Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Title of Thing
Title of Thing
activity but in order for that to be true we must FIRST disavow the truth about a
particular form of violence that not only strips Blackness of its ability to SPEAK its
suffering which is integral for the ability of persuasion but also its ontological integrity to
exist on an equal playing field for its true metaphysical injury to be recognized, symbolized,
or COMMUNICATED, or be healed. As we plunge into this Black abyss we have three
immediate questions: 1. Can you hear a Black shadow? 2. How can the shadow speak
back? 3. How can the shadow know about itself? While we may never create a complete
grammar of suffering-- the shadow of Anna Brown--a shadow that doesn’t care about the
uniqueness of a name but the (non)uniqueness of Black fresh as its shade reverberates in
society like an orchestra’s sound in a room. This incoherent shadow—of Black life within-
death—is where we choose to descend when posed with the task of responding to the
affirmative
Brady 12 Louder Than the Dark: Toward an Acoustics of Suffering By Guest Contributor on October 11, 2012. Nicholas Brady is an
activist-scholar from Baltimore, Maryland. He is an executive board member of Leaders of a Beautiful Struggle, a community-based think tank
focused on empowering youth in the political process. Through the organization, he has helped to produce policy and critical intervention papers,
organize efforts in Baltimore against the prison industrial complex, lead educational forums on a myriad of community-oriented projects, and use
debate as a critical pedagogical tool to activate the voices of young people from ages 10 to 25. He is a recent graduate of Johns Hopkins
University with a bachelor’s degree in Philosophy and is currently a doctoral student in the University of California-Irvine Culture and Theory
program. http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/10/louder-than-the-dark-towards-an-acoustics-of-suffering/ dx/////
Can you hear a shadow? The more enlightened, the deeper the shadows, but can the shadow enunciate the depth of
its sorrow back to the world it is invariably bound to? A silhouette is wheeled to the corner of a
hallway, its face obscured. The nurse has demanded that she leave the hospital. Unbeknownst to the
shadow, the police happen to be in the building at the same time and are asked to remove her from
the premises. They drag her out of the wheelchair and handcuff her, leaving her slouched on the ground. A few more cops come and they
cart her away to literally rot in a jail cell. The shadow’s name is Anna Brown. She has also been named “the
homeless lady,” as well as “the crackhead” or “drug sick” individual by the officers that arrested
her. She went to the hospital after spraining her ankle, was arrested because she refused to leave
due to continued pain, and was found dead on the prison floor because her sprain produced blood
clots that lodged into her lungs. Due to medical malpractice and the police officers’ violence, Anna
passed away alone on the floor of a prison cell. Yet, that last sentence was entirely too nice, for in
truth Anna Brown was murdered. The hesitation to describe this as a “murder” is because that
implies an event, a narrative, a “when,” “where,” and “who” (as in “who done it?”). Yet this was
not an event with an acting subject; she was instead murdered by subjectivity itself : a
series of incidents centered on her body, each reverberating off each other into an orchestra of
death. Each proceeding was an echo of the one preceding it: waves of suffering reflecting off each action through time. Her death was
caused by the incoherence of her voice, her calls for care, her screams of agony. Put another way,
she was murdered by civil society’s inability-–and lack of desire-–to hear her being. Discourse on
race normally focuses on the material and the visual, but the video of Anna Brown’s death points us
less to the images and more to the centrality of aurality to black suffering. The first part of the video is without
audio, but this does not mean sound is absent per se. That the video lacks audio in the beginning says more than perhaps the soundtrack itself
could, for it makes explicit the inaudibility of black suffering. We know that Anna Brown had expressed her lasting pain, in spite of the doctor’s
opinion that she was fine. The hospital then ordered her to leave and she protested, saying that she was still in pain. She was forcibly wheeled to
the hallway and eventually arrested by the police. Her vocal protests, critiques of inadequate service and expression
of her persistent pain, fell on deaf ears. She spoke the knowledge of her body, but her voice was
muted and over-dubbed by the knowledge of the professionals. How can the black know about
itself? How can the shadow speak back? The violence that produces the subject (in this case, the
doctor) robs Anna Brown of vocality, not so much literally as ontologically. Insofar as an object (a commodity,
a slave) can speak, it cannot be said that it can communicate. At the etymological root of “communicate” is the logic of
the commons or community: informing to participate in the world, sharing one’s utterance(s) to
join the community. Communication, not even to imply anything as serious as the ethics of
dialogue, requires an equal ontological status amongst the communicators. That several titles of the video
online have called her the “homeless woman” evidences one singular truth (the desire to insult her notwithstanding ): Anna Brown, as
the descendent of slaves, has no home while the doctors are in their own dominion. In a public
lecture titled “People-of-Color-Blindness,” Jared Sexton describes an experience at a jazz club
where the microphones go off, but the band continues to play. Even though the sociality between
the band and the audience has been shut down, the band still plays on. Sexton uses this example to
dramatize how even though the black is socially dead, that does not signify that black life is non-
existent. Instead, our social death signifies that black life is sealed off from the world and happens
elsewhere: “underground or in outer space.” In this way Anna speaks, but the microphone that would project her subjectivity
to the world has been turned off. Her suffering has been rendered unreal while her voice is heard as
incoherent and dangerous. If Anna Brown’s suffering is inaudible, the second half of the video speaks to how her voice and pain are
criminalized. When the police arrive, they surround Anna and then drag her out of the wheelchair,
handcuff her, and leave her on the hospital floor. She is given two different charges: her protests
for better service are charged as “trespassing” and her inability to walk due to her injury is
charged as “resisting arrest.” When she is in the police car, the camera in the vehicle has a microphone. When they arrive at the
prison, Anna continues to tell them she can’t walk and that she needs to be in a hospital. The police officers ignore her statements and instead
oscillate between asking her “are you going to get out” and threatening her; “you have two seconds to [swing your legs out]…” Each implies that
she can move her legs and she is choosing not to.
As Saidiya Hartman writes in Scenes of Subjection, “the slave
was recognized as a reasoning subject who possessed intent and rationality solely in the context of
criminal liability.” Her suffering remains inaudible, but her voice can only be heard by the police as
her voice can only be
challenging the law, resisting arrest, disrespecting their authority;
heard as a legitimizing force for their violence . As they drag her out of the car, she screams
out in pain before the door is shut and her voice becomes muffled. They carried Anna Brown to the cell and laid her body on the ground as if she
were already a corpse; they even refused her the dignity of lying on the bed. As they stepped around her body and closed the cell door, the only
sign she was still alive were her wordless screams.
Her screams pierce through my speakers, haunting my mind
but they seem to have no effect on the prison workers. She was clearly not the first screaming body
they had carried into a cell, for they did not even take time to stop their chatter. There is no
passion, intimacy, or perverse enjoyment, just a multicultural group of men doing their job. Anna’s
death is not the “primal scene” that the beating of Aunt Hester (Frederick Douglass’s Aunt) was.
These two black women’s screams are connected by the paradigm of anti-blackness, yet their
screams terrify for different reasons. The beating of Aunt Hester is a spectacular example of the
“blood-stained gate” of the slave’s subjection. While the circulation of the Anna Brown video has
given me pause, her death is more an example of the “mundane and quotidian” terror that
Hartman focuses on in her text. Brown’s death was a (non)event, concealed from the world by the
walls of the prison cell. Without this video, only those on the inside would have heard her screams.
Anna Brown didn’t simply pass away, she was killed, but who did it? Douglass’s Aunt Hester was beaten by
Captain Anthony, a man who wanted her and was jealous of her relationship to another slave. Anna Brown was murdered by a
disparate set of (non)events where her body shuttled between a hospital and a prison, doctors and
nurses, police officers and prison officials. There is no one person who killed her; instead, a
structure of violence murdered her. No intimacy, just cold efficiency. Her scream was less of a
sorrow song than the sharp pitch of nu-bluez: an impossible scream to be heard from the depths of
incarceration and incapacity. Anna Brown’s death was neither an event nor a spectacle. An event
signifies presence, but Anna’s death is an ethereal absence, a spirit’s wail fading away like one’s
warm breath on a cold day. If the beating of Aunt Hester demands that one meditate on the spectacle of black suffering, Anna
Brown’s screams call for us to think of the aurality of agony, the acoustics of suffering. What are
the aural mechanisms that made it impossible for civil society to hear Anna Brown’s pain? What
are the technologies that remix the tonalities of black people into criminalized speech? These thoughts on
the acoustics of suffering are not to displace the visual for the aural, but instead to theorize how they form and invigorate each other. Put another
way, anti-blackness is a structure where (black) skin speaks for itself and the body it encompasses, even when the black’s subjecthood is muted.
In the darkness of space, one cannot hear you scream. Focusing on acoustics can offer a different
sharpening of the cutting edge, a modality that allows us to tune into the unimaginable frequency of
black thought. If it is impossible to hear the black (aurality) and for the black to speak on its own
terms (orality), then to be heard in this world, we would have to break the laws of physics–
ontologically speaking. This is another way of saying that the acoustics of suffering forces us to
think of the impossibilities of harmony and, perhaps, the terrifying beauty of cacophony. In this
way, the enlightenment of the ignorant shadows would not be the key to the future, but instead the
reverberation of our revolutionary racket that clangs through civil society. From the black hole of
our subjectivity and into the screeching noise of this parasitic world, we scream that our lives, black
life, matters until the final, paradigmatic quiet comes.
The 1AC is premised upon a ruse of analogy – their refusal of ableism is merely the
upending of a conflict within civil society which mystifies the fundamental
antagonism which structures America and the World: the absolute non-being of
blackness – anti-blackness provides ontological and conceptual coherence to any
notion of a “human” subject which means the 1AC’s affirmation of cripping of
surveillance crowds out the slave’s grammar of suffering
Kim 13 (Hyo Kim, assistant professor of English at Medgar Evers College, City University of New York, PhD from Stony Brook
University, Fall 2013, ““The Ruse of Analogy”: Blackness in Asian American and Disability Studies,” Penumbra: An Interdisciplinary Journal
of Critical and Creative Inquiry Volume 1) gz
The problematic model of civil society as constituent of undifferentiated humans aside (a point to which I will return later), Davis’s
critique of identity works to consolidate the idea of liberal political subject that is ideally
unmarked by embodied difference such as race and gender. According to Chris Bell, it is
precisely such flattening of racial difference in Disability studies that helps
body that resists localization enables the return of what he fears —the able-
bodied white male subject as the proxy for normalcy. Incidentally, in a slightly different but
nevertheless relevant context, Julia Kristeva’s ethico-political orientation toward the “stranger” has come under similar criticism. As Sara Ahmed
queries, does not the model of “call[ing] ourselves (i.e. all human subjects) strangers … perform the gesture of killing the strangers it
simultaneously creates, by rendering them universal: [as] a new community of the ‘we’ is implicitly
created. If we are all strangers (to ourselves), then nobody is” (73).5 Or in Bell’s more scathing critique: “Far from excluding
treats people of color as if they were
people of color, White Disability Studies
white people , as if there are no critical exigencies involved in being people of color
that might necessitate these individuals understanding and negotiating disability in a different way
from their white counterparts” (282). Though Bell does not go on to explore what specific “critical exigencies” differentiate how
“people of color” embody disability or suffering, it is clear from his critique that he intuits a certain “grammar” to suffering
which Davis’s “Dismodernism” cannot accommodate . For instance, what at first glance seems
merely naïve―that is the observation that in the U.S. “[b]eing disabled is just like being
black”―actually does index how disability cannot be synonymous with
Whiteness . For what is suggested through the forced parity between the construction of blackness and disability is that the disabled
body or mind cannot properly embody Whiteness in toto. And that is what Anna Stubblefield demonstrates in “‘Beyond the Pale’: Tainted
Whiteness, Cognitive Disability and Eugenic Sterilization,” which iterates how disabled white persons have historically been categorized as
embodying a tainted form of whiteness. She convincingly argues that beginning from the 1800s in the U.S. those who were considered
feebleminded, a form of cognitive disability, lost the full privileges attendant with white citizenship. As she writes, “ … to grasp
feeblemindedness fully as a signifier of tainted whiteness, it is important to understand that the state-sponsored, involuntary sterilization of
tainted whites meant that they had, in effect, lost the full protection that whiteness conferred in a white supremacist society” (178; emphasis
added). Not only did the so-called feebleminded whites come to embody a compromised form of whiteness but also the “ … white men [and
women] labeled as criminal, sexually deviate, homosexual, … or insane … ” (Stubblefield 178). What Stubblefield emphasizes is that disability
as a social construct cannot easily be detached from its imbricated positioning within a network of material forces that include not only race but
sexuality, class, and gender. Her study foregrounds the need for Disability studies to attend to racialization as not a tangential focus but central to
its overall theoretical and political project. Interestingly Stubblefield’s
study of how disability can dispossess whites of
their “full personhood” under U.S. law seemingly lends support to what “Dismodernism”
authorizes, which is the idea that the suffering of blacks can be made equivalent to not only
what disabled whites come to embody but also to all those other Others represented under the
category of “people of color.” In short, disability has the potential to democratize civil society by
recalling how all citizens are common in their humanity―that is, equally exposed to
disability . Yet, if we read between the lines of Stubblefield’s summary of how “feebleminded
whites” can become “tainted,” the singularity of “blackness’s grammar of
suffering” emerges. For what distinguishes “blackness grammar of suffering” is how it does
not operate according to the assumptive logic of capability . In other words, to
approach “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” Wilderson insists that one must be able to imagine
“anethicality … so terrifying that, as a space to be inhabited and terror to
be embraced ” (41), it resists language . It is a “grammar of suffering” based not
upon the logic of a “lost” capacity but that of a deontologized property ,
the Slave that is not “exploited and alienated” but rather “ accumulated and fungible .”
The effect of this singular grammar on Asian American and Disability studies is significant, but the impact
of Wilderson’s critique on the “scholarly and aesthetic production” of the “Black theorist” is
radical by comparison. As he writes: This [“blackness’s grammar suffering”] makes the labor of
disavowal in Black scholarly and aesthetic production doubly burdensome, for it is triggered by a
ontological incapacity .
dread of both being ‘discovered,’ and of discovering oneself, as
Thus, through borrowed institutionality ―the feigned capacity to be essentially
exploited and alienated (rather than accumulated and fungible) in the first ontological
instance (in other words, a fantasy to be just like everyone else , which is a
fantasy to be )―the work of Black film theory [and by extension Black studies] operates
through a myriad of compensatory gestures in which the Black theorists assumes
by which civil society makes sense of itself to itself―the simultaneous disavowal of and
parasitic dependency on the Black . In other words, the desire to make blackness
an analogue of disability amounts to denying the structural relevancy of
slavery to the formation of U.S. civil society. Wilderson’s reading of Fanon helps to articulate
the radical singularity of “blackness’s grammar of suffering,” as it emphasizes how “… the
gratuitous violence of the Black’s first ontological instance, the Middle Passage, ‘wiped
out [his or her] metaphysics … his [or her] customs and sources on
which they are based .’ Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans
went into the ships and came out as Blacks ” (38). What Wilderson calls the
“blackness’s grammar of suffering,” consequently, has no analogue in either the
both Wilderson and Bell help foreground the important fact that even suffering obtains a “grammar,”
that is, has a way of indexing ―whether positively in the form of identification or negatively
through dis- or even through non-identification, the presence or absence of a world .
What Bell’s and especially Wilderson’s critique bring into sharp relief is that anti-blackness is part and parcel of
the episteme that gives internal coherence to U.S. civil society . To approach
“blackness’s grammar suffering” is therefore to contemplate , albeit always indirectly, not
the paradigm of disability which is always already predicated on
agency but a radical non-capacity. Wilderson’s illumination of how the “antagonism”
that obtains around blackness is structural to the formation of U.S. civil society has the effect of
clarifying the positioning of sub-fields such as Disability and Asian
American studies , especially when their protocols aim toward establishing some form of
political justice based upon “exploitation and alienation,” which is at
odds with “blackness’s grammar of suffering .” As previously mentioned, Wilderson
draws a sharp distinction between “conflict” and “antagonism.” And this is
key, as it is only when anti-blackness is positioned as an “antagonism” that the residual and
structural effects of the Slave (the non-human) can be allowed to erupt into the living
present of U.S. civil society . As such, though by comparison far more optimistic than Wilderson’s study,
Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (2010) gives powerful evidence to Wilderson’s theory of the “structural antagonisms” that contour U.S. civil
society. This is how a critical theory based upon advancing a colorblind world or an ethicality based upon
the universal human effectively silences the suffering of the Black . As Alexander argues: Far
from being a worthy goal … colorblindness has proved catastrophic for African Americans. It is not an
The aff’s struggle in the debate space rebels in the face of this divine racism,
claiming to “one day get there” while ignoring the demand for evidence of the
efficacy of this struggle. The logic of struggle perpetuates black suffering by placing
relief in an unattainable future, a future that offers nothing more than an
exploitative reproduction of its own means of existence.
Warren 15 (Calvin, Assistant Professor of American Studies at George Washington University “Black Nihilism and the Politics of Hope”
Ill-Will Editions, June 2015 pg. 19-21) NIJ
“social, political, and intellectual struggle... struggle in solidarity with others, the struggle to be for
and with others, the struggle of the multitude, the struggle that is blackness [as] the new ecclesiology ” (4) The
term “struggle” here presents political metaphysics as a solution to the problem of anti-blackness—
through labor, travail, and commitment one embraces progress and linearity as social goods. With this
metaphysics, according to Carter, we can “struggle to get rid of these ‘Stand Your Ground’ Laws that are in place in many states besides Florida, struggle against state legislatures (such as North
Carolina’s) that are enacting draconian laws of various sorts, struggle in the name of the protection of women’s agency about their own bodies—in short, struggle to imagine a new politics of
social-order.” Again, the trick of time is deployed to protect “struggle” from the rigorous historical
analysis that would demand evidence of its efficacy. The “not-yet-social-order,” situated in an
irreproachable future (a political prolepsis), can only promise this overcoming against a history and historicity
of brutal anti-black social organization. Carter is looking for a political theology—although we’ve always had one under the guise of democratic
liberalism—that will provide conditions of life by mobilizing the discourses of hope and future temporality. The problem that this theology encircles, and evades, is the failure of “social justice”
and “liberation theology” to dismantle the structure of anti-black violence; this brings us full circle to the problem that Dr. William R. Jones brilliantly articulated. Are we hoping for a new
strategy, something completely novel and unique, that will resolve all the problems of the Political once and for all? If the Political itself is the “temple” of
the idolatrous god—the sphere within which it is worshipped and preserved—can we discard the idol and purify the temple? Does
this theology offer a political philosophy of purification that will sustain the “progress” that struggle is purported to achieve? In short, how does one translate the spiritual principle of hope into a
political program—a political theology? The problem of translation haunts this theology and the looking-forward stance of the political theologian cannot avoid the rupture between the spiritual
Can we reject this racist god and, at the same time, support the political structure that affirms this
and the Political.
idol? Can we be “partial” atheists? This becomes a problem for Carter when he suggests that we abandon this idol, but fails to critique the structure of political
existence, which sustains the power of this idol.” Atheism as imagined here would entail rejecting the racist- white-god, or a racist political theology, and replacing it with a just God, or an
equitable political theology. Will replacing the idol with a more just God transform the political into a life- affirming structure for blackness? Unless we advocate for a theocracy, which is not
what I believe Carter would propose, we need an answer to this question of translation. The answer to this question is glaringly absent in the text, but I read this absence as an attempt to avoid the
nihilistic conclusion that his argument would naturally reach. We might even suggest that one must assume a nihilistic disposition toward the Political if justice, redress, and righteousness are the
aims.The problem with atheism, then, is that it relies on the Political as the sphere of redemption and hope,
when the Political is part of the idolatrous structure that it seeks to dismantle. In this sense. Dr. William R. Jones
becomes an aporia for Dr. Kameron Carter’s text, if we read Jones as suggesting that black theology offers no cogent
political philosophy, or political program, that would successfully rid the Political of its anti-black
foundation. The Political and anti-blackness are inseparable and mutually constitutive. The utopian
vision of a “not-yet-social order” that purges anti-blackness from its core provides a promise
without relief—its only answer to the immediacy of black suffering is to keep struggling. The logic
of struggle, then, perpetuates black suffering by placing relief in an unattainable future, a future that
offers nothing more than an exploitative reproduction of its own means of existence. Struggle,
action, work, and labor are caught in a political metaphysics that depends on black- death.
But who takes care of us while we are dying? From taking care of white
children to healing black families Black queer women occupy the position of
the unthought and the placeholder for the signifier Nurse for their notions of
care
Hartman 16 Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux,
2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford, 1997). She has published several
articles on slavery, including “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Time of Slavery.” She is completing a book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful
Experiments, which examines the sexual upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the slums in the early decades of
the 20th century. Souls A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society ISSN: 1099-9949 (Print) 1548-3843 (Online) Journal
homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou20 The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors
The systematic violence needed to conscript black women’s domestic labor after slavery
required locking them out of all other sectors of the labor market, a condition William Patterson described
as economic genocide. Race riots, the enclosure of the ghetto, the vertical order of human life, and the forms of value and debt
promulgated through emergent forms of racism, what Sarah Haley terms “Jim Crow modernity,” made it impossible for black women to escape
the white household. As domestic workers, black women were conscripted to a role that required them to care for and
replenish the needs of the white household, and tend to the daily activities necessary for its maintenance. They were forced to
perform the affective and communicative labor necessary for the sustenance of
white[Bp1] families at the expense of their own; as surrogates, they were required to
mother children who held their children in contempt; to cook, clean, and comfort white
men enabling them to go out into the world as productive laborers; and submit to intimate
relations with husbands and sons and brothers or be raped by them—you cannot choose
what you cannot refuse. In this labor of service to the white household, the domestic worker struggled to enable the survival of her
own. Her lover, her spouse, and her kin depend on this labor for their subsistence, as does
her community. As a consequence, she comes to enjoy a position that is revered and reviled,
essential to the endurance of black social life and, at the same time, blamed for its
destruction. The care extracted from her to tend the white household is taken at the cost of
her own. She is the best nanny and the worst mother. Yet this labor remains marginal or neglected in the
narratives of black insurgency, resistance, and refusal. Where does theimpossible domestic fit into the general
strike? 12 What is the text of her insurgency and the genre of her refusal? What visions of
the future world encourage her to run, or propel her flight? Or is she, as Spillers
observes, a subject still awaiting her verb? Strategies of endurance and subsistence do not
yield easily to the grand narrative of revolution, nor has a space been cleared for the sex
worker, welfare mother, and domestic laborer in the annals of the black radical tradition. 13
Perhaps understandable, even if unacceptable, when the costs of enduring are so great. Mere survival is an achievement in a context so brutal. If
we intend to do more than make the recalcitrant domestic, the outcast, and insurrectionist
a figure for our revolutionary longing, or impose yet another burden on black female flesh
by making it “a placeholder for freedom,” 14 then we must never lose sight of the material
conditions of her existence or how much she has been required to give for our
survival. [Bp2] Those of us who have been “touched by the mother” need acknowledge that
her ability to provide care, food, and refuge often has placed her in great jeopardy and, above all,
required her to give with no expectation of reciprocity or return. All we have is what she
holds in her outstretched hands.15 There is no getting around this. Yet, her freedom struggle remains
opaque, untranslatable into the lexicon of the political. She provides so much, yet rarely
does she thrive. It seems that her role has been fixed and that her role is as a provider of care, which is
the very mode of her exploitation and indifferent use by the world, a world blind to her
gifts, her intellect, her talents. This brilliant and formidable labor of care, paradoxically, has been produced through violent
structures of slavery, anti-black racism, virulent sexism, and disposability.16 The forms of care, intimacy, and
sustenance exploited by racial capitalism, most importantly, are not reducible to or
exhausted by it. These labors cannot be assimilated to the template or grid of the black
worker, but instead nourish the latent text of the fugitive. They enable those “who were
never meant to survive” to sometimes do just that. This care, which is coerced and freely
given, is the black heart of our social poesis, of making and relation.
But How do Darius and I live? Vote neg as the alternative reject libidinal investment
in anti-blackness and to remember that this fantasy or as you would say Joe, reject
their simulation within the simulacra of debate
Hartman 16
Hartman, Saidiya. "The Dead Book Revisited." History of the Present 6, no. 2 (2016): 208-15. doi:10.5406/historypresent.6.2.0208. Pg. 213
In the wake of the recent onslaught of black death at the hands of the police, the murders of black
men, women and children have been recorded, documented, widely circulated and witnessed by
millions. Yet this ever-growing archive of black death has produced an outcome no different than the
decision made in the case of the two girls: no one would ever be convicted or held responsible for
these murders either. These circumstances have led me to revisit again what happened on the Recovery and what
was possible more generally (care, grief, regard) on board a slave ship. As our present makes all too
apparent, there is no space outside the threat of death in which black mourning can or could take
place. So we make a place, we take space, make the outside while we are still being held captive on
the inside; we hold these deaths in our bodies and in our songs, create a way to celebrate the lives
and memorialize the deaths of those we loved and those we never knew, the deaths of strangers we
claim as kin. These practices did not and do not occur outside the zones of anticipated and
premature death. They do not happen in safe spaces, but in the here and now, where we are, in a
time and a place where all refuge is temporary. We are murdered where we pray; sleeping in bed
with our grandmothers; chilling on the front steps with our friends; playing at the park; in the
company of our children; and with the whole block watching. Our mourning will not wait and
cannot be deferred. By not expounding earlier on this capacity to mourn for one another, or to create sociality through grief or find
companions among the shipped, I did not intend to minimize or deny such possibility. Rather, I sought to underscore the structures of violence
and dispossession that made death not-much noticed, effaced murder in columns of debits and loss, and conscripted our future for the master’s
wealth and security. There
is a great paradox at play here: how is it possible to entertain ideas of care,
love and regard in the confines of the extreme and normative violence of slavery? This question
required me to recalibrate the terms and imagine differently the collectivity that emerged from the
hold, and to follow a line of thought that made it possible to discern the potentialities and capacities
residing among the shipped: the contours of struggle and the shape of thought under extreme
domination; the poetics of a free state engendered by the slave quarters; and the forms of life that
emerge under the sentence of death.18 How does one conceive the possibility, chance and contingency of life as it is structured
by death? What is the imagination and practice of freedom in the belly of the ship or on the plantation? What are the dimensions of refusal that
arise in captivity—no matter how many are murdered, beaten, raped and tortured? The
first girl who died refused to eat,
intent on ending the terror by embracing death. It is unclear if Venus also refused to eat, or if she
pursued another line of flight. Others vowed never to become habituated to this violence, never to
believe that they were the property of white men, always insisting that they were human flesh. How
does one account for the state of extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice? How does time unfold in the confines of expected
death? And does this negate or destabilize the very idea of the everyday or the ordinary? At the very least, would this suggest that time is lived in
multiple and simultaneous registers that trouble discrete notions of the beginning and end of captivity, the before and after of slavery?19 How
does one comprehend the routine struggle to endcure together with the state of emergency? Is it possible to hold the disaster and the everyday in
the same frame of reference? Is this what is entailed in living in the wake?20 This
task (of fathoming existence in the hold)
is made even more difficult given the character of slavery’s archive, which provides such a meager
picture of the life and thought of the enslaved. How do we apprehend the philosophy of those inside
the circle of slavery, as Frederick Douglass would say, from the outside? Or is the very notion of being outside the hold a kind
of fiction, a myth of progress, the price of admission to the welcome table? If the matrix of death and dispossession constitute the black ordinary,
even if not solely or exclusively, then how are we to think about practice in the hold? I
believe it requires us to rethink the
meaning of abolition, not only as the not-yet, not simply as the event for which we are waiting, but
as the daily practice of refusal and waywardness and care in the space of captivity, enclosure, and
incarceration. How does the song inside the circle go? We are the ones we have been waiting for. What is
impossible to bear is that the hold is the black ordinary and, at the same, it is what we seek to
escape. How can we live? There is no question more enduring and uncertain than this one. The life
of the enslaved, and, more generally, black social life, has never been a matter of facts or crude
plots of when, where and how. What could be of greater critical and philosophical import than the
matter of black life in a context of anticipated death, brutal violence, and enduring dispossession? If
they take you in the morning, they will come for us at night. When they come for you, I will shield
your name.21 We grieve and make life with one another. The space for our love, our care, and our
dreams will have to be taken like everything else.