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 […]

My Project: A New Language of Abstraction

My project takes a magnifying glass to Part II: Homo Scientificus of Denise Ferriera Da Silva’s ‘Towards a Global Idea of Race’ by looking at how the figure of homo scientificus in Psychiatry exist antagonistically towards the Black and suicidal. In this sense, it is a work at the intersections of Madness studies, Science studies, […]

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. […]

Protected: Consent Not To Be A (Human) Being

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Exhaustion

Notes for Classroom Presentation: Black Visual “Exhaustion is the contemporary crisis of black studies.” Calvin Warren names exhaustion as the contemporary crisis of Black studies as the field maneuvers more and more towards a desire for an afterword to Slavery. It is this move to turn slavery into a “thing of the past” that animates […]

Collapse Of The Paradigm

Collapse of the paradigm. Classroom Presentation: Afropessimism and the Status of the Subject Thursday, January 14th 2021 Orlando Patterson’s analysis of slavery in Slavery and Social Death is an explosion of the notion of slavery from its prevailing definitions in the general academic parlance. Patterson’s constituent elements of slavery argue against a consensus that understands […]

Fashioning Desire, Desiring Fashion Winter 2021

Syllabus for hypothetical reading group of Winter 2021. Week 1-2: Fashion and Psychoanalysis Rikky Byrd, “On the ‘Black Designer’” Week 3-4: The Subject of Fashion Week 4-5: The Sex Which is Not Uniform Francisco J. Galarte, “The Crowns of Stuzo Clothing” Eva Hayward, “Don’t Exist” Week 6-7: The Libidinal Economy of Decadence David Marriott, […]

The Maxim of Life

Homo Scientificus and The Maxim of “Life” Darwin’s post-Kantian revolution served to reify the inhumanity of Blackness that the modern grammar of representation had already imposed and presumed as early as 1684 in Francois Bernier’s A New Division of the Earth. Thus, in a gesture beyond deconstruction, Denise Ferriera Da Silva examines the axioms of […]

Apocalypse Now! Apocalypse Forever!

there is no redemption the redemption will never arrive all of the request for redemption are fantasies of flight. redeem what? redeem who? redeem where? what’s done is done. apocalypse now. apocalypse forever. the apocalypse came many yesterdays ago. The Conservative and The Liberal gather together in the ruined streets of Minneapolis urging for peace. […]

The Social Sculpting of the “Humans of Museums”

The Social Sculpting of the “Humans of Museums” (Paper and Photography Presented at Pomona College on Wednesday, November 6th 2019) The German artist, Josef Beuys, was a Fluxus performance artist in the 20th Century. Commonly regarded as one of the most prolific and influential artist of the century, when he arrived in America for the […]