research post 2025-09-16
Build another reality
Things are happening fast now. Dance harder.
“Why, we can ask, did the plantation system outlaw gatherings of those it considered to be slaves? In the slaver’s conception of the world, after all, slaves were livestock, talking plows, with no minds of their own. Why, then, couldn’t they pray to their own gods, given that it is a waste of time to ad- dress oneself to fetishes and idols that aren’t listening anyway? If they were so powerless and incapable, why couldn’t they be allowed move around freely and create their own spaces for thinking through their actions and behavior? Why did the plantation system consider any expression of their free will a form of defiance so dangerous it had to be destroyed relentlessly in order to guarantee the normal functioning of agro- industry? What, precisely, was it that these savages could do so effectively that it threatened a form of power that considered itself boundless? In fact, beyond the regulations of the dominant system and the punishments they were threatened with, the captives were building another reality. And it threatened the colonists so much that they wanted to dismantle it at all costs.”
- Jean Casimir, The Haitians
Reads
Bernard Michon, “The Marie-Séraphique, a Slave-Trading Ship from Nantes in the 18th Century (EN, FR),” Manifest, December 14, 2022, https://www.projectmanifest.eu/the-marie-seraphique-a-slave-trading-ship-from-nantes-in-the-18th-century-en-fr/.
“La traite atlantique et l’esclavage colonial à Nantes - Musée d’histoire de Nantes,” Château des ducs de Bretagne | Musée d’histoire de Nantes, n.d., accessed September 16, 2025, https://www.chateaunantes.fr/thematiques/la-traite-atlantique-et-l-esclavage-colonial/.
“Matana Roberts on the Origin of Coin Coin,” accessed September 16, 2025, https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/2016/11/matana-roberts-coin-coin-feature.
Alexis De Veaux, JesusDevil: The Parables (AK Press, 2023).
Harmonia Rosales, Chronicles of Ori: An African Epic (W. W. Norton & Company, 2025)
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Prodigal,” in American Artist: Shaper of God, ed. American Artist and Zainab Aliyu (Pioneer Works Press, 2025)
Taylor Renee Aldridge et al., American Artist: Shaper of God, ed. American Artist and Zainab Aliyu (Pioneer Works Press, 2025)
Lumarhi J. Rivera Lozada, “REPRESENTACIÓN DE LA NEGRITUD COMO ARMA EN LA LUCHA POR LAS MUJERES,” Revista Étnica, n.d., accessed August 30, 2025, https://www.revistaetnica.com/blogs/news/representacion-de-la-negritud-como-arma-en-la-lucha-por-las-mujeres;
N et al., “‘George Bush Doesn’t Care about Black People’ 20 Years Later,” It’s Been a Minute, NPR, August 27, 2025, https://www.npr.org/2025/08/27/nx-s1-5517328/george-bush-doesnt-care-about-black-people-20-years-later;
KAPRICE DANIELS AND JADA CEASAR and Ceasar, JAda, “Guest Column: Katrina’s Education Reforms Took the Schools Away from the Communities,” NOLA.Com, August 29, 2025, https://www.nola.com/opinions/guest_columns/katrina-education-new-orleans/article_642c01d2-51a0-4465-a163-3a05a13f8d94.html;
CITY OF A MILLION DREAMS | Trailer, directed by City of a Million Dreams, 2021, 02:46,
;
Cierra Chenier, “What Remains Above the Water Line | National Museum of African American History and Culture,” NMAAHC, August 29, 2025, https://nmaahc.si.edu/explore/stories/what-remains-above-water-line;
Book Banter Featuring Brad Richard, Mona Lisa Saloy, Alison Pelegrin & Karisma Price, directed by Book Banter Books, 2025, 59:21,
;
Elise Plunk, “Since Katrina, Infrastructure Shortcomings Create Resiliency Fatigue • Louisiana Illuminator,” Louisiana Illuminator, August 26, 2025, https://lailluminator.com/2025/08/26/katrina-resiliency/;
“Something Beautiful out of the Darkness,” Southern Cultures, January 23, 2024, https://www.southerncultures.org/article/something-beautiful-out-of-the-darkness/;
Emilie Diouf et al., “Our Ubuntu: A Black Feminist Turn,” Agenda 37, no. 2 (2023): 32–43, https://doi.org/10.1080/10130950.2023.2229572;
Zophia Edwards, “Labor, Agency, and State-Building in Trinidad and Tobago: Toward a Postcolonial Sociological Approach to Development,” Journal of Historical Sociology 31, no. 2 (2018): 134–53, https://doi.org/10.1111/johs.12168;
Kristina Kay Robinson, “What We Lost After Katrina,” Features, Harper’s BAZAAR, August 20, 2025, https://www.harpersbazaar.com/culture/features/a65810072/new-orleans-katrina-anniversary/;
Therese O’Malley, “Lewis Miller’s View of American Landscape,” Nineteenth-Century Art Worldwide 12, no. 1 (2013), https://www.19thc-artworldwide.org/spring13/omalley-on-lewis-millers-view-of-american-landscape.
"I therefore cannot regard regard what I write as a fetish object called literature--a being in itself--to be deified under the static concept of Art for Art's sake. I cannot accept that culture is, to borrow the phrase of Roland Barthes, "a piece of inexplicable magic," to be created by the artist, unconsciously, as medium, with the critic as high Priest and conscious interpreter. I accept Brecht's thesis that in settled periods of history, culture--and literature which is its part, with criticism as its partner--can reflect reality. But that in traumatic times like ours, when reality itself is so distorted as to have become impossble and abnormal, it is the function of all culture, partaking of this abnormality, to be aware of its own sickness. To be aware of the unreality of the unauthenticity of the so called real, is to reinterpret this reality. To reinterpret this reality is to commit oneself to a constant revolutionary assault against it."
- Sylvia Wynter. “We Must Learn to Sit Down Together and Talk About a Little Culture,” 1968
Watch
African Queens: Njinga on Netflix (gives Bad Ass Black Women à la The Woman King in Jada Pinkett-Smith voice)
Pojects
Kellie Jones, “Now Dig This!: Art and Black Los Angeles 1960–1980 | Hammer Museum,” accessed September 17, 2025, https://hammer.ucla.edu/now-dig-this.
Listen
“Matana Roberts – Coin Coin Chapter 1: Gens de Couleur Libres,” No Food Just Wax, March 28, 2020, https://nofoodjustwax.com/matana-roberts-coin-coin-chapter-1-gens-de-couleur-libres/.
Thank you 🙏🏿