Saidiya Hartman & Arthur Jafa

Hello everyone, welcome to the Hammer Museum. I'm Claudia Bester, I'm Director of Public Programs, and I'm very happy to welcome you to tonight's Hammer Conversation with Arthur Jaffa and Sudhir Hartman before we begin. I want to invite you all to come. Back at the Hammer Museum this Saturday night we will have a big party to celebrate our summer exhibitions from 8:00 to 10:00 p.m. It's free, open to the public I also want to mention some upcoming free Ham Republic programs that might interest you June 9 Artist Sarah Lucas will be here in dialogue with writer Maggie Nelson July 16 Artists Rawls will give a talk presenting her latest work in progress, he's an artist in residence here at the Hammer Museum and he's making this kind of experimental stop-motion film with dance and he'll be doing a presentation here of that work on July 30 and 31.

We are going to screen the Democratic presidential candidate debate with a cash bar and then we will have a panel discussion and in August we will have a mini Film Festival commemorating the films of John Singleton curated by critic Ernest Hardy, so we have a lot to do do here at the Hammer. and we would love to have you all back. Admission to the museum is always free and our public programs are always free as well. Continue with tonight's conversation. Arthur J. faux has had many careers, seemingly all of them simultaneously. An artist who last month received one of the most prestigious awards possible, the Golden Lion at the Venice Biennale, over three decades, Jaffas developed a dynamic practice comprising films, artifacts and events that reference and question the universal and specific articulations of being black.

There is a recurring question that appears throughout his work: how can visual media, such as objects and still and moving images, convey the equivalent power, beauty and alienation, inherent in the forms of black music in the American culture. The cinematographer filmed Crooklyn's Seven Songs for Malcolm X and Daughters of the Dust, among others, and also directed the film. The films will be filmed in tree 1.0 and little by little, in addition to his film works, he has also published essays on black cultural politics in the books Black Popular Culture and everything but the burden that white people are taking from black culture .

Java was born in Tupelo Mississippi and studied at Howard University in Washington DC and his artwork is represented in museum collections around the world, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art and MoMA and the Studio Museum in New York, the Tate in London, SF MoMA, High Museum in Atlanta, Dallas Museum of Art, mcg in Chicago. the state licks the Pérez Museum of Art in Miami MOCA LACMA the Hirshhorn and the Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others, has current and upcoming solo exhibitions of his work at the Pérez Museum of Art the Berkeley Art Museum the Galerie Rudolph inium in Prague and Madonna musiah in Stockholm sedessa dia Hartmann is one of the most important theorists, literary and cultural historians living today through her scholarship, she has created entirely new avenues for thinking about and discussing the history of the transatlantic slave trade in stateless and his legacy continues.

She is the author of several books, scenes of subjection, terror, slavery and self-creation in the United States of the 19th century, published in 1997, Lose Your Mother, a trip along the Atlantic Slave Route in 2007 in which she herself, as the protagonist, carries out a trip to Ghana for the first time and his most recent book is called Lives Astray Beautiful Experiments, Intimate Stories of Social Upheaval which was just published in February this year and we have copies of that book for sale at the Hammer Lobby and we will have a small reception after the talk with free coffee, tea and cookies, so we are waiting for you. you can join us Hartman is currently working on a new book project called n folio, an essay on slavery and the archive that I think will be fascinating.

She is one of the most interesting people who thinks about archives and what they reveal and how. They can be used in new ways. She has published many articles on the history of slavery and the archive and lives of black women, including three that are constantly cited: The Terrible Beauty of the Venus Slum and Two Acts and the Belly of the World. She is a Guggenheim Fellow and was a Coleman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Film Fellow in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Visiting Professor of Critical Research at the University of Chicago.

She received her BA from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. at Yale has taught at UC Berkeley and is now a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia, so without further ado, please join me in welcoming Cedilla Hartmann and Arthur Jaffa and to the microphone, they told me to grab the microphone, so thank you for coming to get started and I'm very excited. I'm here talking about the Cydia CD and I talk all the time, so we had a conversation in the back. It's not that we should fight for that and for the people, but we heard that the occasion is basically come on.

To try to do two things, we're going to try to talk a little bit about the book, have Cydia explain some things, or and we're also going to try to give you an idea, at least we hope you have some. I like the kind of conversations that we have, which are a little different because we're not holding microphones, but to start with, as I was reading the book, she has an incredibly beautiful introduction to the book, but really an introduction to her methodology, which I think is A lot of the book is tangled up and I thought I kept taking notes from it at one point.

I had basically just rewritten the introduction so I decided we should read it, it's not very long. and I'm going to read it, so excuse my halter and my reading, but I think it's a good starting point and then I'll quiz her a little bit on some propositions that she makes casually, often, of course, and introduction, but they could all be books or essays in themselves, so note the method in the title of the book in case you didn't know how to just say "it's okay, I don't want to destroy it", lives gone astray, comas, beautiful experiments, intimate stories from the networks social. notes of agitation on the method at the beginning of the 20th century, young black women were an open rebellion, they fought to create autonomous and beautiful lives to escape the new forms of servitude that awaited them and live as they were free the book this book recreates the radical imagination and the misguided practices of these young women in describing the world through their eyes, is a narrative written from nothing, from the nothingness of the ghetto and the nothingness of utopia, every historian of the multitudes that dispossessed the subaltern and the enslaved is forced to grapple with the power and authority of the archive and the limits it sets on what we can know, whose perspective matters, and who had doubts about the gravity and authority of the historical actor when writing this account of the misguided, I have used a wide range of archival documents.

Materials to represent everyday experience and the restless nature of life in the city. I recreate the voices and use the words of these young people and inhabit the intimate dimensions of their lives. The goal is to convey the sensory experience of the city and capture the rich landscape of black social life. To this end, I employ a closed narration mode, a style that places the voice of the narrator and the character in an inseparable relationship so that the Vision, language and rhythm of the way words shape and organize sense the way they are shaping. organize to savor sorry for the italicized phrases and lines of statements from the chorus the story is told from within the circle all the characters and events found in your book are real they are not made up discuss that what I know about the lives of these young women has been extracted from rent collectors' magazines surveys and monographs of sociologists trial transcripts photographs of slums reports of Vice investigators social workers and probation officers with psychiatrists and psychologists and prison case files, all of which represent them as a problem ;

Some of the names have been changed to protect confidentiality and as required by the use of the State Archives, I have developed a counternarrative free of the judgment and classification made by these subjects, who subjected young black women to surveillance that subjected them to surveillance, arrest, punishment and confinement, and offered an account that witnesses a beautiful experiment in making a living and art undertaken by those often described as reckless, wild and wayward Asst rescuers, the effort is to reclaim the insurgent ground of these lives to exhume open rebellion from the case file to unleash witness rejection and mutual aid. and liberate love from its identification as deviance, criminality and pathology to affirm free motherhood, reproductive choice, intimacy outside the institutions of marriage and queer and outlaw passions, and illuminate the radical imagination and every day and our key to ordinary girls of color who have not only been overlooked but are almost unimaginable incredible lives gone astray elaborate increases transpose and open archival documents so that they can offer a richer picture of the social upheaval that transformed black social life In the 20th century and everywhere the goal is to understand and experience the world as these young women did to learn from what they know.

I prefer to think of this book as the fugitive texts of the wayward and it is marked by the wandering it describes in this spirit. I have insisted that the limits of the case file are speculated in the document. about what could have been imagined, things whispered in dark bedrooms and amplified movements of withholding escape and possibility, moments when the vision and dreams of the wayward seemed possible, few then are now recognized as young black women as sexual modernists, free lovers, radicals and anarchists, or they realize that the flapper was a pale imitation of the game girls to whom nothing has been attributed remain unimportant surplus women girls considered unfit for history and destined to be minor figures This book is informed by a different set of values ​​and recognizes the revolutionary ideals that animated ordinary lives Explores utopian longings and the promise of a future world that resided in waywardness and refusal to be governed The album gathered here is an archive of EXOR being a dream book to exist in another way attending to these lives a very unexpected history of the 20th century merges when it offers an intimate chronicle of black radicalism an aesthetic and writing history of girls of color and their experiments with freedom a revolution before Gatsby, for the most part, the history and potentiality of his lifeworld has remained unthought because no one could conceive of young black women as visionaries and social innovators in the world in which these acts took place.

The decades between 1890 and 1935 were decisive for determine the course of the future of black people, a revolution in a minor key developed in the city and young black people and women were the vehicles of this agitation or transformation of the intimate life of black people. It was a consequence of economic exclusion, material deprivation , racial enclosure and social dispossession, but it was also driven by the vision of a future world and what could be the crazy idea that animated this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways of living and never stopped To consider how the world could be right, that's amazing.

Well, for starters, tell me what the hell you mean by wayward because that word comes up a lot not only. Is it in the title? It must appear at least ten or twelve times. I mean, there are so many. In fact, I have this short chapter called Wayward, a short entry on the possible, and I think Wayward is intertwined with a variety of other words like you. know queer, anarchic, regrettable and fugitive errands, and it is a way of thinking about a practice that interrupts, destroys and exceeds the norms, but I liked wayward because it seemed organic in the way these young women were described in the space and the time, and also I don't want to subsume their practice into other categories because, for a lot of people, I mean, I think of them as being involved in this kind of practice of black radicalism and black anarchy that we could actually trace back to. the continent and the fight against the big states there, but I didn't want to have to defend what they were doing nor did I want that to translate into other critical frameworks that, as you know, have the consequence of marginalizing black women as thinkers and as actors to Let them know that part of the spirit of rebellion is to build on this vast repertoire of critical concepts but also to push against those concepts that I am using to construct the argument.

It seems to me that a lot of what you and I are reframing. I'm going to try to narrow it down if you seem to be Rena qualifying the idea of ​​what a radical figure is and what a radical figure is like.we have these presumptions about you know, if we think of a radical figure, we immediately think of a type and it's like Rimbaud or whatever, you know what I mean, we had these ideas about it and one of the things that the book relentlessly does is decimating This is a very narrow idea of ​​what radical, transformative behavior like Luke's looks like.

To a large extent it seems to me that it is not simply a matter of pointing out or identifying it, but rather trying to discuss it in a way that we can use it as models, it is paradigms because when we see a radical figure we normally say it is someone who is worth emulating in some way, like this that the idea that young black women are worthy of emulation and valorization seems to be a big part of your project. Alright. I think for most people you know, that's not us. You know he's like a radical and you know I made that disgusting idea that they would back off and I think even in the context of I mean, you know, a phrase that we like to use a lot is to think that you know a black radical tradition and like we know you can writing books about the black radical tradition and having Black women appear neither as thinkers nor as important actors, so I think that even with those projects that are Kindred projects like you, you know Marxist or anarchist projects that we have not included in them and I would say yes, there are lessons to be learned. learn I mean, one of the ways I tried to think about these movements is that you know through someone like two children this conception of the general strike, for example, and he talks about it as a rejection of working conditions and what They were these misguided youths. women and girls rejected the working conditions they rejected the conditions of servitude they rejected a certain script of what their life should be like as you know as a well-adjusted girl as a representative black as an obedient wife as an obedient daughter, so I felt like they gave me an example because I think there are many things that we should reject and that every day we just say yes to, so I wanted to say look, they have a lot to teach us and They were also very prophetic and understood that what was being presented as a set of alternatives reasonable or well-trodden paths for some hope of upward mobility, they realized that in reality there was no future and that when people tried to convince them otherwise and many times we say yes to things even when we know that there is no future and that It's a dead end, it's exhausted, right?

You just called it a movement, which is interesting because you know a lot of times, in general, like black. people, what I would say, anyone other than the designated actor in the story, can't even be called a movement, it's even like people just aren't random, like ants or something, you know what I mean, instead of no, this is like something that has like I got equality and it's like you know what I mean, no that, it seems to me that they didn't have a convention about these values, but nevertheless people almost spontaneously came to very conclusions similar that they were not just implement, but by watching each other we reinforced, you know, I mean, because there are negative examples of people reaching a dead end that you know how they did it and then they crash and burn and then it's like, Well, I don't know where. that ends or if there is a but that person is still moving so well I was wondering about just I mean there's something about just calling it a movement, what is the movement of these kind of headless off-center groups instead of a movement ? there has to be a leader and there has to be like a document or a ten point program and say, well, no, it's all these social groups that do things that make things happen and think about the movement with a little em and I think about the movements always in their plurality and yes, it was a movement and I think we often recognized things that you know belatedly.

I mean, I was recently at this event at the Guggenheim and Lorraine O'Grady, the artist who was one of the participants in an exhibition. It was called We Want a Revolution, she said when she walked into the Brooklyn Museum and thought, "wow, I was part of a movement when I was making my art and I was doing the things I was doing." I didn't understand how fully and deeply there were so many other women artists who were doing the same thing, so I think often our recognition of a movement is late and it's about adding what are these seemingly individual acts or acts of a small number of people , but then we see like, oh, this thing that produces a certain kind of turn or detour from a certain path.

I think these movements, these movements, this kind of inability to adapt to the norms, as you know, the small societies were a creative mismatch, we know that by 1940 they were remaking a Negro. social life is marked and definitive, so at that moment it is undeniable, but it is something that young black women are not attributed to, as you already know. Oh, a departure from the norm to simply create another way of being and being. Live there are two things I want: one is a little step back just because I want you to talk about it, but I want to go back for a second to this whole idea of ​​a radical figure and how figures resonate or I set parameters or they said instructions, they said courses of action.

It is funny. I was in Australia and I became very obsessed with this, what they call Western Desert painting in Australia, as if we'd ever seen Aboriginal painting. It's like they have the dots everywhere and they have all this complicated cosmology around them, like you know, dreaming and all these kind of very deep philosophical ideas and we went to this, it's called the marker project and it's like you know that people makes this painting to make you like it. See these, first of all, crazy, radical paintings like they're big, formally as complex as Pollock or something, that's what comes to mind if you try to reference them with anything, but you walk through that workshop and It's like these old ones. black ladies sitting on the floor painting these damn things and it's just one of the things that occurred to me was how radically divergent it is from what my ideal is with the avant-garde like you have this jet black sister in this painting thing and you pass and you go like it's amazing what you're looking at and you say hello and she just waves and keeps doing what she's doing, you know what I mean, it's both edgy but seems to have nothing.

Doing it is like it's the same thing I would say with your sisters in Alabama, gee, it's like these, oh, you know, it's like these black women, they're not educated per se, they're older, they're in the south and yet , They're making these quilts, they can clearly match anything Kandinsky Rothko and other great people did, so there's something I guess I'm interested in. How do you think about the kind of valorization or redefinition of what a radical figure is? it seems and why is that important yeah, I mean, I think it's enormously important, I think it's vitally important because even when we think about something like black radicalism and it's, you know, the historical development and in its varieties, even when women support nurturing, imagine and engender. those movements fall out of them, they are a kind of official writing or they are never the representative figure and even in other types of aesthetic conceptions, or when we think about it, you know the way they are.

The jazz ensemble functions as an emblem of a black sociality and you and I have had this argument or argument. I wondered how something that is the space of this can overwhelm you, you know, male virtuosity, how can that be the figure of black social life, right, and you seem to know that when we think about what blackness is or if we think about racism, since you know this kind of unequal distribution of death or the particular condition of black people defined by this intimate relationship. with death and what is actually a more pressing political task than the function of trying to maintain and reproduce social life correctly, so how do you think about social death as a kind of critical concept without thinking about the pressure on life and who endures that?

We put intimate pressure on who has been tasked with tending to social reproduction and it seems that that too has fallen outside our critical conceptual language, so we think avant-garde and we can think of that quite exclusively, maybe we'll add like Adrian Piper in there it is, but just pushing against that and there is the figure of the ensemble and I like to think of Samba as something too much like an assembly, but the choir was also a way of, you know, pushing against a certain type of masculinist configuration of the set as a privileged domain of SEality blocks yes, I mean, it's clear, it seems to me, I mean, would I go off on too much tangent because I would let you tell me that figure?

You say how a set can work. a figure, but I think it is a figure like most of our figures, you know, we must understand that it is already problematic even when we erect it or it is erected. I mean, I'd say something like we know there's some concession to the idea. that black people can be virtuous, it's a genius even in the way that the verses in the whole are all these things that were kind of accepted, but we know that it's the kind of art that they are, it's like you know it because we know In our reality, the real complexity of what happened in the musical is not just who is playing tonight, it's never just the performers, it's the people who are listening and a lot of times what happens is the women are pushed to the edge, so if you didn't. let's say like jazz and you immediately tried to start going to Mary Lou Williams, you don't know, you start looking for the figures that are players as if the players are the only ones that matter and I don't mean that this is trying to I have some changed criteria for that women can be included, but as soon as you say the genius of the whole versus the individual genius, she's already saying that it's something external to the author himself, it's responsible for the culture, it affirms what's happening, you know, I think I like it that way. of framing things and certainly, as you know, George Lewis and critical improvisation studies are trying to open up that framework, but I heard Vijay Iyer talk about music to me in a way that resonates with this because I was thinking he was basically saying that the music is only you. knowing the product of a particular organization of society, so instead you know a kind of thinking about the hierarchy of aesthetic value, just think, oh, one mode of sociology produces music, another mode of sociology produces the banquet in the table and, simply, a type of thought. about those things in relationship and the practices of resistance produce music and the practices of resistance produce dance and stories, so the vision for me is much more open than the efforts to I don't know how to say, you know, we're at the table and doing a certain set of arguments about aesthetic value and then including women in what already is, seems like a very limited set of presuppositions about the supremacy of the aesthetic or what its constituents are, but I can't ask if you want anything.

The rest is kind of related, but it's something that I found curious as I was reading the book: the specificity of young black women versus black women, period, yeah, what it's about, it's kind of a little melancholy when I thought about the implications of this and I want to ask you why the radical lives in a radical example of young black women there is time, I mean one and distance I think those other examples that you mentioned there is something in the figure of the mother that can always be recovered well, so This more masculine figure has like a history of maternal entitlement and it seems like there's a way that black women's maternal labor is commanded by both white supremacy and these capitalist structures.

In part these are young women because they were considered misguided minors, women between 14 and 25 years old. I think there's also a way that we feel the heartbreak and kind of tragic character because we see these really bright, talented young women whose futures are overshadowed and whose opportunities are taken away from them. You know, right now they're coming of age and they're being funneled into this very narrow path of servitude, so they're the ones we're saying no, no, no to, so they're partly being The goals of the state are what they are. more public and declarative around that resistance and we see what doesn't come to exist, so that was part of it, but I think there's also that intergenerational image because when we think you meet someone like Maddie Jackson in the book.

I mean, basically, she's punished and imprisoned for her own intimate history and the one her mother writes about, so there's a way that I think I'm trying to say you know black women in general, whatever their generation is. is left out of this kind of binary construction of a gender formation that, as you know, is overwhelmingly overwritten by whiteness, so what is it, what is it like to live when you are left out of the categories and there and again there is a potential, there is one possibility, there is a gift that lies outside the category and they also acknowledge that mm-hmm in the introduction, you know, it was impossible for me to read it with that, inIt's really more like, okay, we have to get back to this.

This whole idea of ​​truth because I'm really interested to know that there's a TV show on HBO that I'll now call Chernobyl, which I watched a few nights ago and it was surprising for me to watch, you know? because it definitely had a testimony aspect to it and then I was reading about it and it's kind of tied to, you know, this writer, she got the Nobel Prize and okay, as I was reading it and reading about her, I thought about you a little bit. also in terms of your project and go back to this whole notion of auteurism like who is the author who is the person driving the story because it seemed like some of what was had been controversial if I want to call it that particularly from the Soviet Union saying about their work that are oral histories and she herself has rejected the designation of journalism as very visceral, she said as if she were not a journalist even though in fact she obtained her degree from journalism school, but she says that it is not journalism, it is not what I'm doing, but I'm doing oral histories, but it was something about the tenor of the way he talked about his project and there's something related in your project when you talk about extracting the archives in a very specific way and I know that's something that It is a common thread and all your work from holding scenes. which is if you haven't, if you don't know what you shouldn't know, it's super canonical, incredibly, a world-breaking text.

I think we would all recognize that now, after losing your mother and now, with this book, it seems like one of the things you're dealing with is this whole question of narrative, you know how we create narratives, what narratives, our official narratives , what makes a narrative illegitimate or legitimate, this kind of thing and I know I feel like a scholar and an academic one of the things I see you dance with sometimes is like on the one hand you still have to do things in which you were trained you know that it is an academic you have to allude to the academic but like in that introduction you start by telling the truth but at the end of what you are talking about as if you were spending that you know that you are spending this entire category it is as if it were true but It was like I was imagining what they were thinking.

I really want to challenge you or get you to talk a little bit more about yourself because you know there are two categories: fiction and nonfiction, but I like to say that sometimes nonfiction needs fiction, but Fiction doesn't eat nonfiction, I mean, so how do you think if I say it's a deer. I don't care about your educational background. All this is fiction. On some level, that discredits it as true, but that's not what I mean to suggest. What I mean is to suggest something else, so talk, talk about it, yeah, I mean, there's a lot in that conversation topic and I think you probably know that there are different things that are at play, but I say with scenes.

I remember someone saying, “wow, you got a date.” give an enslaved voice the same authority that you give Foucault and I was like, yeah, you know it's a critical perspective on this world and project, so I think it's how an idea is seen and how the plurality of ideas is revealed. and thoughts and that took a shape and scenes. I think you know Marcin makes this distinction well between fact and truth and so there are, you know, all these kinds of social forces that go into the production of facts and often times facts are just like us.

Do you know that living in it is simply a fiction supported by state power? And I think, just so you know the facts and the truth, I mean, before genetic testing was done, you could look at old issues of Ebony magazine and see Thomas Jefferson's grandchildren and great-grandchildren just like us. I always knew what the truth was, even in the absence of a certain type of evidence or fact, to quote in quotes demonstrate that I think the difference between fiction and nonfiction has a lot to do with power and who has the power and authority to promote truth claims, who has the power and authority to make certain kinds of statements about the world that need to be attended to correctly, so anyone can write fiction because there is a way that there isn't the same kind of contestation around power and the knowing that takes place in that domain that said I'm walking this line and you know, and every time I walk it, I raised these questions, so maybe I'll talk about what that line is, you know, and you know, wayward lives and I think for me I know I raised this question of Venus in two acts, what does it mean to try to go beyond the limits of the archive to make some violence and context of that archive that is already violent but still maintains some kind of fidelity to this book?

I thought like Oh, maintaining fidelity to a certain set of boundaries or productions of our chi Bowl means that we will forever be consigned to telling the same kinds of stories and not have access to this realm of experience that lacks a given fact. or archival trail and I just thought, given that kind of violence and power that this has engendered, why should I be faithful to that limit? Why should I respect that? I mean, what's interesting, in particular, looking at these kinds of case files in the juvie, I mean they're full of state fictions, so it's not like there's something called fact and truth that's absolute and then there's my own elaboration, there are the kinds of fictions that the state needs to produce to carry out the work of discipline and punishment, so they are sort of counterfictions to that project, but I would say that it is not a distinction between fact and truth because one side and the imagination on the other.

I think you know there's a lot of talk again. about what it means to decolonize knowledge production, so what does it really mean to decolonize knowledge production? I think I'm partly thinking about that in this book, really taking what we know seriously and then trying to write. create to choose the world from what we know, I mean one of my other types of polemics, you know, the imaginary subtitles of this were like you know a story of the universe written by an anonymous black girl, you know, and I think part of it again, is that notion of, oh, what could a black girl say about the history of the universe in the broadest terms?

That required a different set of strategies and I think what most marks the work as a non-traditional story despite its archive is everything has to do with the character of the narrative voice because the narration of the clothes means that it is tangled, it is a narrative written with these other voices as opposed to a narrative voice that would be separate from the world being described in that space of entanglement and intimacy and writing from within the circle were fundamental to me and I thought, oh, that's part of the way. where we decolonize, you know, knowledge, right?

I mean, there's a way that normally we're in this circle and then we say okay, we're in this circle we're producing brilliant ideas and then let's translate that to the world, which really comes down to something like, you know, let's do it. readable to those outside the circle in terms they can understand and affirm, I mean all of this. I know and I'm very curious because I know, like you told me, how I remember when we met. Oh, my editor said, "Just write a novel. You actually told me that." I said it when I was shopping.

In the book there were people saying, "Oh, if you did it, you know, turn it into a novel, yes, because then it would be easy, yes, sure, easy in certain ways, because I would suggest something like what you know, just to take". Toni says more, for example, that it's obviously a great example, but there's something about writing fiction that calls itself fiction, a product of the imagined nation that isn't supported by correct evidence, which means that whatever truth it evokes, whatever it is, its ability to convince. tell us that this is a truth that there is truth as legitimacy in this understanding of the world it is only in the power of manipulation of the thing you don't know it as soon as I see a movie and it says based on a true story I at the beginning Any movement already I tune out on some level because I know the movie's not going to work very effectively if I feel like it needs to be said at the end of the day, it just happened like that discounted all the translations and all the other things that happened so I mean I'm back. to this again because I would suggest in your defense, I don't want to say it, but I would suggest something that you just articulated about your relationship with the archive or me.

I would say that your relationship to priority texts like that. a lot of this is about, as I say, treatment, not material, it's not about taking a thing and turning it around, so it seems to me that he was radical and virtuous in his books and overall it's how they take these things that have understandings fixed and fixed forms in which it has to be interpreted that you know these things, if we give you this footage, one has to conclude x y&z from it and you go in and it's almost like you're put through a different kind of algorithm or something like that and you get other types of The conclusions from this material are fine, but having said that, although I just want to ask you one more time, I ask you the same thing, for example, that you are vast, not wavering, but vibrating or flowing in these spaces of abroad. legitimization because a big part of this particular book is just virtuoso storytelling, it's just made for Netflix, anybody's out there, it's like story after story, it's like relentless stories and in a sense it's super radical in its storytelling. precisely because it doesn't even seem to be hampered by some need for an overriding network, like the way we would normally set up classical narrative: you introduce these characters, they introduce, they have a conflict or they dissolve because you just go from one character to the next, but What you end up with is like a relentless telling of stories that hold together with you and your non-philosophical, I'm not an intellectual, but your conceptual framework holds them together, but they are stories, so I saw this book as in a tradition of something like Jane Caine Tumors seemed to me to have some connection.

You know, I agree. I mean, I would say that there is another really important resource of collective expression and that is the work of poets and novelists that I also use in this case. you know, you know history texts to describe these lives. I mean, I think there is and maybe this is about. I mean, I've been thinking about something like black compositional thinking because I think there's a way for these radical acts. of imagination or some speculative work has been really very very important to something like the black intellectual production that you know from the 17th century and basically part of it is just imagining what is unimaginable to most people and I mean when and I'm trying to track down these examples, but an early example of this is, you know, in Kiana's narrative and it's this wonderful line where he talks about how he's imagining a day to celebrate the end of the slaves and the times are a bit crazy. because he's actually anticipating the arrival of something he's talking about, remembering in presence and that's that kind of speculative work that I'm talking about and he's saying, you know, speculation pleases me a lot if you think you know something like you do. know Angela Davis' classic essay, know the role of women in the slave community, know the work with this radically limited archive, but radically reimagine the terms of the black woman's existence in the context of child slavery blacks, reconstruction.

I mean these historical acts or just you know, or political longings are even based on acts of wild and radical imagination, so I agree with that and I think Cain is one of those that you know and there is a reference, there is a Cain's resonance, they're both the way the tumor and Du Bois construct the work and I think there's something in the way of wayward lives that resonates with them, but I do think about what it means to label something as something and you know. One of the challenges or problems with this imaginative work that I'm involved in in a relationship with the archive is that I have to explain it and explain it and explain it and I thought you know whatever I write next.

It's a novel, yeah, I mean, it doesn't mean I'd actually be working differently, but there's just a difference, you know, and part of it is about, oh, who do I want to have to answer to? mm-hmm and I think not. I really want to respond to someone, yes, so maybe write a novel, not because you're trying to produce that kind of document that has individual protagonists over the course of an hour, I mean, it would be unrecognizable in terms of generic expectations, but there would be something that you know about the novel and again you know that a novel could be what a work of political economy a novel could be a sociological study a novel could just be some crazy exercise in prose experiment, I mean The Thing About Kane in particular is that they call it a novel just because they didn't know what to call it, it's just that it has a cover like this that plays like poems andnarratives, you know, and it's also very much based on his experiences of actually committing to going to be a teacher in the south if that book is completely related to that project, then you said it's very similar.

I find this idea really interesting that you also like, it's like they are stages, we know that there are black beings to It's like a bad twist on the way that black people are in the world, okay, but we also know if there is a being invisible, so a big part of the problem in the first place is that our being is invisible or seen in such a restricted way. So it seems to me that before you can even make statements about certain beings, you have to point them out and define what these beings are. I'm digging a question here a little bit and I think it has something to do with it and I think it's also related to when you were saying why young women first is just older women - it reminds me of Paul Coates, we did this little profile of him and he said the most interestingly echoes what you just said, he said that when you think about enslaved black people and life as Slaves, right, and how you work from day to night and have no control over rock in your spare time.

He was saying that there is a moment every day, we are only by virtue of you knowing the changes that occur between day and day. There was a time when there was a time that was not controlled under restrictions, let's say, I mean restrictions in the sense that they could go up a hill that they wanted to go, but they had a free moment, let's say, and he said that he always has his idea of ​​like when he's black. People look at that moment and I know there's a tendency to see that even when you see pictures of black people in the past, we always understand them because I know that I also sometimes it's also, in a way, less sophisticated in us.

I would even say dommatina, so we're not that smart despite all the evidence that they produced us, but I don't know if we could really produce them in terms of race and mobility and stuff, but he said there's a time when Black people had this moment and they watched as the sun was setting and they imagined and they were just imagining and what did they imagine, he said they imagined us and I always think about that moment, it's really profound and I think about your project. like you just said, but it's really tied into all of that, after all, the kind of intellectual discussion that is necessary and you know to make room for future efforts and stuff, there's something right at the center that it's about singularly verifying. . people's experiences and being, in a sense, knowing this if you could, I mean, I think you know, maybe I would like it to be extended and different, but the terms of imagining that's where you know all the texture is, so I mean, yeah, what.

Does it mean to imagine that you know what is unthinkable and this is that someone like Michelle or a trio talks about all this as if you know the need to work on that boundary, but I think you know it from me? I think I'm drawn to those kinds of words like deviant or I called practice, maybe more specifically than then like blackness per se because I know that just as you know there were, you know the deviant were few snakes, the queers, the anarchists, I mean. There were other black people who were signing up for a very different project, right, and that project had an antagonistic relationship with the rebels, so I don't know, so I think I agree with you know. statement about yes, people, they were imagining us and there wasn't and again, but that's what a speculative project is.

Speculation is about that ability to imagine that for which you have no evidence that there is nothing you know about the world. I would hold any idea that it is plausible or achievable, but there is something else. I was referring to someone like Amiri Baraka when you talked about black music. You know, it's great to talk about class struggle and black music. people who just want to introduce you to black music, another variant of European concert music, and then there are other people who have a radically different understanding of the project and there have been black people, black movements and black leaders who are like oh okay we're in. to all the categories we just want to be included in them and there are others who say like no no no no we don't want the cat we have to finish this project so that we can all live and prosper exactly, that's why, even as we know, we articulate a notion of a kind of blackness or something black that is internally puckered or divided or structured by antagonisms, okay, if there's someone else like one last thing I want. what it subjects you to before you move on to this, well, yeah, I was sitting in the back, one of the things that's really exciting about the book because it's like we talked about you're interrogating archives that we understand, we normally understand.

Those are like texts, but one of the things that is really incredible in the book is how you question, interpret, decipher, describe, narrate, photographs or images because the image is a very different type of text, if it is a text, it's funny how recently in conversations that People have been having things with me like people keep asking me what are you trying to say about my work. I still understand that you are a living asset and that's why I started saying that I'm not trying to say anything. The only way to give meaning to the world and it seems like if you have a photograph or a video or something like that, it's precisely not saying, a picture is not saying, but it's still making statements about the world, so I'm very interested in all of this. and we've had these conversations before about photography, how photography exists as a text or how I link it, black life emerges and how a big part of your project in this particular one is about constantly returning to the images because the images and I know that if you had your preferences, a lot more images would have appeared, but it's like going back and forth interrogating these images or interpreting these images as: what do you see? obvious between one person and another person, yeah, I mean, I think you know, when I started this project I thought I was going to write something about photography, but I realized that I couldn't do it in some kind of article, why because I didn't. was.

I'm not interested in reading photographs, so that's not how I am in relation or encounter, or my orientation toward poems or even literary objects is not to frame them as reading in quotes, unless the reading is some kind of reinvention or reanimation of So I said, Oh, so this isn't going to be a photography review, so I was really stumped by how you would handle the image and actually my conversations with you were very helpful because there is an image on the page. 27 28 of this book and I was like, oh my God, what do I do with this image?

It's so violent it's so objectifying and I think you said something like well you know you do all this wild stuff with the file like what's the difference between the state of the image versus the document yeah what would it mean to just do whatever you want do with this image? If you could do anything, what would you do? I thought, oh, it would be like writing all over the place, it would just saturate it. with text and there's a way that opened a door for me and I'm one of the other challenges of the book, you know, was that there were all these almost visceral images that were in my head that I didn't have the document of which I didn't have the photograph or If I had a photograph it was from another era, so part of it was like, oh, there's this practice of a crisis that allowed me to build this.

You kind of know the textures of black sociality, so there are descriptions that are taken from 20th century films, so it's deeply visual in its grammar and I mean there's a way and I know this doesn't make sense, but I think I wanted to. make a book as a moving image as you know, and I think it's because this project started with Du Bois and a lot of what he was writing against the way that black life is fixed and static by sociology and there is a way. certain type of documentary or reformed photography also made black life fixed and static and I wanted this to be the moving image of many movements and that's why I also show figures in this because from the beginning It was just kind of of capturing, you know, those realities in his films and a lot of the realities are about snapshots of movements similar to those of black people, whether it's dance parades in clubs, people walking down the street and I thought, oh, I want that the book be a The movie in that way, I mean, it's like it has a very centrifugal quality to me because when I think about it, I think a lot of the book is like people standing in the door, they've been in the hallways, being dragged out of the hall, he goes through the streets. and someone coming up is natural, I mean, a lot of the book is that over and over again, so we're just standing there minding their business since a cop came and grabbed him and crushed someone who was chasing her husband and He was He didn't go there and then they came, you know, it's a lot, it really has a lot of quality, like when I think about my uncles just talking, you know, I mean when people tell stories the same way that black people do this kind of storytelling. digressive It really has a lot of that, I almost feel like the book is like you go over it and then you put a frame on it or like if you were cooking something you put a frame on it and then you take it out in the bowls and you put the lid on it.

I feel like you keep doing that throughout the whole thing. time, yeah, because I mean, I think the way that you know we experience racism or anti-blackness is like you're just in your development, but then there's like. arrests, there's this seizure, you're like walking home with two sandwiches and then there's that seizure, so it's not like you know, okay, I'm in hypervigilant mode and you know the police are here, but part of it seems like The drama of that and I guess you know what it announces is that no, you're not allowed to just be in the world, so whether it's being lost and dreaming or sitting in the stew or occupying a public space, no, that's what it is Pro, that's what's prohibited. and that's why even in that imagination of the rules of the project it was like, you know, yeah, I mean the mandate of white people, black people don't even try to live, they don't even try to live, so there's this kind of continuous development of everyday life.

That then, you know, collides with the limits of racialized confinement and I think that's how we live, you know, we're talking, we love each other, we go out with our friends or we walk to school with our children and then, there's that. reminder, there's that moment where you know like, oh, we forget that we're inside the prison landscape, you know, it's science fiction, you know, don't get on my side, space, but it's science fiction again because it's like what is the narrative that I don't know, I forget the names. I'm bad with names. This sister has this relationship with her man and she knows that she takes care of him and then he leaves, he's gambling and part of her she just waits for him on the street.

Wait, oh yeah, yeah, yeah. At first it's like a Bergman story, but then a monster appears out of nowhere. It's like you're watching a marriage or something and at some point Freddy Krueger in your life you find yourself in something psychological and you know. very dry, so I would say which is the sweetest author, Cherry Orchard and all, oh, that Chekhov tic, oh yeah, yeah, you know you're onto something like that, but then you get out of left field and then this feeling is almost like a Greek tragedy or something because This just comes out of nowhere.

Zeus was bored that day, so he decided to put some on and trip you. You know, you just try to go to work, but these white demons keep showing up like this over and over again, isn't that your narrative? in your narrative, which seems true to me and something about you know that you would often associate this phrase with you, the precariousness of black life is something about how the vehicles of that Picardy look over and over and over again yeah, no, but I think you know and it's just that because I was thinking about like you know these questions of time and scale because I mean in a way that it takes place in an altered timescape because I think every moment of the book is unfolding. in the now, so it doesn't like to develop chronologically and I think there's something about that template of continuous mouths, yeah, it continues now like a tangled now, yeah, and I think that scales from the absolutely mundane to the tragic in ten seconds. re transported that's why it's a great movie waiting to be made hmm or a Netflix series okay so maybe that's a good point to open it up and I have to do my due diligence now are the questions if we can , you ask in that statement. or anyone, keep the questions unless they are brilliant statements, okay we have someone, yes first, thank you for this really powerful and engaging conversation in the context of racialized and gendered issues for young radicals, please say more about the acceptance of the impossibility of imagination. young black women as a radical act, yes, that's a great question.

I mean, I think that's what the book tries to do in each chapter, partly, you know, at the level of imagining a life that's not defined by servitude, you know, you know a type. from a young queer who would probably use you know one day to describe herself now MabelHampton looking forward to it, who is incredibly talented but is training to be an opera singer at a time when basically no black women were singing opera on stages in the U.S. So what did it mean to you to work as a laborer? home or in a factory, but still train in the hope of being able to?

And she, in fact, performs on stage at Carnegie Hall with some kind of amateur opera company that you know. I think you know that the imagination is you. It requires even living in these situations that are unlivable and unbearable, so I would say yes, all of these characters were involved in that radical act of imagination every day. I mean, I think one of the things I say is that only you know others. I know that Black women dedicated themselves 24/7 to imagining a different kind of life for Black women collectively. Hello, thank you very much for being here.

My name is sama and I am an academic and an immediate petitioner from South Africa and the reason I mention. that's because I also consider myself a wayward and deliberate thinker, and being a young scholar and finding your voice or navigating within the Academy itself sometimes seems like a very violent act to me, so when I look at your work and Especially when you're interacting with archives, I'm very interested in how black creative intellectuals and thinkers preserve themselves during those moments when you're theorizing and I also think your work with Arthur Jaffa is in the conversation about the ways in which you articulate blackness. and I'd like you to also explain and expand on this notion of I think you call it black potential, so this tension that exists as a black person where you're never really able to fully actualize your potential and what that looks like in the future. contemporary moment as a young black thinker, how do we fly away from that tension?

Thanks, so I know it's a great and difficult question, but I think you should answer it too. You know, I think what I mean by this, I think strength. of accident and intervention explains a lot of my path and you probably know the role of ancestors in making a path for me because I was actually, as a fourth year abject teaching assistant, I was actually thinking about leaving abject, abject, abject. I was actually thinking about dropping out of college. I really thought, "Oh, this is such a terribly alienating place to work and I want to be here." So at that moment, at that very moment, something happened that allowed me to be there and I actually received like it was like divine intervention and I actually received early tenure that year at this time that I was really thinking about leaving. and I don't know if that path would not have been created for him to even have obtained tenure. through normal means, I don't know how things went, but what that meant was that I already had tenure as I was, you know, finishing my book so I could do what I wanted and, you know, the chair of the English department. at that moment she told me, oh well, you have an early position, you don't even need to finish a book now you have job security and and that's like, even right now it's like oh, I'm a black woman, so of course I don't have an intellectual project that I'm committed to doing, it's like I now have job security, so I feel like there was a kind of marginality that I had enough space to just do. what I wanted to do and I never wrote anything with the expectation that it would be well received and advance my career and I think in retrospect I could say that's kind of a blessing because it meant I wasn't trying to talk. to what the kind of predominant disciplinary conversations were or to being trained that way, I thought, "Oh, I'm going to do this and see how things fall, but I couldn't do this because of this, totally unexpectedly, you know." An early gift of fortune that, as you know, gave me the kind of protection I needed to finish the scenes in the book and do exactly what I wanted.

I have a quick little answer because I feel like I've been asked for a version of that. asked several times recently in public talks, this sister when she was in Berkeley even just said hello, she said well, both sisters asked questions at the same time, one said how do we navigate or reconcile the space between the cinema we think we need and feeding ourselves themselves, which is kind of a version of that and the other sister says something like it seems like you've given up on the world of film and chosen the world of art, that's the space where we should operate and I laughed at the second one because I thought that I didn't choose the art world, which shows me that you know and can say "like" because I know that if you ask a question, I think I'm assuming that when you ask a question like that, you're looking for a model. a paradigm of how to proceed, which is a good reason to ask the question, but I think on one level everyone is on their own path too because I know that my path, which is very different from Sudhir's path, was the path of many failures .

I would say people would question me and say you had some successes there, but I feel like you know I got into my 50s and somehow landed in the place that seems to make sense to me. I'm not working harder than I used to work, but it's like, you know, but it's like and the consequence of what's similar, we look alike this way is because I was failing. I was always doing what I wanted to do because it just didn't seem like there was anything I aspired to do, it wasn't going to be a success and I couldn't even get it, you know, I mean, it wasn't going to be a success just because of what it entailed. you know it's not related, it's a connection even at this particular moment for me just for a second, personally, the divergence is that I'm a product like Mike, my peer group is like in 84 85 is my peer group, like the filmmakers who really jumped out. it comes out at the same time as me, but I feel like here I am, 30 years later, finally emerging and it's only because you choose a path for yourself and it just has to be an intellectual project, like Sudhir was saying, you have to have a project. and you have to stick to that like my project is always some version of film noir like the music because the music is very poor, you know, it's always a variation of that, but that should kick my ass, you've known that for a long time and now I've just reached a point where journalists tell me now, but you know it's gaining ground in a certain way, but really it's about, like Cedilla said, having a project, we all have to feed ourselves, but you have to have a project that exists independently.

That's what you're going to do whether you're fed or not, you have to stick to that, but can I until I know you might have to open this door? So I'm going to try to not only, but You know, but I also wanted to say that I think my version of that was being extremely marginal. I mean, as a black intellectual woman, I'm at the bottom of the food chain, so there was a way like, but in that no one's space. taking me seriously, there was also all this space to work because I was taking myself seriously, right, and I say this because sometimes, when I talk to younger intellectuals, academics or artists, they all think that I had a path where people thought I was really brilliant from the start and they supported me and I never suffered from institutional racism or marginalization and then I said no, I was treated as badly as everyone else, but that's just the context in which we work well. it's like, but then what is the job that you need to do and really stay focused on that because often the working conditions are enough to really take the wind out of your sails, so part of it is like you know the communities of support? that you have with other people and ideally some relationship that you can have with older people who are mentors who can also help support you because it's still difficult and it's not like you know that in this world people say oh you are so valuable your side your heart but you know outside this room you know I'm still right you know I said it's a joke but it really matters that's the only thing keeping you from drowning is the people next to you saying no you're the one even if the world doesn't say that, yes, absolutely hi.

I just want to say first that you both have this. I'm fascinated by their discussion of a crisis and how they approached their work by looking at images and trying to create this rhetoric. relationship with them because I think that's something that Arthur would also practice between film and music, this type of interconnection and another way of describing art in a different medium, so I wonder in that project that you are looking for. in human human artifacts in this case the archive the absences the presence is there and how they are factual or truthful nature impacts how you perceive the human being what these relics are like that you are trying to describe in a different way or give an imagination different to challenge previous conceptions of what it means to be human and build new tenants in the possibilities of what it means to be human.

Yeah, that's a good question, I mean because obviously I mean all of this. You know, the racial order occurs on this incredibly exclusive notion of the human, and given these centuries of human violence and human disruption on earth, I don't know that the human is a category that can be explained. I think in the book it means another domain of and I don't even know if I would call it crisis, but there are certainly descriptions of other societies that are very important in the social and political imagination of the book and one is because in part the meeting the congregation, I mean , there is the language of the swarm, right, and there is a loving and critical reference to Kropotkin, you know mutual aid and certainly in that, and you know, imagining what anarchy is, he looked at all these varieties of types of animal sociability to refute.

Social Darwinism and saying you know that competition and survival of the fittest are not really supported by these variants of animal sociality, so I think there's a swarm of trophallaxis murmurings, it also describes the kind of social terms and the creation practice and other things in the book too, so yes, I would say that there is an imagination that if it does not exceed the human at least once 2d Center the human, so yes, I mean, for me it is as if it had been thinking a lot. about Kawhi Leonard these days just a few days ago because you know he's the lord.

Cybertron doesn't know that he's a black Vulcan and all that kind of stuff, but they recently printed that some people knew him for a long time, we had him talking trash, which is a little strange because he just seems like the OP. Like people say, don't even try to throw out the trash, how come he doesn't? He doesn't respond, but they had this account of him in college and they said he would get a rebound and he was like boring, that was boring, boring or yeah. you tried to score him, I mean, you couldn't score, he was like no, no, so I think for me I started to think a little bit about what I do in those terms, like you have an image and you're presented in a certain way and people tend to understand it, a lot of what I feel like I do is present a picture and I say no, I keep saying no, no, that's not it when I read it and a lot of us just put these things in relation to each other they know each other, it's like they see a black person standing a certain way and they want to read it like they're trying to summarize it and people always ask me why I put the sun down.

I always have the sun and many of my things. I know and Sudhir has said that I'm not good at talking about what my job means. I'm pretty good at talking about processes and stuff like that, but that's something I can't really explain and I always say I put this in there. next to supposedly oppressed or somehow you know negative associations of black people because I say it's the same way you should look at the actions of black people, what it should be like to look up, that I'm the same way looking at these Things are not these. marginalize little parochial things that don't matter, but it's cosmological the way that dawn talks about black life and things you know, that's the right framework, the right tone and you want to understand black life, so that is an example of no, just saying you don't know this, no, no.

In all of that you know I got the last thing I say, the last drink I put in love is a message, you know, you had the sun, you had James Brown, the last drink I put in was a sister twerking and some really good friends of mine. so I won't mention it because I'm not trying to blow them up, but they say why did you put that shot there with your sister twerking next to James Brown, who is no one as close as we are to an Olympic figure in LeBron James and the Sun I liked him because his twerking is as virtuoso as any LeBron James dunk, which is why I say I'm not making the hierarchy.

I'm going to say virtuosity, black virtuosity, black virtuosity, that's a no, I think, I think, I think. For me, as the son of yours, it's about scale and it's about that change of scale from the everyday to the cosmic. I mean, I think there's also something about no, Aaron Manning and Brian Masumi, and the thought and the act that Talks about autistic perception and one of the things is that it's a way of looking at becausepeople you know often mistakenly talk about autistic people because you know they lack empathy, but the human being is also not privileged as the center of perception and, again, it is this type of radical. decentering of the human being in action or in the frame and that is a note that you know, it is also rejection as we said and rejections.

I think part of Sudhir's project is precisely that it's harder to talk about what people refuse to do than it is to talk about people. doing things because my person who does something is there that thing that he did but if you reject or refuse to do something you are talking about an absence it is much more difficult to talk about it two more questions thank you, thank you both Fred Moton says that one of the responsibilities of Black Studies is to try to figure out how to save the Earth and I was wondering what you think about that idea and what particular kind of abilities or gifts you think Blackness brings to the table. that project, yes, that is good and I want to say that I agree that it would give a historical answer and in part if we think about the plantation as one of the first organizational drivers to manage these large economies of scale, whether in terms of production of crops of capitalism of racial slavery and also the plantation orders domestic life, privatizes it, creates a home that sustains it and also creates that hierarchy of life of the species.

I mean, Anna Singh has a wonderful book called Mushroom at the End of the World which has a short article called Rebel Edges it's like Sylvia Winter thinking about that relationship between plantations and the Anthropocene or you know, human destruction, so I think that this fight against plantations is also a fight against the notion of an idea of ​​Earth that can be possessed by right and a certain instrumental vision of relationality and an instrumental hierarchical vision of the taxonomy and order of life of species and you know, black studies has been fundamental and its critique of that world made by the plantation.

Hello thank you very much. There's a lot here, but I'm going to try to summarize when you talked about decentering the human. I was wondering if you were talking about our idea of ​​the human as it is assumed to be generalized under white supremacy under gender under capitalism or if you were talking about multispecies or interspecies feminism and I don't think those are two different ideas, but I wonder about of the category that speaks of the unsaid, they are filling the difference by recognizing the difference without this line between the whole and universalization also existing. or generalization, I should say something there.

I'll let you have the last word because when you say it without saying it, I thought it's something that's come up a couple of times recently and it speaks to me, it's like I almost said it. I don't happen to think about it, people react when I refer to whiteness as a psychopathology and people really understand, you know, and for me it's okay, yeah, what could we call it, but you know, someone told me in French that I gave like can you know what you said I said well look I think it's important to say that so that people get used to the idea that whiteness and white people are not exactly the same you know in the same way patriarchy and men are not exactly the same as if If you had to say patriarchy and say that it is in psychopathology so that man can choose whether to align or fight to dealign with patriarchy, you know, I mean, if I am anti-patriarchy, I am not an inherently necessary anti-man, so if I say that I'm against whiteness or I'm for the abolition of whiteness, I'm not necessarily against people of European descent or any rights, in fact, I like quite a few of them, but you know what I'm trying to say.

I mean, it's important to say that so that people get used to the idea that there's a difference between whiteness and white people, so you know, yeah, I mean, I'm tempted to just say yes to your question, I mean this notion of the human and the way we're implementing it, and I mean it's kind of a modern concept, you know, totally shaped by racism and awkwardness. I mean, Cesaire famously and beautifully says that You know the human being has produced a huge pile of corpses, so you know even Aaron's comments about human rights that we have human rights when we've been stripped of everything else , so I think I'm operating with this kind of disenchantment.

The notion of what is human or what you know is constituted by these incredible exclusions. I mean, I think there are other ways of knowing the world outside of a certain kind of Western philosophical framework that don't have that hierarchy of species life, so it's not like you know we have to come up with a new ontology for us to understand that something since you know that the rest of existence is not under our Dominion or land that you know is not something of our own, it seems that there are many people in the world who have said exactly that, right, that is really nothing new and that those projects from from there they are inextricably linked, to give you a notion of the human, someone like winter would say that it is overrepresented by a certain figuration of man. it's to you know, bring to life a different set of relationships and I also thought I heard you riffing on Denis Ferrer in Silva's because she has a wonderful short word called you know what the difference is without you separable so that's also thinking about a different way of framing and imagining the relationship thank you Thank you AJ I hope you will all join us now in the theater lobby for a small reception with coffee, tea and cookies and Cydia will sign some books and thank you very much Arthur Java and Sudhir Hartman you