carmen Kynard, Vernacular Insurrections: Race, Black Protest, and the New Century in
Composition-Literacies Studies (Albany: suny Press, 2013), 10 – 11.
30. Kynard, Vernacular Insurrections, 18.
31. Jacqueline Jones Royster, ed., Southern Horrors and Other Writings: The Anti-lynching
Campaign of Ida B. Wells, 1892 – 1900 (Boston: Bedford/St. Martins, 1996).
32. “The intellectual and cultural achievements of the black Atlantic populations ex-
ist partly inside and not always against the grand narrative of Enlightenment and its op-
erational principals.” Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 48.
33. “And where the words of women are crying to be heard, we must each of us recognize
our responsibility to seek those words out, to read them and share them and examine them
in their pertinence to our lives. That we not hide behind the mockeries of separations that
have been imposed upon us and which so often we accept as our own. For instance, ‘I can’t
possibly teach Black women’s writing — their experience is so different from mine.’ Yet how
many years have you spent teaching Plato and Shakespeare and Proust? Or another: ‘She’s a
white woman and what could she possibly have to say to me?’ Or, ‘She’s a lesbian what would
my husband say, or my chairman?’ Or again: ‘This woman writes of her sons and I have
no children.’ And all the other endless ways we rob ourselves of ourselves and each other.”
Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (Berkeley, CA: Crossing Press, 1984), 44.
34. “No matter how many studies and references we accumulate (though it is our profes-
sion to carry out such things), we will never reach the end of such a volume; knowing this in
advance makes it possible for us to dwell there.” Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 154.
35. Listen to Ella Fitzgerald, “My Happiness,” Brunswick, 1958.
36. Makeda Silvera, Silenced: Talks with Working Class West Indian Women about Their
Lives and Struggles as Domestic Workers in Canada (Toronto: Sister Vision Press, 1989).
37. I will not attempt to list all the syllabi for freedom produced from about 2012 on-
ward. Teaching Trayvon; Ferguson Syllabus; Discussion Guide: Justice for Colten Boushie;
Waller County Syllabus . . .
38. Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, eds., All the Women Are White,
All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave (New York: Feminist Press, 1982), 349.
39. VèVè Clark, “Developing Diaspora Literacy: Allusion in Maryse Condé’s Hérémak
honon,” in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and
Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 1990), 303 – 319.
40. Richard Wright, Native Son (New York: Signet, 1940), 37.
41. Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Plume, 1987), 226; Gayl Jones, Eva’s Man (Boston:
Beacon, 1976); Missy Elliott, “Work It (Official Video),” YouTube video, 4:25, posted Octo-
ber 26, 2009, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cjIvu7e6Wq8; Lil’ Kim, “Big Momma
Thang,” Hard Core, Big Beat/Atlantic, 1996; Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching
God (1937; rpt., New York: Perennial, 1990), 11. “Picnics swarmed those summers as fervidly
as bees”: John Keene, Annotations (New York: New Directions, 1995), 25.
42. Charmaine Lurch, Through the Material Landscape, art exhibition at Daniels Spec-
trum Gallery, February 8 – March 12, 2017.
43. Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1982), 152.
44. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Spe-
cies? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being
Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015).
45. Nella Larsen, Quicksand (New York: Penguin, 1928), 13.
46. Walter Benjamin, “Unpacking My Library,” in Walter Benjamin: Illuminations, ed.
Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 59 – 67. See also Di-
onne Brand, Inventory (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2006); Dionne Brand, Ossuaries:
Poems (Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 2010); Dionne Brand, Land to Light On (Toronto:
McClelland & Stewart, 1997).
47. Aimé Césaire, “Demeure I,” from Solar Throat Slashed, ed. and trans. A. James Ar-
nold and Clayton Eshleman (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2011), 36.
The title of this story, “The Smallest Cell Remembers a Sound,” is from M. NourbeSe Philip,
She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (Charlottetown, Canada: Ragweed Press,
1989), 63.
1. For an extended, overlapping, and different story, see Chela Sandoval, Methodology of
the Oppressed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000).
2. In this story I discuss discipline, disciplinarity, disciplined thought, as academic areas
of study. Thus, I am not referring to the practice and work of study. In much of black studies
this work is very disciplined. It is a practice of rigor, care, monumental effort. This work
takes time, and has psychic and economic costs. It is enveloped in long lists of books,
extensive notes and songs, and layers of intellectual histories and theories by black and
nonblack thinkers (the work, the practice, is disobedient not undisciplined).
3. Harold Bloom, The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages (New York: Har-
court Brace, 1994).
by the density of disciplinarity and the method of making disciplined
categorization happen: around every corner, at every turn, disciplinary
practitioners provide disciplined narratives that confirm the solidity of
disciplinary knowledge and its categorical difference from other ways of
knowing.4 The canon, the lists, the dictionaries, the key thinkers, the key-
words, the core courses, the required courses, the anthologies, the quali-
fying exams, the comprehensive exams, the core textbooks, the tests, the
grading schemes and rubrics, the institutes, the journals, the readers.
Core.5 Learning outcomes.6 The demonstrated knowledge of Jürgen
Habermas texts requires the refusal of W. E. B. Du Bois and can in no
way imagine — even in refusal — Ida B. Wells. (The breadth and depth
of the answer demonstrates the scholars’ substantive and comprehensive
knowledge of . . . ) Disciplines are coded and presented as disconnected
from experiential knowledge; experiential knowledge is an expression of
data (The objective census numbers factually show that the poor living
here experience . . . ). Disciplines stack and bifurcate seemingly discon-
nected categories and geographies; disciplines differentiate, split, and cre-
ate fictive distances between us.
Discipline is empire. Sylvia Wynter’s essay “On How We Mistook the
Map for the Territory, and Re-imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable
Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre” provides a very useful critique of disci-
pline. In this piece, Wynter dwells on black studies — the black arts move-
ment, the interventions of Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, anticolonial
4. Barbara Christian, “The Race for Theory,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 1 (Spring 1998):
67 – 79.
5. Core: the central or most important part of something.
6. “Learning outcomes are statements of what a learner is expected to understand, value,
or demonstrate after completion of a process of learning. The Learning Outcomes are mea-
surable, and communicate expectations to learners about the skills, attitudes and behaviors
they are expected to achieve after successful completion of a course, program or degree.
Accurate assessment of learning outcomes is an essential component of competency-based
education. This project aligns well with the academic plan . . . which emphasizes the devel-
opment of fundamental academic skills, transferable skills that span a range of disciplines
and are essential for professional practice. . . . The aims of the project are: to quantify student
achievement of transferable learning outcomes; to develop reliable and sustainable means
of assessing student learning; to encourage faculty to develop and assess transferable skills
in their courses and programs; and to build a foundation for a wider rollout of this type of
assessment across faculties and programs over the next few years.” See Queen’s University,
“Queen’s Learning Outcomes Assessment,” accessed March 20, 2018, http://www.queensu
.ca/qloa/home.
7. Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-i mprisoned
Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Désêtre,” in Not Only the Master’s
Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna
Gordon (London: Paradigm, 2006), 108, 112.
8. Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory,” 158.
Remembers a Sound 37
are invested (experientially and economically and psychically) in sus-
taining our present system of knowledge (which venerates Homo oeco
nomicus). The rigid and restrictive underpinnings of disciplinary think-
ing become apparent when we notice that categorization — specifically
the method and methodology of sustaining knowledge categories — is an econ-
omized emulation of positivist classificatory thinking (thinking that is
produced in the shadows of biological determinism and colonialism).9
Generic. Genus. The learning system and its attendant methodology pro-
duce an ungenerous taxonomy that segregates kinds and types of knowl-
edge as well as the spaces where ideas are generated. The taxonomy is
ranked and funded accordingly. In this learning system, the (fictive) dif-
ferences between humans swell.10
The splitting and differentiation of ways of knowing is in part, Ed-
ward Said reminds us, the function of empire.11 Discipline is empire.12
This is exemplified when, for example, we notice that “studying black
people” and “studying indigenous people” is an intricate Malthusian
project of bifurcating each racial history according to different identity
markers and genealogies (which shadow biocentric and colonial logics);
describing black and indigenous politics as only and always and authen-
tically emerging from blood-identity; refusing to notice or acknowledge
the many black and indigenous communities that have always, together
(even if not always under the same stars), been fighting against colo-
nialism, racism, capitalism, empire, nation, and their attendant sexed-
gendered brutalities; unseeing black-indigenous intimacies and love and
friendships; documenting and reporting that indigenous people are sin-
gular objects of study that are only and always poor, oppressed, abject,
9. William Clark’s Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 2006) tracks academic disciplines and practices and figures
(faculty, students, department heads, and so on) from juridicio-ecclesiastical to politico-
economic, thus offering a genealogy of how tradition, rationality, discipline, hierarchy, and
specialization get embedded within the university learning system and increasingly econo-
mized. See also Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History
of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013); and Abigail Boggs and Nick Mitch-
ell, “Critical University Studies and the Crisis Consensus,” Feminist Studies 44, no. 2 (2018):
432 – 463. Thank you, Adam Bledsoe, for sending me Ebony and Ivy.
10. Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, The Bell Curve: Intelligence and Class Struc
ture in American Life (New York: Free Press, 1994).
11. Edward W. Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Vintage, 1993).
12. Listen to Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross,” The Harder They Come, Island Rec
ords, 1972.
13. Read with Michelle Daigle, “The Spectacle of Reconciliation: On (the) Unsettling
Responsibilities to Indigenous Peoples in the Academy,” Environment and Planning D: Soci
ety and Space (January 2019): 1 – 19.
14. Roderick Ferguson, The Reorder of Things: The University and Its Pedagogies of Mi
nority Difference (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012); Kandice Chuh,
Imagine Otherwise: On Asian Americanist Critique (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2003).
15. Paul Gilroy, Against Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cam-
bridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000). The resistance to Against Race, particularly
(but not only) from black US scholars, has always been curious to me — so much so that I
Remembers a Sound 39
disciplines — just like the discipline of English literature — are canonized
and economized: there are good identities and bad identities; there are
good women, good queers, good people of color, and there are bad women,
bad queers, bad people of color. There are good books and bad books.
This does not mean, however, that English literature or history or math-
ematics are more ethical disciplines because they do not immediately
seethe identity and its attendant corporeal matter; rather, it means that
in academic settings, identity-disciplines function to uphold misery and
empire and the segregation of ideas and idea makers precisely because
all disciplines are differently enfleshed and classified and hierarchized.16 If
identity is biologic — or, to be more specific, narratively biologized — are
the identities that make and produce and uphold disciplining categories
not, also, biologizing disciplines? If so, all disciplinary thinking is laden
with colonial logics and all disciplines are enfleshed (as gendered, raced,
sexed, and so on). Identity-d isciplines — those areas of study that were set
up to research and work to undo oppression and are so often kept afloat and
administered by hardworking queer-black-indigenous-people-of-color! — are
particularly poignant examples of how academic institutions colonize
the production of knowledge by defining, policing, determining, financ-
ing, what categories (genus, studies) should live and die.17 For disciplines
thought I was misreading the book, or that my copy was missing a chapter. It is as though the
title for the US edition of the book — Against Race — is some kind of template implying that
Gilroy is, himself, “against race” and that the text is a refusal of black studies. The discussion
of fascism is hard, the journey into black conservatism is hard too, as are the discussions of
corporeal authenticities . . . but this book is not a negation of race, blackness, or black stud-
ies. It is a monumental critique of race thinking and ultranationalism. The European edi-
tion of this book is titled Between Camps: Nations, Cultures and the Allure of Race (London:
Allen Lane, 2000).
16. See Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and
Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). Enflesh-
ment — and here I am paraphrasing Weheliye — is the process through which racial codes
get attached to (un)gendered bodies, which then symbolically and materially dwell in — and
navigate as enfleshed persons — the fallout of racial capitalism and colonialism. Remember,
too, that this process is dynamic: (un)gendering is a fundamental part of how racial codes
get worked out as narrative and theory. So, enfleshment is the process through which we
come to know the gendered workings of humanity within the context of prevailing racial
codes.
17. Malinda Smith’s research on equity in universities delineates this clearly: white
women faculty evidence otherness and diversity in the academy, thus fulfilling equity re-
quirements and policies; whiteness outlives blackness, indigeneity, and other nonwhite
identifications. Malinda Smith, “Gender, Whiteness, and the ‘Other Others’ in the Acad-
emy,” in States of Race: Critical Race Feminism for the 21st Century, ed. Sherene Razack, Ma-
linda Smith, and Sunera Thobani (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2010), 37 – 58.
18. “The best university scholars are characterized as entrepreneurial and investment
savvy, not simply by obtaining grants or fellowships, but by generating new projects from old
research, calculating publication and presentation venues, and circulating themselves and
their work according to what will enhance their value.” Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos:
Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015), 36 – 37. Thank you, Jamie
Peck.
19. Carole Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia
Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007).
Remembers a Sound 41
that describing her work as invested in “the human” (as an object of analy-
sis) is perhaps misguided; such a description often privileges Homo oeco
nomicus (the figure of Man2 in her work) as the human we must undo
and, at the same time, undermines her ongoing argument that the human
is not singular (or even the doubly entwined Man1-Man2) but, rather,
is a manifestation of new ways of living with each other that emerges from
an interspecies-interecological schema. A preoccupation with only-the-
human also privileges and centers the very human she (and we) seek to
challenge by disregarding or marginalizing the perspectives of Man’s hu-
man others and Wynter’s ongoing insistence on a species perspective that is
tied to our ecological worlds (plot-and-plantation, drought, desertification,
global warming and climate change, and so on). If our analyses of Wynter’s
work are preoccupied with the figure of the human, we risk only talking
about and writing about and describing the human we already know. In re-
ducing her ideas to a singular fictive figure, we will lose our way.20
20. Some readings of Wynter’s “human” center or recenter the scholars themselves, be-
cause they use this category-figure to conflate a range of human experiences and histories.
The argument is, often, that Wynter’s reconceptualization of the human (beyond or after
Man) is capaciously “everyone,” which the scholar reads as a singular slot that collapses us
all (a collective we) into one stable human category. At the same time, this conceptual move
reifies the human they are claiming to undo by attaching an analytical currency to a singu-
lar enfleshed identity (the scholar as describer of collective humanity). And . . . for the white
antiracist scholar doing work on black and indigenous worlds, the fictive singular slot of “all
humans” — seemingly endorsed by an anticolonial scholar, Wynter — is the perfect antira-
cist opening to claim and center white humanity. Curious. This, too, rushes past Wynter’s
reading of black intellectuals and creatives as providing the intellectual infrastructure for
a version of humanity that cannot be contained by enfleshed monohumanism and its colo-
nial wreckage; it also rushes past her studies of uneven human experiences. For this reason,
I find that Wynter’s call to think through “who and what we are” (in an extra-philosophical
sense) a much more refined — yet analytically generous — rendering of how she imagines
our interspecies-i nterecological struggles. This phrase exemplifies how her work does not
dwell on singular human (or the category of human), per se, but knotted processes of know-
ing which lead to us to grapple with (not settle on or describe) the question of who and what
we are (extra-philosophically): “The Argument proposes that the new master code of the
bourgeoisie and of its ethnoclass conception of the human — that is, the code of selected
by Evolution/dysselected by Evolution — was now to be mapped and anchored on the only
available ‘objective set of facts’ that remained. This was the set of environmentally, climati-
cally determined phenotypical differences between human hereditary variations as these
had developed in the wake of the human diaspora both across and out of the continent of
Africa; that is, as a set of (so to speak) totemic differences, which were now harnessed to the
task of projecting the Color Line drawn institutionally and discursively between whites/
nonwhites — and at its most extreme between the Caucasoid physiognomy (as symbolic life,
the name of what is good, the idea that some humans can be selected by Evolution) and
the Negroid physiognomy (as symbolic death, the ‘name of what is evil,’ the idea that some
humans can be dysselected by Evolution) — as the new extrahuman line, or projection of
genetic nonhomogeneity that would now be made to function, analogically, as the status-
ordering principle based upon ostensibly differential degrees of evolutionary selectedness/
eugenicity and/or dysselectedness/dysgenicity. Differential degrees, as between the classes
(middle and lower and, by extrapolation, between capital and labor) as well as between men
and women, and between the heterosexual and homosexual erotic preference — and, even
more centrally, as between Breadwinner (jobholding middle and working classes) and the
jobless and criminalized Poor, with this rearticulated at the global level as between Sartre’s
‘Men’ and Natives . . . before the end of politico-m ilitary colonialism, then postcolonially
as between the ‘developed’ First World, on the one hand, and the ‘underdeveloped’ Third
and Fourth Worlds on the other. The Color Line was now projected as the new ‘space of
Otherness’ principle of nonhomogeneity, made to reoccupy the earlier places of the motion-
filled heavens/non-moving Earth, rational humans/irrational animal lines, and to recode in
new terms their ostensible extrahumanly determined differences of ontological substance.
While, if the earlier two had been indispensable to the production and reproduction of their
respective genres of being human, of their descriptive statements (i.e., as Christian and as
Man1), and of the overall order in whose field of interrelationships, social hierarchies, system
of role allocations, and divisions of labors each such genre of the human could alone realize
itself — and with each such descriptive statement therefore being rigorously conserved by
the ‘learning system’ and order of knowledge as articulated in the institutional structure of
each order — this was to be no less the case with respect to the projected ‘space of Otherness’
of the Color Line. With respect, that is, to its indispensability to the production and repro-
duction of our present genre of the human Man2, together with the overall global/national
bourgeois order of things and its specific mode of economic production, alone able to pro-
vide the material conditions of existence for the production and reproduction of the ethno-
class or Western-bourgeois answer that we now give to the question of the who and what we are.”
Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the
Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation — an Argument,” cr: The New Centennial Review
3, no. 3 (Fall 2003): 315 – 317 (emphasis added).
Remembers a Sound 43
history of blackness provides the conditions to learn and live and love our
world differently. Reading anticolonially is deciphering practice.21 As a
methodology (rather than simply a time past that is over and done with)
the 1960s questioning of the global world system that Wynter highlights is
productively unfinished. Positioned as an open questioning, method and
methodology are unhinged from the stasis of noun, and thrown into the
less predictable work of verb.
Method-making. I theorize Wynter’s insights on the rebellious poten-
tial of 1960s — what she describes as the groundwork for the realization of
a new order of being human — as long-standing and unfinished method-
making.22 This kind of analytical maneuvering marks black rebellion as
method-making; this is one way to signal and think about the praxis of
black life and livingness. The maneuvering, ideally, dwells on and thinks
about the questioning and overturning of normative systems of knowl-
edge, and thus what it means to be human, by situating the process of
inquiry as the analytical framework through which to study. Method-
making compulsively moves with curiosity (even in frustration) rather
than applying a set of techniques to an object of study and generating un-
surprising findings and outcomes. Methodology is disobedient (rogue,
rebellious, black).23
Description is not liberation. Methodology that is relational, intertex-
tual, interdisciplinary, interhuman, and multidisciplinary honors black
studies. Methodology that is relational, intertextual, interdisciplinary,
interhuman, and multidisciplinary provides an intellectual framework
through which the study of black life cannot be reduced to authentic bio-
logical data (biologized-identity-d iscipline) that emanates some kind of
truth about racial oppression (black people are abject) and a solution to
repair that truth (we must fix [correct], fix [designate and detain], and get
rid of the abject). As I note above, discipline operates to reify biocentric
and colonial categories; if the study of black people gets caught up in the
disciplined projects of empire, black humanity is unthinkable. Indeed, so
trusted and commonsense are studies that begin with black dehuman-
ization and/or social death and accompanying methods of proving ab-
24. Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (1952; rpt.,
New York: Grove, 1967), 112.
25. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997), 9.
Remembers a Sound 45
genre of blackness that is not solely and absolutely defined by and through
abjection, subjection, and objectification. The project of making disci-
pline overwhelmingly only gives us two options for the study of black
people — to describe racism and resist racism; these options rarely have
any noise or curiosity or questions about black life interrupting them.
Discipline, even identity-d iscipline, cannot adequately attend to black-
ness precisely because black life is absent from the disciplinary question.
Or, discipline describes black death and degradation as legitimate schol-
arly findings.
Method-making is the enactment of black life and bursts through dis-
ciplined abjection. Method-making is relation.
We are just barely beginning to conceive of this immense friction.
The more it works in favour of an oppressive order, the more it calls
for disorder as well. The more it produces exclusion, the more it gen-
erates attraction. It standardizes — but at every node of Relation we
will find callouses of resistance. Relation is learning more and more
to go beyond judgements into the unexpected dark of art’s upsurg-
ings. Its beauty springs from the stable and the unstable, from the de-
viance of many particular poetics and the clairvoyance of a relational
poetics. The more things it standardizes into a state of lethargy, the
more rebellious consciousness it arouses.26
Method-making acknowledges and despises and critiques degrada-
tion without sourcing it as the only way to know black people. Method-
making knows black people know. We know more than the abjectness
that is projected upon us. We are not obsequious. We are not abject. We
know more. We know. We know ourselves.
Method-making. Black scholars, artists, writers rely on a variety of
sources (music, math, sociology, science, geography, history, fine art,
dance, and everything in between and beyond) in order to study, con-
vey, and talk about race and racism. In a range of texts — The Souls of
Black Folk, Poetics of Relation, American Civilization, Women, Race, and
Class, Black Feminist Thought, A Genealogy of Resistance, Development Ar
rested, In the Break, The Black Atlantic, Blues People, Golden Gulag, Drop
ping Anchor, Setting Sail, Dark Matters, Solidarity Blues, and so on — the
work stands across-w ith-outside-w ithin-against disciplinary boundar-
27. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage, 1903, 1990); Édouard
Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; rpt., Ann Arbor: University of Michi-
gan Press, 1997); C. L. R. James, American Civilization (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992); Angela
Davis, Women, Race, and Class (New York: Vintage, 1982); Patricia Hill Collins, Black Fem
inist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990; rpt., New
York: Routledge, 2000); M. NourbeSe Philip, A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays
(Toronto: Mercury Press, 1997); Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Planta
tion Power in the Mississippi Delta (London: Verso, 1998); Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aes
thetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003);
Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 1993); Amiri Baraka, Blues People: Negro Music in White Amer
ica (New York: W. Morrow, 1963); Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus,
Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Berkeley: University of California Press,
2007); Jacqueline Nassy Brown, Dropping Anchor, Setting Sail: Geographies of Race in Black
Liverpool (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009); Richard Iton, Solidarity Blues:
Race, Culture, and the American Left (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press,
2000).
28. Toni Morrison, Jazz (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1992); Hazel Carby, Race Men
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
29. Here I recall Jacqueline Nassy Brown’s insightful presentation on Stuart Hall.
Brown writes: “In 1985, Hall published in a journal called Critical Studies in Mass Commu
nication. The article is called, ‘Signification, Representation, Ideology: Althusser and the
Post-structuralist Debates.’ Just as the title promises, we’re entering the realm of High The-
ory. Toward the end of the article, and with barely a transition, he moves into the realm of
autobiography — toward the important theoretical goal of showing how ‘some of the things
I have said about Althusser’s general concept of ideology allow us to think about particular
ideological formations.’ He continues, ‘I want to think about that particular complex of dis-
courses that implicates ideologies of identity, place, ethnicity and social formation gener-
ated around the term ‘black’’’ (108). From there he offers a narrative that is alternately poi-
gnant and funny — for example, saying that once, when he returned to Jamaica for a visit, his
mother told him, ‘I hope they don’t mistake you over there for one of those immigrants!’ ”
Brown writes that Hall continually inserted himself, and blackness, in places where you
would least expect them to appear. Her decision to focus on Hall’s interruption of the schol-
arly journal narrative is especially meaningful, as she shows how Hall both works within and
refuses normative systems of academic knowledge, while also figuring “black” as an open-
ended Althusserian intellectual inquiry. Jacqueline Nassy Brown, “Stuart Hall’s Geographic
Refusals: A Response to Katherine McKittrick,” paper presented at the conference Stuart
Hall: Geographies of Resistance, cuny gc, New York, March 26, 2015. Thank you, JNB, for
Remembers a Sound 47
liberation, but to seek it out. The process of seeking will, ideally, be per-
sistently unsatisfied with ideas that are and were constructed alongside
the “ambivalent legacy of emancipation and the undeniably truncated
opportunities available to the freed.”30 The process of seeking is one of
inquiry and curiosity. While I am only addressing how a sliver of black
liberation is enacted — through the praxis of method-making — I hope
this story provides us, as academics and thinkers who compulsively seek
out liberation, with the intellectual mechanisms to do this work in a va-
riety of university settings that, as we know, were not built to honor the
lives of black and other marginalized communities. Seeking liberation is
rebellious.
Connections. Reading across a range of texts and ideas and narratives
— academic and nonacademic — encourages multifarious ways of think-
ing through the possibilities of liberation and provides clues about living
through the unmet promises of modernity; method-making undercuts
the profitable standardization of racial authenticities and disciplining
practices.31 These processes, in turn, hopefully challenge two bothersome
analytical habits. The first, which has been continually inserting itself
into this story, is the tendency to seek out and find marginalized subjects,
who then serve as academic data and provide authentic knowledge about
oppression.32 The second is the tendency to privilege some theoretical
or academic work as the methodological and intellectual frame through
sharing a hardcopy of your presentation. See also Stuart Hall, “Signification, Representa-
tion, Ideology: Althusser and the Post-structuralist Debates,” Critical Studies in Mass Com
munication 2, no. 2 (1985): 91 – 114.
30. Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-
Century America (London: Oxford University Press, 1997), 12.
31. A note on interdisciplinarity: normally, interdisciplinary method asks the scholar to
bring together two or more academic disciplines, in order to hopefully broaden and refine
our approach to any given subject; interdisciplinary work seeks to breach the barriers be-
tween prescribed and sanctioned knowledge bases as a way to challenge how we understand
the production of knowledge. As I see it, though, this is more than bringing together texts;
interdisciplinary methods must always insist that nonwhite academic and nonacademic
voices be understood in relation to, rather than outside of, dominant disciplinary academic
debates and theories in order to continually unsettle what we think we know. I say this, too,
because the production and protection of disciplinary knowledge — including “interdisci-
plines” like gender studies or other identity studies — is a racialized and protectionist knowl-
edge project.
32. Keguro Macharia, “On Being Area-Studied: A Litany of Complaint,” GLQ: A Journal
of Lesbian and Gay Studies 22, no. 2 (2016): 183 – 189.
33. For Butler on Morrison see Judith Butler, “After Loss: What Then?,” in Loss: The Poli
tics of Mourning, ed. David L. Eng and David Kazanjian (Los Angeles: University of Cali-
fornia Press, 2003), 467 – 474; Judith Butler, Excitable Speech: A Politics of the Performative
(New York: Routledge, 2013). See also Ernesto Javier Martínez, “On Butler on Morrison on
Language,” Signs 35, no. 4 (Summer 2010): 821 – 842.
Remembers a Sound 49
departmentalized, interdepartmentalized, and mapped out in university
settings. The disciplining of thought (the process of habitually delimit-
ing what we know about blackness through honoring colonial perimeters)
stabilizes race and perpetuates racism. More specifically, the biocentric
logic of race, which sorts and assesses bodies according to phenotype and
attendant evolutionary scripts, is part of a larger commonsense belief sys-
tem that seemingly knows and thus stabilizes the biological data that vali-
dates unevolved black deviance; this belief system thus knows, in advance,
who should live and who should survive and who should die and who is
naturally selected and who is naturally not-selected. Indeed, this biocen-
tric belief system is steadily carried forward, not articulating itself in the
same way over time and space, but certainly shaping what we think we
know about, and how we know, black people. Part of our intellectual task,
then, is to work out how different kinds and types of voices relate to each
other and open up unexpected and surprising ways to think about libera-
tion, knowledge, history, race, gender, narrative, and blackness.34 As we
see from the work of many scholars of black studies, the liberatory task
is not to measure and assess the unfree — and seek consolation in nam-
ing violence — but to posit that many divergent and different and rela-
tional voices of unfreedom are analytical and intellectual sites that can
tell us something new about our academic concerns and our anticolonial
futures.
I am especially interested in how black life and livingness are tied to
creative, intellectual, physiological, and neurological labor. This emerges
from noticing the physical cost of practicing a range of black studies. I
am not abandoning the body or the biologic — we are, after all, flesh and
muscle, bones and blood and water. Instead, I want to approach the bio-
logic as relational to black intellectual life and creative praxis. Perhaps
this will, if only for a moment, honor black life in ways that do not require
beginning with, and then saving, the violated black body. In their narra-
tive, poetic, visual, psychic, and physiological responses to racism, black
cultural producers reconfigure normative and biologically determinist
understandings of race by producing works that are in tandem with, yet
imagine our past-present-f uture outside, colonial logics. Many black mu-
sical texts, to give an obvious example, are lyrical and sonic critiques of
34. For example: Mark V. Campbell, “Sonic Intimacies: On djing Better Futures,” De
colonization: Indigeneity, Education and Society, March 25, 2015, https://decolonization.word
press.com/2015/03/25/sonic-i ntimacies-on-djing-better-f utures/.
35. Oliver Sacks, Musicophilia: Tales of Music and the Brain (New York: Knopf, 2012);
Daniel J. Levitin, This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession (New York:
Plume, 2007); Aniruddh D. Patel, Music, Language, and the Brain (Oxford: Oxford Uni-
versity Press, 2010); Sally McKay, “On the Brain,” Canadian Art 35, no. 4 (Winter 2018):
62 – 63.
Remembers a Sound 51
theoretical text. If we are committed to relationality and interhuman dia-
logue, if we are committed to academic practices that disobey disciplines,
then the song, the groove, the poem, the novel, the painting, the sculp-
ture must be relational to theory and praxis. These kinds of strategies —
reimagining the black biologic as creative knowledge, disobeying the dis-
ciplines, viewing black texts as verbs rather than nouns, engendering in-
terhuman relationalities, asking the groove and the poem for theoretical
insight — provide intellectual spaces that define black humanity outside
colonial scripts.
Drexciya, an electronica band from Detroit, produced a series of con-
cept albums between 1992 and 2002. The albums, it has been argued, mu-
sicalized the black Atlantic.36 The band was a duo: James Stinson and
Gerald Donald. Stinson died in 2002. The narratives and stories sur-
rounding Drexciya are numerous: Stinson is said to have mostly worked
alone, although the few early writings about the band and their music al-
ways include reference to Donald. They did not play their music to live
audiences and both Stinson and Donald were involved in various other
collaborative projects using their real or alternative names (the most rec-
ognizable is their affiliation with the Underground Resistance techno
collective from Detroit).37 Reading about Drexciya, one always comes
across their secreted and complicated identities: anonymity was cen-
tral to their work and identifications, and the band members’ identities
were not unearthed until Stinson’s death. Anonymity was maintained be-
cause “the music is more urgent than the organizers of it and should take
a place of primary importance. . . . It does not matter if one is known or
not known directly.”38 Personality, they note, deflects from the creative
36. Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofuturism,” cr: The New Centennial
Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287 – 302.
37. A. J. Samuels, “Master Organism: A. J. Samuels Interviews Gerald Donald,” Tele
kom Electronic Beats, June 2013, http://www.electronicbeats.net/gerald-donald-i nterview/.
Tom Magic Feet, “James Stinson, 1969 – 2002: An Appreciation,” Spannered, September 6,
2002, http://www.spannered.org/music/774/; Jason Birchmeier, “Artist Biography: James
Stinson,” All Music, accessed January 8, 2017, https://www.allmusic.com/artist/james
-marcel-stinson-m n0001315741/biography.
38. Stephen Rennicks, “The Primer,” Wire 321 (November 2010): 32; Matthew Ben-
nett, “Drexciya Interview: The Anonymous Protagonists of Detroit Electro,” Clash Music,
May 12, 2012, http://www.clashmusic.com/features/drexciya-i nterview; Samuels, “Master
Organism.”
Remembers a Sound 53
claims. As method-makers, Drexciya are “out of sight” and thus offer an
analytic that speaks to long-standing resistances to racism.40 At the same
time, their unknowability asks that we listen, or try to listen, and perhaps
wonder, what unidentified identifications bring to bear on how we engage
creative texts. Possibility.
Even so, descriptors of Drexciya float and press. Their music and iden-
tities are described as cloistered, pugnacious, local, racial, exclusionary
to the point of distraction, open, fresh, brooding, urgent.41 The seeming
anonymity is coupled with a more specific origin story. The liner notes of
their 1997 album The Quest include the following cosmogony:
Could it be possible for humans to breathe underwater? A foetus in
its mother’s womb is certainly alive in an aquatic environment.
During the greatest holocaust the world has ever known, pregnant
America-bound African slaves were thrown overboard by the thou-
sands during labor for being sick and disruptive cargo. Is it possible
that they could have given birth at sea to babies that never needed air?
Recent experiments have shown mice able to breathe liquid oxygen.
Even more shocking and conclusive was a recent instance of a pre-
mature infant saved from certain death by breathing liquid oxygen
through its undeveloped lungs. These facts combined with reported
sightings of Gillmen and swamp monsters in the coastal swamps of
the South-Eastern United States make the slave trade theory star-
tlingly feasible.
Are Drexciyans water breathing, aquatically mutated descendants of
those unfortunate victims of human greed? Have they been spared
by God to teach us or terrorise us? Did they migrate from the Gulf
of Mexico to the Mississippi river basin and on to the great lakes of
Michigan?
40. Simone Browne, Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke
University Press, 2015), 21.
41. Andrew Gaerig, “Drexciya, Journey of the Deep Sea Dweller II,” Pitchfork, May 31, 2012,
http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/16678-journey-of-t he-deep-sea-dweller-i i/; Antoin
Lindsay, “Delving into the Drexciyan Deep: The Essential James Stinson,” Vice, September
3, 2015, https://thump.vice.com/en_ca/article/8q7nnb/delving-i nto-t he-d rexciyan-deep
-t he-essential-james-stinson; Rennicks, “The Primer: Drexciya.”
42. The Unknown Writer, “Liner Notes from Drexciya,” Quest, Submerge, 1997. For an
extended discussion of the liner notes and the origin story see Nettrice R. Gaskins, “Deep
Sea Dwellers: Drexciya and the Sonic Third Space,” Shima 10, no. 2 (2016): 68 – 80.
43. Ytasha Womack, Afrofuturism: The World of Black Sci-Fi and Fantasy Culture (Chi-
cago: Chicago Review Press, 2013), 70; Kodwo Eshun, “Further Considerations on Afrofu-
turism,” cr: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 2 (2003): 287 – 302.
44. James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 115; M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Toronto: Mercury Press,
2008); Katherine McKittrick, “Diachronic Loops/Deadweight Tonnage/Bad Made Mea-
sure,” Cultural Geographies (December 2015): 1 – 16.
45. See Gallagher, Coral Cities; Kate Forde, “Ellen Gallagher,” Frieze 124 (June – August
2009): 189. Read with Dora Silva Santana, “Transitionings and Returnings: Experiments
with the Poetics of Transatlantic Water,” tsq 4, no. 2 (May 2017): 181 – 190; LaMonda Stall-
ings, Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures (Urbana: University of Il-
linois Press, 2015); Taunya Lovell Banks, “Still Drowning in Segregation: Limits of Law in
Post – Civil Rights America,” Law and Inequality 32, no. 2 (Summer 2014): 215 – 255.
Remembers a Sound 55
able, and the cosmogony in the liner notes of The Quest provide a redou-
bled satisfaction: a legible neo – slave narrative that promises a future. But
this future, as we know, has not arrived yet. We are still waiting.
While we wait, I turn to the music itself. I read Drexciya not as nec-
essarily emerging from a narrative of the Middle Passage toward an Af-
rofuture aquatopia, but instead as collaborative sound-labor that draws
attention to creative acts that disrupt disciplined ways of knowing. To
begin, how might one describe lyricless Detroit techno? Andrew Gaerig
describes the band’s music as “short tracks of spackled, analog funk . . . of-
fering occasional clues about Drexciya’s sci-fi mystery. . . . Wild high-pass
filters . . . provide plenty of twine for James Stinson and Gerald Donald to
bind their clapping 808s. . . . Beautiful stylistic diversions. . . . A wily slab
of electro.”46 On Harnessed the Storm, I hear fast tin beats atop heavy long-
moving-long-shaking baselines that are animated by light green taps. On
Harnessed the Storm I hear electronic hi-hats (spa-spa-spa-spa-spa-spa). I
hear hollow echoes and deluge. On Harnessed the Storm I feel bump-trap-
boom loss (trap). Isk-isk-crash.
These narratives — the Middle Passage cosmogony, the spackled ana-
logue funk clapping 808s (spa spa spa spa, zap, shhhh-isk, loss), the an-
onymity of the band — can be thought about alongside creative labor.
Working primarily with a synthesizer, the band generates and modifies
sounds electronically; the synthesizer, as we know, can imitate different
instruments: so, the moment of synthesization is about collaboration,
borrowing, sharing, removing, and rewriting. With this, they use algo-
rithms to create a signal with different sounds, thus taking waveforms,
synthesizing them, to provide a soundtrack to the storm: they electroni-
cally harness the storm. Importantly, though, Drexciya also recorded all
of their albums live. By this I mean they played live into a predigital ana-
logue recorder. What we are given, as listeners, is synthesized improvisa-
tion. They harness the storm and then let it go. Improvisation demands
practice and structure — it is not a natural process, it is practiced creative
labor that is physiologically enacted. The labor of music, the work of mak-
ing music, draws attention to acts of collaboration. The work of practice
and practicing is, as well, always coupled with improvised sound — for
one cannot improvise without practicing and arranging and rearrang-
ing memory patterns developed through partly unconscious repetition
47. Stuart Hall, “Cultural Identity and Diaspora,” in Contemporary Postcolonial Theory:
A Reader, ed. Padmini Mongia (London: Arnold, 1996), 110 – 121.
48. Woods, Development Arrested (London: Verso, 1998), 288.
Remembers a Sound 57
CONSCIOUSNESS (FEELING LIKE, FEELING LIKE THIS)
Separately and in tandem, blackness and the fantastic work to disrupt the bodily imperial-
isms of the colonial and corrupt the related, innocent representations of the modern. It is in
this spirit that I might suggest that analyses of black politics, and by necessary extension the
“generic” political, require that the exhaustion with politics itself that structures so much of
contemporary discourse not delimit our own investigations of the ways certain things are kept
together and others kept apart, and the capacity of the substances and processes associated
with the cultural realm to deepen our understanding of these operations.
— Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic
“Feeling like, feeling like this” is from esg, “Moody,” A South Bronx Story, Universal Sound,
2000.
1. Encephalon. Sylvia Wynter’s work on neurobiology and the brain (what is inside the
head, the soft neural tissue, the synapses and their attendant chemicals and chemical signals)
has led me think about the powerful weight of science-biology. Readers sometimes overde-
termine brain in her work, rather than think about neurobiology alongside her overarching
research program. By this I mean, when she writes of “neurobiology” or related terms (even a
variation on what she describes as a “new science of human discourse” which can be found in
a few of her essays) the reader often responds by suggesting that Wynter is singularly concep-
tualizing science-biology according to the exacting terms of colonial-modernity (which are
bracketed by scientific racism or biological determinism). To put it differently, the reflexive
response to “science” and “neurobiology” and the “brain” is to read these terms as falling un-
der the category of “biological science,” thus failing to consider how Wynter is conceptualiz-
ing “science” and “biology” outside the order of Man. For some reason, her work on the brain
is not read in the same way as her work on music, film, intellectual leaps, slavery, religion,
racism inform the “puzzle of conscious experience.”2 While she explores
these questions in a number of her writings, “Towards the Sociogenic
Principle” offers a sustained discussion of the ways in which practices of
genre (as they are embedded in her wider thesis about blackness and humanity), and so on.
The brain is removed by the reader, and then cast as outside her wider project. Wynter’s re-
search on neurobiology is thus read by some as a reification of the purely biological and thus a
moment where the brain is a purely natural brain (that is not conditioned by extrahuman sto-
ries). This critique also suggests that she essentializes the brain by privileging its neurotypi
cality. While Wynter’s work on neurobiology is by no means perfect — she is not a practicing
neurobiologist, for example — across all of her writings the reader can observe the ways she
seeks to illuminate the dangers of separating the natural sciences from the humanities and,
as well and consequently, how she is conceptualizing science outside our present system of
knowledge (which is a truth-making-positivist-biocentric system of knowledge). The brain,
then, does not stand alone. I think it is important, therefore, to continually frame Wynter’s
research on neurobiology (indeed, all her research) through “science of the word,” which
means that the biological (in this case the brain) and the narrative (in this case how we story
who and what we are) cannot be bifurcated. One way to challenge a biocentric reading of
Wynter’s insights on neurobiology is to notice how she engages science as a socially produced
set of narratives that emerge alongside our human biologics (which means the soft neural tis-
sue is not analytically privileged, nor is it analytically formed in advance of narrative). Notice
too, importantly, that she is trying to work through and illuminate the relationality of brain-
narrative-bios-mythoi. She is not suggesting that all brains are the same, all brains respond
similarly to narrative, all brain synapses spark in the same way, good brains are normative,
normative brains are typical and generic, brains, alone, are the path to freedom, bad brains
are nonnormative, nonnormative brains are bad. Indeed, it is because the brain is structured
by both the biological and narrative (bios-mythoi) — soft tissue existing and working along
side extrahuman scientific scripts that explain the function of the soft tissue differentially
according to time and place — that we can work out how it is a site where neural differen-
tiation takes place while also noticing the punishing limits of neurotypicality. It follows, of
course, that all brains are not the same: here we can think about neuroatypical and nonneu-
rotypical subjects as fully human and providing a pathway to a different way of knowing the
bios-mythoi underpinnings of neurobiology while also stretching ourselves to consider how
Wynter’s theory of demonic ground is a location that provides the conditions to think out-
side normative systems and cognitively remap our inner and extrahuman worlds (repattern-
ing how we know and what we know, how we know ourselves, to recast what they think we
are). What if the alternative politics engendered on/in/with demonic grounds (and demonic
ground) are theorized alongside neurobiology and neurological patterns?! What are the neu-
robiologics of the Fanonian leap? I must be science fiction. See Sylvia Wynter and Kather-
ine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Humanness a Dif-
ferent Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine
McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 9 – 89; Katherine McKittrick and
Alexander Weheliye, “808s and Heartbreak,” Propter Nos 2, no. 1 (Fall 2017): 13 – 43. Thank
you, Alexander Weheliye, for encouraging me to think about and write out these curiosities.
2. Sylvia Wynter, “Towards the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Con-
scious Experience, and What It Is Like to Be ‘Black,’ ” in National Identities and Sociopolitical
8. Perry Carter, David L. Butler, and Derek H. Alderman, “The House That Story Built:
The Place of Slavery in Plantation Museum Narratives,” Professional Geographer 66, no. 4
(2014): 547 – 557.
9. Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 154.
10. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 5.
11. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 98.
12. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 158.
13. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 97.
14. Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return, 101.
19. Edward Howard, liner notes for Donny Hathaway, Extension of a Man, Atco, 1973.
Hathaway was diagnosed as paranoid schizophrenic and took his life in 1979. In the 2008
“Donny Hathaway” episode of the tv series Unsung (episode 104), it is explained that his
mental health struggles led him to believe white people were going to, among other things,
kill him. I stop.
20. Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi
Delta (London: Verso, 1998), 20.
21. In his essay “Still Life,” Richard Iton writes of love and love songs, asking the reader
to consider how the ongoing legacies of transatlantic slavery and coloniality have, together,
opened up affective registers that cannot be contained — or rendered legible — within our
present racial logics. In identifying the struggle to write and sing about black life, Iton asks
that we hold close — and in many ways take pleasure in — the uneasy tensions between black
politics and “the love song stuff.” Nile Rogers quoted in Iton, “Still Life,” Small Axe 17, no. 1
(2013): 23. “Still Life” shows that the black love song “can be seen as one of the more familiar
and available sites for the imagination of black political possibilities, radical and otherwise”
(26). With this, Iton’s essay also allows one to think carefully about the ways in which ongo-
ing practices of racial violence both obscure and deny narratives of black love. As we learn
to love and invest in loving black, we come to realize that this love, this act, is a confounding
political option. Black love is/as/was strange and unexpected and bedazzling. Loving black
people, Iton reminds us, discloses “the contending black thoughts defined by a differently
gendered, chronologically disordered, and fundamentally reflexive spirit that is at times so
exterior as to be beyond representation, registration, and recognition” (Iton, “Still Life,”
31 – 32). Drawing on Iton’s insights, we notice that black love is affectively and narratively
and purposefully expressed as an assertion of black life; this assertion is a fantastic asser-
tion, because it shows that the struggle to love and live black is bound up in, yet cannot be
contained by, normative governmentalities that thrive on practices of racial, and specifically
antiblack, violence. The love that emerges out of our plantation pasts, Du Boisian musical
infrastructures of sorrow, cannot ethically end precisely because “the-end-of-love” — which
is finding and grabbing a love that hates and despises blackness — defies the political work
of black life. In Richard Iton’s research and writing, then, the love song, the praxis of loving
black, the set list of black life, lasts forever. Iton, “Still Life”; W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of
Black Folk (1903; rpt., New York: Vintage, 1990); Katherine McKittrick, “Fantastic/Still/
Life: On Richard Iton (A Working Paper),” Contemporary Political Theory (February 2015):
24 – 32. Go and listen to Roberta Flack, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” First Take, At-
lantic, 1972; and Prince, “Love,” 3121, npg/Universal, 2007; and Kanye West, “Hey Mama,”
Late Registration, Def Jam, 2005. Love is like the sky / you know it never stops. I knew our
joy would fill the earth / and last until the end of time. No matter where you go / my love is
true.
22. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 1997).
23. Woods, Development Arrested, 140.
24. Susan Schneider and Max Velmans, “Introduction,” in The Blackwell Companion to
Consciousness, ed. Max Velmans and Susan Schneider (Oxford: Blackwell, 2007), 1.
25. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Introduction,” in Clyde Woods, Development Arrested: The
Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, 2nd ed. (1998; rpt., London: Verso, 2007),
xiv.
26. Woods, Development Arrested, 335.
27. Robin James, “Affective Resonance: On the Uses and Abuses of Music in and for Phi-
losophy,” PhaenEx 2 (Fall/Winter 2012): 59.
28. Richard Iton, In Search of the Black Fantastic (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008).
29. Marlon Bailey, Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture
in Detroit (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2013), 16 – 17; Robin D. G. Kelley, Yo’
Mama’s Disfunktional! Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America (Boston: Beacon, 1997),
45.
30. Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston: Bea-
con, 2002), 35.
31. No. At times black thought is not always a refusal outright; it is not a denial or a re-
jection. Black thought is the intellectual praxis of living this world and seeking liberation;
living this world and seeking liberation engages and disrupts this world and, importantly,
allows us to gather and learn about ways of liberation that are already here, while imagin-
ing better futures. Sometimes refusals refuse too much. I, we, refuse what they want us to
be while also gathering clues (notes, songs, grooves, memories, the forgotten) within and in
excess of our present system of knowledge. The clues are insurgencies.
“Of course, refusal has its limits.” AbdouMaliq Simone, Improvised Lives (Cambridge,
MA: Polity, 2019), 23.
And . . . “The Black Radical Tradition is a constantly evolving accumulation of structures
of feeling whose individual and collective narrative arcs persistently tend toward freedom. It
is a way of mindful action that is constantly renewed and refreshed over time but maintains
strength, speed, stamina, agility, flexibility, balance. The great explosions and distortions
of modernity put into motion — and constant interaction — already existing as well as novel
understandings of difference, possession, dependence, abundance. As a result, the selection
and reselection of ancestors is itself a part of the radical process of finding anywhere — if not
everywhere — in political practice and analytical habit, lived expressions (including opaci-
ties) of unbounded participatory openness.” Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Abolition Geography
and the Problem of Innocence,” in Futures of Black Radicalism, ed. Gaye Theresa Johnson
and Alex Lubin (New York: Verso, 2017), 237.
32. Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 138 – 139.
33. Kara Keeling, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of
Common Sense (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 6.
34. Lisa Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015), 163 – 165.
35. “The interrelationship between the consciousness of the self and the emancipatory
programme is of paramount importance. Blacks no longer seek to reform the system be-
cause doing so implies acceptance of the major points around which the system revolves.”
Steve Biko, “The Definition of Black Consciousness,” in I Write What I Like: Selected Writ
ings (1978; rpt., Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 49.
36. Sylvia Wynter quoted in Greg Thomas, “Yours in the Intellectual Struggle,” in The
Caribbean Woman Writer as Scholar, ed. Keshia N. Abraham (Coconut Creek, FL: Carib-
bean Studies Press, 2009), 47.
T O D E F I N I T I V E LY P I N I T D O W N
E ach time I arrive at her home we stand in the doorway to catch up.
I arrive and we catch up. It feels forever. We sit at her dining room
table. I do not tire. We eat. We share the Haitian rum. Each time
I leave I am weary and worn out.1 A combination of speechlessness and
fast thoughts and tireless sharing and stories that I can never remember
fully and then I leave and I lose focus. Every time I leave “possibility” ex-
presses itself affectively and physiologically. I feel possibility. I think this
is what possibility feels like. It is not narrated textually. It is not an idea.
I have always pushed myself and my students to think about how black
liberation can be understood as a site of possibility and as a struggle that
is ongoing but never resolved. This is the gift of black studies — a concep-
tual frame that draws attention to and critiques racism and other practices
of discrimination but does not remain beholden to the system of knowl-
edge that profits from oppression. I am committed to possibility analyti-
cally. But after each departure, I lose focus of the analytics. I feel unsteady.
This is what possibility feels like. Maybe this is what possibility feels like.
What she has generously offered me in our conversations is that doing
this intellectual work, and indicting the system that misrepresents and
obscures your creative-intellectual labor just as it thrives on racial vio-
lence, is a feeling too. I can only describe it as a kind of terrifying openness
that promises a different future and this future is outside what we have
been taught to recognize as liberation. The future, too, is here. I know this
“Something That Exceeds All Efforts to Pin It Down” is from AbdouMaliq Simone, Impro
vised Lives (Cambridge, MA: Polity, 2019), 5.
1. Each time I leave I feel as though I have been swimming for seven hours.
because I felt it in the doorway, at the table, and in the aftermath. Libera-
tion is already there and here.
Rewind. Unparalleled catastrophe. We worked through the contents
of the original document for seven years.2 It is impossible to track exactly
what went on in those seven years. It felt like endlessness moving very
fast. The long conversation gave me a glimpse of the risky and rebellious
project of undoing what we know, and making sense of the world in new
ways; it required thinking big about the specificities of who and what we
are in a world that denies black personhood. She draws attention to how
race figures into genealogies that ask not only what it means to be human
but also how we came to be who and what we are. In addition, she urges
us to redefine the human through our racial attachments, for the sake of
not just our collective selves but for the planet (and our environmental
decline, climate change, is tied to the enslaved moving across the Middle
Passage, a linear temporal-spatial logic of accumulation by dispossession
and extraction that we still honor and replicate and resist, too).
The struggles against plantation and postplantation violences foster a
range of interlocking perspectives that continually question and disobey
geographic and intellectual practices that sequester, watch over, harm,
and manage black diasporic peoples. This is an intellectual and physi-
ological struggle. This is work. This is doing the work. In terms of the
production of material and intellectual space, in my view, this (our) dis-
obedience rarely replicates colonial-plantation geographic logics. Black
expressive life cannot replicate these logics, and the task of nonreplication
is exhausting. The disobedience sparks a stream of black texts and prac-
tices that continually imagine a way of being black as linked to landless-
ness and activity-based collaborative intellectual labor. In this, we share
how we arrive at struggle; how we get there, what stories allow us get there,
what stories disrupt what we know and what stories enable new ways of
2. Simple random sample of documents: draft Wynter interview, April 23, 2007; Sylvia
Wynter, interview 2008; revised Wynter, May and June 2008; final Wynter draft, July 2010;
Wynter March 21, 2011; Wynter, Marx section; Wynter new excerpt, new conclusion; Wyn-
ter, July part 1; Wynter, July part 2; Third Event 1; Third Event 2; Third Event 3; Third Event
all; Wynter, Spring 2012, parts abcd; In Closing/Coda/After/Word/The Third Event: Our
Collective Drought/Desertification/Starvation/Accelerating Species Threat Catastrophe
and Our Iconic Blombos Cave Type Initiation; Wynter McKittrick 1: Final: 2013; Wynter
McKittrick 2: Final 2014; Wynter: revised ending 2014; Wynter_September and October
Merged.
3. Believing in black life and black livingness is radical generous political act. Believ-
ing each other and believing the stories we tell each other about what happened. Believing
what we love and what we find hard. Believing our unsettling encounters which each other.
Believing our experiences with racism and racist and sexist violence. Believing our broken
hearts.
4. Avery Gordon and Céline Condorelli, “Conversation 1,” in Avery Gordon, The Haw
thorn Archive: Letters from the Utopian Margins (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018),
92 – 93.
5. Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism, trans. Joan Pinkham (1955; rpt., New York:
Monthly Review Press, 2000), 73.
6. Aimé Césaire, “Poetry and Knowledge,” in Lyric and Dramatic Poetry, trans. Clayton
Eshleman and Annette Smith, xlii – lvi (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1990).
Original source: Place of creation: No place, unknown, or undetermined. Credit: Ted Grant /
Library and Archives Canada / PA-170252. Restrictions on use: nil. Copyright assigned to
Library and Archives Canada by copyright owner Ted Grant.
NOTES
Original source: Ellen Gallagher, Coral Cities (London: Tate, 2007). “Catch a Wave” is from
Drexciya, “Wavejumper,” The Quest, Submerge, 1997.
CHARMAINE’S WIRE
Original Source: Charmaine Lurch’s Studio, Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Photo by the author.
P O LY C A R B O N AT E , A L U M I N U M ( G O L D ) , A N D L A C Q U E R
Original source: Betty Davis, They Say I’m Different, Light in the Attic Records, 1974.
BLACK CHILDREN
Original source: June Jordan, “The Test of Atlanta,” in Directed by Desire: The Collected
Poems of June Jordan, ed. Jan Heller Levi and Sara Miles (Port Townsend, WA: Copper
Canyon Press, 2007), 390 – 391.
TELEPHONE LISTING
Original source: Sandra Brewster, From Life 3, 2015, mixed media on wood, 60 × 48 in.
FAILURE (MY HEAD WAS FULL OF MISTY FUMES OF DOUBT)
The subtitle of this story, “My Head Was Full of Misty Fumes of Doubt,” is from Zora Neale
Hurston, Dust Tracks on a Road (1942; rpt., New York: HarperCollins, 1991), 195.
1. Monte Reel, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold: Predicting Murder on Chicago’s South
Side,” Harper’s, March 2014, 43 – 51.
2. Reel, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” 43.
3. Reel, “Chronicle of a Death Foretold,” 46. On risk thinking see Nikolas Rose, “At Risk
of Madness,” in Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility, ed.
Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 209 – 237.
many ways his life only enters the mathematical equation as death. The
algorithm was granted more energy and vitality — through the act of
application — than Flennoy (the object and outcome of the mathemati-
cal analysis). After the predictive system algorithmically anticipated his
death, and measures were taken to prevent his death, Flennoy was killed
in June 2012. This report sat on my desk for just over two years, and I read
the first page over and over. I could not fully integrate into my psyche the
idea of an algorithm that was manufactured to assume, anticipate, prede-
termine, and foretell deadly violence; at the same time, I did not want to
consume, yet again, what I and we already know. I read that first page over
and over for about two years, noticing that the compulsion to repeat put
me in a state, to borrow from Dina Georgis, “of simultaneously not want-
ing to forget and not wanting to know.”4
When I returned to the report and completed reading it, I learned that
the predictable algorithmic model saw both funding cuts and ineffectual
results: the key to the program was to run the algorithm, identify ultra-
high-risk people, and prevent their deaths by providing them with mentors
who would support, teach, counsel youths. The cost was about $15,000 per
student, annually, and the funding model was unsustainable; as well, gun-
shot victimization did not decrease among the algorithmed.5 Soon after, a
similar predictable-analytics formula was adopted by the Chicago Police
Department — one we are all familiar with and referred to as the predic-
tive policing model: this algorithm identifies a series of “hot spots” and
“hot lists” that single out criminals and their attendant geographies.
I begin this story with the Harper’s report not because what is uncov-
ered is new or astonishing but because it shows how blackness and race
are implicit to mathematical codes, discourses, and problems. The re-
port, without reserve, situates black youths in the midst of what Bernard
Harcourt calls “actuarial predictions.”6 The predictions — the hot spots,
4. Dina Georgis, The Better Story: Queer Affects from the Middle East (Albany: suny
Press, 2013), 47.
5. Rachel Levenstein, Sue Sporte, and Elaine Allensworth, “Findings from an Investi-
gation into the Culture of Calm Initiative,” University of Chicago Consortium on School Re
search, October 2011, https://consortium.uchicago.edu/publications/findings-investigation
-culture-calm-initiative. Dana Chandler, Steven D. Levitt, and John A. List, “Predicting and
Preventing Shootings among At-R isk Youth,” American Economic Review: Papers and Pro
ceedings 101, no. 3 (2011): 288 – 292. Thank you, Nik Theodore.
6. Bernard Harcourt, Against Prediction: Profiling, Policing, and Punishment in an Actu
arial Age (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 2.
10. Katherine McKittrick, “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place,” Social
and Cultural Geography 12, no. 8 (2011): 947 – 963.
11. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; rpt., Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997), 92.
12. These problem-solving operations can be imagined in relation to the Du Boisian
question “How does it feel to be a problem?” In this case, the calculations and other math-
ematical operations require the uneasy embodiment of racial and racist designation and re-
sultant structures of feeling (how does it feel to be?). The mathematics seek to resolve (solve,
find an answer to) us. We are the repository of the mathematical operations. The affective
work Du Bois points to is taxing. We know that problems are trouble. Problems are harmful
and problems get in the way. Problems need to be resolved. Problem is dilemma, nightmare,
mess. How does it feel to be a problem? It feels oppressive. It feels worrying. It feels forever.
It feels awful. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Vintage, 1990), 7; W. E. B.
Du Bois, “The Study of the Negro Problems,” Annals of the American Academy of Political
and Social Science 11 (January 1898): 1 – 23; Nahum Chandler, X — The Problem of the Negro
as a Problem for Thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014); Paul Gilroy, Against
Race: Imagining Political Culture beyond the Color Line (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press, 2000). She is a loose cannon, a problem. Remove her.
13. Tobias Dantzig, Number: The Language of Science (1930; rpt., New York: Plume, 2007),
33.
14. Khan Academy, “What Is an Algorithm and Why Should You Care?,” accessed May
19, 2016, https://www.khanacademy.org/computing/computer-science/algorithms/intro
-to-a lgorithms/v/what-a re-a lgorithms.
15. Khan Academy, “What Is an Algorithm and Why Should You Care?”
16. Carole Cadwalladr, “The Great British Brexit Robbery: How Our Democracy was Hi-
jacked,” Guardian, May 7, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2017/may/07/the
-g reat-british-brexit-robbery-h ijacked-democracy?CMP=share_btn_link. In addition to
being linked to the military industrial complex and surveillance, Cadwalladr likens voter
information extraction to a “massive land grab.” She also refers to the data and generation
of computer information as an “ecosystem” that can be mapped. Data mining: to quarry,
to excavate, to remove. The spatial terms are dizzying given that computer data is not, in
fact, a three-d imensional space that we can touch and/or inhabit. Instead, the data ecosys-
tem is made up of computer codes. The ecosystem is produced by scripting languages like
C++ or Frege or Python or Objective-J and it is upheld by software architecture. In many
ways, the land does not exist and therefore cannot be grabbed or mined: the goal is, Jiawei
Han and Micheline Kamber argue, “the extraction of patterns and knowledge from large
amounts of data, not the extraction (mining) of data itself.” Jiawei Han and Micheline Kam-
ber, Data Mining: Concepts and Techniques (Burlington, MA: Morgan Kaufmann, 2001), 5.
However, Cadwalladr’s language is powerful precisely because it nods to a much longer his-
tory of racial and colonial violence and, at the same time, allows our mind to leap and think
about how data produces real three-d imensional geographies. Data grabbing and data min-
ing are certainly not the same as massive transnational land transactions and land grabs,
spurred by violent “development” logics that necessarily displace and destroy the lives of
the world’s most vulnerable. But the data grabbing — think Brexit and US president Trump,
for example — remakes place and perhaps might be an anticipatory shadow in less immedi-
ate histories that were underwritten by displacement and accumulation by dispossession.
Here, the work of Sharlene Mollett is instructive: land grabbing is not novel or recent; land
grabbing is long-standing and routinely operationalized to naturalize racial hierarchies and
racist “whitening logics.” Sharlene Mollett, “The Power to Plunder: Rethinking Land Grab-
bing in Latin America,” Antipode 48, no. 2 (March 2016): 412 – 432. Land grabbing is a self-
replicating system that provides the avaricious conditions for the data grab. They are not the
same, but they are both tied to colonialism and capitalism and they are both entwined with
the production of space. The task of data grabbing is to remake our sense of place, heart-
lessly. Thank you, Paul Gilroy.
17. Harcourt, Against Prediction, 57.
18. Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Spe-
cies? Or, to Give Humanness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being
Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015),
26 – 30.
19. Chandler, Levitt, and List, “Predicting and Preventing Shootings among At-R isk
Youth,” 288 – 292.
20. Leslie W. Kennedy, Joel M. Caplan, and Eric Piza, “Risk Clusters, Hotspots, and Spa-
tial Intelligence: Risk Terrain Modeling as an Algorithm for Police Resource Allocation
Strategies,” Journal of Quantitative Criminology 27, no. 3 (2011): 339 – 362.
21. Neda Atanasoski and Kalindi Vora, “Surrogate Humanity: Posthuman Networks
and the (Racialized) Obsolescence of Labor,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 1,
no. 1 (2015): n.p., http://feministtechnoscience.org/ojs/index.php/catalyst/article/view
/ata_vora.
22. Ezekiel Edwards, “Predictive Policing Software Is More Accurate at Predicting Po-
licing,” Huffington Post, August 31, 2016, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/predictive
-policing-reform_us_57c6ffe0e4b0e60d31dc9120; R. Joshua Scannell, “Broken Windows,
Broken Code,” Real Life, August 29, 2016, http://reallifemag.com/broken-w indows-broken
-code/; Cathy O’Neil, Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and
Threatens Democracy (New York: Crown, 2016). Ruha Benjamin, Race After Technology: Abo
litionist Tools for the New Jim Code (Cambridge: Polity, 2019).
23. Amanda Fama, “Beauty Contest Regrets Using Robots for Judges after Only White
People Win,” Elite Daily, September 9, 2016, https://www.elitedaily.com/news/beauty
-contest-robot-judges-regrets/1606213; Navneet Alang, “Facebook Algorithms Can’t Re-
place Good Judgment,” Globe and Mail, September 9, 2016, https://www.theglobeandmail.
com/opinion/facebook-a lgorithms-c ant-replace-good-judgment/article31805498/; Dave
Gershgorn, “It’s Getting Tougher to Tell if You’re on the Phone with a Machine or Human,”
Quartz, September 9, 2016, https://qz.com/778056/google-deepminds-wavenet-a lgorithm
-can-accurately-m imic-human-voices/; Cory Doctorow, “Blackballed by Machine Learn-
ing: How Algorithms Can Destroy Your Chance of Getting a Job,” BoingBoing, September
8, 2016, https://boingboing.net/2016/09/08/blackballed-by-machine-learnin.html; Emma
Lundin, “Could an Algorithm Replace the Pill?,” Guardian, November 7, 2016, https://
www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/nov/07/natural-c ycles-fertility-app-a lgorithm
-replace-pill-contraception. Read with: Marcus Gilroy-Ware, Filling the Void: Emotion, Capi
talism, and Social Media (London: Repeater Books, 2017).
24. Julia Angwin, Jeff Larson, Surya Mattu, and Lauren Kirchner, “Machine Bias,” Pro
Publica, accessed June 20, 2016, https://www.propublica.org/article/machine-bias-r isk
-assessments-i n-criminal-sentencing.
25. Walt L. Perry, Brian McInnis, Carter C. Price, Susan C. Smith, and John S. Holly-
wood, Predictive Policing: The Role of Crime Forecasting in Law Enforcement Operations (Santa
Monica, CA: Rand, 2013); Andrew Guthrie Ferguson, “Predictive Policing and Reasonable
Suspicion,” Emory Law Journal 259 (2012): 261 – 313; Samuel Greengard, “Policing the Fu-
ture,” Communications of the acm 55, no. 3 (March 2012): 19 – 21.
26. Predpol, “About,” accessed February 1, 2017, http://www.predpol.com/about/.
27. Greengard, “Policing the Future,” 19 (emphasis added).
34. “Never stop the action / keep it up / keep it up”: Grace Jones, “Jones the Rhythm,”
Slave to the Rhythm, Island Records, 1985. Also recall Jones’s live performances of “Slave to the
Rhythm,” where she hula-hoops throughout the entire song, often for over eight minutes —
no beat lost. See Grace Jones, “Slave to the Rhythm — Live avo Session,” YouTube video,
8:33, posted June 26, 2010, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yPHmJLRFv8c.
When I was writing this story, I stopped several times because I didn’t
want to finish it. I felt tired and defeated. In fact, I hated my argument
and I came to despise algorithms. I realized that the work of coding — the
practical science of computer science — was impenetrable and unwelcom-
ing to a person who has not been trained in the discipline. I hated what I
wanted to know and why I wanted to know it. My curiosity diminished. I
am not a computer scientist: everything I read that was intelligible — the
articles and books that spelled out how algorithms are undemocratic and
racist — affirmed racism. What I read did not take me anywhere new and,
at the same time, gave me a future I did not want. I didn’t know anything
yet I knew something. The only transparency for me, a non – computer
scientist, was premature and preventable death. I also resented the con-
text through which I and we are writing and thinking — normalized racial
violence, lists of the dead and dying, the same old thing: “rampant textu-
ality” coupled with excessive unspeakable violence that leads us on a lin-
ear path to a future of unfreedom.36
36. The term “rampant textuality” is from Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and
Double Consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 78.
37. Disaster.
Listen to.1
The title of this story is from “Housequake,” by Prince, on Sign o’ the Times, Paisley Park/
Warner Brothers, 1987.
1. This story was written with: AbdouMaliq Simone, Adam Elliott-Cooper, Alexander
Weheliye, Barrington Walker, Carmen Kynard, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Eric Lott, Errol Naza-
reth, Esther Harvey, Kara Keeling, Kiese Laymon, Maya Stitski, Renée Green, SA Smythe,
Shana M. Griffin, Shana Redmond, Simone Browne, Steven Osuna, Tia-Simone Gardner,
Yaniya Lee.
Damon Davis featuring Tonina, “Light Years”
Dionne Warwick, “Don’t Make Me Over”
Donna Summer, “I Feel Love”
Ebony Bones, “w.a.r.r.i.o.r.”
The English Beat, “Twist and Crawl”
Erykah Badu, “Didn’t Cha Know”
Erykah Badu, “The Healer”
Fauness, “Street Song”
fka Twigs, “Cellophane”
Frank Ocean, “Nikes”
Gil Scott-Heron “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised”
Idris Ackamoor and the Pyramids, “Sunset”
Janelle Monáe, “Americans”
Jimmy Cliff, “Many Rivers to Cross”
j.o.e. featuring Konshens, “Fit”
Kamasi Washington, “Fists of Fury”
Kano, “Endz”
Kendrick Lamar, “i”
Khia, “My Neck, My Back (Lick It)”
Kojey Radical featuring Mahalia, “Water (If They Only Knew)”
Labi Siffre, “Remember My Song”
Laura Mvula, “That’s Alright”
Layla Hendryx, “Rain or Snow”
Leikeli47, “Money”
Lion Babe, “Treat Me Like Fire”
Mariah Carey, “The Distance”
Max Roach and Abbey Lincoln, “Triptych: Prayer, Protest, Peace”
Millie Jackson, “Phuck U Symphony” (Live)
Millie Jackson, “Put Something Down on It” (Live)
Missy Elliott, “The Rain (Supa Dupa Fly)”
Mobb Deep featuring Lil’ Kim, “Quiet Storm” (Remix)
Moor Mother, “By the Light”
Nas, “NY State of Mind”
Native, “Late September in May”
Neneh Cherry featuring Michael Stipe, “Trout”
Nina Simone, “Ain’t Got No/I Got Life”
Nina Simone, “Pirate Jenny”
Nitty Scott, “bbygrl”
OutKast, “The Whole World”
The subtitle of this story, “Bad Made Measure,” is from M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (To-
ronto: Mercury Press, 2008), 5.
1. See John Keene, Counternarratives: Stories and Novellas (New York: New Directions,
2015); and Richa Nagar, Muddying the Waters: Coauthoring Feminisms across Scholarship and
Activism (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2014).
2. A different version of this paper can be found here: Katherine McKittrick, “Diachronic
Loops/Deadweight Tonnage/Bad Made Measure,” Cultural Geographies 23, no. 1 (Decem-
ber 2015): 1–16.
science into conversation with autopoietics, black Atlantic livingness,
weights and measures, and poetry. A biocentric knowledge system and
conception of the human, as noted throughout many of these stories, re-
fers to the lawlike order of knowledge that posits a Darwinian narrative of
the human — that we are purely biological and bio-evolutionary beings —
as universal.3
3. Joyce E. King and Sylvia Wynter, “Race and Our Biocentric Belief System: An Inter-
view with Sylvia Wynter,” in Black Education: A Transformative Research and Action Agenda,
ed. Joyce. E. King (Washington, DC: American Educational Research Association, 2005),
361–366. Here Wynter provides us with an original formulation that is distinctly different
from biocentrism (as taken up in environmental ethics). See Patrick George Derr and Ed-
ward M. McNamara, Case Studies in Environmental Ethics (New York: Rowman and Little-
field, 2003).
4. “The Negroes are animals. They go about naked.” Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White
Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (1952; rpt., New York: Grove, 1967), 165.
5. “My body was given back to me sprawled out . . . ” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 113.
6. “Recently an acquaintance told me a story. A Martinique Negro landed at La Havre
and went into a bar . . . ” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 21.
7. “The Negro symbolizes the biological.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 167.
8. “With the Negro the cycle of the biological begins.” Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks,
161.
126 (Zong)
This story is an imperfect and unfinished working through of how we
think about, study, and theorize racial violence. The story explores how
racial violence is structured through the enmeshment of positivism and
biocentricity — the social scientific and empirical verification of racial-
gendered-classed-queered corporeal-locational differences among hu-
mans. Racial violence illuminates the difficult work of showing (prov-
ing) that discrimination, hate, racism, and other forms of oppression are
unjust because they emerge from false claims of racial inferiority that are
supported by bewitching scientific biases (a biocentric conception of the
human assumes that we, as a species, have evolved differentially accord-
ing to race-ethnicity; race functions to naturalize this conception of the
human). Our work exposes the falsities. The exposed falsities, our proof,
engenders hopeful anxiety.
A large cluster of analytical work on race —and specifically blackness—
draws attention to the unjust violence done to black people’s bodies. The
body is the primary site of analysis. This work seeks to refuse scientific
racism. Some analyses of the violated black body are coupled with op-
positional narratives wherein black embodied knowledge is valued as a
site of resistance. Black embodied knowledge radically overturns the
normalizing workings of white supremacy by enunciating, demand-
ing, and asserting black agency and humanity. At the same time, how-
ever, because the body and embodied knowledge are so tightly bound
together — the physiological body imbues epistemology and ontology
and comportment — often the black body, alone, is thrown into sharp
(analytical) relief, displacing or hiding black agentive-intellectual labor.
As a category of analysis (not an experiential physiology) the black body
often signifies the “why” and “where” and “how” and “when” and “what”
of racial violence; as a concept and category of analysis, the black body
is the site where scrutiny and critique of violence takes place. The black
body is never worn out or worn down. The black body is a site of experi-
mentation, medicalization, study, data collection. The black body is the
target (the bullseye and the objective) of hate and racist violence. The
black body gives. The black body is scanned, worked on, and worked over.
The black body carries and comports our liberation.
While theories of corporeality complement and complicate how we
think through blackness, I wonder if the black body, as an analytic, can
be imagined outside violation. This raises a number of open-ended ques-
tions: What happens when the black body is positioned, in itself and on
its own, as racial knowledge? What happens when the black body is, in
128 (Zong)
articulates an unexpected scientific promise. The overarching work of
the vignettes, the poetry, and the story as a whole is to push against the
tendency to read blackness in/and science through a singular analytical
model (one that classifies black people as less than human, or, one that
leans on biological determinism and its bewitching misrepresentations
of the black body). I conclude with a brief discussion that addresses the
difficulties of reading, teaching, and analyzing racial violence, particu-
larly when we rely on data sets that seek to grapple with race by relying
on the axiom that biological race is socially produced. In this story, I am
not dismissing or disputing the social production of race. I am, instead,
questioning how comfortably falling back on this reasoning — that race is
a fiction — can, in some (not all) instances, be underpinned by quiet bio-
centric logics. While each section has textual boundaries, the parts and
pieces of data and theory and narrative, when read in tandem, draw atten-
tion to an analytical praxis that highlights how reading across (reading
with, writing relationally, sharing with each other) is one way to coun-
ter the scholarly objectification of black people and their pain while also
drawing attention to the richness of their geographies, stories, theories,
songs, lovingness, effort.9
S C I E N C E S T U D I E S , T H E S I N G U L A R I Z AT I O N
OF BLACK BIOLOGICS, AUTOPOIETICS
Since about the 1970s, feminist science studies and feminist philosophies
of science have provided a theoretical critique of scientific neutrality and
epistemological purity. Feminist science studies have developed research
queries that are committed to challenging biological determinism and the
absented role of women in the sciences.10 These studies have also contrib-
9. “There was, quite simply, no secret about the killings of Africans on the Atlantic slave
ships.” James Walvin, The Zong: A Massacre, the Law, and the End of Slavery (New Haven,
CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 115.
10. Anne Fausto-Sterling, Myths of Gender: Biological Theories about Women and Men
(New York: Basic, 1985); Donna Haraway, Primate Visions: Gender, Race, and Nature in the
World of Modern Science (New York: Routledge, 1989); Donna Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (New York: Routledge, 1991); Sandra Harding, Whose
Science? Whose Knowledge? Thinking from Women’s Lives (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University
Press, 1991); David Noble, A World without Women: The Christian Clerical Culture of Western
Science (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992); Sharon Traweek, Beamtimes and Lifetimes:
The World of High Energy Physicists (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992).
11. Sandra Harding, ed., The “Racial” Economy of Science: Toward a Democratic Future
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993); Haraway, Simians, Cyborgs, and Women. No-
table, although often not mentioned, are the ways in which Haraway’s landmark concept of
“situated knowledge” is, in large part, made possible through her reading of the life and cre-
ative work of Nigerian author Buchi Emecheta.
12. Lundy Braun, Breathing Race into the Machine: The Surprising Career of the Spirom
eter from Plantation to Genetics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2014); Eve-
lynn Hammonds and Banu Subramaniam, “A Conversation on Feminist Science Studies,”
Signs 28, no. 3 (2003): 923–944; Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and
Big Business Re-create Race in the Twenty-First Century (New York: New Press, 2011); Banu
Subramaniam, “Moored Metamorphoses: A Retrospective Essay on Feminist Science Stud-
ies,” Signs 34, no. 4 (2009): 951–980; Karla F. C. Holloway, Private Bodies, Public Texts: Race,
Gender and a Cultural Bioethics (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011); Alondra Nel-
son, “Bio Science: Genetic Genealogy Testing and the Pursuit of African Ancestry,” Social
Studies of Science 38, no. 5 (2008): 759–783; Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of dna: Race,
Reparations, and Reconciliation after the Genome (Boston: Beacon, 2016); Simone Browne,
Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness (Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
2015).
130 (Zong)
tice of documenting and knowing otherness and epidermal differences
puts demands on how we ethically respond to processes of racialization,
particularly wherein the black body is scanned, worked on, and worked
over. They also punctuate, in terrifying ways, how race is knotted to me-
chanical infrastructures (labs, actuators, control panels, levers, switches,
cylinders, motherboards, bearings, needles, vials, pullies, scales) and, as
well, how these infrastructures bend and flex to accommodate biocentric
ways of knowing.
In feminist science studies and science studies of race, then, three over-
lapping fields of study emerge: research that addresses the ways in which
the racial underpinnings of science have long informed analyses of so-
cial inequities, poverty, racial and sexual discrimination, citizenship, and
belonging; research on themes such as genomes, blood quantum, mis-
cegenation, the bell curve, intelligence testing, and reproductive tech-
nologies, all of which bring into focus racial formations; investigations
that examine and critique the ways in which the body, phenotype, skulls,
height, hair, and gender comportment are indicators of biological differ-
ences among humans. In these areas of study two important themes are
worth highlighting: that race is socially produced yet differentially lived
vis-à-v is structural inequalities; and that the application of science can
and does adversely shape the lives of women, poor, and nonwhite com-
munities. In other words, although science is a knowledge system that
socially produces what it means to be biologically human, it is also the
epistemological grounds through which racial and sexual essentialism is
registered and lived. These research foci and themes, for the most part,
tend to focus on the long-standing prominence of scientific “facts” devel-
oped between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the dominance
of the colonial and patriarchal Western knowledge systems and scientific
racism, and the project of undoing these histories. These foci and themes
are anchored, implicitly or explicitly, to the body and bodies and, among
these corporeal clusters, the black body is the fulcrum of experimenta-
tion, medicalization, study, data collection.
While feminist science studies and cognate studies of race in/and sci-
ence constitute vast areas of inquiry — research themes range from equity
in engineering to environmental racism — the question of where we know
science from remains relevant precisely because, as Subramaniam has
brilliantly argued, the field has actually continued without comprehen-
sively attending to colonialism and has rarely moved beyond a critique
132 (Zong)
and naturalized fictive truths of scientific racism by exposing how race
underpins, and indeed propels, the autopoiesis of biocentricity.
In Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela track the discursive and biological enact-
ment of social life through autopoiesis. By examining cellular networks,
the theorists explain how the system that houses the cellular network is
a closed and recursive system. The cellular network understands itself as
bounded; any cellular growth or cellular changes that occur do so only
through the reconstitution of the system that houses and sustains the
cells. The system is closed and self-referential, and the cellular network is
committed to this system because it realizes itself through the process of
recursion.18 The argument that follows is that the organization of human
life — which underpins the enactment of ourselves and each other and our
attendant environments — is comparable to, but not twinning, the cellular
networks as just described. Here the practice of being human is relational
to and embedded in a living-system that replicates itself and, in this, rep-
licates what it means to be human according to the parameters of the exist
ing social system. Autopoiesis is the process through which we repeat the
conditions of our present mode of existence in order to keep the living-
system — our environmental and existential world, our humanness —
living. The living-system is normalized and inconspicuous and comfort-
able (our attachment and allegiance to the system keeps it living). Here,
too, the processes of repetition and replication fold into each other dem-
onstrating the corelational workings of how we know our human life and,
simultaneously, do not notice the process of recursion: the practice of be-
ing human, and the enactment of social life, replicates itself with the ana-
lytic, affective, and material talisman of realization inducing the replica-
tion of how things already are and therefore normalizing the system as
imperceptibly quotidian. As humans, we organize ourselves according
to self-referential social systems: these systems are many and intercon-
nected (and they can be bound up in our scholarly practices).19
Science studies of blackness, as noted above, expose a bundled auto
poietic system that perpetuates and singularizes the logic of biological
determinism. This disciplined and singularized logic, resting on a habit-
18. Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realiza
tion of the Living (London: D. Reidel, 1972).
19. Nikolas Luhmann, Social Systems, trans. J. Bednarz Jr. and D. Baecker (Stanford, CA:
Stanford University Press, 1995).
134 (Zong)
struction,” to make sense. The analytical and methodological purpose
then — to name and dismantle race and racism — tends to move from the
(firmly entrenched) racialized physiological figure outward. Black lives
are reduced, in this process, to analytical data and are cast as figures that
are biologically determined to become factual parts of a bigger habitual
belief system invested in racial differentiation. This uncovers a teleo-
logical narrative where the body violated by racist scientific narratives is
the anchor to a liberatory trajectory and thus can, in this closed system,
only realize itself and keep living by — to paraphrase Frantz Fanon —
moving from subhumanness toward a genre of humanness that despises
blackness.21
With this in mind, it is notable that some analyses of black lives and
black histories that solely focus on naming scientific racism fall back on
a biocentric model. As such, some analytical approaches to race — across
disciplines — inadvertently produce blackness as less-than-human in or-
der to point to the problematic narratives that are attached to those who
are socially produced as less-t han-human. Biological determinism and
the critique of biological determinism, together, flatten out and singu-
larize the biologics of blackness. This forecloses the relational and com-
plicated interdisciplinary workings of black studies. In this formulation,
scientific racism continues to have the last word precisely because it is
recursively enacted as socially constructed. Conceptually, the critique is
useful — the work of demystifying race and racism is difficult and impor-
tant and urgent. However, at times, this demystifying work necessarily
involves marking blackness as a site of false racial defectiveness that rein-
forces, analytically, black-as-always-defective. An analytical conundrum
is thus posed, one that echoes the concerns Fanon identified in 1952: How
might we think about the social construction of race in terms that notice
how the condition of being black is knotted to scientific racism but not
wholly defined by it?22
21. Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Constance Farrington (New York:
Grove, 1963), 163. Fanon writes: “Bourgeois ideology, however, which is the proclamation of
an essential equality between men, manages to appear logical in its own eyes by inviting the
sub-men to become human, and to take as their prototype Western humanity as incarnated
in the Western bourgoisie.”
22. Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks.
If we turn to the writings of Sylvia Wynter we can observe how the repeti-
tive naming and critique of biological determinism is nested in a mon-
umental system of biocentricity. Wynter allows us to work through the
ongoing predicament Fanon identified (the condition of being black is
knotted to scientific racism but not wholly defined by it). This narrative
block takes us back in time, momentarily returning to the above section,
in order to prepare for the forthcoming columns and the discussion of
Zong!
136 (Zong)
‘forms of life’ gives expression to [a] . . . hybridly organic and . . . languaging
existence.”24
Wynter draws attention to the ways in which alternative human formations
inform our worldview. She writes, then, that there is “always something else be-
sides the dominant cultural logic going on, and that something else is constituted
another — but also transgressive — ground of understanding . . . not simply a so-
ciodemographic location but the site both of a form of life and of possible critical
intervention.”25 Importantly, the possible critical interventions are not the opposi-
tional narratives or reclamations that prize what Wynter calls the overpresentation
of Man-as-human.26 Wynter’s project, instead, demonstrates the ways in which
the practice of opposing and/or reclaiming can, in fact, be made through and
against, and thus in the image of Man-as-human (the organization of human life
is conceptualized along racial-biological lines; evolutionary differences are tagged
as false; the description of difference — say, the wrongness of black inferiority —
is repetitively constituted as socially constructed by science; the wrongness of
science repeats the racial-biological description [black inferiority, black inferior-
ity, black inferiority]; the biocentric system of knowledge [expressed as Man-as-
human] remains powerful and empowered and loops around, again, to naturalize
racial-sexual differentiation).
The “something else” that is “going on” is a new worldview, or an interhuman
lens, that moves beyond the bio-evolutionary story of Man and toward the in-
scriptions of being human that unsettle this racial logic. Part of Wynter’s concern
is that the dominant belief system about what it means to be human follows
governing codes that divide and sort science and creativity: the human, in this
formulation, is primarily physiological while creativity is an extrahuman activity.
With the category of race in mind, we can observe how the bifurcation of science
and creativity can reify racial differentiation: the bifurcation posits, in advance,
that all humans are bio-evolutionary beings that develop and progress toward cre-
ative acts that are nonphysiological. Wynter argues however, that we must notice
the ways in which we, as humans, are simultaneously biological and cultural and
alterable beings — skin and masks, bios and mythoi. This positions humans as be-
ings whose physiological origins are relational to representation and narrative.
24. Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the
Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington,
DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 7 (emphasis in the original).
25. David Scott, “The Re-enchantment of Humanism: An Interview with Sylvia Wyn-
ter,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 164.
26. Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom,” 257–337.
138 (Zong)
THE ZONG
28. The references informing the three columns are James Walvin, The Zong, 11, 95–98,
101, 213; Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Cambridge,
MA: Harvard University Press, 1993), 16; Sonjah Stanley Niaah, DanceHall: From Slave
Ship to Ghetto (Ottawa: University of Ottawa Press, 2010), 19; Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica
Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom,” Me
ridian 12, no. 2 (2014): 169–195; Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 12, no. 2
(June 2008): 4, 1–14; Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” Black Scholar 44, no.
2 (Summer 2014), 16–28; Erin McMullen Fehskens, “Accounts Unpaid, Accounts Untold:
M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong! and the Catalogue,” Callaloo 35, no. 2 (Spring 2012), 407–424;
Joshua Smyth, “How to Calculate Dead Weight,” Sciencing, accessed March 25, 2018, https://
sciencing.com/calculate-dead-weight-7289046.html. See also Ian Baucom’s Specters of the
Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke Univer-
sity Press, 2005), which tracks how slavery and capitalism, key sites of modernity, contextu-
alize the historically present workings of credit, insurance, liability, recompense.
James Walvin wrote a legal If the history Walvin un There are many social
history of the slave ship covers (to the left) is one theories that attend to the
the Zong. Walvin’s research of public racial violence slave ship, the Atlantic
tracks the deliberate killing and the anticipation of slave triangle, and the
of enslaved black people different instances of Middle Passage. I will
that occurred in 1781 so postslave premature death, outline a few that have
that the slavers could both we would do well to think most directly informed
survive and collect insur- through how the seeming this story and lead to my
ance on their massacred scientific underpinnings discussion ahead and look
human cargo. Walvin of modernity — acts that back on Walvin’s history
writes: weigh and measure and and deadweight (left). The
differentiate — are in- first is Paul Gilroy’s
“It was calculated that the
sinuated into, and push discussion of the slave
ship now had enough water
up against, the knowledge ship in The Black Atlantic,
for only four days, but that
systems that narrate the where he argues that the
it would take between ten
Zong. slave ship is a technology
and fourteen days to sail
of modernity that con-
back to Jamaica. . . . On We might dwell, even
nected various diasporic
29 November [1781] the more, on the measure-
geographies and histories
crew were assembled and ments that make this
of terror; Gilroy’s discus-
asked what they thought of difficult diasporic life
sion of the ship under-
the suggestion that, faced possible, in part because
scores — or presupposes, to
with the water crisis, ‘Part the practice of empiri-
use his word — his critique
of the slaves should be cal containment provides
of ethnic absolutism thus
destroyed . . .’ At 8 pm the conditions for social
demonstrating how slave
that evening fifty-four theories (to the right) to
and postslave struggles
women and children were interrupt and undo the
evidence the complicated
pushed overboard. . . . Two biocentric logic of race. It
work of belonging. Gilroy’s
days later . . . a group of is through conceptualizing
analysis draws atten-
forty-two men were thrown weights and measures as
tion to J. M. W. Turner’s
overboard from the quar- relational to and distin-
1840 painting The Slave
terdeck. A third batch of guished from black life
Ship (Slavers Throwing
thirty-eight Africans were that the promise of the
Overboard the Dead and
killed some time later: slave ship emerges.
Dying — Typhoon Coming
ten Africans, realizing
Here the positivist under- On), which was inspired
what was about to happen,
pinnings of modernity open by the Zong massacre (and
jumped to their deaths.”
140 (Zong)
Some History, cont. Weights and Measures, cont. Some Social Theory, cont.
The history Walvin uncov- up, just fleetingly, to reor- enlivens black premature
ers is disturbing: he der or mark black life and death through descriptively
evidences that the killings breach the closed system coding the enslaved as not
were premeditated and that is so often understood simply dead, but also “dy-
situates this racial violence as a location that houses ing”). Gilroy theorizes the
within the context of the objecthood and death. slave ship as purposeful
slave trade: and living.
Maritime knowledge
“Killing Africans was not systems are grounded by Gilroy theorizes the slave
unusual” and, moreover, weights and measures. ship as purposeful and
was “not a matter of There are numerous living and thereby provides
murder.” scientific and mathematic the conceptual platform
calculations that under- for Sonjah Stanley Niaah’s
What emerges first,
write ship design, safety research, which discusses
through this narrative
measures, port fees, man- the restless resistances
of history, is the closed
ning regulations, and so that emerge when black
system circulating through
forth. But most interesting geographies are under
and beyond the Zong. The
to me is the concept of siege.
history conveyed points
deadweight tonnage — a
to the acceptability of Niaah works through how
postslavery term — for it is
black death. The archival those aboard the slave ship
this measure of weight that
research done by Walvin, and the Middle Passage
brings together and col-
which I won’t replicate reorder linear time through
lapses the entirety of the
here, demonstrates the rhythm, with the Brath-
ship’s weight. This is to say
ways in which the legal waitian “limbo” signifying
that unlike gross tonnage
landscape simply oversees the simultaneity of dis-
or net tonnage — which
racial violence. Indeed, placement and reinvention.
measure internal vol-
as one reads his text, the She dwells on livingness
ume and cargo, respec-
historian Walvin refers to not to refuse violence
tively — the deadweight
the justified, admissible, and loss but to illuminate
tonnage, or deadweight
commonsense killing of the ways in which black
capacity measurement,
human cargo throughout aesthetics — dance, song,
takes into consideration
the slave trade multiple diasporic literacies —
all provisions, crew, fuel,
times, thus remarking that engender alternative
cargo, and so forth.
the violence aboard the modes of freedom.
Zong was not unusual; as Deadweight tonnage is
Alternative modes of
a result he lays bare for everything and everyone
freedom are expressed
the reader the mundane as viewed and calculated
workings of racist violence. through the lens of weights through a range of black
In many ways, this history and measures. sexual identifications and
is a closed system — for the practices, as noted by Treva
What these weights and
pages claim to uncover a Lindsey and Jessica Marie
measures offer is a way
“murderous secret” that Johnson. Alternative modes
to remathematize black
is, as you continue to of freedom, a range of
life, for in deadweight
read, not a secret at all. sexual identifications and
the entirety of the ship is
Indeed, the text needs an practices, yoked to but not
subjected to a measure-
engagement with explicit replicating a closed system.
ment system that bundles
and mundane antiblack
everything and everyone These insights can be
violence to move forward:
together. thought about alongside
racism and black death
Saidiya Hartman’s research
provide the conditions There is only a singu-
that dwells on the ways in
through which British- lar deadweight tonnage
which the data of the ship
ness makes itself known measurement even though
renders the enslaved part
and realizes itself, for the there are a range of people
of a register, a record, a
Zong would, Walvin argues, and objects that make this
ledger, a tally of debits.
figure into antislavery weight possible. The mea-
campaigns and then lead surement erases human- (Labs, actuators, control
to British rejection of their ness just as it enacts it, panels, levers, switches,
“lucrative habit.” This is a for the deadweight signals cylinders, motherboards,
biocentric history, so there the unfolding of modernity bearings, needles, vials,
is little to no room for an and collective human lives pullies, scales.)
unusual or alternative tale alongside, rather than be-
Hartman’s thinking demon-
or the promised secrets: fore or after, the biological
strates how the tabulation
the dimensions of racial determinant.
of antiblack violence and
difference stay in place
The deadweight measure unfreedom are legible only
while emancipatory tenets
tasks us to review the ship as a loss.
are soldered to exploitation
through relational and con-
that is shrouded in white No matter how hard we
nective means — bundled
benevolence. try to retell the story, the
data sets that are both
quantitative matters of
At the same time, though, closed and open, past and
the slave trade emerge as
the historian provides a present — without losing
the official story. No matter
mathematical opening. those biocentric codes that
how hard we try.
Walvin initially puts forth differentiate the weight
confident numbers — those sources and noticing, of Any discussion of archival
just listed above — which course, that the dead- loss asks that we recognize
142 (Zong)
Some History, cont. Weights and Measures, cont. Some Social Theory, cont.
allow the reader to tabulate weight will be relieved in the archives as tracking
the number of Africans crisis through the loss of the incomplete project of
killed: 186. Despite black life. freedom. This incomplete-
Walvin’s data, though, he ness opens up the work of
Here the biocentric nar-
also exclaims that these imagination—iterations
rative is not situated as
numbers are unreliable: of black life that cannot
the primary analytic story;
“There is some confusion,” be contained by official
instead, biocentricity is
he writes, “about the pre- history.
correlational to transport
cise numbers killed.” He
and other scientific mat- Keep trying.
follows this with a series
ters that, together, are
of other numbers: 150, These theorists (differ-
brought into being by
142, 122, one-third of the ently) provide a conceptual
black and other human
Africans on board. Other frame that can be stacked
lives.
histories of the Zong are onto and situated along-
also unclear about the num- The weights and measures, side Walvin’s history and
ber of Africans killed: 150, the bundled (anachronis- the weights and measures
133, 132, 123. The death tic) deadweight tonnage, (left). In these texts, one
tabulation is, as I read it, provide the conditions for can read the ways in which
best understood as a range us to, analytically, shift the technology and science
of numbers gathered from our focus away from the of the slave ship not only
many texts and sources. The always oppressed black reduced black humans
inability to count the dead body and toward a different to cargo but also, in this
allows us to doubt knowable set of questions that ask process of objectification,
data and a singular analyti- how the measurability of provided the conditions
cal frame, and therefore to violence—and thus the through which blackness
open ourselves up to body— lends a voice to is rearticulated as rebel-
another set of questions and black life. liously diasporic.
numbers that follow along-
The closed analyti- Likewise, there is a naming
side and after the Zong.
cal system, wherein we of violence and death as
With this opening in place,
theoretically describe the an insistence that black
one cannot help but think
brutalities of slavery as the life — not just black sur-
about these deliberate kill-
origin of black oppression, vival — informs modernity.
ings alongside a whole host
is breached on the recogni- In short, the empirical
of contemporary premature
tion of the analytics of purpose of the slave ship
and preventable deaths
black life: 150, 142, 122, belies its ongoing living
that continue to realize the
one-third of the Africans history.
closed system—deaths that
on board . . .
are too many to list and too Things Needed: ship; The closed analytical sys-
many to grieve (miners shot, draft marks; calculator or tem, wherein we theoretical-
killing black youths to bring computer: Note all provi- ly describe the brutalities of
silence to black music, sions and cargoes being slavery as the origin of black
executing the unarmed). loaded onto the ship. Add oppression, is breached on
together the weights of recognition of the analytics
(No matter how hard we
each piece of cargo, each of black life.
try to retell the story, the
passenger or crew member,
quantitative matters of Noticeably, across these
and all provisions that
the slave trade emerge as theoretical texts, the
have been loaded onboard.
the official story.) mathematical data of the
Calculate the weight of
slave ship is continually
In many ways, the deliber- fuel: multiply the volume
interrupted by an assertion
ate murdering of black of fuel taken aboard by its
of life and therefore a new
slaves on the Zong eerily density. Calculations are
definition of livingness.
anticipates our contempo- commonly performed in
rary struggles with racial metric units. Fuel oil has I read these texts, and the
violence. This is not to a density of 890 kilograms actors within — diasporic
conflate time and space per cubic meter, mean- figures in limbo — as a dis-
but, rather, to notice how ing that a ship that has ruption of racist violence.
the Zong moves forward in loaded 1 cubic meter (or
These texts offer a genre
time and becomes impli- 100 liters) of fuel has
of black life and a way of
cated in a similar circular added 890 kilograms to
being black.
closed system: in naming its weight. Add the fuel
these histories as evidence weight to the weight of Here, then, racist violence
of the violent, ongoing, cargo, passengers, and — normalized premature
but differential workings provisions to calculate death as well as the slow
of premature or prevent- total deadweight. Or: Find death that informs black
able death, the history of the ship’s displacement life, black lives, and black
the Zong points to how marks. These are white histories — is animated
we know our human life ruler lines on the bottom by a relationality wherein
through instances of black of the bow and stern of the a different kind of living
death; the practice of being hull. Note which displace- figure emerges.
human and the enactment ment line is sitting at the
These texts do not move
of social life is sustaining water level before loading
from racial violence toward
itself through the replica- the ship. Load the ship
a freedom that houses and
tion of how things already with all crew, cargo, fuel,
replicates racial violence.
are. With this history in and provisions. Note which
144 (Zong)
Some History, cont. Weights and Measures, cont. Some Social Theory, cont.
mind, the Zong stands as a displacement mark is now Instead, they differently
cosmogony of contemporary at the waterline. Consult notice that the slave ship
racial violence, throwing the ship’s displacement and the horrors of slavery
blackness overboard, again tables, which have formu- engendered difficult forms
and again, and thus real- las to calculate how much of diasporic livingness that
izing—in the present—a water has been displaced that cannot write itself-say-
living network of scientific based on the shape of the itself-know-itself within
racism and despair where ship’s hull. The weight the logics of plantocratic-
black life has no beginning of the displaced water is colonial registers.
and a discourse of eman- equal to the weight loaded
cipatory benevolence—the onto the ship — that is, the
Zong as antislavery technol- deadweight.
ogy—expresses Fanon’s
predicament.
ZONG!
It is in concert with and within NourbeSe Philip’s long poem Zong! that
history, weights and measures, and social theories of the slave ship and
the Atlantic emerge and intertwine. Reading the creative text with and
through the columned vignettes both reveals and disproves biocentric
logics, therefore also reaching and bending back to the narrative blocks
above. Zong! works within and thinks outside a closed system, and this
inside-outside uncovers an autopoietic system. Because I am focusing on
a text-based analysis and working with autopoiesis and network systems,
I have found diachronic loops a useful and complementary concept. In
their theories of loops and self-referencing, David Levary and his col-
leagues explore how words, definitions, and concepts are interrelated.
Their research examines lexical networks — which we can here, in a small
way, liken to the aforementioned social systems and cellular networks.
The study shows how distinct semantic ideas remain coherent even when
new words are introduced into the network. Levary and his colleagues
use etymological data to show that even as new words disrupt and re
imagine the broader definitional and conceptual ideas, this is done within
a self-referencing system. Within this system are diachronic loops — clus-
ters of words, definitions, and concepts that are introduced into the sys-
tem at different times and thus hold in them the possibility to question
29. David Levary, Jean-Pierre Eckmann, Elisha Moses, and Tsvi Tlusty, “Loops and Self-
Reference in the Construction of Dictionaries,” Physical Review X 2, no. 3 (2012), https://
journals.aps.org/prx/abstract/10.1103/PhysRevX.2.031018.
30. Marika Preziuso, “M. NourbeSe Philip—Zong!,” accessed December 22, 2013, http://
latineos.com/articulos/literatura/item/46-m-NourbeSe-philip-zong.html?lang=es.
31. Philip, Zong!, 191
146 (Zong)
deploys and enjoins the law, the data of the slave ship, unusual and norma-
tive calendars, songs, prayers, biblical and philosophical citations, histori-
cal narratives, archives, verses, multiple languages, phrases, ledgers, fugal
and counterpointed repetition, inventories, in order to exhibit the poetry
cycle.32 The poem includes a glossary, a journal entry, a legal document,
songs, a ship’s manifest, and a coauthor — Boateng — who is the voice of
the ancestors.
NourbeSe Philip’s poem and poetry cycle cannot, in my view, with-
stand an analysis that dwells on simply naming and reclaiming black
death. Indeed, I would argue that the poetry cycle is not preoccupied with
the past and resuscitating the dead but instead provides a future — and
part of this future involves reading black cultural production as invested
in history-making that names the data of violence in order to creatively
interrupt it and intentionally point to, and undo, the empirical and ana-
lytical violence that cannot sustain its own brutalities in the present. With
the creative in mind, the logistics of the history of slavery might be read
through the kind of lens NourbeSe Philip puts forth in Zong!: in these
poetics we not only find loss, history, and the anticipation of the ongoing
racial violences that engender and define us; we also notice in the text a
place where the data of the massacre, the calculated empirical and theo-
retical and public and scientific accumulation of black death, can no lon-
ger tell itself, in the present, within the terms that made it possible.
Of particular significance, then, is the livingness of the slave ship —
precisely because robust racial logics institute the Zong as predicated
on the dead and dying. The livingness of the ship forges the columns —
intimacies, rebellions, weights and measures, secrets that are not secret
at all — with Philip’s textual history. Here the voices within (sometimes
faded and in italics, sometimes in plain text, sometimes songs, sometimes
data) can be read alongside and with the empiricism of weights and mea-
sures that contain and extend black life beyond the ship itself. Most obvi-
ously, the excerpt “uncommon weight / great weight / uncommon weight /
great weight / new weight” brushes up against “perils of necessity / mor-
tality / slave / them was slaves not evidence.”33 As one reads through, dif-
ferent histories take place — more words, more concepts, more diachronic
loops that cut across and refuse a narrative of deadness and lend them-
selves to the livingness of the ship itself. The text gives us clues to what a
34. See, for example, Octavia Butler, Kindred (New York: Doubleday, 1979).
148 (Zong)
AGAINST DESCRIPTION
This is, in part, then, about teaching and learning from the analytics of
violence and race — for the story of the Zong asks that we be cautious
about singular (linear-enclosed) narratives while also noticing the ways
in which the logic of race is anchored to a monumental biocentric nar-
rative that is invested in replicating scientific racism (even in critique).
The intellectual work of honoring complex racial narratives that name
struggles against death can be, paradoxically, undermined by the ana-
lytical framing that dwells on and concretizes racial violence. The con-
ceptual difficulty lies in the ways in which descriptions of racial violence
actually contribute to the ongoing fragmentation of human relation-
ships. While biocentric narratives have certainly been contested — social
construction, sociocultural practices, nonlinear space-time experiences
and experiments, and performativity are just some ways our biocentric
world has been challenged — the language and process of explicating ra-
cial violence often tends to fall back on an axiomatic frame of survival
(wherein the suffering body and the dying have always been the margin-
alized human other who stands in opposition to the white Western liber-
ated human norm, precisely because black death precedes and is necessary
to this conceptual frame). This is a frame that delineates how the analytical
stakes of studying race and racism often only provide us with a descrip-
tive story that corresponds with our existing system of knowledge, one
that has already posited blackness and a black sense of place as dead and
dying.
Here we would do well to notice how the inhabitants of spaces of ab-
solute otherness can be, quite easily, discursively colonized by our intel-
lectual investigations.35 There is a tendency to focus on a certain mode
of appropriation and codification within mainstream academic questions
that profit from simultaneously devaluing and damning racial-sexual in-
tellectual narratives as we empirically collect wretched bodies. Within
this framework we can apparently fix and repair the racial other by pro-
ducing knowledge about the racial other that renders them less than hu-
man (and so often biologic skin, only and all body, is the dehumanizing
proof). No one moves. It is worth thinking about how the cyclical and
35. See Chandra Talpade Mohanty, “Under Western Eyes: Feminist Scholarship and Co-
lonial Discourses,” boundary 2 12, no. 3–13, no. 1 (1984): 333–358.
150 (Zong)
I GOT LIFE / REBELLION INVENTION GROOVE
The rhythm, the beat, was to become the central underlying principle.
— Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis
I n her essay on jazz, Dionne Brand writes that black music “leaves
you open, and up in the air and that this is the space that some of
us need, an opening to another life tangled up in this one but open-
ing.”1 Writings on black music abound, tracking a range of social, political,
economic, affective, and geographic patterns and contexts, as well as the
biographical narratives that inform music, music-making, and musicians.
These writings also draw attention to the tensions between the material-
ity of black music (the racial economies and racial histories that underpin
the production and distribution of black creative works), lyrical content
(if the tune indeed has lyrics), and the waveforms that underpin and soni-
cally frame song (beats, rhythms, acoustics, notational moods, frequen-
cies). Black musical aesthetics not only emerge within and against long-
standing antiblack practices; they are heard and listened to across and in
excess of the positivist workings of racism. Waveforms — beats, rhythms,
acoustics, notational moods, and frequencies that intersect with racial
economies and histories and available lyrical content — cannot be ex-
acted, yet they speak to exacting racial technologies. With this, black mu-
sic, what we hold on to and what we hear, moves between and across and
The title of this story, “I Got Life,” is from a song by Nina Simone and is on her album Nuff
Said (New York: rca Studios, 1968). This story, with minor differences, was previously pub-
lished as “Rebellion/Invention/Groove,” Small Axe 49 (March 2016): 79 – 91.
1. Dionne Brand, “Jazz,” in Bread out of Stone (New York: Random House/Vintage, 1994),
161.
outside ungraspable waveforms, the anticolonial politics underpinning
black cultural production, and the racial economy of white supremacy
that denies black personhood. In this story, I think about these tensions —
between waveforms, anticolonial politics, the memory of slavery, and
long-standing practices of racial violence — as they emerge in Sylvia Wyn-
ter’s Black Metamorphosis.
Before turning to an analysis of Black Metamorphosis, it is impor-
tant to briefly situate this monograph in relation to Wynter’s thinking
on art, cultural production, and music. Wynter’s dramatic plays and her
novel The Hills of Hebron, as well as her analyses of films, poetry, drama,
music, and fiction, demonstrate a steady critical engagement with cre-
ative worlds. Wynter works out how creative narratives (including but
not limited to the works of Ellison, Shakespeare, Cervantes, Morrison,
Glissant, Césaire, and Marley) simultaneously narrate and disrupt nor-
mative assertions of humanism.2 Her research draws attention to the
overlapping epistemologies fostered during and after imperialism, colo-
nialism, and transatlantic slavery, and uncovers the ways in which black
worldviews are relational to overarching systems of European and West-
ern knowledge. Indeed, overarching systems are powerfully anchored
to uneven practices of accumulation and dispossession that thrive on
replicating themselves through rewarding human activities that validate
inequities. Wynter’s insights on creative works are therefore not simply
a call to integrate “race” or “black art” into the global histories of the
West; rather, she argues that the perspectival economic imperialism of
the planet, and attendant racial processes such as plantation slavery, pro-
duced the conditions through which the colonized would radically and
creatively redefine — reword, to be specific — the representative terms of
2. See, for example, Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron: A Jamaican Novel (New York: Si-
mon and Schuster, 1962); Sylvia Wynter, “The Eye of the Other,” in Blacks in Hispanic Litera
ture: Critical Essays, ed. Miriam DeCosta (New York: Kennikat, 1977), 8 –19; Sylvia Wynter,
“Rethinking Aesthetics,” in Ex-iles: Essays on Caribbean Cinema, ed. Mbye Cham (Trenton,
NJ: Africa World Press, 1992), 238–279; Sylvia Wynter, “On Disenchanting Discourse: ‘Minor-
ity’ Literary Criticism and Beyond,” in The Nature and Context of Minority Discourse, ed. Ab-
dul R. JanMohamed and David Lloyd (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 432–469;
Sylvia Wynter, “One Love—Rhetoric or Reality?—Aspects of Afro-Jamaicanism,” Caribbean
Studies 12, no. 3 (October 1972): 90–97; Sylvia Wynter, “Ethno or Socio Poetics,” Alcheringa/
Ethnopoetics 2, no. 2 (1976): 78–94; Sylvia Wynter, “Jonkonnu in Jamaica: Towards the Inter-
pretation of Folk Dance as a Cultural Process,” Jamaica Journal 4, no. 2 (1970): 34–48; Sylvia
Wynter, “Maskarade,” in West Indian Plays for Schools, by Easton Lee, Sylvia Wynter, and Enid
Chevannes, vol. 2 (Kingston, Jamaica: Jamaica Publishing House, 1979), 26–55.
3. Demetrius Eudell, “Afterword: Toward Aimé Césaire’s ‘Humanism Made to the Mea-
sure of the World’: Reading The Hills of Hebron in the Context of Sylvia Wynter’s Later
Work,” in Sylvia Wynter, The Hills of Hebron (1962; rpt., Kingston, Jamaica: Ian Randle,
2010), 311 – 340; Carole Boyce Davies, “From Masquerade to Maskarade: Caribbean Cultural
Resistance and the Rehumanizing Project,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed.
Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 203 – 225.
4. I use the term “New World” following Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in
Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt
and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 5 – 57.
5. To clarify my terms: reinvention is the process through which enslaved and postslavery
black communities in the New World came to live and construct black humanity within the
context of racial violence: a range of rebellious acts that affirmed black humanity and black
life were and are imperative to reinvention. Invention is meant to signal those cultural prac-
tices and texts—marronages, mutinies, funerals, carnivals, dramas, visual arts, fictions, po-
ems, fights, dances, music-making and -listening, revolts—that emerged alongside reinvented
black lives. I want to point out, too, the relational workings of reinvention and invention: the
reinvention of black life and attendant cultural inventions were engendered by the Middle
Passage and plantation systems dynamically and simultaneously. One cannot reinvent the hu-
man without rebellious inventions, and rebellious inventions require reinvented lives.
6. Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World (unpublished ms.,
n.d.), 196.
REBELLION
22. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 243 – 244, 506. It important to underscore that the
specificity of African-ness, the varying intimacies of multifarious African indigenous lives,
are not exactly replicated by the enslaved — retention in the New World is trace, and trace is
repurposed in the context of the New World plantation logic.
23. In Black Metamorphosis Wynter’s concept of indigenization is not, it should be noted,
a discussion of teleological-temporal New World arrivals and here-fi rst-spatial-birth-claims;
indigenization is a verb. It is, then, a thinking through of the ways in which Middle Passage
and plantation systems produced a range of differential modes of knowing and uneven per-
ceptions of humanness (of which the enslaved black was excluded altogether as labor-u nit).
This analytical approach allows us to address and discuss: the heavy weight of normative
ideologies and values and the brutally oppressive technologies of slavery and colonialism
that, all together, produce modern relational histories and narratives and dynamic acts of
rebellion — rebellion is indigenization — against the codes of unfreedom that violently mar-
ginalize global damnés. See her discussion of the “underlife” throughout the manuscript,
too.
24. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 83.
25. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 248.
INVENTION
Black Metamorphosis traces the ways in which the Middle Passage and
plantation systems produced the conditions to reinvent new forms of hu-
man life. Rebellions, uprisings, and cultural production, Wynter writes,
disclose black intellectual strategies that “operated by a different principle
of thought from that of the rational mind related to that of the planta-
tion.”29 She continues: “Revolts were, at one and the same time, a form
of praxis and an abstract theoretical activity. Neither could be separated
from the other. Theory existed only in praxis; praxis was inseparable
47. For example, Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 82, 109, 412, 545 – 546, 817.
48. See also Wynter’s discussion of bios-mythoi and human being as praxis: Sylvia Wyn-
ter and Katherine McKittrick, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species? Or, to Give Hu-
manness a Different Future: Conversations,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis,
ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 1 – 89.
49. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 412.
50. Wynter, Black Metamorphosis, 245.
I have told this story elsewhere. Differently.1 This story has three sec-
tions that work toward reimagining the spatial politics of the black
diaspora. These sections can be read separately, together, or in any
order. I begin with method and the framing and organization of the story.
The first section, “The List,” is an excerpt of a human geography ency-
clopedia entry on diaspora.2 The entry has been revised, amended, and
modified; it also contains many ellipses, pauses . . . indicating breaks,
breaths, erasures that are not found in the original encyclopedia entry.
The list, with any luck, will hint at how cataloguing a material, concep-
tual, and imaginative site — diaspora — does little to undo, and indeed re-
constitutes, our present geographic order. “The List” serves as a guide, or
an opening, to the second section, “Ungeographic,” which outlines the
limits of mapping diaspora through prevailing geographic concepts. In
that section I discuss how listing functions to affirm mapping — a carto-
graphic practice that is laden with oppressive geographic techniques: in
short, to map the diaspora by enfolding it into a human geography ency-
clopedic entry and listing its fundamental characteristics forecloses the
radical spatial politics diaspora offers. In the final section of this story,
“Tormented Chronologies,” I work with the writings of Édouard Glis-
The title of this story, “(I Entered the Lists),” is from Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks
(New York: Grove, 1952), 114.
1. A very different version of this story was written as “I Entered the Lists . . . Diaspora
Catalogues: The List, the Unbearable Territory, and Tormented Chronologies — Three
Narratives and a Weltanschauung,” xcp: Cross Cultural Poetics 17 (2007): 7 – 29. Thank you,
Alexander Weheliye, for sharing that this imperfect story of lists, now and then, matters.
2. Katherine McKittrick, “Diaspora,” in International Encyclopedia of Human Geography,
ed. Rob Kitchin and Nigel Thrift (London: Elsevier, 2009), 156 – 161.
sant to consider how we might undo the colonizing desire that underpins
place-making (ownership as authenticated by list and map and list and
map as coveted objects). To do this, I think through Glissant’s concept of
“tormented chronology.”
ONE METHOD
4. J Dilla, Donuts, Stone’s Throw, 2006. Thank you, Elliot Jun. See also Aram Sinnreich,
Mashed Up: Music, Technology, and the Rise of Configurable Culture (Amherst: University of
Massachusetts Press, 2010).
5. The list is from Paul D. Miller aka dj Spooky that Subliminal Kid, Rhythm Science
(Cambridge, MA: mit Press, 2004), 25.
170 (I Entered
THE LIST
Glossary: for readers from elsewhere, who don’t deal very well with un-
known words or who want to understand everything. But, perhaps, to es-
tablish for ourselves, ourselves as well, the long list of words within us
whose sense escapes or, taking this farther, to fix the syntax of this lan-
guage we are babbling. The readers of here are the future.6
GLOSSARY OF TERMS
6. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, trans. Betsy Wing (1990; rpt., Ann Arbor: Uni-
versity of Michigan Press, 1997), xxi.
172 (I Entered
massacres of 1915–1916 . . . mass genocide and displacement . . . dis-
crimination, war, poverty, colonialism, ethnic cleansing and violence
have removed and moved Irish, Asian, South Asian, Caribbean,
Eastern European, and Middle Eastern groups from their countries
of birth . . . war, ethnic cleansing, colonialism, and various genocides
paved the way for . . . gay, lesbian, transgendered, and bisexual commu-
nities . . . queer diasporas . . . spaces of resettlement . . . homophobia
and heterosexual gender conventions . . .
. . . returns . . . the process of returning, whether imaginary, real, filmic,
fictional . . . what returns are possible . . . through travel, remem-
brance, imagination, remittances, yearnings, stories, or songs? are
past cultural practices retained on relocation, and do these cultural
practices carry in them the history of violence, dispersal, and mem-
ories of home? . . . Afrocentrism, Negritude, and Pan-A fricanism
produce links . . . funds are sent “home” to assist family and friends
or to secure future departures . . . films that take up departures or
violence, novels that remember slavery, poetry that explores forced
human migrations, internet sites that map Holocaust memorials
and record the lives of survivors, songs that sample the music of
Bob Marley and are then played on local radio stations, globally,
live performances of Ghidda in the UK or Canada . . . diasporic
returns . . . real, imaginary, political, economic, and creative . . . if
diaspora fundamentally centers on the movement of people, are not
all traveling cultures diasporic . . . if departure is voluntary, or indi-
vidual rather than collective, is this diasporic process . . . do all dia-
sporic subjects return? . . . all diasporas are historically contingent
on the specificities of time and space . . .
RETURNS
“routes and roots” . . . diasporic cultures are not traveling and migrat-
ing with ease . . . a particular event or events — poverty, violence,
174 (I Entered
. . . the disappearance of indigenous communities . . . bondage, genocide,
violence, and colonialism are . . .
progress, enlightened reason, democracy . . . negotiate and enlightened
modernity if, in its various implementations, it negates their world-
view and figures, even prefigures, them as irrational, uncivilized,
and worthy of expulsion and bondage? . . . is often equated with
democratic citizenship, technological progress, and new ways of or-
ganizing the world . . . validated the expulsion of particular groups
from their country of origin . . . nation is central to theorizing dias
poras . . . forced dispersal carries with it the idea of “displacement
from” somewhere and “displacement to” somewhere . . . how dias
poric communities understand themselves in relation to the
nation . . . racial identities within a prescribed country or region
(Vietnamese only live in Vietnam . . . )
. . . the nation, as a political bounded entity that safely houses and sup-
ports its citizens, is constantly being breached . . . some citizens are
not, in fact, welcome or at ease within the boundaries of their coun-
try of birth . . . as a refugee, economic migrant, or exiled subject . . .
fraught with ambivalence . . . acts of discrimination . . .
. . . not outside of modernity . . . the experiences of removal, travel, and
return are indicative of how roots and routes (indeed diaspora
spaces) intersect with, and therefore are indicative of, modern ge-
ographies . . . these processes of displacement, outer-national ties,
and settlement demonstrate the workings of modernity and the
modern nation not as bounded or unchanging but as a territory in-
flected with difference . . . this formulation attempts to recuperate
or restore a broken past . . . anticolonial struggles . . . how masses of
people might, together, relate to this history vis-à-v is their common
identities and contemporaneous political struggles against oppres-
sion . . . identities were and are soldered as a counter-narrative to
Eurocentric modernity and the nation-state . . . absolutely other or
wholly different from the bourgeois hegemonic class . . . diaspora
identities change from moment to moment and place to place . . .
original geographic loss . . . can only be understood as fluid and
changing: there is no satisfactory relationship with historic regions
of displacement . . .
176 (I Entered
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Eppler, B. (2000). Queer diasporas. Durham, NC: Duke University Press . . .
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KEYWORDS: colonialism, diaspora, displacement, exile, holocaust (Shoah),
home, homeland, identity, migration, modernity, nation, transatlantic
slavery
UNGEOGRAPHIC
In 2007 or 2008 I was invited to write a “diaspora” entry for the Inter
national Encyclopedia of Human Geography. I envisioned that this task
would be relatively straightforward: I had planned to provide a genealogy
of sorts, tracing displacements experienced by Jewish, African, Arme-
nian communities, outlining exiles instigated by war, violence, and then
taking up contemporary debates on queer diasporas and migration and
globalization. I had planned to outline, furthermore, some of the central
questions selected diaspora theorists raised: how expulsion is attached to
memory and modernity; how traveling cultures are not always diasporic;
how nostalgia and/or the nation underwrite many diasporas. While writ-
ing up these themes, ideas, and histories, I was asked to pay close atten-
tion to the “aims and scope” provided by the International Encyclopedia of
178 (I Entered
concepts.10 These sources of geographic knowledge do not pay close at-
tention to geographies of race and racism or what we might call alter-
native geographies: the Middle Passage, W. E. B. Du Bois’s urban stud-
ies, Toni Morrison’s site of memory are not to be found. Sometimes key
thinkers of race are included (Gayatri Spivak, bell hooks, Edward Said).
Of course, opening up the possibility of nonwhite geographic knowledge
is not the point of the texts — they are designed to outline and therefore
fashion a particular geographic story.
The production of knowledge within the discipline of geography
is closely related to the discipline’s history of positivism and exclusion.
While many human geographers, anxiously and not, name legacies of
whiteness, colonialism, and heterosexism that inhabit their areas of
study, the production of the discipline — as disciplined — thrives. When
the production of specialized handbooks, lists, and encyclopedias are in-
corporated into academic and nonacademic spheres, they follow similar
guidelines to the International Encyclopedia of Human Geography. This
emphasizes the ways in which the production of knowledge is intimately
bound to the production of space. Indeed, the work of cataloguing and
naming diaspora is a mapping exercise; it is a renewed enlightenment ex-
ercise of classifying, finding, discovering, and documenting. With this in
mind, there are written and unwritten codes within the discipline of hu-
man geography that understand knowledge to be fundamentally spatial;
the spatialization of ideas — material, metaphoric — can easily replicate
colonial efforts.11 That is, the knowledge that is documented and collected
and listed is tied to a legacy of colonialism, extraction, and cataloguing.
Given our present and prevailing geographic system — wherein we
are rewarded for owning things and places and ideas — spatializing the
black diaspora (and by extension the subdiscipline of black geographies)
in normative ways risks partaking in a politics of territorialization. More
specifically, the exercise of authenticating an authoritative and compre-
10. See Phil Hubbard, Rob Kitchin, and Gill Valentine, eds., Key Thinkers on Space and
Place (London: Sage, 2004); Stuart Aitken and Gill Valentine, eds., Approaches to Human
Geography (London: Sage, 2006); Nicholas Clifford and Gill Valentine, eds., Key Methods
in Geography (London: Sage, 2003); Sarah Holloway, Stephen Rice, and Gill Valentine, eds.,
Key Concepts in Geography (London: Sage, 2003). In fact, the “reference” series from Sage is
unending. See http://sk.sagepub.com/reference.
11. Neil Smith and Cindi Katz, “Grounding Metaphor: Towards a Spatialized Politics,”
in Place and the Politics of Identity, ed. Michael Keith and Steve Pile (New York: Routledge,
1993), 67 – 83.
12. Philip Crang, Claire Dwyer, and Peter Jackson, “Transnationalism and the Spaces of
Commodity Culture,” Progress in Human Geography 27, no. 4 (2003): 446.
13. Andrew Kahn and Jamelle Bouie, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” Slate,
June 25, 2015, http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history _of_american_slavery
/2015/06/animated_interactive_of_the_history_of_the_atlantic_slave_trade.html. See
also http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_history_of_american_slavery.html, accessed
April 23, 2018.
14. Kahn and Bouie, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes.”
180 (I Entered
do not undo the feeling of dread that accompanies witnessing centuries
of racial violence in two minutes. You watch and you know the timing —
so fast, so dehumanizing — is awful and unspeakable.15
The interactive map is, in theory, diasporic (it shows that transatlantic
slavery, beginning in the fifteenth century, forcefully moved black peo-
ples — in slave ships represented as dots — from the continent of Africa
to a range of non-A frican geographies). It shows dispersal, displacement,
exile. It shows 315 years, 20,528 voyages, millions of lives, in two minutes.
It is nauseating. This is one way to map the black diaspora. But there are
other ways, too: mapping the creative works of authors, musicians, and
poets, analyzing postslave travels or the work of scholars like NourbeSe
Philip or Jennifer Morgan or Gayl Jones or . . . The two-minute map is not
enough. The map needs . . . 16
While I was writing the encyclopedia entry, I was preoccupied with
two other geographic concerns: the expulsion of black and poor peo-
ples from New Orleans, and a paper by Carole Boyce Davies and Baba-
car M’Bow titled “Towards African Diaspora Citizenship: Politicizing an
Existing Global Geography.”17 The black diaspora — the process of dis-
15. Pair with the interactive map of lynchings in the United States: The Map of White
Supremacy Mob Violence. This reflects the difficult research conducted by Monroe Nathan
Work. I am uncertain how to interact. I look. Ida B. Wells. She was the first. I stop.
Home: the horror of these gruesome killings was surging.
Instructions: zoom in using slider; click on the points that appear; drag the timeline that
appears.
This is a learning tool. I hate the map.
Monroe Work Today, accessed December 21, 2018, http://www.monroeworktoday.org
/index.html?u=2.
16. We need Treva C. Ellison and Romi (Ron) Morrison, “Decoding Possibilities: An Al-
luvial Map of Black Feminist Praxis,” paper presented at Black Geographies: A Symposium,
University of California, Berkeley, October 12, 2017.
17. Karen Bakker, “Katrina: The Public Transcript of Disaster,” Environment and Plan
ning D: Society and Space 23, no. 6 (2005): 795 – 801; Neil Smith, “There’s No Such Thing as a
Natural Disaster,” Understanding Katrina: Perspectives from the Social Sciences, June 11, 2006,
https://items.ssrc.org/understanding-katrina/theres-no-such-thing-as-a-natural-disaster/;
Bruce Braun and James McCarthy, “Hurricane Katrina and Abandoned Being,” Environ
ment and Planning D: Society and Space 23, no. 6 (December 2005): 802 – 809; Carole Boyce
Davies and Babacar M’Bow, “Towards an African Diaspora Citizenship: Politicizing an Ex-
isting Global Geography,” in Black Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKit-
trick and Clyde Woods (Toronto: Between the Lines Press, 2007), 14 – 45; Katherine McKit-
trick and Clyde Woods, “No One Knows the Mysteries at the Bottom of the Ocean,” in Black
Geographies and the Politics of Place, ed. Katherine McKittrick and Clyde Woods (Toronto:
Between the Lines Press, 2007), 1 – 13.
18. C. L. R. James, Beyond a Boundary (1963; rpt., Durham, NC: Duke University Press,
1993).
182 (I Entered
I am in search of an expansive methodology . . .19
The one hundred years and 133 troubling cases of Black criminals
covered in these pages . . .20
You better go back in and ask her to draw you a map . . .21
TORMENTED CHRONOLOGIES
The violent dislocation that accompanied the slave trade, Édouard Glis-
sant notes, reconfigures black diasporic time. Black consciousness, too,
is dislocated and reconfigured. The question of History — linear, totali-
tarian, clear — cannot account for black time.22 Glissant writes that His-
tory (colonial) narratively erases black history (nonhistory), but he also
thinks through how the violent dislocation produced a sense of time that
“came together in the context of shock, contraction, painful negation,
and explosive forces.”23 He is keenly aware of, but not preoccupied by, dis-
cursive erasure because the Middle Passage and forced plantation labor
(time characterized by ruptures) produced totally different temporal con-
ditions for Caribbean populations. This is a meaningful analytical move,
one that recognizes that erasure from history is oppressive yet, at the same
time, draws attention to how the material conditions of displacement —
the punishing expulsion of black peoples — lead to “a painful notion of
time and its full projection into the future.”24 This painful notion of time,
expulsion, and loss can be theorized in tandem with diaspora space (un-
geographic), thus totally calling into question the Eurocentric invento-
ries and geometrics that dominate how we know where and who we are.
19. Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 201.
20. Barrington Walker, Race on Trial: Black Defendants in Ontario’s Criminal Courts,
1858 – 1958 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2010), 23.
21. Alice Walker, “Looking for Zora,” in In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist
Prose (New York: Harcourt and Brace and Company, 1983), 103.
22. Édouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Char-
lottesville: University Press of Virginia), 61 – 65.
23. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 62.
24. Glissant, Caribbean Discourse, 64.
184 (I Entered
production, creativity, and beyond. The tormented chronology, read with
and alongside black humanity (black ungeographic time space), turns the
lists upside down, tears them up, adds and discards, not with the ongo-
ing fear of disavowal but, rather, through the pain and pleasure of what is
made possible, and new, as our listings converge, confront one another,
and overlap. While lists function to catalogue and affirm geopolitical
boundaries (territories of Man and his human others), Glissant reads
them as changeable and always changing precisely because they emerge
from the material conditions of displacement that engender submarine
roots and the alterability of time and space.
D ear Science,
When I last wrote, I told you about how I am trying to work
out — without descriptively writing out — the intellectual-
physiological effort that emerges alongside black rebellion. You didn’t
write back. Alone, without your response, I had to confront something I
keep grasping for but cannot seem to explicate well: black rebellion, the
work of liberation, regardless of scale, is livingness; black livingness is un-
measurable; our despair and heartbreak and friendships and ways of lov-
ing and moving, are tethered to a dehumanizing system of knowledge, a
monumental story, that is measured (unfaltering) and precise (quantifi-
able). I wonder if the effort to live this world should be told at all. Maybe
you can help me with the wording.
I finished the book I told you about and it was sent to Reader. They
urged the praxis of story. They reminded me that we are not outside sci-
ence, we are of science, and that the book holds in it mnemonics that
repeat and restore not dehumanization but unfurled and hidden ideas
about collaboration and liberation. This is where you, Science, took me.
To be black is to live through scientific racism and, at the same time, re-
invent the terms and stakes of knowledge. The reinvention becomes an
invention-appreciation of our relational lives, I suppose, which is espe-
cially urgent given that we continue to collectively struggle against racial
violence, premature death, and ecocide. To be black is to recognize and
enervate the fictive perimeters of you, Science, and notice that the enclo-
sures of biological determinism and the potentials of opacity, together,
provide the conditions to concoct a different story altogether. There is
more to you than I know. The concoction — secret, fiction, detailed, un-
clear, momentary, forever — accounts for how we live through the wreck-
age of the plantation and displace its racist logics and accompanying geo-
graphic weights and measures. What the plantation did to us, globally!
Still. Reader wrote of implications, future pathways, provisional pursuits,
recombinant possibilities, incomputables, quarks and curved space. I of-
fer mnemonic black livingness: fluctuating codes and stories of black life,
new and long-standing, that honor and study, imperfectly, our collabora-
tive efforts to seek liberation. This is mindful work that is not interested
in seizing, expropriating, place. Mnemonic black livingness is liberation
unrealized (black geography, verb, is the process of seeking liberation).
I remember writing to you about physics and computer science and
mathematics. I remember the failure and disappointment. I did not un-
derstand the syntax, the source codes, or the energy properties. I was left
with numbers that could only produce what I could not bear and cannot
forget. Like the Greenhill auction block. Like the girl. I asked for help.
People shared and collaborated generously. We are curious. I want to sus-
tain wonder.
Until soon,
Katherine xo
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DIEGESES AND BEARINGS