Psychedelics and Black Liberation Syllabus

Psychedelics and Black Liberation – FALL 2024 Week 0 Carl Hart, Drug Use for Grown Ups: Chasing Liberty in a Land of Fear Week 1 Mark Fisher, Acid Communism (Unfinished Introduction) Charisse Burden-Stelly, Black Scare/Red Scare – Forthcoming Spring 2023 Week 2 Jacques Derrida, “The Rhetoric of Drugs” Joy James, Warfare in the American Homeland: […]

Terror ad infinitum, Black Extinction, or an Otherwise World.

Photo Digital Painting by JT Creswell entitled, “Sentient Flesh” I shall began at the end. The end of the world that is. Some say such an end has already begun. Others say that this end is on its way. Then there are those who think that the end is only the end if it ends […]

Protected: Reapers of Oblivion

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Black Abstraction

Sometimes: I want to kill myself just to see what’s on the otherwise. One of the consequences of metaphysical violence has been: the violent erasure of Black abstraction and ideation and the subsequent (dis)placement of Black thought to the position of the unthought. This violence has prevented not only the activity of Black thought and […]

What is this truth?

“Desire unconscious of itself is logic.” – Anthony Paul Farley, The Dream of Interpretation “There are always more things on heaven and earth than are dreamt of in our philosophies.” – Anthony Paul Farley, The Dream of Interpretation “[I]f you purport to love truth as power, if you reject the fact that all true love […]

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 […]

War, or The Art of Failure

Inspired by a ghost of a friend, a shadow of a dancer, a fellow mumblr-in-theory brian muraya This was supposed to be about the art of war. It became a note on the art of failure. Somehow these terms crossed paths on the tip of my tongue. Somehow I made them make a sweet embrace. […]

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 […]