Monthly archives: May 2015

At the DIY Cultures Zinefair last Sunday 24 May 2015 we asked people to spin the Wheel of Whiteness and to respond to the action oriented white identity the Vitruvian Man points to. Some tweets from the day:

Here are a few responses:

The Wheel of Whiteness is based on Barnor Hesse’s 8 action oriented white identities

8 white identities

The responses will be collated into a zine some time in the near future.

 

slavery-abolition-granger

The field of Black Studies consists in ‘tracking the figure of the unsovereign’ (Chandler, 2013: 163) in order to meditate upon the paramount question: ‘What if the problem is sovereignty as
such’ (Moten, 2013)? Abolition, the political dream of Black Studies, its unconscious thinking, consists in the affirmation of the unsovereign slave – the affectable, the derelict, the monstrous, the wretched – figures of an order altogether different from (even when they coincide or cohabit
with) the colonized native – the occupied, the undocumented, the unprotected, the oppressed. Abolition is beyond (the restoration of) sovereignty. Beyond the restoration of a lost commons through radical redistribution (everything for everyone), there is the unimaginable loss of that all too imaginable loss itself (nothing for no one). If the indigenous relation to land precedes and exceeds any regime of property, then the slave’s inhabitation of the earth precedes and exceeds any prior relation to land – landlessness. And selflessness is the correlate. No ground for identity, no ground to stand (on). Everyone has a claim to everything until no one has a claim to anything. No claim. This is not a politics of despair brought about by a failure to lament a loss, because it is not rooted in hope of winning. The flesh of the earth demands it: the landless inhabitation of selfless existence. Jared Sexton – The Vel of Slavery.

 

 

saidiya hartman

Explorations into Decolonial Love… in response to: “I’m not racist, I have a black girlfriend”, consider this:

“The significance attributed to feelings, attachment, and the familiarity of domestic slavery rendered domination in a heartwarming light. The power of influence invested in the enslaved -the power of the weak to sway the powerful- and the place attributed to feeling in regulating the excesses of market relations refigured relations of domination and exploitation in the garb of affection, family, and reciprocal obligations. Such reasoning held that violence was both necessary and tolerable, while insisting that feelings determined the character of the master-slave relationship and informed social, familial, and political organization. In short, slave relations were dependent upon and determined by ‘the action of taking place in individual hearts’. “Saidiya V. Hartman.