Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2145593
João Batista Nascimento Gregoire
At the moment, broad sectors of the population are organized around the goal of regaining the democratic freedoms lost after the 1964 military coup. The Black population cannot be absent, we need to be active agents in this process. The MNU joins forces with those who fight for free trade unionism, for freedoms of expression and organization, for general, inclusive, and unrestricted political amnesty and, for a freely elected Constituent Assembly. We are going to participate in the November 15 electoral process, supporting candidates who are aligned with the MNU’s program... The Brazilian population will reaffirm their disavowal of this anti-national and anti-popular regime...We are going to say no to censorship, because we know that its principal goal is to impede our awareness and the fight for better living conditions. We are going to say yes to democracy.
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2145552
M. Dickinson
I n November of 1794, an enslaved woman named Pegg requested assistance from the Pennsylvania Abolition Society (PAS), an exclusively white abolition organization, in securing her freedom. Pegg and her slaveholder, Phillip Ruby, had moved to Pennsylvania from North Carolina six years earlier. After their first three years in the state, Ruby organized an indentured servitude contract with Pegg, agreeing to free her after 14 additional years of service. Pegg served three years of the indenture during which she discovered that she was legally free. In 1780, Pennsylvania ratified “An Act for the Gradual Abolition of Slavery,” also referred to as the “Gradual Abolition Act.” Among its stipulations, the law required slaveholders coming into the state to indenture their enslaved people within six months of their arrival. Because Phillip Ruby did not indenture Pegg within the first six months, the law granted her freedom. With her newfound knowledge Pegg, “now having arrived to her 19th or 20th year of age & being married” contacted the PAS and “apply’d for release” from her contract. The fact that Pegg’s status as a married womanwas detailedwithin the generally succinct PAS meeting minutes suggests that the relationship was perhaps a significant factor motivating Pegg to pursue her freedom claim. A marriage without the confines of forced labor would have been worth the risk. The organization supported her claim noting that “the girl having become free by the operation of the Law of 1780” should have her liberty. PAS lawyers then pursued her case, using the courts to enforce the abolition law, and secured her freedom. By actively applying for assistance from the organization, Pegg resisted both her oppressor and the institution of slavery. Her case was just one example in the larger story of Black resistance and agency in the late eighteenth century. Her story was far from uncommon. And as was the case with Pegg, many people of African descent actively solicited the help of PAS staff members, fostering interracial allyship, to claim their freedom and the freedom of loved ones. As historians increasingly work to uncover Black voices and activism, the cases of the PAS provide rich windows into Black agency during the Early Republic. This study utilizes the Papers of the Pennsylvania Abolition Society to examine how Black men and women fought for their liberty between 1784, when the PAS began its large-scale efforts to aid people of African descent, through the turn of the century. Investigating their struggles also provides insight into the many complexities of freedom in the decades immediately following the American Revolution. Though limited, PAS records reveal a Black population, enslaved and free, committed to securing and maintaining freedom. Between 1784, when the organization reorganized, and the end of the century, the PAS pursued hundreds of cases, many of which were the result of Black claimants actively seeking help from the
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Pub Date : 2023-01-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2145596
Ahmad Greene-Hayes
J. Brent Crosson’s Experiments with Power is, indeed, an experiment, and a successful one at that. A powerfully written, meticulously researched ethnography, Crosson offers an insightful way forward for thinking critically about the policing of Africanderived religions in the afterlife of slavery and colonialism in Trinidad and throughout the Americas. This policing is not a relic of the past, but as the spiritual workers in Crosson’s narrative argue, the past and the present are not only interconnected, but they blur. Pointedly, Crosson charts how the historical construction of the “thug” by the state and its allies has worked in tandem with the construction of the category of “the demonic,” such that criminalized Black people are also likened to “demons.” As I read Crosson’s theoretical analysis, especially in the first chapter “What Obeah Does Do,” I was reminded of former Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson’s grand jury testimony in 2014 that the slain Michael Brown, Jr.—whom he killed—was “like a demon.” In his narrative account, Crosson joins a rich discourse on the policing of Black people and Black people’s religions. Without question, policing is shaped by carcerality, and as Crosson shows, by carceral theologies at the helm of the category of “religion.” Antiblackness shapes the world as we know it, including policing, and “religion” is often shaped by antiblackness, and so as Crosson encourages, we must examine “what it excludes rather than [just] its recognized representations” (9). Religion and religious studies are confining discourses, and Black people are often their prisoners, seeking the freedom to believe, practice, and live religious lives not shaped by statecraft. Obeah, a criminalized, policed constellation of African-derived religious practices, has only recently been decriminalized in Trinidad as of 2000, though the stigma surrounding it persists throughout the
j·布伦特·克罗森的《权力的实验》确实是一次实验,而且是一次成功的实验。克罗森是一本文笔有力、研究细致的民族志,为批判性地思考特立尼达和整个美洲在奴隶制和殖民主义之后对非洲衍生宗教的监管提供了一条富有洞察力的道路。这种监管不是过去的遗迹,但正如克罗森叙事中的精神工作者所言,过去和现在不仅相互关联,而且模糊不清。克罗森尖锐地指出,国家及其盟友对“暴徒”的历史建构是如何与“恶魔”这一类别的建构协同作用的,因此,被定罪的黑人也被比作“恶魔”。当我阅读克罗森的理论分析,尤其是第一章“奥比ah Does Do”时,我想起了弗格森前警官达伦·威尔逊(Darren Wilson) 2014年在大陪审团的证词,他在证词中说,被他杀死的小迈克尔·布朗(Michael Brown jr .)“像个恶魔”。在他的叙述中,克罗森加入了关于黑人警察和黑人宗教的丰富论述。毫无疑问,警务是由残暴塑造的,正如克罗森所展示的,是由残暴的神学主导的“宗教”范畴。反黑人塑造了我们所知的世界,包括警察,而“宗教”也常常被反黑人所塑造,所以正如克罗森所鼓励的那样,我们必须审视“它所排斥的东西,而不仅仅是它公认的代表”(9)。宗教和宗教研究限制了话语,黑人往往是他们的囚犯,他们寻求信仰、实践和过宗教生活的自由,而不是被国家政治所塑造。Obeah是一种被定罪的、由警察管理的源自非洲的宗教活动,直到2000年,它才在特立尼达被合法化,尽管围绕它的污名一直存在于整个国家
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2111649
M. Collins
Many will recall with ease the murder of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in 2014 whose untimely death was a flash point in the ongoing protest against state-sanctioned deaths in the new century. Following the death of Trayvon Martin in 2012, Tamir’s death joined a cadre of other high-profile police killings that rallied national outcries and birthed new political movements largely formed by the digital age in which they occurred, such as #BlackLivesMatter and the Movement for Black Lives. The 9-11 call from the person who first speculated that a “Black man was throwing a gun around,” visualized the scene of Rice’s death for listeners. In many ways, the lasting legacy of the digital footprint of Tamir Rice’s death is the most material thing we have of his memory. Stills from this video are what replays the actual events and normalizes the mass viewership of Black death, remnant of lynchings in our not so distant past that once attracted crowds of over ten thousand people. In the same era in which videos of the death scenes of Korryn Gaines, Eric Garner, and Tamir Rice circulated the web, a concurrent public memory crisis erupted around the institutional and structural legacies of the Civil War and Confederate “heroes.” The ire to remove Confederate monuments was part and parcel of the same social fabric of this time, displacing the impossibility to erect physical memorials for slain Black folks while the digital allowed us to re-live their deaths over and over—sustaining grief as a permanent condition of Black life. This condition is often defined as the social position of being Black. Critical Black theorists engage in mourning in a myriad of ways; most applicable here are their contributions to the ways it contributes to a “slow death” of Black mothers and how mourning continues the spectacle created by Black death. These spectacles manifest physically in memorials, monuments, and in the bodies and minds that contextualize them within their own experiences with mothering and parentage. Material memorials for Black people, meaning three dimensional sites, statues, or plaques commemorating the slain, were defunct for a society that was still living the original event at the click of a button and the never-ending evidence of gratuitous antiBlackness. What is less frequently recalled about the murder of Tamir Rice and those also killed by state-sanctioned violence in the digital age is the difficulty to erect material memorials of their lives. The abhorrent circumstances through which they died challenge attempts to materially manifest Black memorial. The public resistance to figure state culpability within the grammar of memorialization continues to demand critique. A critique of the memorialization within the context of the Black maternal relies on Samaria Rice’s grief as a framework to understand the object of the gazebo as a generative object for a multitude of efforts including healing for Tamir’s mother, but
许多人会轻松地回忆起2014年12岁的塔米尔·赖斯(Tamir Rice)被谋杀的事件,他的过早死亡是新世纪持续抗议国家批准的死亡的一个引爆点。在2012年特雷沃恩·马丁(Trayvon Martin)死亡之后,塔米尔的死加入了其他一系列备受瞩目的警察杀人事件的行列,这些事件引发了全国的强烈抗议,并催生了新的政治运动,这些运动主要是在数字时代形成的,比如#黑人的生命也很重要#和“黑人生命运动”(Movement for BlackLives)。第一个猜测“一个黑人在到处乱扔枪”的人打来的911电话,让听众想象了赖斯死亡的场景。从许多方面来说,塔米尔·赖斯(Tamir Rice)之死的数字足迹所留下的持久遗产,是我们对他的记忆中最实质性的东西。这段视频的剧照重播了真实的事件,并使黑死病的大众观众正常化,这是我们不久以前私刑的残余,曾经吸引了超过一万人的人群。在柯林·盖恩斯、埃里克·加纳和塔米尔·赖斯的死亡视频在网上流传的同一时代,一场围绕内战和邦联“英雄”的制度性和结构性遗产的公共记忆危机同时爆发。拆除邦联纪念碑的愤怒是这个时代同一社会结构的重要组成部分,它取代了为被杀害的黑人建立实体纪念碑的不可能性,而数字技术让我们一遍又一遍地重温他们的死亡,并将过度的悲伤作为黑人生活的永久状态。这种情况通常被定义为黑人的社会地位。批判的黑人理论家以无数的方式进行哀悼;这里最适用的是他们对黑人母亲“缓慢死亡”的贡献,以及哀悼如何继续黑死病造成的奇观。这些景象在纪念碑、纪念碑和身体和思想中表现出来,在他们自己的母性和父母的经历中表现出来。黑人的物质纪念碑,即纪念被杀害者的三维场所、雕像或牌匾,对于一个仍然生活在按下按钮的原始事件和无休止的无端反黑人证据中的社会来说是不存在的。关于塔米尔•赖斯(Tamir Rice)的谋杀案,以及那些在数字时代被国家认可的暴力杀害的人,很少被人提起的是,很难为他们的生命建立物质纪念碑。他们死亡的恶劣环境挑战了黑人纪念的物质表现。公众在纪念语法中对国家罪责的抗拒仍然需要批评。在黑人母亲的背景下,对纪念活动的批评依赖于撒玛利亚·赖斯的悲伤作为一个框架来理解露台的对象作为一个产生对象的多种努力包括对塔米尔母亲的治疗,但是
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Pub Date : 2022-10-02DOI: 10.1080/00064246.2022.2111654
E. L. Hayes
Houston’s rap genre, chop and screw, focuses on the distortion of sound and voice; here, not only is the original song distorted, but the listener requires a slow listening practice to hear what could not hear before. I liken the methodological openings of a distortive tempo like chop and screw to the speculative openings needed of Texas’ archives of enslavement. Distortion, as a tool of Black archival practice, is also called upon by Sylvia Wynter who writes that “The Europeans usedwriting” to establish hegemonic authority. It was the privilege of legibility through a pen, writing, and creation of and dependence on the archival record that overwrote African diasporic knowledge production countering what is known, materialized, and recorded of the enslavement era. Rather, from the emergence of Black cultural spaces, the enslaved could articulate themselves in theworld, in community and in nature thus creating their own ongoing record of events. Here, these (il)legible spaces broke ground to disrupt this white hegemonic dependency on an archive as the sole proprietor of legitimate knowledge on enslavement. Archival distortion allows for speculative play in the illegible, and sometimes non-sensical, remnants of Afro-Texan women’s memory of living under enslavement. This text, thus, turns to an archive made of dirt. Building from Black Texan sonic legacies and, what I take up as a methodological intentionality behind chop and screw, I offer the slow ponderings of my dive into the difficult ways of preserving memory Afro-Texan women integrated within, alongside, and beyond the FWP archive. Afro-Texans, specifically formerly enslavedwomen, slowlymaking historical record of their enslavement illegible, or difficult to engage linearly. In other words, the FWP was not the “text [onto] which [their] social relations [we]re inscribed.” Taking rather literally Wynter’s turn to “grounds,” I, too, came to focus in on the important role of Texas dirt as an archive used to hold material and immaterial record of Afro-Texan histories. Dirt made portions of Afro-Texan women’s narratives illegible under the consumptive and dehumanizing nature of FWP archiving and plantation era violences seeped into its record. Simultaneously, dirt transformed what would have been archival analysis of relations occurring between Black flesh and Texan plantation dirt—an obscure relation where one is not too distinct from the other. It is dirt that pointed this text towards the consideration that perhaps the true archives of enslavement we study and hope to engage require a strangeness in response. Turning to the dirt of the Black South nods to its epistemological oddities that not only blur flesh and dirt through its consumption, but as an archive offers a space of fabulation where intimacy from it—what Yaeger describes as “flesheating, dirt-eating kindredness... of the hardbitten everyday”—may offer a cloudy complexity to how archival terror at the hands of early twentieth-century
休斯顿的说唱风格,chop and screw,专注于声音和声音的扭曲;在这里,不仅原来的歌曲被扭曲了,而且听众需要慢慢地听练习才能听到以前听不到的东西。我把一种扭曲节奏的方法论上的开放,像切和拧,比作德克萨斯州奴隶制档案中需要的投机性开放。歪曲作为黑人档案实践的一种工具,西尔维娅·温特也呼吁“欧洲人利用写作”来建立霸权权威。正是这种通过笔、书写、创造和依赖档案记录的易读性的特权,覆盖了非洲流散的知识生产,与已知的、物化的和记录的奴役时代相抗衡。相反,从黑人文化空间的出现,被奴役的人可以在世界、社区和自然中表达自己,从而创造他们自己对事件的持续记录。在这里,这些(不)清晰的空间打破了白人霸权对档案的依赖,因为档案是关于奴役的合法知识的唯一所有者。档案的扭曲使得非裔德克萨斯妇女在奴役下生活的记忆中难以辨认,有时甚至毫无意义的残余得以推测。因此,这篇文章变成了一个由污垢构成的档案。从黑人德克萨斯人的声音遗产出发,以及我认为是一种方法上的故意,我提供了我对保存记忆的缓慢思考,这些记忆是我在FWP档案内部、旁边和之外整合的非裔德克萨斯妇女的困难方法。非裔德克萨斯人,特别是以前被奴役的妇女,慢慢地使她们被奴役的历史记录变得难以辨认,或者难以线性地参与。换句话说,FWP不是“[他们的]社会关系[我们]刻在上面的文本”。从字面上看,轮到温特讲“土地”的时候,我也开始把重点放在德克萨斯泥土的重要作用上,它是用来保存非裔德克萨斯历史的物质和非物质记录的档案。在FWP档案的消耗性和非人性化的性质和种植园时代的暴力渗透到它的记录下,肮脏使部分非裔德克萨斯妇女的叙述难以辨认。同时,泥土也改变了对黑人和德克萨斯种植园泥土之间关系的档案分析——一种模糊的关系,两者之间并没有太大的区别。正是这种肮脏让这篇文章指向这样一种思考:也许我们研究和希望参与的真正的奴隶制档案需要一种奇怪的回应。转向黑人南方的肮脏承认了其认识论上的古怪,它不仅通过消费模糊了肉体和肮脏,而且作为一个档案提供了一个虚构的空间,在那里亲密关系-耶格尔描述为“肉加热,肮脏的善良……——这可能会给我们提供一种模糊的复杂性,即二十世纪早期档案手中的档案恐怖是如何被写出来的,以及黑人档案逃避和讲故事的做法是如何形成的。
{"title":"Between Flesh and Dirt","authors":"E. L. Hayes","doi":"10.1080/00064246.2022.2111654","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2111654","url":null,"abstract":"Houston’s rap genre, chop and screw, focuses on the distortion of sound and voice; here, not only is the original song distorted, but the listener requires a slow listening practice to hear what could not hear before. I liken the methodological openings of a distortive tempo like chop and screw to the speculative openings needed of Texas’ archives of enslavement. Distortion, as a tool of Black archival practice, is also called upon by Sylvia Wynter who writes that “The Europeans usedwriting” to establish hegemonic authority. It was the privilege of legibility through a pen, writing, and creation of and dependence on the archival record that overwrote African diasporic knowledge production countering what is known, materialized, and recorded of the enslavement era. Rather, from the emergence of Black cultural spaces, the enslaved could articulate themselves in theworld, in community and in nature thus creating their own ongoing record of events. Here, these (il)legible spaces broke ground to disrupt this white hegemonic dependency on an archive as the sole proprietor of legitimate knowledge on enslavement. Archival distortion allows for speculative play in the illegible, and sometimes non-sensical, remnants of Afro-Texan women’s memory of living under enslavement. This text, thus, turns to an archive made of dirt. Building from Black Texan sonic legacies and, what I take up as a methodological intentionality behind chop and screw, I offer the slow ponderings of my dive into the difficult ways of preserving memory Afro-Texan women integrated within, alongside, and beyond the FWP archive. Afro-Texans, specifically formerly enslavedwomen, slowlymaking historical record of their enslavement illegible, or difficult to engage linearly. In other words, the FWP was not the “text [onto] which [their] social relations [we]re inscribed.” Taking rather literally Wynter’s turn to “grounds,” I, too, came to focus in on the important role of Texas dirt as an archive used to hold material and immaterial record of Afro-Texan histories. Dirt made portions of Afro-Texan women’s narratives illegible under the consumptive and dehumanizing nature of FWP archiving and plantation era violences seeped into its record. Simultaneously, dirt transformed what would have been archival analysis of relations occurring between Black flesh and Texan plantation dirt—an obscure relation where one is not too distinct from the other. It is dirt that pointed this text towards the consideration that perhaps the true archives of enslavement we study and hope to engage require a strangeness in response. Turning to the dirt of the Black South nods to its epistemological oddities that not only blur flesh and dirt through its consumption, but as an archive offers a space of fabulation where intimacy from it—what Yaeger describes as “flesheating, dirt-eating kindredness... of the hardbitten everyday”—may offer a cloudy complexity to how archival terror at the hands of early twentieth-century ","PeriodicalId":45369,"journal":{"name":"BLACK SCHOLAR","volume":"52 1","pages":"53 - 63"},"PeriodicalIF":0.4,"publicationDate":"2022-10-02","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44045488","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}