We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the

same way that domestic surveillance originally came to be

in American societyfrom slaverythe original lists of
human cargo, plantation inventories and diaries that were
used by masters to govern slaves.
Modern disciplinary practices originated from the
surveillant assemblage of the plantation the logistical
coding of slave life rendered bodies disposable even
resistant efforts to the plantation were sublimated into
civil society legible practices of resistance ultimately are
subsumed by whiteness only by destabilizing the
information regimes of cataloguing can we combat
quotidian violence
Browne 2012 PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education (Simone;
Race and Surveillance Routledge Handbook of Surveillance Studies;
Google Book; https://books.google.com/books?
hl=en&lr=&id=F8nhCfrUamEC&oi=fnd&pg=PA72&dq=race+and+surveillanc
e+Simone+browne&ots=y_cvDcnYS0&sig=ZmhtR3WJI2mp_clVI6qwScZDZwQ
#v=onepage&q=race%20and%20surveillance%20Simone
%20browne&f=false; 7/5/15 || NDW)
According to Christian Parenti, the history of surveillance in America can be
traced to the "simple accounts" of slave owners. Of course, the accounting
practices of transatlantic slavery were also present outside of the Americas.
These simple accounts included slave vessel manifests listing human cargo,
plantation inventories, diaries which contained observations about plantation
life and instructions for governing slaves. One example involved the "General
Rules" recorded by Charles Tait for his Columbus, Texas plantation: "4th in
giving orders always do it in a mild tone, and try to leave the impression of
the mind on the Negro that what you say is the result of reflection." The
detailed cataloguing of slave life was a mechanism of disciplinary power,
where disciplinary power, as Michel Foucault tells us, is "exercised through
its invisibility," while imposing a "compulsory visibility" on its
targets. Disciplinary power then operated on the enslaved as racialized
surveillance that individuals were at once subjected to and that produced
them as racial, and therefore enslave able, subjects. Such a racializing
surveillance was apparent in the plantation security system, a system that
relied on, as Parenti lays out, three "information technologies: the written
slave pass, organized slave patrols, and wanted posters for runaways". Here,
surveillance and literacy were closely articulated as slaves and indentured
servants who could read and write could also forge passes and manumission
papers or alter existing ones by replacing dates, names, and other unique
identifiers, in this way functioning as antebellum hackers" able to "crack the

code of the planters' security system". These forged passes were used for
unauthorized travel outside of the plantation and were [produced by fugitives
upon demand by slave patrollers, or "Pattie rollers", who were often nonproperty owning armed white men who policed slave mobilities. Sometimes
producing a forged pass was not necessary. Any piece of printed text would
do given that fugitive slaves were aware of many of these pattie rollers were
illiterate, so they would hand over these "passes" when apprehended. This
security system, then, relied on the "racially defined contours of (white)
literacy and (black) illiteracy", a dichotomy that was not so readily upheld.
Less easily counterfeited passes were later fashioned out of metal. The
compulsory visibility of the racial subject can be seen in the circulation of
newspaper advertisements and wanted posters for runaway slaves and truant
servants. These texts were primarily aimed at a white public that was
assumed to be literate and free, and who in consuming these texts, became
a part of the aparatus of surveillance, and the eyes and ears of face-toface watching and regulating. In detailing physical desacriptions, the
surveillance technology of the fugitive slave advertisement made the already
hypervisible racial subject legible as "out of place ." For instance, a March 15
1783 advertisement in The Royal Gazzette offering a "Two Dollar Reward" for
"a Mulatto, or Quadroon Girl, about 14 years of age, named Seth, but calls
herself Sall," attests to the role of fugitive slave notices, and similarly, wanted
posters, in upholding racial categorization. This notice went on to state:
"sometimes says she is white and often paints her face to cover that
deception." Seth's, or Sall's, duplicity is not limitefd to her use of an alias, as
this notice tells us, but also to her racial ambiguity, witness her apparent
choosing to self-identify or pass as white, rather than as "a Mulatto"(one
black parent and one white parent) or a "Quadroon Girl" (one black
grandparent) as per the racial nomenclature that arose out of slavery. Later
such classifications as a form of population management were made official
with the first US federal census in 1790. I will retun to the census as a
technology that formalized racial categorization later. For now, the wanted
notice for fugitive slaves as an information technology demonstrates that
then as now race was a social construct that required constant policing
and oversight. However, the format of the fugitive notice was repurposed in
the form of handbills that functioned as a means of counter-surveillance. An
1851 handbill produced by abolitionists Theodore Parker attests to this as it
cautioned "colored people of Bostonb" to steer clear of "watchmen and oilice
officers" and to "keep a sharp look out for kidnappers, and have top eye
open." "Top eye" here was a directive to look out and about with keen intent
as police officeers were empowered to act as slave catchers under fugitive
slave laws. Black spectatorship, along with the gazes of white abolitionists
and other allies, functioned as a form of oppositional looking back at
racializing surveillance. In her discussion of black spectatorship, the gaze and
looking relaitons during slavery and the racial apartheid of Jim Crow in the
southern United States, bell hooks tells us that black people often "cultivated
the habit of casting the gaze fdownwards so as not to appear uppity To look
directly was an assertion of subjectivity, equality". hook suggests that the

boften violent ways in which blacks were denied the right to look back - think
of the gruesome beating and murder of 14-year-old Emmett Till in Mississippi
in 1955, allegedly for looking at a white woman - "had produced in us an
overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze". Such
politicized and oppositional looking were agential acts and can be seen, for
example, in a June 14th 1783 runaway slave notice printed in the Royal
Gazette for 16-year-old Samm, who is described in the notice as "five feet
high" and "remarkable in turning up the whites of his eyes when spoken to."
This notice records Sam's oppositional gaze, his lokking back, and shows us
that resistance can be found even in the simple act of rolling one's eyes.
Black looks have the power to trouble surveillance as a "Technology of
Whiteness".

As such, the plantation converted blackness into a

pathogen depictions of blackened bodies become
marked as deviant from the model of the human-as-such,
the aesthetic paradigms of modern surveillance are
directly opposed to that of the slave the question of this
debate is will you be the pathologist, finding joy in the
inhumanity of blackness or just a cog in the machines of
whiteness
Moten 13 Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh). The South Atlantic
Quarterly, 112:4, Fall 2013. Pgs. 736-739. PWoods.

well have occasion to consider what that means, by way of a

discussion of my preference for the terms life and optimism over death and
pessimism and in the light of Wildersons and Sextons brilliant insistence not
only upon the preferential option for blackness but also upon the requirement
of the most painstaking and painful attention to our damnation, a term I
prefer to wretchedness, after the example of Miguel Mellino, not simply
because it is a more literal translation of Fanon
but also because wretchedness emerges from a
standpoint that is not only not ours, that is not only one we cannot have and
ought not want, but that is
held within the logic of im/possibility that
delineates what subjects and citizens call the real world
I will seek to begin to explore not just the
absence but the refusal of standpoint, to actually explore and to inhabit and
to think what Wagner
calls existence without standing from no
standpoint because this is what it would truly mean to remain in the hold of
the ship (when the hold is thought with properly critical, and improperly
celebratory, clarity).
What emerges
in the desire that constitutes a certain proximity to that thought is not (just)
that blackness is ontologically prior to the logistic and regulative power that
is supposed to have brought it into existence but that blackness is prior to
ontology; or, in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the
an original displacement of ontology , that it is ontologys anti- and antefoundation, ontologys underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontologys
Over the course of this essay,

(though often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer the particular kinds of precision that

follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation)

, in general,

(Mellino 2013). But this is to say, from the outset, not that I

will advocate the construction of a necessarily fictive standpoint of our own but that

Bryan

(2009: i)

What would it be, deeper still, what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint?

time and space.

This is to say that what I do assert, not against, I think, but certainly in apposition to Afro-pessimism, as it is, at least at one point, distilled in Sextons work, is not what

black life
which is as surely to say lf as black thought is to say thoughtis irreducibly
social; that, moreover, black life is lived in political death or that it is lived, if
you will, in the burial ground of the subject by those who, insofar as they are
not subjects, are also not, in the interminable (as opposed to the last)
analysis, death-bound,
I also agree with Sexton insofar
as I am inclined to call this burial ground the world and to conceive of it and
the desire for it as pathogenic. At stake will be what the difference is
between the pathogenic and the pathological, a difference that will have
been instantiated by what we might think of as the view, as well as the point
of view, of the pathologist. I dont think I ever claimed, or meant to claim,
that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen.
he calls one of that projects most polemical dimensions, namely, that black life is not social, or rather that black life is lived in social death (Sexton 2ollb: 28). What I assert is this: that

as Abdul Jan Mohamed (2005) would say. In this, however,

, now,

I think I probably do, or at least hope that it is,

insofar as I bear the hope that blackness bears or is the potential to end the world.The question concerning the point of view, or standpoint, of the pathologist is crucial but so is the question of what it is that the

What
is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist,
trains his eye? What is the object of his complete lysis
pathologist examines.

, precisely,

(Fanon 2008: xiv)? And if it is more proper, because more

literal, to speak of a lysis of universe, rather than body, how do we think the relation between transcendental frame and the body, or nobody, that occupies, or is banished from, its confines and powers of
orientation? What I offer here as a clarification of Sextons understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando Pattersons (1982) work that

The
secular excommunication that describes slavery for Patterson
is more
precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a political order,
with something on the order of a radical relegation to the social. The
problem with slavery, for Patterson, is that it is political death, not social
death; the problem is that slavery confers the paradoxically stateless status
of the merely, barely living; it delineates the inhuman as unaccommodated
bios.
emerges in what I take to be his deep but unacknowledged affinity with and indebtedness to the work of Hannah Arendt, namely, with a distinction crucial to her work between the social and the political.
(1982: 5)

which is tantamount, in

Arendts formulation,

At stake is the transvaluation or, better yet, the invaluation or antivaluation, the extraction from the sciences of value (and from the very possibility of that necessarily fictional, but materially brutal,

standpoint that Wagner [2009:1] calls being a party to exchange). Such extraction will, in turn, be the very mark and inscription (rather than absence or eradication) of the sociality of a life, given in common,

What I am trying to get to

is the consideration of a
radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned, statesponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the
structural foundation of Pattersons epiphenomenology of spirit.
instantiated in exchange.

, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson,

To have honor, which is, of necessity,

to be a man of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivitys perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the

It is,
to consider that the unspoken violence of
political friendship constitutes a capacity for alignment and coalition that is
enhanced by the unspeakable violence that is done to what and whom the
political excludes.
I am in total agreement with the Afro-pessimistic
understanding of blackness as exterior to civil society and, moreover, as
unmappable within the cosmological grid of the transcendental subject.
However, I understand civil society and the coordinates of the transcendental
aestheticcognate as they are not with the failed but rather with the
successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizensto be the
fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily
necropolitical imitation of life.
Afro-pessimists say that social life is not the
condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it,
then thats a formulation with which I would agree. Social death is not
imposed upon blackness by or from the standpoint or positionality of the
political; rather, it is the field of the political, from which blackness is
relegated to the supposedly undifferentiated mass or blob of the social, which
is, in any case, where and what blackness chooses to stay. This question of
the location and position of social death is
crucial. It
constitution of civil society as enmity, hostility, and civil butchery.

moreover,

This is to say that, yes,

So that if

, as Sexton has shown no more rigorously than I could ever hope to do,

raises again that massive problematic of inside and outside that animates
thought since before its beginning as the endless end to which thought
always seeks to return
This mass is understood to be undifferentiated precisely because from
the imaginary perspective of the political subjectwho is also the
transcendental subject of knowledge, grasp, ownership, and self- possession
difference can only be manifest as the discrete individuality that holds or
occupies a standpoint. From that standpoint, from the artificial, officially
assumed position, blackness is nothing, that is, the relative nothingness of
the impossible, pathological subject and his fellows.
It is from this standpoint, which Wilderson
defines precisely by his inability to occupy it, that he, in a painfully and
painstakingly lyrical tour de force of autobiographical writing, declares
himself to be nothing and proclaims his decision which in any case he cannot
make, to remain as nothing,

. Such mappability of the space-time or state of social death would, in turn, help us better understand the positionalities that could be said, figuratively,

to inhabit it.

I believe it is from that standpoint that Afro-pessimism identifies and

articulates the imperative to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity, relative.

in genealogical and sociological isolation even from every other nothing. Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered on the

floor like Lisas grievance. I am nothing, Naima, and you are nothing: the unspeakable answer to your question within your question. This is why I could not would notanswer your question that night. Would I
ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatoryI know. And nothing terrifies me more than such a question asked in earnest. It is a question that goes to the heart of desire, to the heart of our
black capacity to desire. But if we take out the nouns that you used (nouns of habit that get us through the day), your question to me would sound like this: Would nothing ever be with nothing again? (Wilderson
2008: 265) When one reads the severity and intensity of Wildersons wordshis assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness for his readerone is all but overwhelmed by the need for

Its not that one wants to say no, Professor Wilderson, you
are, or I am, somebody; rather, one wants to assert the presence of
something between the subjectivity that is refused and which one refuses
and nothing, whatever that is. But it is the beautythe fantastic, celebratory
force of Wildersons and Sextons work, which study has allowed me to begin
more closely to approachof Afro-pessimism that allows and compels one to
move past that contradictory impulse to affirm in the interest of negation and
to begin to consider what nothing is
from the
absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that
blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and
regenerative preservation.
the fugitive field of unowning, in and
from which we ask, paraontologically, by way of but also against and
underneath the ontological terms at our disposal: What is nothingness? What
is thingli-ness? What is blackness? Whats the relationship between
blackness, thingli-ness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of
what Deleuze might call a life in common?
Our aim, even in the face of
the brutally imposed difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration.
because the cause for celebration turns out to be the condition of possibility of black thought, which animates the black operations that will produce the absolute overturning, the
absolute turning of this motherfucker out. Celebration is the essence of black
thought, the animation of black operations, which are, in the first instance,
our undercommon, underground, submarine sociality. In the end, though life
and optimism are the terms under which I speak, I agree with Sextonby way
of the slightest, most immeasurable reversal of emphasisthat Afropessimism and black optimism are not but nothing other than one another.
a kind of affirmative negation of his formulation.

, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but

Thats the mobility of place,

Where do we go, by what means do we begin, to study blackness? Can there be an aesthetic

sociology or a social poetics of nothingness? Can we perform an anatomy of the thing or produce a theory of the universal machine?

This is not because

celebration is supposed to make us feel good or make us feel better, though there would be nothing wrong with that. It is, rather,

I will

continue to prefer the black optimism of his work just as, I am sure, he will continue to prefer the Afro-pessimism of mine. We will have been interarticulate, I believe, in the field where annihilative seeing,
generative sounding, rigorous touching and feeling, requires an improvisation of and on friendship, a sociality of friendship that will have been, at once, both intramural and evangelical. Ill try to approach that field,
its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwells (1982) extended meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanons and Peter Line- baughs accounts of language in and as vehicularity; by way of
Foucaults meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuzes consideration of the boat as interior of the exterior when they are both thoroughly solicited by the uncharted voices that we carry; by way, even, of Lysis and
Socrates; but also, and in the first instance, by way of Hawk and Newk, just friends, trading fours. Perhaps Im simply deluding myself, but such celebratory perfor mance of thought, in thought, is as much about the

I plan to stay a believer in

blackness, even as thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as
insurgency of immanence as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the consolation oftranscen- dence. But, as I said earlier,

imprisonment in passage on the most open road of all, even asto use and
abuse a terribly beautiful phrase of Wildersons (2010: xi)fantasy in the
hold

Make no mistake, we arent isolated from these regimes

of surveillance the academy itself has become an agent
of surveillance lawgivers, hellbent on policing the
borders of pedagogy, maintaining order and seeking to
stifle all dissonance How do we curtail surveillance? By
tearing shit down.
Moten et al 13 Fred Moten, Member of the Undercommons. 2013. Undercommons: Fugitive planning and
black study. Pgs. 8-11, 26-28, 87-88, 92-97. PWoods.

study what it would mean to refuse what they term the call to
order. And what would it mean, furthermore, to refuse to call others to order,
to refuse interpellation and the reinstantiation of the law. When we refuse
we create dissonance and more importantly, we allow dissonance to
continue when we enter a classroom and we refuse to call it to order, we
are allowing study to continue, dissonant study perhaps, disorganized study,
but study that precedes our call and will continue after we have left the room.
Moten and Harney also

, Moten and

Harney suggest,

Or, when we listen to music, we must refuse the idea that music happens only when the musician enters and picks up an instrument; music is also the anticipation of the performance and the noises of appreciation

when we refuse the call to order

the teacher picking up the book, the conductor raising his baton, the
speaker asking for silence, the torturer tightening the noose we refuse order
as the distinction between noise and music, chatter and knowledge, pain and
truth.
the undercommons is not a realm
where we rebel and we create critique; it is not a place where we take arms
against a sea of troubles/and by opposing end them. The undercommons is
a space and time which is always here. Our goal and the we is always the
right mode of address here is not to end the troubles but to end the world
that created those particular troubles as the ones that must be opposed.
refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity, as the absence of a plan
and as a mode of stalling real politics.
listen to the noise we make
and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise
Refusing to be for or against the
university and in fact marking the critical academic as the player who holds
the for and against logic in place,
subversive
intellectuals engage both the university and fugitivity : where the work gets
done, where the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still
strong. The subversive intellectual
is unprofessional, uncollegial,
passionate and disloyal. The subversive intellectual is neither trying to extend
the university nor change the university, the subversive intellectual is not
toiling in misery and from this place of misery articulating a general
antagonism.
the subversive intellectual enjoys the ride and wants it to be
faster and wilder; she does not want a room of his or her own, she wants to
be in the world, in the world with others and making the world anew.
it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it while listening. And so,

These kinds of examples get to the heart of Moten and Harneys world of the undercommons

Moten and

Harney

Moten and Harney tell us to

into music. In the essay that many people already know best

from this volume, The University and the Undercommons, Moten and Harney come closest to explaining their mission.

Moten and Harney lead us to the Undercommons of the Enlightenment where

, we learn,

In fact,

Moten insists:

Like Deleuze. I believe in the world and want to be in it. I want to be in it all
the way to the end of it because I believe in another world in the world and I
want to be in that. And I plan to stay a believer
But thats beyond me,
and even beyond me and Stefano, and out into the world, the other thing, the
other world, the joyful noise of the scattered, scatted eschaton, the
undercommon refusal of the academy of misery. The mission then for the
denizens of the undercommons is to recognize that when you seek to make
things better, you are not just doing it for the Other, you must also be doing it
for yourself. While men may think they are being sensitive by turning to
feminism, while white people may think they are being right on by opposing
racism, no one will really be able to embrace the mission of tearing this shit
down until they realize that the structures they oppose are not only bad for
some of us, they are bad for all of us. Gender hierarchies are bad for men as
well as women and they are really bad for the rest of us. Racial hierarchies
are not rational and ordered, they are chaotic and nonsensical and must be
opposed by precisely all those who benefit in any way from them
The
coalition emerges out of your recognition that its fucked up for you, in the
same way that weve already recognized that its fucked up for us. I dont
need your help. I just need you to recognize that this shit is killing you, too,
however much more softly, you stupid motherfucker, you know? The
coalition unites us in the recognition that we must change things or die. All of
us. We must all change the things that are fucked up and change cannot
come in the form that we think of as revolutionary
Revolution
will come by entering into
study. Study, a mode of thinking with others separate from the thinking that
the institution requires of you, prepares us to be embedded
the with
and for
we must make common cause
with those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable: we
must
refuse that which was first refused to us and in this refusal
reshape desire, reorient hope, reimagine possibility and do so separate from
the fantasies nestled into rights and respectability.
our fantasies must
come from
call the hold: And so it is we remain in the
hold, in the break, as if entering again and again the broken world, to trace
the visionary company and join it. The hold here is the hold in the slave ship
but it is also the hold that we have on reality and fantasy, the hold they have
on us and the hold we decide to forego on the other, preferring instead to
touch, to be with, to love. If there is no church in the wild, if there is study
rather than knowledge production, if there is a way of being together in
brokenness, if there is an undercommons, then we must all find our way to it.
And it will not be there where the wild things are, it will be a place where
refuge is not necessary and you will find that you were already in it all along.
[CONTINUED PAGE 26.]The Only Possible Relationship to the University Today
is a Criminal One To the university Ill steal, and there Ill steal
This is the only possible relationship to the American university
today.
certainly, this much is true in the
United States: it cannot be denied that the university is a place of refuge, and
it cannot be accepted that the university is a place of enlightenment

, like Curtis Mayfield.

. Or, as Moten puts it:

not as a masculinist surge or an armed confrontation.

will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what

in what Harney calls

and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney,

, on behalf of this alignment,

Instead,

what Moten and Harney citing Frank B. Wilderson III

, to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry

V, as he would surely borrow from us.

This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But

. In the face of these

one can only sneak into the university and steal what one can. To abuse
its hospitality, to spite its mission, to join its refugee colony, its gypsy
encampment, to be in but not ofthis is the path of the subversive
intellectual in the modern university
conditions

. Worry about the university. This is the injunction today in the United States, one with a long history. Call for its

restoration like Harold Bloom or Stanley Fish or Gerald Graff. Call for its reform like Derek Bok or Bill Readings or Cary Nelson. Call out to it as it calls to you. But for the subversive intellectual, all of this goes on

the subversive intellectual came under false

pretenses, with bad documents, out of love Her labor is as necessary as it is
unwelcome
She disappears into the
underground, the downlow lowdown maroon community of the university,
into the Undercommons of Enlightenment, where the work gets done, where
the work gets subverted, where the revolution is still black, still strong
teaching would be performing the
work of the university Teaching is merely a profession and an operation of
what Jacques Derrida calls the onto-/auto-encyclopedic circle of the
Universitas. But it is useful to invoke this operation to glimpse the hole in the
fence where labor enters, to glimpse its hiring hall, its night quarters. The
university needs teaching labor, despite itself, or as itself, self-identical with
and thereby erased by it
it is teaching that
brings us in
upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all,

. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears.

. What is that work

and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say

, one

. It is not teaching then that holds this social capacity, but something that produces the not visible other side of teaching, a thinking through the

skin of teaching toward a collective orientation to the knowledge object as future project, and a commitment to what we want to call the prophetic organization. But

. Before there are grants, research, conferences, books, and journals there is the experience of being taught and of teaching. Before the research post with no teaching, before the

graduate students to mark the exams, before the string of sabbaticals, before the permanent reduction in teaching load, the appointment to run the Center, the consignment of pedagogy to a discipline called
education, before the course designed to be a new book, teaching happened. The moment of teaching for food is therefore often mistakenly taken to be a stage, as if eventually, one should not teach for food. If the

teaching is consigned to
those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of
the university
But what would it mean if
the beyond of
teaching is precisely what one is asked to get beyond, to stop taking
sustenance And what of those minorities who refuse, the tribe of moles who
will not come back from beyond2 (that which is beyond the beyond of
teaching), as if they will not be subjects, as if they want to think as objects,
as minority? Certainly, the perfect subjects of communication, those
successfully beyond teaching, will see them as waste. But their collective
labor will always call into question who truly is taking the orders of the
Enlightenment
the biopower of the Enlightenment know
this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must
even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them
uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional
if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but
goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the
Undercommonsthis will be regarded as theft, as a criminal act. And it is at
the same time, the only possible act
. To enter this space is to inhabit the ruptural and
enraptured disclosure of the commons that fugitive enlightenment enacts,
the criminal, matricidal, queer, in the cistern, on the stroll of the stolen life,
the life stolen by enlightenment and stolen back, where the commons give
refuge, where the refuge gives commons
its about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical
passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because
stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and

. Kant interestingly calls such a stage self-incurred minority. He tries to contrast it with having the determination and courage to use ones intelligence without being guided

by another. Have the courage to use your own intelligence.

teaching or rather what we might call

. The waste lives for those moments 102 Moten/Harneybeyond2 teaching when you give away the unexpected beautiful phrase unexpected, no one has asked, beautiful, it

will never come back. Is being the biopower of the Enlightenment truly better than this? Perhaps

. But

. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmaticwhy steal when one can have

it all, they will ask. But

. In that Undercommons of the university one can see that it is not a matter of teaching versus research or even

the beyond of teaching versus the individualization of research

. What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not passing, not completing;

one does not possess the kind of agency that can hold the regulatory forces
of subjecthood, and one cannot initiate the auto-interpellative torque that
biopower subjection requires and rewards. It is not so much the teaching as it
is the prophecy in the organization of the act of teaching. The prophecy that
predicts its own organization and has therefore passed, as commons, and the
prophecy that exceeds its own organization and therefore as yet can only be
organized. Against the prophetic organization of the Undercommons is
arrayed its own deadening labor for the university, and beyond that, the
negligence of professionalization, and the professionalization of the critical
academic. The Undercommons is therefore always an unsafe neighborhood.
To work today is to be asked, more and more, to do without
thinking, to feel without emotion, to move without friction, to adapt without
question, to translate without pause, to desire without purpose, to connect
without interruption.
we heard
[CONTINUED ON PGS. 87--97]

Only a short time ago many of us said work went through the subject to exploit our social capacities, to wring more labor power from our labor. The soul

descended onto the shop floor as Franco Bifo Berardi wrote, or ascended like a virtuoso speaker without a score as Paolo Virno suggested. More prosaically

the entrepreneur, the artist,

and the stakeholder all proposed as new models of subjectivity conducive to channeling the general intellect. But today we are prompted to ask: why worry about the subject at all, why go through such beings to

And why limit production to subjects, who are after all such a small
part of the population, such a small history of mass intellectuality? There
have always been other ways to put bodies to work, even to maintain the
fixed capital of such bodies
for capital the subject has
become too cumbersome, too slow, too prone to error, too controlling, to say
nothing of too rarified, too specialized a form of life.
This is the
automatic, insistent, driving question of the field of logistics. Logistics wants
to dispense with the subject altogether. This is the dream of this newly
dominant capitalist science. This is the drive of logistics and the algorithms
that power
the
conception of a drone war.
Today this field of logistics is in hot pursuit of the general intellect in its most
concrete form, that is its potential form, its informality, when any time and
any space and anything could happen, could be the next form, the new
abstraction. Logistics is no longer content with diagrams or with flows, with
calculations or with predictions.
? The
rise of logistics is rapid.
, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these classic capitalist
sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields of objectoriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical
conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects.
logisitics, is
today increasingly reduced to collateral damage in the drive of logistics for
dominance. In war without end, war without battles, only the ability to keep
fighting, only logistics, matters. Where did logistics get this ambition to
connect bodies, objects, affects, information, without subjects , without the
formality of subjects, as if it could reign sovereign over the informal, the
concrete and generative indeterminacy of material life? The truth is, modern
logistics was born that way. Or more precisely it was born in resistance to,
given as the acquisition of, this ambition, this desire and this practice of the
informal. Modern logistics is founded with the first great movement of
reach the general intellect?

, as Christian Marrazi might say. And anyway

Yet it is not we who ask this question.

that dream, the same algorithmic research that Donald Rumsfeld was in fact quoting in his ridiculed unknown unknowns speech, a droning speech that announced

Because drones are not un-manned to protect American pilots. They are un-manned because they think too fast for American pilots.

It wants to live in the concrete itself in space at once, time at once, form at once. We must ask where it got this ambition and

how it could come to imagine it could dwell in or so close to the concrete, the material world in its informality, the thing before there is anything. How does it proposes to dwell in nothing, and why

Indeed, to read today in the field of logistics is to read a booming field, a conquering field. In military science and in engineering of course, but also

in business studies, in management research

In military science the

world has been turned upside down. Traditionally strategy led and logistics followed. Battle plans dictated supply lines. No more. Strategy, traditional ally and partner of

commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave
trade, founded against the Atlantic slave.
From
the motley crew who followed in the red wakes of these slave ships, to the
prisoners shipped to the settler colonies, to the mass migrations of
industrialisation in the Americas, to the indentured slaves from India, China,
and Java, to the trucks and boats leading north across the Mediterranean or
the Rio Grande, to oneway tickets from the Philippines to the Gulf States or
Bangladesh to Singapore, logistics was always the transport of slavery, not
free labor. Logistics remains, as ever, the transport of objects that is held in
the movement of things. And the transport of things remains, as ever,
logistics unrealizable ambition.
Breaking from the plundering accumulation of armies to the primitive accumulation of capital,

modern logistics was marked, branded, seared with the transportation of the commodity labor that was not, and ever after would not be, no matter who was in that hold or containerized in that ship.

Logistics could not contain what it had relegated to the hold. It cannot. Robert F. Harney, the historian of migration from the

bottomup, used to say once you crossed the Atlantic, you were never on the right side again. B Jenkins, a migrant sent by history, used to turn a broken circle in the basement floor to clear the air when welcoming
her students, her panthers. No standpoint was enough, no standpoint was right. She and their mothers and fathers tilled the same fields, burned up the same desert roads, preoccupied the same merely culinary

If
commodity labor would come to have a standpoint, the standpoint from
which ones own abolition became necessary, then what of those who had
already been abolished and remained? If the proletariat was located at a
point in the circuits of capital, a point in the production process from which it
had a peculiar view of capitalist totality, what of those who were located at
every point, which is to say at no point, in the production process? What of
those who were not just labor but commodity, not just in production but in
circulation, not just in circulation but in distribution as property, not just
property but property that reproduced and realized itself? The standpoint of
no standpoint, everywhere and nowhere, of never and to come, of thing and
nothing. If the proletariat was thought capable of blowing the foundations sky
high, what of the shipped, what of the containerized? What could such flesh
do? Logistics somehow knows that it is not true that we do not yet know what
flesh can do. There is a social capacity to instantiate again and again the
exhaustion of the standpoint as undercommon ground that logistics knows as
unknowable, calculates as an absence that it cannot have but always longs
for, that it cannot, but longs, to be or, at least, to be around, to surround.
Logisitics senses this capacity as never before this historical insurgent
legacy, this historicity, this logisticality, of the shipped. Modernity is sutured
by this hold. This movement of things, unformed objects, deformed subjects,
nothing yet and already. This movement of nothing is not just the origin of
modern logistics, but the annunciation of modernity itself, and not just the
annunciation of modernity itself but the insurgent prophesy that all of
modernity will have at its heart, in its own hold, this movement of things, this
interdicted, outlawed social life of nothing.
union. Harney kept in mind the mass migrations from Southern and Eastern Europe at the turn of the 19th century, beside themselves in the annunciation of logistical modernity. No standpoint.

The work of Sandro Mazzadra and Brett Neilson on borders for instance reminds us that the

proliferation of borders between states, within states, between people, within people is a proliferation of states of statelessness. These borders grope their way toward the movement of things, bang on containers,
kick at hostels, harass camps, shout after fugitives, seeking all the time to harness this movement of things, this logisticality. But this fails to happen, borders fail to cohere, because the movement of things will not
cohere. This logisticality will not cohere. It is, as Sara Ahmed says, queer disorientation, the absence of coherence, but not of things, in the moving presence of absolutely nothing. As Frank B. Wilderson III teaches

the improvisational imperative is, therefore, to stay in the hold of the ship,
despite my fantasies of flight. But this is to say that there are flights of
fantasy in the hold of the ship. The ordinary fugue and fugitive run of the
language lab, black phonographys brutally experimental venue.
Paraontological totality is in the making. Present and unmade in presence,
blackness is an instrument in the making.
Do you remember the days of slavery?
us,

Quasi una fantasia in its paralegal swerve, its mad-worked braid, the imagination produces nothing

but exsense in the hold.

Nathaniel Mackey rightly says The world was ever after/elsewhere,/no/way where

the void of our

subjectivity. And so it is we remain in the hold, in the break, as if entering
again and again the broken world, to trace the visionary company and join it.
This contrapuntal island, where we are marooned in search of marronage,
where we linger in stateless emergency, in our lysed cell and held
dislocation, our blown standpoint and lyred chapel, in (the) study of our seaborn variance, sent by its pre-history into arrivance without arrival, as a
poetics of lore, of abnormal articulation, where the relation between joint and
flesh is the folded distance of a musical moment that is emphatically,
palpably imperceptible and, therefore, difficult to describe.
we were/was there. No way where we are is here. Where we were, where we are, is what we meant by mu, which Wilderson would rightly call

Having defied degradation the moment becomes a

theory of the moment, of the feeling of a presence that is ungraspable in the way that it touches. This musical moment the moment of advent, of nativity in all its terrible beauty, in the alienation that is always
already born in and as parousia is a precise and rigorous description/theory of the social life of the shipped, the terror of enjoyment in its endlessly redoubled folds. If you take up the hopelessly imprecise tools of
standard navigation, the deathly reckoning of difference engines, maritime clocks and tables of damned assurance, you might stumble upon such a moment about two and a half minutes into Mutron, a duet by Ed

Youll know the moment by how it requires you to think the

relation between fantasy and nothingness: what is mistaken for silence is, all
of a sudden, transubstantial. The brutal interplay of advent and chamber
demands the continual instigation of flown, recursive imagining; to do so is to
inhabit an architecture and its acoustic, but to inhabit as if in an approach
from outside; not only to reside in this unlivability but also to discover and
enter it
Blackwell and Don Cherry recorded in 1982.

. Mackey, in the preface to his unbearably beautiful Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship between the books serial halves (Each was given its impetus by a piece of recorded

music from which it takes its title, the Dogon Song of the Andoumboulou, in one case, Don Cherrys [and Ed Blackwells] Mu First Part and Mu Second Part in the other) speaks of mu in relation to a circling or

to the wailing that accompanies entrance into and

expulsion from sociality.
marking socialitys ecstatic existence beyond beginning and
end, ends and means, out where one becomes interested in things, in a
certain relationship between thingliness and nothingness and blackness that
plays itself out in unmapped, unmappable, undercommon consent and
consensuality. Blackness is the site where absolute nothingness and the world
of things converge. Blackness is fantasy in the hold and Wildersons access to
it is in that he is one who has nothing and is, therefore, both more and less
than one. He is the shipped. We are the shipped, if we choose to be, if we
elect to pay an unbearable cost that is inseparable from an incalculable
benefit. How would you recognize
gratuitous violence
in
The answer, the unmasking, is mu
not simply because in its imposed opposition to something, nothing is
understood simply to veil, as if some epidermal livery, (some higher) being
and is therefore relative
but because nothing
remains unexplored, because we dont know
what we mean by it, because it is neither a category for ontology nor for
socio-phenomenological analysis. What would it be for this to be understood
in its own improper refusal of terms, from the exhausted standpoint that is
not and that is not its own?
spiraling or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking beginning and end, and

But his speaking makes you wonder if music, which is not only music, is mobilized in the service of an eccentricity, a centrifugal force whose

intimation Mackey also approaches,

the antiphonal accompaniment to

if it were

the sound that can be heard as

response to that violence, the sound that must be heard as that to which such violence responds?

as opposed to what Nishida Kitaro, would call absolute;

(this paraontological interplay of

blackness and nothingness, this aesthetic sociality of the shipped, this logisticality)

We attach, Fanon says, a fundamental importance to the phenomenon of language and consequently consider the study of language

essential for providing us with one element in understanding the black mans dimension of being-for-others, it being understood that to speak is to exist absolutely for the other. He says, moreover, that [t]he black

this is not simply a question of perspective,

since what we speak of is this radical being beside itself of blackness, its off
to the side, off on the inside, out from the outside imposition.
being
together in homelessness, this interplay of the refusal of what has been
refused, this undercommon appositionality, be a place from which emerges
neither self-consciousness nor knowledge of the other but an improvisation
man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites. But

The standpoint, the home territory, chez lui

Markmans off the mark, blind but insightful, mistranslation is illuminative, among his own, signifying a relationality that displaces the already displaced impossibility of home. Can this

that proceeds from somewhere on the other side of an unasked question? Not
simply to be among his own; but to be among his own in dispossession, to be
among the ones who cannot own, the ones who have nothing and who, in
having nothing, have everything
. This is the sound of an unasked question. A choir versus acquisition, chant and moan and Sprechgesang, babel and babble

and gobbledygook, relaxin by a brook or creek in Camarillo, singing to it, singing of it, singing with it, for the bird of the crooked beak, the generative hook of le petit negre, the little niggers comic spear, the cosmic

Come on,
get to this hard, serial information, this brutally beautiful medley of carceral
intrication, this patterning of holds and what is held in the holds phonic
vicinity
brokenness and crumpling, the imposition of irrationally
rationalized angles, compartments bearing nothing but breath and battery in
hunted, haunted, ungendered intimacy. Is there a kind of propulsion, through
compulsion, against the mastery of ones own speed, that ruptures both
recursion and advance
crook of language, the burnin and lootin of pidgin, Birds talk, Bobs talk, bard talk, bar talk, baby talk, B talk, preparing the minds of the little negro steelworkers for meditation.

. That spiraling Mackey speaks of suffers

? What is the sound of this patterning? What does such apposition look like? What remains of eccentricity after the relay between loss and restoration

has its say or song? In the absence of amenity, in exhaustion, theres a society of friends where everything can fold in dance to black, in being held and flown, in what was never silence. Cant you hear them
whisper one anothers touch?

Some people want to run things, other things want to

run. If they ask you, tell them we were flying We
advocate a praxis of fugitivity in response to domestic
surveillance
Moten 8 Fred, OG, Member of the Undercommons. "Black optimism/Black operation". PMLA, October 2008. Pgs.
17431747. PWoods.

color
+ beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper
still, where I am. This shell, this inhabitation, this space, this garmentthat I
carry with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its
makingis a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of
impoverishment
My field is black studies. In that field, Im trying to hoe the hard row of beautiful things. I try to study them and I also try to make them. Elizabeth Alexander says look for color everywhere. For me,

of any kind however much it is of, which is to say in emergence from, poverty (which is, in turn, to say in emergence from or as an aesthetics or a poetics of poverty).

The highly cultivated nature of this situated volatility, this emergent poetics of the emergency, is the open secret that has been the preoccupation of black studies. But it must be said nowand Ill do so by way of a

there is a strain of black studies that

strains against black studies and its object, the critique of western
civilization, precisely insofar as it disavows its aim (blackness or the thinking
of blackness, which must be understood in what some not so strange
combination of Nahum Chandler and Martin Heidegger might call its
paraontological distinction from black people).
cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power pointthat

There was a moment in Rebeccas presentation when the image of a black

saxophonist (I think, but am not sure, that it was the great Chicago musician Fred Anderson) is given to us as a representative, or better yet a denizen (as opposed to citizen), of the space of the imagination.
Whats cool here, and what is also precisely the kind of thing that makes practitioners of what might be called the new black studies really mad, is this racialization of the imagination which only comes fully into its
own when it is seen in opposition, say, to that set of faces or folks who constituted what I know is just a part of Laurens tradition of Marxist historiographical critique. That racialization has a long history and begins
to get codified in a certain Kantian discourse, one in which the imagination is understood to produce nothing but nonsense, a condition that requires that its wings be severely clipped by the imagination. What
Im interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operationone in which Kant moves toward something like a thinking of the imagination as blackness that fully recognizes the
irreducible desire for this formative and deformative, necessarily supplemental necessity; one in which black studies ends up being unable to avoid a certain sense of itself as a Kantian, which is to say anti-Kantian

The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black

studies, since every iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, cant help
but get pissed at the terrible irony of its irreducible Kantianness precisely
because it works so justifiably hard at critiquing that racialization of the
imagination and the racialized opposition of imagination (in its lawless,
nonsense producing freedom) and critique that turns out to be the condition
of possibility of the critical philosophical project. There is a voraciously
instrumental anti-essentialism, powered in an intense and terrible way
by good intentions, that is the intellectual platform from which black
studies disavowal of its object and aim is launched, even when that
disavowal comes in something which also thinks itself to be moving in the
direction of that object and aim. Im trying to move by way of a kind of
and ante-Kantian, endeavor.

resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation

to blackness; Im trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of
being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the
fugitivity
that is an irreducible property of life,
persisting in and against every disciplinary technique while constituting and
instantiating not just the thought but that actuality of the outside that is
what/where blackness isas space or spacing of the imagination
Its annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to
know that I aint mad. I loved these presentations, partly because I think they
loved me or at least my space, but mostly because they were beautiful. I love
Kant, too, by the way, though he doesnt love me, because I think hes
beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever
(to echo Natahaniel Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination)

, as condition of possibility and

constant troubling of critique.

. But even though Im not mad, Im

not disavowing that strain of black studies that strains against the weight or burden, the refrain, the strain of being-imaginative and not-being-critical that is called blackness and that black people have had to carry.

black optimism, is bound up

with what it is to claim blackness and the appositional, runaway black
operations that have been thrust upon it. The burden, the constraint, is the
aim, the paradoxically aleatory goal that animates escape in and the
possibility of escape from. Here is one such black opa specific, a capella
instantiation of strain, of resistance to constraint and instrumentalization, of
the propelling and constraining force of the refrain, that will allow me to get
to a little something concerning the temporal paradox of, and the irruption of
ecstatic temporality in, optimism, which is to say black optimism, which is to
say blackness
Black Studies strains against a burden that, even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism,

. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybodys sweet home, everybodys land of California, as Robert Johnson puts it. This is music from a Head Start

program in Mississippi in the mid-sixties and as you all know Chicago is a city in Mississippi, Mississippi a (fugue) state of mind in Chicago. Da Da Da Da, The Child Development Group of Mississippi, Smithsonian

The temporal paradox of optimismthat it is, on the one hand,

necessarily futurial so that optimism is an attitude we take towards that
which is to come; but that it is, on the other hand, in its proper Leibnizian
formulation, an assertion not only of the necessity but also of the rightness
and the essential timelessness of the always already existing, resonates in
this recording. It is infused with that same impetus that drives a certain
movement, in Monadology, from the immutability of monads to that
enveloping of the moral world in the natural world that Leibniz calls, in
Augustinian echo/revision, the City of God.
this remainder, their fugitivity,
remains, for me, in the intensity of their refrain, of their straining against
constraint, cause for the optimism they perform. That optimism always lives,
which is to say escapes, in the assertion of a right to refuse
the first right: an instantiation of a collective negative tendency to differ,
to resist the regulative powers that resistance, that differing, call into being.
To think resistance as originary is to say, in a sense, that we have what we
need, that we can get there from here, that theres nothing wrong with us or
even, in this regard, with here, even as it requires us still to think about why it
is that difference calls the same, that resistance calls regulative power, into
existence, thereby securing the vast, empty brutality that characterizes here
and now.
Folkways Records, FW02690 1967

With respect to C. L. R. James and Jos (Muoz), and a little respectful disrespect to Lee

Edelman, these children are the voices of the future in the past, the voices of the future in our present. In this recording,

, which is, as Gayatri Spivak says,

Nevertheless, however much I keep trouble in mind, and therefore, in the interest of making as much trouble as possible, I remain hopeful insofar as I will have been in this very collective

negative tendency, this little school within and beneath school that we gather together to be. For a bunch of little whiles, this is our field (i.e., black studies), our commons or undercommons or underground or

its fugitive proximity to blackness

the condition of possibility of politics .
outskirts and it will remain so as long as it claims

, which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness,

is

Why affirm? Because its a performance of the liminal

freedoms and vibrancy of racialized bodies An
intellectual fugitivity emphasizing the embodied
experiences of those on the outsides of civil society
blackness is always-already the non-subject before the
law anxiously awaiting acceptance into the law, nave to
its unending prohibitive borders refuse attempts to
reform society and run away
Browne, 2012 - PhD in Sociology and Equity Studies in Education
(Simone; EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN: Black
luminosity and the visual culture of surveillance; Article; Pg 551-555; DOA:
7/5/15 || NDW)
Moment by moment is the experience of surveillance in urban life , as David Lyon
where the city dweller expects to be constantly illuminated (2001, p. 5153). It is
how the city dweller contends with this expectation that is instructive. To
examine closely the performance of freedom, a performative practice that I
suggest that those named fugitive in the Board of Inquiry arbitration hearings made
use of, I borrow Richard Itons visual surplus and its b-side performative sensibility (2009, p. 105). What Iton suggests is that we come to
internalize an expectation of the potential of being watched and with this
emerges a certain performative sensibility. Coupled with this awareness of an overseeing surveillance apparatus was

observes,

the conscious effort to always give ones best performance and encourage others to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of ones audience (or

Iton employs the term visual surplus to think about the

visual media of black popular culture (graffiti, music videos) made increasingly available
to the public through the rise of hip-hop in the five boroughs of New York City
in the 1970s and the uses of new technologies (cellular phones, handheld cameras, the Internet, DVDs) to record and distribute performances. Applied to a
different temporal location, Itons analyses of visual surplus and performative
sensibility are useful for how we think about fugitive acts, black expressive
practices and the regulation of black mobilities in colonial New York City 200
years earlier. What I am suggesting here is that for the fugitive in eighteenth
century New York such a sensibility would encourage one to perform in this
case perform freedom even when one was not sure of ones audience . Put
differently, these performances of freedom were refusals of dispossession,
constituting the black subject not as slave or fugitive, nor commodity but as
human. For the black subject, the potentiality of being under watch was a
cumulative effect of the large scale surveillance apparatus in colonial New
York City and beyond stemming from transatlantic slavery, specifically
fugitive slave posters and print news advertisements, blackbirders and other
freelancers who kidnapped free blacks to transport them to other sites to be
enslaved, slave catching and through the passing of repressive black codes,
such as those in response to the slave insurrection of 1712. April 1712 saw an armed insurrection
whether there is in fact an audience) (p. 105).

in New York City where over two dozen black slaves gathered in the densely populated East Ward of the city to set fire to a building, killing at least nine whites and
wounding others. In the end over 70 were arrested, with many coerced into admissions of guilt. Of those, 25 were sentenced to death and 23 of these death sentences
were carried out. Burned at the stake, hanged, beheaded and their corpses publicly displayed and left to decompose, such spectacular corporal punishment served as a
warning for the citys slave population and beyond. With these events and the so-called slave conspiracy to burn the city in 1741, the black code governing black city life
consolidated previously enacted laws that were enforced in a rather discretionary fashion.6 Some of these laws spoke explicitly to the notion of a visual surplus and the
regulation of mobility by way of the candle lantern. On 14 March 1713, the Common Council of New York City passed a Law for Regulating Negro or Indian Slaves in the
Nighttime that saw to it that no Negro or Indian Slave above the age of fourteen years do presume to be or appear in any of the streets of New York City on the south
side of the fresh water one hour after sunset without a lantern or a lit candle (New York Common Council, Volume III). Fresh water here referring to the Fresh Water Pond
found in lower Manhattan, slightly adjacent to the Negroes Burial Ground and that supplied the city with drinking water at the time. Again, this law regulating mobility and
autonomy through the use of the technology of the candle lantern was amended on 18 November 1731 where no negro, mulatto or Indian slave above the age of fourteen
years unless in the company of some white person or white servant belonging to the family whose slave he or she is, or in whose service he or she there are was to be
without a light that could be plainly seen or it was then lawful for any of his Majestys Subjects within the said City to apprehend such slave or slaves and carry him, her

or them before the Mayor or Recorder or any of the Aldermen of the said City who are hereby authorized upon proof of offense to commit such slave or slaves to the 552
CULTURAL STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Common Gaol (New York Common Council, Volume IV). Any slave convicted of being unlit after dark was
sentenced to a public whipping of no more than 40 lashes, at the discretion of the master or owner before being discharged. Later this punishment was reduced to no more
than 15 lashes. Such discretionary violence made for an imprecise mathematics of torture. Mostly, punishment for such transgression was taken into the hands of the slave
owner. In 1734 a male slave of John van Zandt was found dead in his bed. The dead man was said to have absented himself from van Zandts dwelling in the night-time
(New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Although it was first reported that the slave was horsewhipped to death by Van Zandt for being caught on the streets after
dark by watchmen, a coroners jury found Van Zandt not negligent in this death, finding instead that the correction given by the Master was not the cause of death, but
that it was by the visitation of God (New York Weekly Journal CXIII, 5 January 1735). Other laws put into place around light and black mobilities in New York City stipulated
that at least one lantern must be carried per three negroes after sunset, more tightly regulated curfews and in 1722 the Common Council relegated burials by free and
enslaved blacks to the daytime hours with attendance of no more than 12, plus the necessary pallbearers and gravediggers, as a means to reduce opportunities for
assembly and to prevent conspiracy hatching. In recounting physician Alexander Hamiltons narrative about his travels through New York City in July of 1744, Andy Doolen
details that one outcome of the alleged conspiracy of 1741 was the ruining, according to Hamilton, of the traditional English cup of tea (2005). It was thought by Hamilton
that: they have very bad water in the city, most of it being hard and brackish. Ever since the negroe conspiracy, certain people have been appointed to sell water in the
streets, which they carry on a sledge in great casks and bring it from the best springs about the city, for it was when the negroes went for tea water that they held their
caballs and consultations, and therefor they have a law now that no negroe shall be seen upon the streets without a lanthorn after dark. (Hamilton 1948, p. 88) We can
think of the lantern as a prosthesis made mandatory after dark, a technology that made it possible for the black body to be constantly illuminated from dusk to dawn,
made knowable, locatable and contained within the city. The black body, technologically enhanced by way of a simple device made for a visual surplus where technology
met surveillance, made the business of tea a white enterprise and encoded white supremacy, as well as black luminosity, in law. Of course, unsupervised leisure, labour,
travel, assembly and other forms of social networking past sunset by free and enslaved black New Yorkers continued regardless of the enforcement of codes meant to
curtail such things. BLACK LUMINOSITY AND SURVEILLANCE 553 Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 Oftentimes social networking by free and enslaved black New
Yorkers took place right under the surveillant gazes of the white population, in markets and during Sabbath and holiday celebrations. In these spaces of sometimes
interracial and cross-class commerce and socializing, black performative practices of drumming, dancing and chanting persisted. During celebrations of Pinkster marking
the feast of Pentecost of the Dutch Reformed Church, amongst the rituals, free and enslaved blacks elected a governor who would serve as a symbolic leader resolving
disputes and collecting tributes, making this holiday an event for white spectatorship of black cultural and political production, although for many such celebratory
resistance made this a festival of misrule (Harris 2003, p. 41). So much so that the Common Council of Albany, New York, banned Pinkster celebrations in 1811, for
reasons including a resentment of the space that it opened up for unsettling exchanges between blacks and whites (Lott 1993; McAllister 2003; White 1989). The most
controversial incorporation of black performativity into Pinkster was the Totau. On the Totau, McAllister writes: a man and a woman shuffle back and forth inside a ring,
dancing precariously close without touching and isolating most of their sensual movement in the hip and pelvic areas. Once the couple dances to exhaustion, a fresh pair
from the ring of clapping dancers relieves them and the Totau continues. (McAllister 2003, p. 112) That such a performative sensibility was engaged by black subjects in
colonial New York City approximately 200 years before the emergence of hip hop in the Bronx, New York City, is of much significance. The Totau, and later, the Catharine
Market breakdown reverberate in the cypher of b-boys and b-girls. In Eric Lotts discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voes eyewitness account of the
Catharine Market breakdown in the early nineteenth century New York City. De Voe writes: This board was usually about five to six feet long, of large width, with its
particular spring in it, and to keep it in its place while dancing on it, it was held down by one on each end. Their music or time was usually given by one of their party,
which was done by beating their hands on the sides of their legs and the noise of the heel. The favorite dancing place was a cleared spot on the east side of the fish
market in front of Burnel Browns Ship Chandlery. (De Voe 1862, cited in Lott 1993, pp. 4142) In this instance, the breakdown is performed in a market, allowing for white
spectatorship and patronage in a space that is already overdetermined as a site of commerce within the economy of slavery. Later, DeVoe recalls public 554 CULTURAL
STUDIES Downloaded by [] at 11:11 05 July 2015 negro dances at Catharine Market in an 1889 New York Times article where he is quoted as saying that the dancers
would bring roots, berries, birds, fish, clams, oysters, flowers, and anything else they could gather and sell in the market to supply themselves with pocket money (28

Sylvia Wynters provision ground ideology in instructive here for an

understanding of solidarity, survival and the role of folk-culture as resistance
to the dehumanization of Man and Nature (1970, p. 36). Out of the provision
grounds came the cultivation of ceremonial practices, including dance, that
were, as Wynter tells us, the cultural guerilla resistance against the Market
economy (1970, p. 36).7 The remains of the Catharine Market breakdown can be
found in the cardboard and turntables of the breakdancing cypher. Then and
now cultural production and expressive practices offer moments of living
with, refusals and alternatives to routinized surveillance within a visual
surplus. In so being, they allow for us to think differently about the predicaments,
policies and performances constituting surveillance. Colonial New York City
was a space of both terror and promise for black life. Lantern laws, fugitive
slave notices, public whippings and the discretionary uses of violence by his
Majestys subjects rendered the black subject as always already unfree yet
acts, like the breakdown, that were constitutive of black freedom persisted. It
is under this context where certain humans came to be understood by many
as unfree and the property of others while at the same time creating
practices that maintained their humanity by challenging the routinization of
surveillance, that we should read the 1783 Board of Inquiry hearings at
Fraunces Tavern.
April 1889).

The Role of the Ballot is to signify the team with the best
strategy to combat violence against bodies deemed
deviant

The inculcation of western legal subjecthood is impossible

for racialized bodies Ahistorical narratives of legality is
the very thesis of lawfare demands for legibility within
Western Common Law maintain an anxious affective
investment in the state, ensuring that the human-as-such
can only sustain coherence through the violent expulsion
of those who embody the excess of the Laws simulacra
Comaroff and Comaroff 7 John Comaroff, Professor of African and African
American Studies and of Anthropology, Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies at Harvard, and
Jean Comaroff, Professor of African and African American Studies and of Anthropology,
Oppenheimer Fellow in African Studies also at Harvard, Law and disorder in the postcolony,
Social Anthropology/Anthropologie Sociale (2007) 15, pg. 144

the past, too, is

being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of atrocity in
Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier,

its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for having killed local leaders, unlawfully alienated

By these means is colonialism itself

rendered criminal. Hauled before a judge, history is made to submit to the
scales of justice at the behest of those who suffered it . And to be reduced to a cash
equivalent, payable as the official tender of damage, dispossession, loss, trauma. What imperialism
is being indicted for, above all, is its commission of lawfare: the use of its own
penal codes, its administrative procedures, its states of emergency, its
charters and mandates and warrants, to discipline its subjects by means of
violence made legible and legal by its own sovereign word . Also, to commit its own
territory from one African people to another, and so on.33

ever-so-civilised forms of kleptocracy. Lawfare the resort to legal instruments, to the violence inherent in
the law, to commit acts of political coercion, even erasure (Comaroff 2001) is equally marked in

As a species of political displacement, it becomes most visible

when those who serve the state conjure with legalities to act against its
citizens. Most infamous recently is Zimbabwe, where the Mugabe regime has consistently passed laws
postcolonies.

to justify the coercive silencing of its critics. Operation Murambatsvina, Drive Out Trash, which has forced
political opponents out of urban areas under the banner of slum clearance has recently taken this
practice to unprecedented depths. Murambatsvina, says the government, is merely an application of the

Lawfare may be limited or it may

reduce people to bare life; in Zimbabwe, it has mutated into a necropolitics
with a rising body count. But it always seeks to launder visceral power in a
wash of legitimacy as it is deployed to strengthen the sinews of state or
enlarge the capillaries of capital. Hence Benjamins (1978) thesis that the law originates
in violence and lives by violent means; that the legal and the lethal
animate one another. Of course, in 1919 Benjamin could not have envisaged the possibility
law of the land to raze dangerous illegal structures.

that lawfare might also be a weapon of the weak, turning authority back on itself by commissioning courts
to make claims for resources, recognition, voice, integrity, sovereignty. But this still does not lay to rest the

Why the fetishism of legalities? What are its implications for the
play of Law and Dis/order in the postcolony? And are postcolonies different in
this respect from other nation-states? The answer to the first question looks obvious. The
turn to law would seem to arise directly out of growing anxieties about
lawlessness. But this does not explain the displacement of the political into
the legal or the turn to the courts to resolve an ever greater range of wrongs.
The fetishism, in short, runs deeper than purely a concern with crime. It has to do with the
very constitution of the postcolonial polity. Late modernist nationhood, it appears, is
key questions:

undergoing an epochal move away from the ideal of cultural homogeneity : a

nervous, often xenophobic shift toward heterogeneity (Anderson 1983). The rise of
neoliberalism with its impact on population flows, on the dispersion of cultural practices, on geographies
of production and accumulation has heightened this, especially in former colonies, which were erected

with growing
heterodoxy, legal instruments appear to offer a means of
commensuration (Comaroff and Comaroff 2000): a repertoire of standardised terms
and practices that permit the negotiation of values, beliefs, ideals and
interests across otherwise intransitive lines of cleavage . Hence the flight into
a constitutionalism that explicitly embraces heterogeneity in highly
individualistic, universalistic Bills of Rights, even where states are paying less
and less of the bills. Hence the effort to make human rights into an ever more
global, ever more authoritative discourse. But there is something else at work too. A wellfrom the first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because,

recognised corollary of the neoliberal turn, recall, has been the outsourcing by states of many of the
conventional operations of governance, including those, like health services, policing and the conduct of

Bureaucracies do retain some of their old

functions, of course. But most 21st century governments have reduced their
administrative reach, entrusting ever more to the market and delegating ever
more responsibility to citizens as individuals, as volunteers, as classes of
actor, social or legal. Under these conditions, especially where the threat of disorder
seems immanent, civil law presents itself as a more or less effective weapon
of the weak, the strong and everyone in between. Which, in turn, exacerbates
the resort to lawfare. The court has become a utopic site to which
human agency may turn for a medium in which to pursue its ends .
war, integral to the management of life itself.

This, once again, is particularly so in postcolonies, where bureaucracies and bourgeoisies were not
elaborate to begin with; and in which heterogeneity had to be negotiated from the start. Put all this

the fetishism of the law seems over-determined. Not only is

public life becoming more legalistic, but so, in regulating their own affairs and
in dealing with others, are communities within the nation-state: cultural
communities, religious communities, corporate communities, residential
communities, communities of interest, even outlaw communities.
Everything, it seems, exists here in the shadow of the law. Which also makes
together and

it unsurprising that a culture of legality should saturate not just civil order but also its criminal
undersides. Take another example from South Africa, where organised crime appropriates, re-commissions
and counterfeits the means and ends of both the state and the market. The gangs on the Cape Flats in
Cape Town mimic the business world, having become a lumpen stand-in for those excluded from the
national economy (Standing 2003). For their tax-paying clients, those gangs take on the positive functions
of government, not least security provision. Illicit corporations of this sort across the postcolonial world
often have shadow judicial personnel and convene courts to try offenders against the persons, property
and social order over which they exert sovereignty. They also provide the policing that the state either has
stopped supplying or has outsourced to the private sector. Some have constitutions. A few are even
structured as franchises and, significantly, are said to offer alternative citizenship to their members.35
Charles Tilly (1985) once suggested, famously, that modern states operate much like organised crime.

the counterfeiting of
a culture of legality by the criminal underworld feeds the dialectic of law and
disorder. After all, once government outsources its policing services and
franchises force, and once outlaw organisations shadow the state by
providing protection and dispensing justice, social order itself becomes
like a hall of mirrors. What is more, this dialectic has its own geography. A
geography of discontinuous, overlapping sovereignties . We said a moment ago that
communities of all kinds have become ever more legalistic in regulating their
affairs; it is often in the process of so doing , in fact, that they become
These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states. Self-evidently,

communities at all, the act of judicialisation being also an act of objectification. Herein lies
their will to sovereignty, which we take to connote the exercise of
autonomous control over the lives, deaths and conditions of existence of
those who fall within its purview and the extension over them of the
jurisdiction of some kind of law. Lawmaking, to cite Benjamin (1978: 295) yet
again, is power making. But power is the principal of all lawmaking . In sum, to
transform itself into sovereign authority, power demands an architecture
of legalities. Or their simulacra.

The 1AC is a project of poetic historical repetition We

create a queer temporality within communicative spaces
a destabilization of linear archival narratives, a
rearticulation of black life, resilient in the face of
unending violence In other words, take this chance to
find birth in all this death.
Gumbs 10 Alexis Pauline, PhD in Philosophy from Duke University. We Can Learn to
Mother Ourselves: The Queer Survival of Black Feminism 1968-1996. 2010. Pgs. 78-88.

How do we approach death and systematic, repetitive threats to survival,

poetically? What relationship can we afford to consent to in our reading
practices across and against death? The repetitive incidence of cancer in the lives of middle
aged Black feminist theorists calls for both a social and a theoretical response. In order to be accountable

this project must deal with the

question of whether and how death and disease shift textual
meanings and what reading practice is appropriate in the face of the
seemingly shortened life span of Black feminist theorists and the
struggle so many have had, and are having with cancer. The first section of
to the cultural workers that this dissertation features,

this introduction lists but a few of the contemporary Black feminist thinkers who are dead due to cancer at
this very moment. It would take pages to list all of the Black feminist theorists who are struggling with
cancerous growth, fibroids and pre-cancerous masses right now. Almost every queer Black feminist I know
who is over the age of 35 has already begun to confront these health issues. As I write this, I myself, at the
age of 26, am recovering from a minor surgical procedure related to a growth in my left breast. It would be
irresponsible to assert that these health problems are either mere coincidence, or immaterial to the

We must find a way to read historical

repetition poetically, so that we can create a transformed
relationship to the patterns inscribed upon our bodies, and the
embodied connections that link the meanings of our lives together. In an article
process of literary and theoretical production.

that she wrote about her process of writing a biography of Audre Lorde, Alexis De Veaux describes being
initiated in to a queer Black feminist textual tradition comprised of post-operative scars. Describing one of
the few times that she and Lorde spoke, while sunbathing on a roof De Veaux writes: I think she meant for
me to see her scarification, which was like a written text. She meant for me to know that the scar from my
own surgery a year before-and the multiple fibroid tumors I was now free ofbound me to a history of

the work of this dissertation is in

conversation with the history of these texts, the urgency written upon the
bodies of so many queer Black feminists marking spaces where a rejection of
stable employment, lack of access to healthcare, the stress of exclusion from
multiple communities of support and the dance of constant, teaching, writing
and thinking about and against violence intersect and manifest. If the work of
queer Black feminist mothering produces rival significations of the Black
body, that work and its unlikely survival also exists in the scars and missing
texts written upon womens bodies.87 In some ways,

places in the bodies of the workers, and the missing members of this
intergenerational movement. The meaning of my body is dialogical, produced
both by and in spite of the imagining and intention I am engaged in along
with ancestor mothers, elder mothers, the youngest among us and the
unborn. If we are working to assert that our bodies are sites for the
manifestation of spirit remembrance, we must also take seriously the
dismemberment that capitalism writes on us, both as motivation and
punishment for our dangerous creativity. And this circulation of scars,

disease and healing works in multiple directions. In a letter across

death to her mentor Toni Cade Bambara a Black feminist artist and thinker who also died of breast cancer,
Black lesbian filmmaker Aishah Shahidah Simmons writes of her own experience with painful fibroid tumors
and references The Salt Eaters a novel by Toni Cade Bambara as the text that she needed to read in order
to become proactive about her own healing.88 Toni Cade Bambara herself, at age 42, wrote a letter to June
Jordan commiserating with her struggle to quit smoking, admitting that the only period of her adult life
when she had been able to abstain from cigarette use was when she had also abstained from writing.
Ultimately she chose to keep writing, and continued smoking, but she lit a candle and said prayers towards
June Jordans clean lungs in a letter exchange where the two writers also mourned the early death (at age

while biographical research

into the lives of Black feminists, and queer Black feminists in particular
confronts us with specters of disease, this literary project cannot and would
not create an epidemiology of Black feminism or a theory on the impact that
Black feminist literary production has on physical health. Instead, taking into
account the urgency that my research subjects, my intimate audience and I
face due to the a prevalence of these health problems , I seek to activate
queer intergenerationality as an ethical temporality through which to practice
our reading of queer Black feminist texts (or our queer reading of Black feminist texts).
57) of their mutual friend, the scholar Hoyt Fuller.89 Ultimately,

to articulate a
theory of life and death evocative of a politics of
radical expression and embodied feminism is among
Audre Lordes influential work in the Cancer Journals

Lordes most studied contributions to feminist theory. However Jordans writing on and
in response to breast cancer is rarely featured or highlighted. In the paragraphs that follow, I will pay close
attention to the imagistic repetition in Jordans poetic tributes to Hamer and Lorde, and in order to
elaborate her expression of death always always blurring (y)our vision with tears into a temporality of
reading. Jordans poetic tributes to Hamer and Lorde both draw on images of fullness and trembling. In
Jordans poem for Fannie Lou Hamer she writes We ate A family tremulous but fortified by
turnips/okras/handpicked like the lilies fulled to the very living full A decade and a half later in For Audre

This repetition of the

transformed imagery of fullness and trembling has something to teach us
about a possible mode of response to loss and a form of mourning that is not
specifically Black feminist mourning but is however informed by, and
infused in the practice Black feminist literary production as a survival
intervention. In Jordans tribute to Hamer, she maternalizes her mentor. Early in the poem she quotes
she writes And I look to you, my Sister, with a full and trembling heart.

Hamer insisting that when Jordan comes to Mississippi she must stay at home with Hamer. This home is
a space that has fed Jordan, not only with a theory of the significance of land rights in Black communities
and food sustainability, and literarily with the seeds of a novel on Mississippi and land reform that she

Mothering for Jordan, as this dissertation

is work that fulfills a hungering for within people, for
food in one sense, but in another sense a hungering for connection and home
spaces despite the violence of the racist capitalist sexist context in which life
takes place. Hamer speaks to this conflated hunger for food and sustainable community under dire
never wrote, but also literally in the form of turnips and okra.
will argue and elaborate on

circumstances when Jordan quotes her in the poem yelling BULLETS OR NO BULLETS! THE FOOD IS
COOKED AN GETTING COLD! Despite the impact of the racial violence of the south Hamer created a

Mothering, explained by Jordan and exemplified by

Hamer is the practice of making meaningful connection out of
the possibility of home despite the persistence of forms of
violence predicated on the meaninglessness of Black
life. In this tribute to the life of Fannie Lou Hamer, the extraordinarily brave and outspoken political
chosen family tremulous but fortified.

activist and strategist, Jordan emphasizes the work of mothering, and not through some fantasy about
Mammy or a womans role. For Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamers ability to create a homemade field/ of love, to
assert love on a practical level as a context for life against all odds is a political intervention worth
honoring for the way it literally fills Jordan up. Formally, the poem emphasizes the dialogical significance of
this production of life as love. The poem starts with an intimate citation You used to say, June? Honey....
Interpreted after the fact by Jordan: Meaning home Hamers meaning, her ability to make home, is unlikely
in the context: against the beer the shotguns and the point of view of whitemen don never see Black
anybodies without some violent itch start up. The ones who said, No Niggass Votin in This town... The
racism of the city has a voice in this poem too, but beyond the brutality Hamer experiences while she
fights for equal voting rights, she insists on love in the acts of making home. Jordan finds her in a
laundromat lion spine relaxed and expressing bold insistence when it comes to dinnertime. It is this form
of mothering that leaves Jordan filled to the very living full because it is an intervention into meaning,
which Jordan emphasizes with her use of repetition. In addition to filled and full, she repeats one solid
gospel (sanctified) one gospel (peace) and continues the dialogue with the parenthetical elaborations on
the meaning of the gospels, which are themselves offerings towards the meaning of life. Ultimately Jordan

which is able to fill Jordan with

faith in a loving meaning of Black life despite the violent
evacuation of those loving meanings in the actions of racists. Though in this
honors Hamer for

the work of mothering

poem Jordan does not mention Hamers experience of forced sterilization early in life, but she was well
aware of this fact and it is clear that this knowledge impacts her depiction of Hamers mothering labor.

The attacks against Black mothering, especially in the South were pervasive,
but the queer thing is that in collaboration with Hamer, Jordan illuminates a
definition of mothering that does not depend on biological reproduction ,
because it is about the production of a context of chosen and meaningful
relationships. In the poem, Jordan both emphasizes Hamers miraculous way of asserting these
meanings in forms of mothering (laundry, dinner, hosting June during her visits) and Jordan asserts this
meaning in a dialogic poetic form that acknowledges her coproduction of a field of love through which
she can engage Fannie Lou Hamer past her death. In 1977 days after Fannie Lou Hamers death, June
Jordan introduces Lorde as the first Black poet to be honored with a reading at the Donnell Library, and
explicitly links Lordes work to the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. Lordes daughter Elizabeth saved a signed
copy of Jordans introductory remarks, and after rereading it, Lorde wrote a draft of a thank you letter in
her journal, detailing how much it meant to her to be recognized by Jordan, isnt that what we all long for,
a sister who says, yes I see you sister.90 In early 1993, Jordan is moved to create a tribute past death for

Jordan faces
Lordes death with a full and trembling heart knowing that she too is facing
the cancerous enemy that is responsible for Lordes untimely demise. Jordans
Audre Lorde, a peer, the imagery of fullness and trembling takes on a different feeling.

heart may be full of love in this instance, as in the Hamer example, but it is also filled with fear at what it

It is again the queer and crucial

labor of mothering that connects Jordan to Lorde across death . In this tribute,
means to look at an age-mate across the chasm of death.

written in the form of a prose letter which breaks into poetic form immediately after Jordans description of
her full and trembling heart, Jordan describes her first link to Lorde as their teaching labor of prostesting
students during the uprisings at City College, and explains the success of that labor, which they undertook
in partnership with the students, as a result of mothering as the context of their own lives. Against the
assumption that the needs of Black students would require a lowered set of academic standards she
explains, conspiratorially with Lorde across death We knew better. We had been Black children. And each
of us had given birth to a Black child here, in America. So we knew the precious, imaginably deep music
and the precious unimaginably complicated mathematics that our forbidden Black bodies enveloped. We
will discuss mothering and queer intergenerationality in the classroom more thoroughly in Chapter 3:

Teaching Us Questions, but once again Jordans connection to Lorde leads her to describe mothering as

This process of
mothering is intergenerational as her further bond to Lorde before the details
of their shared oppressions is their shared activity to make their own lives
meaningful in the context of the mystery of our own mothers face. This
possessive mothers is singular to indicate each mother, but also results in
the possible meaning that Lorde and Jordan share a possessive mother, or
are/were inhabited by a spiritual mother in the context outlined above
through which they made their own labor of mothering themselves and
others legible. Jordans survival, and Lordes is caught up in the ability to create mothering as a
access to an alternate meaning for Black life as infinitely precious and complex.

practice that changes the meaning of life and creates a temporality that outlives the threatened bodies

their survival depends on

our ability to read this theoretical practice of radical mothering in their work.
and the unfair means of literary production that each confronted. And

There is birth somewhere here, in all this death. There is

mothering happening as the meaning of your life shifts in these words. There
is queer survival in our opening towards each other. As June Jordan writes to
Audre Lorde, I say to them both and the other ancestors that live here: Here
is the flame of my faith Here are my words that death cannot spell or delete
Here is my tribute Here is my love that I place in your capable hands until we
meet again face-to-face. -June Jordans For Audre February, 18 1993 Here is my tribute
that I place in your capable hands. As the prologue and this introduction insist this is sacred
work where the praxis of an intergenerative reading practice reveals an queer intergenerationality and

This is an act of faith, my faith that

interrogating the functions and fissures of survival and reproduction as key
terms in the work of four Black feminist literary producers will offer us tools to
reread the present. Audre Lorde and June Jordan are the primary theorists of this dissertation, and
alternative future that depends on all of us.

while many more widely read theorists inform my interrogation of their work, they set the context and the
terms for engagement. There work does however intervene into and reframe several conversations about
queer futurity, diaspora, bare life, haunting, and difference that are ongoing. Barbara Smith and Alexis
DeVeauxs experimentations in the politics of publishing serve to provide the practical context for the
implications of the language of survival and mothering that I read through Lorde and Jordan. This
dissertation is more than anything a tribute because it is based on the premise that these four figures and

the discourses they sought to create and the

audience the generated for the question of Black feminism were meaningful,
even if their meaning was never mean to survive. If the work of these
for figures offers a poetic intervention into existing oppressive narratives of
what survival and reproduction, or life over time can mean, this dissertation
is one of the possible counter-narratives for which their interventions break a
space. The reading practice that constitutes this dissertation in an example of what Sylvia Wynter would
call the impossible relationship produced by the poetic act . In short this dissertation is
survival. It is more than a linear argument, which means it exceeds and
contradicts the time markers (1968-1996) I have used to frame it. It is queer
intergenerationality in practice. And while you are reading this dissertation it
is where and when you live.
the community they worked to build,

Uniquely, this space offers an opportunity to experiment

with the bounds of knowledge production take this
chance to destabilize the narratives of coherence at the
heart of the debate community. In other words, refuse to
play the game and instead play with the game - Voting aff
affirms the creation of a an entire body of knowledge that
isnt included in the status quo epistemeits a prerequisite to affirming any alternative existence that can
strive towards freedom
Dillon 13 assistant professor of Queer Studies, holds a B.A. from the
University of Iowa and a Ph.D. in American Studies with a minor in Critical
Feminist and Sexuality Studies from the University of Minnesota. (Stephen,
Fugitive Life: Race, Gender, and the Rise of the Neoliberal-Carceral State ,A
DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF
THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA , May 2013 //SRSL)
two new voices within national debates
about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rightsthe prisoner and
the fugitive. As more and more members of the 1960s liberation movements were
imprisoned or went underground, a new body of knowledge emerged
from both of these figures that negated national narratives of
progress, equality, and justice. While Fugitive Life tells a story about postcivil rights feminist, queer, and anti-racist activism, it focuses on these two
figures and two corresponding spaces: the prison and the underground.
In response to police repression in the form of incarceration, sabotage, and
assassination, and in order to deploy illegal tactics, hundreds of activists in
the 1970s left behind families, friends, jobs, and their identities in order to
disappear into a vast network of safe houses, under-the-table jobs, and
transportation networks. In fact, before she was imprisoned, Davis herself spent many months underground in order to
The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of

hide from the FBI. While there has been a resurgence of interest in many of these groups (prompted by and reflected in the anxiety about

their significance to
the post-civil rights landscapeas structured by the prison and neoliberalism
has only begun to be explored. The books of imprisoned authors like
Eldridge Cleaver, George Jackson, and Malcolm X (which sold hundreds of
thousands of copies) exposed something about the United States that only
they could know. In the original introduction to Jacksons Soledad Brother,
Jean Genet wrote that Jacksons prison writing exposed the miracle of truth
itself, the naked truth revealed.20 For Genet and many readers of this literature, the prisoner
had access to a unique formation of knowledge which led to
alternative ways of seeing and knowing the world. Indeed, scholars like Dylan Rodrguez,
Obamas connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election),

Michael-Hames Garcia, and Joy James have argued that the knowledge produced by the prisoner exposes a truth about the United States that
cannot be accessed from elsewhere.21 The prisoner could name what others could not even see. At the same time, thousands of political
fugitives wrote devastating critiques of the United States as they bombed and robbed their way to what they hoped would be a better world.

Underground organizations like the Weather Underground, Black Liberation

Army, and George Jackson Brigade did more than attack symbols of state
violence; they also wrote poetry, stories, memoirs, communiqus, magazines,
and made films. These groups understood culture as foundational to the

production and survival of alternatives to things as they were. In this way,

culture became a site for the emergence of alternative forms of knowledge.