We begin our discussion of domestic surveillance in the same way that domestic surveillance originally came to be in American society—from slavery—the 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+surveillance+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 non-property 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-to-face 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.

Over the course of this essay, we’ll 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 Wilderson’s and Sexton’s 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 (though often, with regard to Fanon, I prefer the particular kinds of precision that follow from what some might dismiss as mistranslation) 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, in general, held within the logic of im/possibility that delineates what subjects and citizens call the real world (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 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 Bryan Wagner (2009: i) 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 would it be, deeper still,

what is it, to think from no standpoint; to think outside the desire for a standpoint? 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 ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s 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 Sexton’s work, is not what he calls one of that project’s 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 black life—which is as surely to say lf as black thought is to say thought—is 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,” as Abdul Jan Mohamed (2005) would say. In this, however, 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, now, 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 don’t think I ever claimed, or meant to claim, that Afro-pessimism sees blackness as a kind of pathogen. 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 pathologist examines. What, precisely, is the morbid body upon which Fanon, the pathologist, trains his eye? What is the object of his “complete lysis” (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 Sexton’s understanding of my relation to Afro-pessimism emerges from my sense of a kind of terminological dehiscence in Orlando Patterson’s (1982) work that 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. The “secular excommunication” that describes slavery for Patterson (1982: 5) is more precisely understood as the radical exclusion from a political order, which is tantamount, in Arendt’s formulation, 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. 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, instantiated in exchange. What I am trying to get to, by way of this terminological slide in Patterson, is the consideration of a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored terror of power-laden intersubjectivity, which is, or would be, the structural foundation of Patterson’s epiphenomenology of spirit. To have honor, which is, of necessity, to be a man of honor, for Patterson, is to become a combatant in transcendental subjectivity’s perpetual civil war. To refuse the induction that

Patterson desires is to enact or perform the recognition of the constitution of civil society as enmity, hostility, and civil butchery. It is, moreover, 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. This is to say that, yes, 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 aesthetic —cognate as they are not with the failed but rather with the successful state and its abstract, equivalent citizens—to be the fundamentally and essentially antisocial nursery for a necessarily necropolitical imitation of life. So that if Afro-pessimists say that social life is not the condition of black life but is, rather, the political field that would surround it, then that’s 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 , as Sexton has shown no more

rigorously than I could ever hope to do, crucial. It 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. 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. This mass is understood to be undifferentiated precisely because from the imaginary perspective of the political subject—who 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. I believe it is from that standpoint that Afro-

pessimism identifies and articulates the imperative to embrace that nothingness which is, of necessity, relative. 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, in genealogical and sociological isolation even from every other nothing. Now, all that remains are unspoken scraps scattered on the

floor like Lisa’s 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 not—answer your question that night. Would I ever be with a Black woman again? It was earnest, not accusatory—I 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 Wilderson’s words—his assertion of his own nothingness and the implications of that nothingness

for his reader—one is all but overwhelmed by the need for a kind of affirmative negation of his formulation. It’s not that one wants to say no, Pro fessor 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 beauty—the fantastic, celebratory force of Wilderson’s and Sexton’s work, which study has allowed me to begin more closely to approach—of 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, not from its own standpoint or from any standpoint but from the absoluteness of its generative dispersion of a general antagonism that blackness holds and protects in as critical celebration and degenerative and regenerative preserva tion . That’s the mobility of place, 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? What’s the relationship between blackness, thingli-ness, nothingness and the (de/re)generative operations of what Deleuze might call a life in common? 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? Our aim , even in the face of the brutally imposed difficulties of black life, is cause for celebration . 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, because the cause for celebra tion turns out to be the condition of possibility of black thought , which ani - mates 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 Sexton—by way of the slightest, most immeasurable reversal of emphasis—that Afro-pessimism and black optimism are not but nothing other than one another. 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. I’ll try to approach that field, its expansive concentration, by way of Don Cherry and Ed Blackwell’s (1982) extended meditation on nothingness; by way of Fanon’s and Peter Line- baugh’s accounts of language in and as vehicularity; by way of Foucault’s meditations on the ship of fools and Deleuze’s 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 I’m simply deluding myself, but such celebratory performance of thought, in thought, is as much about the insurgency of immanence as it is about what Wagner (2009: 2) calls the

“consolation oftranscen- dence.” But, as I said earlier, I plan to stay a believer in blackness , even as thingliness, even as (absolute) nothingness, even as imprisonment in pas sage on the most open road of all, even as —to use and abuse a terribly beau tiful phrase of Wilderson’s (2010: xi)— fantasy in the hold

Make no mistake, we aren’t 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.

Moten and Harney also 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, Moten and Harney suggest, 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. 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 it generates and the speaking that happens through and around it, making it and loving it, being in it

while listening. And so, 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. These kinds of

examples get to the heart of Moten and Harney’s world of the undercommons – 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. Moten and Harney refuse the logic that stages refusal as inactivity , as the absence of a plan and as a mode of stalling real politics. Moten and Harney

tell us to listen to the noise we make and to refuse the offers we receive to shape that noise 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. 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, Moten and Harney lead us to the “Undercommons of the Enlightenment” where 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, we learn, 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.” In fact, 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. 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 , like Curtis Mayfield. But that’s 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 . Or, as Moten puts it: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us. I don’t 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” – not as a masculinist surge or an

armed confrontation. Revolution will come in a form we cannot yet imagine. Moten and Harney propose that we prepare now for what 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 in what Harney calls “the with and for” and allows you to spend less time antagonized and antagonizing. For Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, we must make common cause with those desires and (non) positions that seem crazy and unimaginable : we must , on behalf of this alignment, 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. Instead, our fantasies must come from what Moten and Harney citing Frank B. Wilderson III 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 I’ll steal, and there I’ll steal,” to borrow from Pistol at the end of Henry V, as he would surely borrow from us. This is the only possible relationship to the American university today. This may be true of universities everywhere. It may have to be true of the university in general. But 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. In the face of these conditions 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 of—this is the path of the subversive intellectual in the modern university. 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 upstairs, in polite company, among the rational men. After all, the subversive intellectual came under false pretenses , with bad documents, out of love . Her labor is as necessary as it is unwelcome. The university needs what she bears but cannot bear what she brings. And on top of all that, she disappears. 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. What is that work and what is its social capacity for both reproducing the university and producing fugitivity? If one were to say teaching, one

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 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 it is teaching that brings us in.

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 stage persists, there is a social pathology in the university. But if the teaching is successfully passed on, the stage is surpassed, and teaching is consigned to those who are known to remain in the stage, the sociopathological labor of the university. Kant interestingly calls such a stage “self-incurred minority.” He tries to contrast it with having the “determination and courage to use one’s intelligence without being guided by another.” “Have the courage to use your own intelligence.”

But what would it mean if teaching or rather what we might call “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 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 the biopower of the Enlightenment know this, or perhaps it is just reacting to the objecthood of this labor as it must. But even as it depends on these moles, these refugees, they will call them uncollegial, impractical, naive, unprofessional. And one may be given one last chance to be pragmatic—why steal when one can have it all, they will

ask. But if one hides from this interpellation, neither agrees nor disagrees but goes with hands full into the underground of the university, into the Undercommons —this will be regarded as theft , as a criminal act . And it is at the same time, the only possible act . 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. 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 . What the beyond2 of teaching is really about is not finishing oneself, not

passing, not completing; it’s about allowing subjectivity to be unlawfully overcome by others, a radical passion and passivity such that one becomes unfit for subjection, because 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 . [CONTINUED ON PGS. 87--97] 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. 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 we heard 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 reach the general intellect? 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, as Christian Marrazi might say. And anyway 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. Yet it is not we who ask this question. 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 that

dream, the same algorithmic research that Donald Rumsfeld was in fact quoting in his ridiculed unknown unknowns speech, a droning speech that announced the conception of a drone war. Because drones are

not un-manned to protect American pilots. They are un-manned because they think too fast for American pilots. 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. 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? The rise of logistics is rapid. 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, logistics is everywhere. And beyond these classic capitalist sciences, its ascent is echoed ahistorically in the emerging fields of object-oriented philosophy and cognitive neuroscience, where the logistical conditions of knowledge production go unnoticed, but not the effects. 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

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 commodities, the ones that could speak. It was founded in the Atlantic slave trade , founded against the Atlantic slave. 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. 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. 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 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. If commodity labor would come to

have a standpoint, the standpoint from which one’s 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. 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 us, 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 phonography’s brutally experimental venue. Paraontological totality is in the making. Present and unmade in presence, blackness is an instrument in the making. Quasi una fantasia in its paralegal swerve, its mad-worked braid, the imagination

produces nothing but exsense in the hold. Do you remember the days of slavery? Nathaniel Mackey rightly says “The world was ever after/elsewhere,/no/way where 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 “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 sea-born 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. 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 Blackwell and Don Cherry recorded in 1982. You’ll 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 . Mackey, in the preface to his unbearably beautiful Splay Anthem, outlining the provenance and relationship between the book’s 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 Cherry’s [and Ed Blackwell’s] ‘Mu’ First Part and ‘Mu’ Second Part in the other”) speaks of mu in relation to a circling or spiraling or ringing, this roundness or rondo linking beginning and

end, and to the wailing that accompanies entrance into and expulsion from sociality . 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, marking sociality’s 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 Wilderson’s 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 the antiphonal

accompaniment to gratuitous violence – the sound that can be heard as if it were in response to that violence, the sound that must be heard as that to which such violence responds? 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 as opposed to what Nishida Kitaro, would call absolute; but because nothing (this paraontological interplay of blackness and nothingness, this aesthetic sociality of the shipped, this logisticality)

remains unexplored , because we don’t 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? “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

man’s 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 man possesses two dimensions: one with his fellow Blacks, the other with the Whites.” But 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. The standpoint, the home territory, chez lui –

Markman’s 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 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 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 nigger’s comic spear, the cosmic crook of language, the burnin’ and lootin’ of pidgin, Bird’s talk, Bob’s talk, bard talk, bar talk, baby talk, B talk, preparing the minds of the little negro steelworkers for

meditation. 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 . That spiraling Mackey speaks of suffers

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 one’s own speed, that ruptures both recursion and advance? 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, there’s a society of friends where everything can fold in dance to black, in being held and flown, in what was never silence. Can’t you hear them whisper one another’s 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. 1743–1747. PWoods.

My field is black studies. In that field, I’m 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, color + beauty = blackness which is not but nothing other than who, and deeper still, where I am. This shell , this inhabitation, this space, this garment—that I carry with me on the various stages of my flight from the conditions of its making— is a zone of chromatic saturation troubling any ascription of impoverishment 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 now—and I’ll do so by way of a cool kind of accident that has been afforded us by the danger and saving power that is power point—that

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). There was a

moment in Rebecca’s 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.” What’s 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 Lauren’s 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 I’m interested in, but which I can only give a bare outline of, is a two-fold black operation—one 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 and ante-Kantian, endeavor. The new black studies, or to be more precise, the old-new black studies, since every iteration has had this ambivalence at its heart, can’t 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. I’m trying to move by way of a kind of resistance to that anti-essentialism, one that requires a paleonymic relation to blackness; I’m trying to own a certain dispossession, the underprivilege of being-sentenced to this gift of constantly escaping and to standing in for the fugitivity (to echo Natahaniel

Mackey, Daphne Brooks and Michel Foucault) (of the imagination) 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 is—as space or spacing of the imagination , as condition of possibility

and constant troubling of critique. It’s annoying to perform what you oppose, but I just want you to know that I ain’t 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 doesn’t love me, because I think he’s beautiful too and, as you know, a thing of beauty is a joy forever. But even though I’m not mad,

I’m 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 Studies strains against a burden that,

even when it is thought musically, is inseparable from constraint. But my optimism, 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 op—a 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. I play this in appreciation for being in Chicago, which is everybody’s sweet home, everybody’s 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 Folkways Records, FW02690 1967 The temporal paradox of optimism—that 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.” With respect to C. L. R. James and José (Muñoz), 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, 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 , which is, as Gayatri Spivak says, 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 there’s 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. 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

outskirts and it will remain so as long as it claims its fugitive proximity to blackness , which I will claim, with ridiculousness boldness, is the condition of possibility of politics .

Why affirm? Because it’s 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, naïve to it’s 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 observes, 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 Iton’s ‘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 ‘the conscious effort to always give one’s best performance and encourage others

to do the same, and indeed to perform even when one is not sure of one’s audience (or whether there is in fact an audience)’ (p. 105). Iton employs the term visual surplus to think about the visual media of black pop ular 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, Iton’s 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 one’s 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, t he 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 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 city’s 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 Majesty’s 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 Zandt’s 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 coroner’s 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 Hamilton’s 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 Lott’s discussion of black performances he cites Thomas De Voe’s 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 Brown’s 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 April 1889). Sylvia Wynter’s ‘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 Majesty’s 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.

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 Law’s 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

Nor is it just the politics of the present that are being judicialised. As we said earlier, the past, too, is being fought out in the courts. Britain, for example, is currently being sued for acts of atrocity in its African empire (Anderson 2005; Elkins 2005): for

having killed local leaders, unlawfully alienated territory from one African people to another, and so on.33 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 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 postcolonies. 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 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 law of the land to raze dangerous ‘illegal structures’. 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 Benjamin’s (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 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 key questions: 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 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

from the first on difference. And difference begets more law. Why? Because, 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 well-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 war, integral to the management of life itself. 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 . 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 together and 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 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. These days, organised crime is operating ever more like states.

Self-evidently, 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 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 to the cultural workers that this dissertation features, 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 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 process of literary and

theoretical production. 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 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 of—bound me to a history of “texts” written upon

women’s bodies.87 In some ways, 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 it’s unlikely survival also exists in the scars and missing 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 Jordan’s clean lungs in a letter exchange where the two writers also mourned the early death (at age 57) of

their mutual friend, the scholar Hoyt Fuller.89 Ultimately, 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). Audre Lorde’s influential work in the Cancer Journals to articulate a

theory of life and death evocative of a politics of radical expression and embodied feminism is among Lorde’s most studied contributions to feminist theory. However Jordan’s 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 Jordan’s 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. Jordan’s poetic tributes to Hamer and Lorde both draw on images of fullness and trembling. In Jordan’s 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” she writes And I look to you, my Sister, with a full and trembling heart. 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 Jordan’s tribute to Hamer, she maternalizes her mentor. Early in the poem she quotes 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 never wrote, but also literally in the form of turnips and okra. Mothering for Jordan, as this

dissertation will argue and elaborate on 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 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 chosen “family tremulous but

fortified.” 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 activist and strategist, Jordan emphasizes the work of mothering, and not through some fantasy about Mammy or a woman’s role. For Jordan, Fannie Lou Hamer’s 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 Hamer’s 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 Niggas’s 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 honors Hamer for the work of mothering

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 poem Jordan does not mention Hamer’s 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 Hamer’s 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 Hamer’s 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 Hamer’s death, June Jordan introduces Lorde as the first Black poet to be honored with a reading at the Donnell Library, and explicitly links Lorde’s work to the legacy of Fannie Lou Hamer. Lorde’s daughter Elizabeth saved a signed copy of Jordan’s 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, “isn’t 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 Audre

Lorde, a peer, the imagery of fullness and trembling takes on a different feeling. Jordan faces Lorde’s death with a “full and trembling heart” knowing that she too is facing the cancerous enemy that is responsible for Lorde’s untimely demise. Jordan’s heart may be full of love in this instance, as in the Hamer example, but it is also filled

with fear at what it means to look at an age-mate across the chasm of death. It is again the queer and crucial labor of mothering that connects Jordan to Lorde across death . In this tribute, written in the form of a prose letter which breaks into poetic form immediately after Jordan’s 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 Jordan’s connection to Lorde leads her to describe mothering as access to an alternate

meaning for Black life as infinitely precious and complex. 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 mother’s face.” This possessive “mother’s” 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 . Jordan’s survival, and Lorde’s is caught up in the ability to create mothering as a practice that changes the meaning of life and creates a temporality that outlives the threatened bodies and the unfair means of literary

production that each confronted. And their survival depends on our ability to read this theoretical practice

of radical mothering in their work. 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 Jordan’s “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 alternative future that depends on all of us. 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 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 DeVeaux’s 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 community they worked to build, 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.

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 isn’t included in the status quo episteme—it’s a pre-requisite 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)

The late 1960s and early 1970s saw the emergence of two new voices within national debates about racism, imperialism, poverty, and civil rights—the 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 post-civil 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 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

Obama’s connections to Weather Underground member Bill Ayers during the 2008 presidential election), their significance to the post-civil rights landscape—as 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 Jackson’s Soledad Brother, Jean Genet wrote that Jackson’s 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 Rodríguez, 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, communiqués, 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.