Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (Duke University Press, 2018), 6.
Toni Morrison, “Friday on the Potomac,” in Race-ing Justice, En-gendering Power: Essays on Anita Hill, Clarence Thomas, and the Construction of Social Reality, ed. Toni Morrison (Pantheon Books, 1992), xviii–xix.
Excerpted from Rizvana Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body: The (Sus)Stain of Black Female (W)holeness,” in “Black Holes: Afro-Pessimism, Blackness and the Discourses of Modernity,” ed. Dalton Anthony Jones, M. Shadee Malaklou, and Sara-Maria Sorentino, special issue, Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge, no. 29 (2016) →.
Excerpted from Rizvana Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity: Black Femininity’s Lyrical Surplus and the Cinematic Limits of 12 Years a Slave,” Black Camera 7, no. 1 (Fall 2015): 162–78, 166.
Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Black Scholar 3, no. 4 (1971): 2–15, 5.
Excerpted from Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity,” 166.
Excerpted from Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body.”
Excerpted from Bradley, “Reinventing Capacity,” 162.
In appositional dis/agreement with my friend, Fred Moten, whose formulation continues to guide me: “The coalition emerges out of your recognition that it’s fucked up for you, in the same way that we’ve already recognized that it’s fucked up for us.” Fred Moten and Stefano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Minor Compositions, 2013), 140.
Axelle Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” Critical Philosophy of Race 7, no. 1 (2019): 47–48.
Karera, “Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics,” 48.
Audre Lorde, “Eye to Eye,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde (Cross Press, 1984), 173.
Alexis Gumbs, “m/other ourselves: a Black queer feminist genealogy for radical mothering,” in Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines, ed. Alexis Gumbs, China Martens, and Mai’a Williams (PM Press, 2016), 19–20.
Simone White, Dear Angel of Death (Ugly Duckling Presse, 2018), 79.
From James Baldwin and Audre Lorde, “Revolutionary Hope: A Conversation Between James Baldwin and Audre Lorde,” Essence Magazine, 1984. Available at MoCADA Online →.
Baldwin and Lorde, “Revolutionary Hope.”
Jacques Rancière, quoted in Davide Panagia, The Poetics of Political Thinking (Duke University Press, 2006), 89.
White, Dear Angel of Death, 121.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “In the Raw,” e-flux journal, no. 93 (September 2018) →.
Aracelis Girmay, “A Tending,” ArtsBlog, November 18, 2014 →.
Some phrases from this paragraph are excerpted from Rizvana Bradley, “Introduction: Other Sensualities,” on “The Haptic: Textures of Performance,” special issue, Women and Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory 24, no. 2–3 (2014): 129–33, 130. See the essays collected in this issue of Women and Performance for various perspectives on the haptic.
Saidiya Hartman, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women’s Labors,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18, no. 1 (2016): 171.
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return (Vintage Canada, 2002), 193.
My insights here offer a modification of a formulation from Calvin Warren, whose paper “Anti-Formalism and Black Destruction: A Pessimistic Meditation” was delivered at Amherst College as part of a conference I also participated in, titled “Rethinking the Black Intellectual Tradition: Pessimism as an Interpretive Frame,” March 30, 2019.
Excerpted from Bradley, “Living in the Absence of a Body.” See also: Evelynn Hammonds, “Black (W)holes and the Geometry of Black Female Sexuality,” differences: A Journal of Feminist Cultural Studies 6, no. 2–3 (1994): 126–45.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 37, 38.
Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (NYU Press, 2015), 215–16.
Lecture by Christina Sharpe, “Soil,” presented during a panel on “The Theoretical Turn,” hosted by the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University on April 26, 2019.
Erica Hunt, “Introduction: Angle, Defy Gravity, Land Unpredictably,” in Letters to the Future: Black Women / Radical Writing, ed. Erica Hunt and Dawn Lundy Martin (KORE Press, 2018), 15.
Excerpted from Rizvana Bradley and Damian-Adia Marassa, “Awakening to the World: Relation, Totality, and Writing from Below,” Discourse: Journal for Theoretical Studies in Media and Culture, vol. 36, no. 1 (2014), 112-131, 125.
The Roots, “Sleep,” Undun, Def Jam, 2011.