Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (Monthly Review Press, 2001), 42.
Leigh’s work troubles the terms of “animacy” itself, not unlike the work of: Mel Y. Chen, Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Duke University Press, 2012); Kim TallBear, “Beyond the Life/Not Life Binary: A Feminist-Indigenous Reading of Cryopreservation, Interspecies Thinking and the New Materialisms,” in Cryopolitics: Frozen Life in a Melting World, eds. Joanna Radin and Emma Kowal (MIT Press, 2017).
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: Written by Herself (Harvard University Press, 2009).
See →.
With all due respect to our journal of arts and letters, Obsidian, in publication since 1975.
Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Duke University Press, 2016), 21.
Dionne Brand, Bread Out of Stone: Recollections on Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming and Politics (Coach House, 1994).
My reading is indebted to Katherine McKittrick’s fundamental insights about black feminist cartographies, and about Brand’s work in particular, found in Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (University of Minnesota Press, 2006).
Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Vintage Canada, 2012). On Christina’s interpretation, see Sharpe, In the Wake, 19, 106, 131.
Dionne Brand, The Blue Clerk: Ars Poetica in 59 Versos (McClelland & Stewart, 2018), 135.
Omise’eke Tinsley, “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 14, no. 2–3 (2008).
Zakiyyah Jackson, “Animal: New Directions in the Theorization of Race and Posthumanism,” Feminist Studies 39, no. 3 (2013).
Zakiyyah Jackson, “Sense of Things,” Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience 2, no. 2 (2016).
Zakiyyah Jackson, “Outer Worlds: The Persistence of Race in Movement ‘Beyond the Human,’” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, 21, no. 2–3 (June 2015): 215–18.
Jackson, “Sense of Things.”
On asterisks, see Christina Sharpe, In the Wake, 29–34. On abstraction, see Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 7 (2008).
Sharpe, In the Wake.
A note on the title: Following Jafari S. Allen’s invocation of the “strokes” that both demarcate and define intimacies among black/queer/diasporas, I place selvage and obsidian in relation here, as distinct sites of material transformation and too, as forms of merged mattering. See Jafari S. Allen, “Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 18, no. 2–3 (2012).
It was an honor to have been asked to participate in this gathering—in such distinguished company—and to honor Simone Leigh: a person who enlivens me, not only because of her intellectual and artistic brilliance, but also because of her steadfast, hilarious, and deeply generous friendship. Thank you to Simone Leigh, Saidiya Hartman, and Tina Campt for all of their caring and intellectual labor in bringing us together. I am indebted to Naomi Greyser for shepherding this response into the world, and to Jafari S. Allen for being there, as ever, and for holding—like selvage—all of my unravellings. In 2017, the Guggenheim acquired Simone’s Georgia Mae—a sculpture named for my daughter in the year of her birth. There is no greater gift: Georgia Mae in person, and now too—thanks to this radical gesture of love—Georgia Mae in porcelain.