Mark Anthony Neal's Blog, page 473

On How to G(r)asp for Life or The Breath in My Bones: A Review of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs

On How to G(r)asp for Life or The Breath in My Bones: A Review of M Archive: After the End of the World by Alexis Pauline Gumbs Reviewed by Sasha Panaram | @SashaPanaram | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
listen: i need my oxygen -- Evie Shockley
And I dream of our coming together encircled driven not only by love but by lust for a working tomorrow the flights of this journey mapless uncertain and necessary as water. -- Audre Lorde
I read M Archive: After the End of the World underwater. Seriously. Between 138 Street and 125 Street where the 6 train traveled from the Bronx to Manhattan darting beneath the Harlem River, I started to imagine what it would be like to live in another world, a world below. I finished M Archive on the day a bomb detonated at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. As the bomb exploded, my train pulled into Grand Central. When a fellow commuter reached for her cell phone to call her boss and explain that she would not make it to work on time, I looked at her and wondered simply this: would I make it at all?
Then I took a deep, long breath.
While I do not typically disclose the coordinates that pertain to where and when I start or finish a book, I feel it necessary to mark when and where I encountered M Archive, because within seconds of completing the text I was simultaneously reminded of the endless possibilities of and for life, andmy own finitude.  
When it occurred to me that for the reasons previously stated I might not surface aboveground again while none of that was okay that I was in the company of Alexis made it all right. Who better to lead me to safety, to usher in a new life than she who can see underwater, she who can breathe below? “Is Alexis writing from the bottom of the ocean, or the far off future, or from inside the mind of God-is-change?” marvels adrienne maree brown. She might be and for that reason sight is an occasion for celebrating while reading M Archivebecause here we see everything broken, boundless, anew.
If Spill is an oracle, then M Archive is our heaven. The second book in a planned experimental triptych, Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ M Archivechronicles the possibility for black life after a worldwide apocalypse. Conveyed to us by a post-scientific researcher encountering artifacts after the end of the world, this work of speculative documentary invites us to think together what it is we know about the world and what it is we cannot know, at least not now.
Gumbs, the newly appointed Winton Chair in Liberal Arts at the University of Minnesota, blurs the boundaries between art and scholarship suggesting that the two are not oppositional or distinct enterprises, but part of the same project, part of the same practice.
I use the term “practice” very intentionally because what is clear upon opening the text is its sacred contents – its holy formulations – that gesture towards modes of living and imagining that if pursued collectively open wor(l)ds: wor(l)ds where being “human” is not enough; wor(l)ds where the land cannot contain us; wor(l)ds where breathing is not taken for granted (“they were raised to believe that they could only trust words. words were a place to stand. even though they could be washed away”).
The book’s subtitle – After the End of the World – echoes a footnote buried deep in Fred Moten’s “Notes on the Passage” wherein he calls for a return to Ed Roberson’s To See the Earth Before the End of the World and then asks readers “if the earth can survive the world” (74). As if departing from this question, M Archive enlightens us to how people have “violated the trust of being born” and plundered the earth bearing little or no respect for the ground they walk on or water they bask in (45).
Prophetic and sobering, M Archive asks “why would anyone choose to come to this planet right now?” (172). Considering black people as critical sites of knowledge production and black women as integral to that process, Gumbs troubles histories of racial categorization and racism. Where some turn to science and mathematics for the answers to life’s most persistent enigmas, she says “you could have asked anyone sitting on the porch back in her day” (24). She would have known the answer. She always already knew.  
Written with the ancestors and with whom Gumbs calls “the far-into-the-future witnesses to the realities we are making possible or impossible with our present apocalypse,” M Archive pays homage to M. Jacqui Alexander’s Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred(2005). Following Alexander’s formulation that the Middle Passage not only resulted in the forced migration and displacement of millions of people, but also the transfer of energies and elements, Gumbs infuses her text with elemental histories. With sections devoted to archiving dirt, sky, fire, and the ocean, she reintroduces us to the stuff of our daily realities.
Each section is prefaced with sections from the Periodic Table of Elements, an organizational scheme that contains all of the relevant data points for a set of elements. For instance, “Archive of Ocean: Origin” begins with the elements hydrogen, sodium, chlorine, and oxygen. However, each of these sections are followed with expositions that show us what these elemental charts cannot. Consequently, M Archive reveals just how little those data points actually reveal when it comes to matters of world-making and world-breaking.
Gumbs self describes her work in M Archive as experimental, but revolutionary is far more accurate. Complete with her own “Periodic Kitchen Table of Elements” that lists books and songs in addition to Pedagogies of Crossingthat inspired M Archive’s creation, Gumbs models how to create and privilege bodies of knowledge.  
Be it on the porch, underwater, in the heavens, or among the trees, M Archivesis a work of geography steering us home (“when she touched the map it moved”).
But there’s something else at stake in M Archive.
We are taught very early on about the importance – in fact, the necessity – of breathing. In moments of distress, we are instructed to take a deep breath. When new life is entering the world, mothers anticipate such arrivals by breathing between contractions. Successful scuba diving is predicated on taking longer breaths so as to conserve air. In the event of an airplane emergency passengers are instructed to secure their oxygen mark first and then attend to others.
M Archive is concerned with the possibilities for breathing underground, below the surface, deep in the water. Hers is an investigation into the capacity for breathing in non-landed spaces.
The past few years have witnessed renewed urgency around the topic of breathing in the field of black studies; urgency no doubt increased by the ongoing attacks on black life that endanger black breath. Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being is partly in search of “the word for keeping and putting breath back into the body” (113). In a chapter devoted entirely to breath in Blackpentacostal Breath: The Aesthetics of Possibility, Ashon Crawley maintains that black pneuma is “the capacity for the plural movement and displacement of inhalation and exhalation to enunciate life, life that is exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally, social, though it is also life that is structured through and engulfed by brutal violence” (38). Frantz Fanon once declared in Toward the African Revolution, “We revolt simply because, for many reasons, we can no longer breathe.” Breath – what we might call the poetics of breathing – has been central to the poet-scholar Nathaniel Mackey’s rich oeuvre of critical and creative works. Similarly, Fred Moten begins The Little Edges with an announcement that introduces his fascination with breath: “live, remote, preoccupied with breathing and black” (4). Even Gumbs previously undertook an examination of breath as she considered its meditative capacities through the development of a c(h)ant for Eric Garner and many more.
M Archive adds to and extends the critical work being done around breath, breathing, and blackness.
And in so doing, it gives us a reason to breathe – independently and collectively – again.

MacArthur Winner Kellie Jones Talks 'South of Pico: African American Artists in Los Angeles in the 1960s & 1970s'

'In South of Pico , MacArthur winner and Columbia University professor Kellie Jones explores how the artists in Los Angeles’s black communities during the 1960s and 1970s created a vibrant, engaged activist arts scene in the face of racism and social upheaval. Building on her work on the Hammer exhibition Now Dig This! Art and Black Los Angeles, 1960–1980, Jones expands our understanding of the history of black arts in Los Angeles and beyond. She is joined by artist and founder of the Brockman Gallery Dale Davis, UCLA professor of English Uri McMillan, and UC Irvine professor of Art History and African American Studies Bridget Cooks.' -- Hammer Museum

Blackness Unmoored: Relational Ethics and Aesthetics in Stromae's "Formidible"

'In this talk, Dr. Daphne Lamothe advances a theory of “Blackness unmoored” through an analysis of the lyrics and music video for the song, “Formidable” by Stromae. Lamothe invoke's the metaphor of unmooring to convey the disorientation, and reorientation, of the subject who navigates contending social spaces, racial formations, and orientations to history. The musical and visual registers of Stromae’s text captures both the melancholy and potentiality of the subject who is racially othered and unhomed. Its portrayal of the African “stranger” set adrift in the European Union’s capital bears witness to the subject’s profound humanity, as well as to the material and psychic violence inflicted by structures founded on ideas of black nonbeing. Professor Lamothe is the 2017-2018 Humanities Writ Large visiting faculty fellow at Duke University, and she is an associate professor of Africana Studies at Smith College where she teaches literature and cultural studies.'-- John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University

BK Stories: The Political Resistance of Haitian Radio Stations

'As the Haitian population in Brooklyn grew, so did the need for Haitian news sources. Brooklyn is home to dozens of radio stations bringing news of nation to New York City.  BRIC TV hears from Haitian Studies scholar, Professor Jean Eddy Saint Paul and Ricot Dupuy of Radio Soleil on Nostrand Ave. on how Haitian immigrants and exiles kept up with the developments of the Duvalier dictatorship via radio, and how stations resisted by using Creole rather than French, which was only spoken by the elite.' -- BK Stories

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'Alex Wagner profiles Amy Sherald, the artist whose painting of former first lady Michelle Obama was unveiled this week at the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, D.C.' -- CBS Sunday Morning

Oakland’s Two Black Panthers: The Movie and the Movement

“This idea of Black heroes, this idea of a Black liberation army, an army of warriors ready to fight, this is both literal and figurative,” Malkia Cyril says. Cyril grew up in the Black Panther Party. “I am the daughter of a Black Panther, a real Black Panther.” Cyril is also the founder of the Center for Media Justice, so Cyril knows just how much representation matters, and not just representation, but empowered representation."

Danai Gurira On Her 'Black Panther' Role: 'She Protects What We Would Have Been'

"I've always felt blessed to be a part of [Black Panther] because I could understand the response, in the sense that this is imagery and narrative that many of us have yearned for", actress and playwright Danai Gurira says, in her conversation with NPR's Michel Martin. Gurira plays the character of Okoye, leaders of a group of women warriors charged with protecting the throne of Wakanda.

Screenwriters’ Lecture: 'Mudbound' Writer & Director Dee Rees

Mudbound writer & director Dee Rees shares thoughts on building stories in film. -- BAFTA Guru

Left of Black S8:E11: The Eloquent Rage of Brittney Cooper

Left of Black S8:E11:  The Eloquent Rage of Brittney Cooper
On location in Winston-Salem, NC at Wake Forest University Left of Black host Mark Anthony Neal is joined by scholar and author Brittney Cooper (@ProfessorCrunk), author of Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower. Of Cooper, noted scholar Michael Eric Dyson writes “Cooper may be the boldest young feminist writing today. Her critique is sharp, her love of Black people and Black culture is deep, and she will make you laugh out loud even as she kicks the clay feet out from under your cherished idols.”
Brittney Cooper is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and Africana Studies at Rutgers University.  She is also the author of Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (University of Illinois Press), and a co-editor of The Crunk Feminist Collection (The Feminist Press 2017)

After 'Black Panther': Roxane Gay on What's Still Missing From the Marvel Universe

' Roxane Gay  is best known as the writer of books, including Bad Feminist and Hunger. But she also collaborated with Ta-Nehisi Coates on the short-lived Black Panther companion series, World of Wakanda. Gay joins The Takeaway to talk about her experience writing for comic book fans and whether Marvel is doing enough to cultivate an inclusive audience.'