James Burke, The Day the Universe Changed (Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1995), 7.
Department of Defense, “DoD News Briefing: Secretary Rumsfield and Gen. Myers,” February 12, 2002. See ➝.
The full phrase, from then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld: “Reports that say that something hasn't happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns—the ones we don't know we don't know.”
Nandita Sharma, “Strategic Anti-Essentialism: Decolonizing Decolonization” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2015), 165.
“The Brazos” refers to the Brazos River, which is the longest river in Texas and flows through my hometown.
Dougald Hine, At Work in the Ruins (White River Junction: Chelsea Green Publishing, 2023), 5.
Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997).
Oyèrónké Oyěwùmí, The Invention of Women: Making an African Sense of Western Gender Discourses (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997).
James Baldwin, Nobody Knows My Name: More Notes of a Native Son (New York: Vintage Books, 1993), 68.
Cited in Karen Barad, Meeting the Universe Halfway (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2007), 42, italics in the original.
Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 65, italics in the original.
Edward W. Said and Jean Mohr, After the Last Sky: Palestinian Lives (New York: Columbia University Press, 1999).
I think of poet-theorist Christina Sharpe’s description of “the wake,” the place of fundamental contradiction where one “occup{ies} and {is} occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.” Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being, (Durham, NC and London, UK: Duke University Press, 2016), 13–14.