Dramaturgy Notes: Fences

Overview “There is a weight of impossible description that falls away and leaves him bare and exposed to a frightful realization. It is a trauma that a sane and normal mind would be unable to withstand. HE begins to dance. A slow, strange dance, eerie and life-giving. A dance of atavistic signature and ritual. LYONS […]

Marriott’s Fanon, or Brevity on the Tabula Rasa

Classroom Presentation: Libidinal Economy Reading: Marriott, David (2011) “Whither Fanon?” Textual Practice 25 (1), 33-69. “Turning to Fanon’s discussion, we will see how the theme of the psyche and culture come together in the form of a mutual abhorrence that is itself a sign of a traumatic inheritance … “ – David Marriott, Whither Fanon […]

On “The Function of ‘the Black Father’”

“If black children were raised in an environment that focused not on bemoaning their lack of fathers but on filling their lives with the nurturing love we all need to thrive, what difference would an absent father make?” (https://www.washingtonpost.com/posteverything/wp/2017/01/10/the-dangerous-myth-of-the-missing-black-father/) This question sets up a false binary: either we bemoan the loss of a Black Father […]

Three Notes on Foucault

“We must not see the constitution of natural history, with the empirical climate in which it develops, as an experiment forcing entry, willy-nilly, into a knowledge that was keeping watch on the truth of nature elsewhere … natural history … is the space opened up … in representation by an analysis which is anticipating the […]

Zombies, Feelings, Brains

“There would be no living dead if there were no ‘rational homunculi’ (de Sousa’s term for ‘simplified models of rational agent[s]”].” (Rei Terada, Feeling in Theory, 156) Let’s start with the question of values. Who has them? Does such a thing truly remain on the face of the Earth? Values exist for the hopeful. Values […]

Rural Wiggers II

I think when you grow up Black in a predominately poor white area in America, there’s a certain austerity you are made to adopt towards your suffering that can transform gaslighting into the everyday state of being alive. Rural wiggers have a different attitude towards suffering. Tiffany Willoughby-Herard describes it as a condition of having […]

In Defense of Waithe’s Nightmare: Notes on Black Horror, Gore and ‘Them’

We younger Negro artists who create now intend to express our individual dark-skinned selves without fear or shame. If white people are pleased we are glad. If they are not, it doesn’t matter. We know we are beautiful. And ugly too. The tom-tom cries and the tom-tom laughs. If colored people are pleased we are […]

Philosophy or Psychosis

PHILOSOPHY. Stay philosophical. – John Murungi When philosophers speak about the public or the masses as if they are not a part of such masses or publics, one should begin their philosophical skepticism there. Why? Because there becomes a separation between what thou art and what thou art with. One is skeptical only in sincerity. […]

Reimagining Science Syllabus

Reimagining Science: Continental Realism and Black Studies’ Philosophies of Science Syllabus I was recently discussing with my advisor about how a dream of mine would be to one day teach a Continental Philosophy of Science graduate seminar in a Comparative Literature Department. I’ve always been interested in Continental philosophy’s approach to traditional philosophy of science […]

Protected: Consent Not To Be A (Human) Being

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