How can the humanities contribute to a better understanding of poverty? These two panels will engage key questions raised by this year’s Mellon seminar on poverty to consider how visual and literary representations of poverty shape how we think about it and how we articulate its so-called “solutions.” What is the role of photography, photojournalism, cinema, documentary, performance, literature, and critical theory and philosophy in addressing what often seems to be a reductive binary between representations of poverty and solutions to poverty? What is at stake in the aesthetic choices made in representations of poverty in art, literature, and other cultural media? What new types of archives might we create and what types of questions might we formulate to deal in a more complex way with poverty as a social, political, and subjective state of being?
Racial Americana
WARNING: This site contains graphic depictions of violence and explicit language.
Monthly Archives: February 2013
Event at Barnard/Frank Wilderson on Django and Manderlay
How do we complicate our notions of gender, violence and political organizing in Black life? What does it mean to conceptualize slavery as an ongoing relationship? Join us for a talk by Frank Wilderson, Professor of African American Studies and Drama (UC-Irvine) and award-winning author of Incognegro and Red White and Black.
Also featuring Esther Armah (political commentator, playwright and WBAI radio host) as discussant.
Sponsored by Sexual Violence Response, Institute for Research in African-American Studies, Institute for Research on Women & Gender, Barnard Center for Research on Women, Women’s Heritage Month, Radical C.U.N.T.S. and the Black Students Organization.
Who can someone love when they know they will lose them? Why should we love at all, knowing that our loved ones will be lost?
“Slavery made your mother into a myth, banished your father’s name, and exiled your siblings to the far corners of the earth. The slave was as an orphan, according to Frederick Douglass, even when he knew his kin. ‘We were brothers and sisters, but what of that? Why should they be attached to me, or I to them? Brothers and sisters were by blood; but slavery had made us strangers. I heard the words brother and sisters, and knew they must mean something; but slavery had robbed these terms of their true meaning.’” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route , page 103
Link to Palm Card for what to do when stopped by the police, provided by the NYCLU:
http://www.nyclu.org/files/publications/nyclu_pub_police_card_english_0.pdf
“But what does a picture of Hell look like?”
-Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Image from Rose Tourist Centre
“Every generation confronts the task of choosing its past. Inheritances are chosen as less of “what happened then” than on the desire and discontents of the present. Striving and failures shape the stories we tell. War recall has as much do with the terrible things we hope to avoid as with the good life for which we yearn” -Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman 1518/4438
Aminta
“Even in the museum, the slaves were missing. None of their belongings were arranged nicely in well-lit glass cases. None of the waste found in the dungeon was placed neatly on trays with small flags. […] The museum was as bereft as the underground.”
—Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007, p. 116.
[Image: The St. George’s Castle / Elimina Castle from the Ghana Museum and Monuments Board]
“Questions first posed in 1773 about the disparity between “the sublime ideal of freedom” and the “facts of blackness” are uncannily relevant today.”
—Saidiya Hartman. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. Farrar, Straus and Giroux: 2007, p. 133.
This idea that Hartman refers to is explained in “The Sublime, Imperialism and the African Landscape” by Hermann Wittenberg, where he argues for “a postcolonial reading of the sublime that takes into account the racial and gendered underpinnings of Kant’s and Burke’s classic theories. The complex and contradictory idea of the sublime, [he] propose[s], is one of the ways in which an alien, remote and incomprehensible social and natural landscape could be imaginatively mapped, visualised, and brought under the ambit of colonial reason.” (p. iii)
[Image: Salvator Rosa, The Crucifiction of Polycrates (1663-64).]
SANKOFA is expressed in the Akan language as ‘se wo were fi na wosan kofa a yenki.’ Literally translated it means “it is not taboo to go back and fetch what you forgot”. http://origin.library.constantcontact.com/download/get/file/1105531002723-2/The+meaning+of+the+Symboloism+of+the+Sankofa+Bird.pdf%20%20
“I shall return to my native land. Those disbelieving in the promise and refusing to make the pledge have no choice but to avow the loss that inaugurates one’s existence. It is to be bound to other promises. It is to lose your mother, always.” Lose Your Mother (100) Saidiya Hartman
“When the power of love overcomes the love of power,
the world will know peace.”
— Sri Chinmoy Ghose
“Mothers, disavowing their love, have called their children donor (slave) in order to save them, while slaveholders have called their property ‘beloved child’ in order to protect their wealth. Mothers plead with the kosanba to remain in the mortal world and not to return to its spirit mother, and masters command the slave to stay put and to forget all thoughts of the mother country, the natal land. Come and stay, child, they both implore”
Lose Your Mother (86) Saidiya Hartman
Some updated facts
42 million
The number of people who identified as black, either alone or in combination with one or more other races, in the 2010 Census. They made up 13.6 percent of the total U.S. population. The black population grew by 15.4 percent from 2000 to 2010.
18%
Percentage of blacks 25 and older who had a bachelor’s degree or higher in 2010.
$32,068
The annual median income of black households in 2010, a decline of 3.2 percent from 2009.
27.4%
Poverty rate in 2010 for blacks.
Source: U.S. Census Bureau, Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States: 2010
Information from:
http://www.census.gov/newsroom/releases/archives/facts_for_features_special_editions/cb12-ff01.html
“Looking at me, the boys imagined the wealth and riches they would possess if they lived in the states. After all, who else but a rich American could afford to travel so far to cry about her past? Looking at me, the boys wished their ancestors had been slaves. If so they would be big men.” pg 89
“Some of them own sneakers and some don’t. So the boys who have sneakers lend a shoe to the ones who don’t. During the game, there are all these boys racing down the field with on sneaker and hoping that foot is going to be the lucky one.
In Atlanta, kids are killing one another over shoes” pg 109
Lose your Mother Saidiya Hartman
~~Isabelle~~
“The 1733 slave insurrection started with open acts of rebellion on November 23, 1733 at the Coral Bay plantation owned byMagistrate Johannes Sødtmann. An hour later, slaves were admitted into the fort at Coral Bay to deliver wood. They had hidden knives in the lots, which they used to kill most of the soldiers at the fort. One soldier, John Gabriel, escaped to St. Thomas and alerted the Danish officials. A group of rebels under the leadership of King June stayed at the fort to maintain control, another group took control of the estates in the Coral Bay area after hearing the signal shots from the fort’s cannon. The slaves killed many of the whites on these plantations. The rebel slaves then moved to the north shore of the island. They avoided widespread destruction of property since they intended to take possession of the estates and resume crop production.”
-Wikipedia (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1733_slave_insurrection_on_St._John#Events_on_November_23.2C_1733)
Photo- Cinnamon bay plantation, one of the first plantations taken by rebels.
http://natashalh.hubpages.com/hub/Virgin-Islands-St-John-Slave-Revolt-of-1733#
~Isabelle~
Every tale of creation I had ever read began in a place like this – in the underworld, in the bowels of the earth, in the gloom of man’s prehistory. The cradle of life bore an uncanny resemblance to the grave, making plain the fact that the living eventually would assume their station among the ranks of the dead. Human life sprang from a black abyss, and from dusk and much we traced our beginning. Base elements were the substrate of life. Blood and shit ushered us into the world. Gods vomited human beings into existence or populated the world by raping the earth or coupling with their daughters, or, in their benignity, led us from the darkness into the light. Adam and Eve were created in this filthy pit. So the British called the first man and woman plucked from the dungeon and bound aboard the slave ship, replaying the drama of birth and expulsion in the Africa trade.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, pp. 126
Erasure of the past
Saidiya Hartman,Lose Your Mother pg 144
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6Cv5P9H9qU?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=281%5D
Tagged amazing grace, chains, hymn, movie, slavery, trade, william wilberforce trailer for the movie “Amazing Grace” which documents the life of William Wilberforce. An interesting contrast to the his depiction in Hartman’s book.
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Identity Problems
“If you believed that slavery was a relatively benign institution in Africa, then you certainly would not expect to hear such things, but in fact, masters and traders spoke about their slaves in exactly these terms and people continue to do so today. In my company, the polite refrained from such remarks and instead made jokes about how I had found my way back home or teased me about searching for my roots. They were used to Americans with identity problems.
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother pg 144
I called the officer every foul name a good twelve-year-old girl who attended Catholic school and who was prohibited from cursing could utter, the first being a racist and the second being a bully; had I known the word ‘fascist’ then, I would have called him that too. I asked the officer if he was going to lock us up or shoot us because my mother’s brakes failed and she left her license at home. He closed his ticket book with my mother’s half-written ticket inside and said, ‘Young lady, I’m sorry you believe all that,’ and walked back to his patrol car.
I’m certain the police officer could not have imagined his daughter saying the awful things I had said to him… He recoiled from the ugliness of it. To put on that uniform each day, he needed to believe it wasn’t true. As he drove away, I’m sure he was thankful no child of his lived in the same country I did.
Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman (Pg.131)
[youtube http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0gmDoon_yC0?wmode=transparent&autohide=1&egm=0&hd=1&iv_load_policy=3&modestbranding=1&rel=0&showinfo=0&showsearch=0&w=500&h=374%5D
Tagged African, African American, Anderson Cooper, Cape Coast Dungeons, ghana, obama, racial americana, slavery Read some of the comments. Do you agree? How might you challenge what they are saying?
(Source: http://www.youtube.com/)
Commemorating a few Black Abolitionists
Ottobah Cugoano (1757 – after 1791) was an African abolitionist who was active in England in the latter half of the eighteenth century. Captured and sold into slavery at the age of 13 in present-day Ghana, he was shipped to Grenada. In 1772 he was purchased by an English merchant who took him to England, where he was freed. Later working for the Cosways, he became acquainted with British political and cultural figures, and joined the Sons of Africa, abolitionists who were Africans.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ottobah_Cugoano
Olaudah Equiano (1745-1797) also known as Gustavus Vassa, was a prominent African involved in the British movement for the abolition of the slave trade. He was enslaved as a child, purchased his freedom, and worked as an author, merchant, and explorer in South America, the Caribbean, the Arctic, the American colonies, and the United Kingdom, where he settled by 1792. His autobiography, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, depicts the horrors of slavery and influenced the enactment of the Slave Trade Act of 1807.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olaudah_Equiano
Ignatius Sancho (1729 – 14 December 1780) was a composer, actor, and writer. He is the first known Black Briton to vote in a British election. He gained fame in his time as “the extraordinary Negro”, and to 18th-century British abolitionists he became a symbol of the humanity of Africans and immorality of the slave trade. The Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, an African, edited and published two years after his death, is one of the earliest accounts of African slavery written in English by a former slave of Spanish and English families.
-Aisha
Data Helps Descendants of Slaves Reclaim History
So after reading about the NY Times article mentioned in chapter 4 of Lose Your Mother, I got a little curious. I went looking for the article itself, and while this isn’t it, it’s somewhat similar. This article reports on the digitization of some of the records collected by the Freedman’s Bureau. It’s interesting to read in the article the reaction of one woman to finding out about one of her ancestors and compare it to the anguish of the man Hartaman recalls reading about.
“Love encourages forgetting, which is intended to was away the slave’s past. Love makes a place for the stranger; it domesticates persons from ‘outside of the house’ and not ‘of the blood’; it assuages the slave’s loss of family; it remakes slaveholders as mother’s and fathers. Owning persons and claiming kin are one and the same; so love cannot be separated from dispossession of property in persons. Affection perhaps softens the sting of dishonor but does not erase is…it doesn’t remedy the isolation of being severed from your kin and denied ancestors.”
– Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, pp. 102-103
“I, TOO, LIVE in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it. It is the ongoing crisis of citizenship. Questions posed in 1173 about the disparity between “the sublime ideal of freedom” and the “facts of blackness” are uncannily relevant today. The echoes could be heard in the plea, still waiting for an answer, chalked onto a rooftop in the Ninth Ward of New Orleans: “Help. The water is rising. Please.” Six of people are trapped on the roof and two of them are waving American flags, hoping against the odds that the Stars and Stripes might make their plight visible, keep them afloat, and demonstrate unequivocally, “We are citizens too.” But the anxiety and the doubt fueling the assertion was made plain by the photograph’s caption: “Cast Away.” Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (p. 133)
-Aisha
In 2006, when Saidiya Hartman published Lose Your Mother, she states on page 129 that black men are “five times” more at risk to be infected with HIV. In 2008, the U.N. stated that over 50% of new HIV cases in the United States were reported in black men. As of 2011, the CDC reported that one out of every 16 black men will be diagnosed with HIV. This is almost 7x higher than the statistic for white men. The dialogue about heterosexual vs. homosexual HIV incidence is often discussed, but unfortunately, the racial aspect of the issue is rarely as publicized.
The image is taken from the CDC’s website: http://www.cdc.gov/hiv/topics/surveillance/resources/slides/race-ethnicity/index.htm
Imagine that hundreds of black protesters were to descend upon Washington DC and Northern Virginia, just a few miles from the Capitol and White House, armed with AK-47s, assorted handguns, and ammunition. And imagine that some of these protesters —the black protesters — spoke of the need for political revolution, and possibly even armed conflict in the event that laws they didn’t like were enforced by the government? Would these protester — these black protesters with guns — be seen as brave defenders of the Second Amendment, or would they be viewed by most whites as a danger to the republic? What if they were Arab-Americans? Because, after all, that’s what happened recently when white gun enthusiasts descended upon the nation’s capital, arms in hand, and verbally announced their readiness to make war on the country’s political leaders if the need arose.”
-Excerpt from Imagine if the Tea Party was Black by Tim Wise
karkles-the-adorabloodthirsty:
I got dressed in my traditional Indian regalia, but there was a man, he was the producer of the whole show. He took that speech away from me and he warned me very sternly. “I’ll give you 60 seconds or less. And if you go over that 60 seconds, I’ll have you arrested. I’ll have you put in handcuffs.”
– Sacheen Littlefeather in Reel Injun (2009), dir. Neil Diamond.
They were MAD, CONFUSED AND PRESSED that Marlon Brando would betray White Supremacy in this way.
To this very day, they are TWISTED over this.
And when Littlefeather got up there and READ THEM FOR FILTH, they GAGGED. For eons.
So I imagine there are people like me out there who’ve never even heard of Marlon Brando and are extremely confused over why this is important.
Marlon Brando was the Don in The Godfather, and in 1973, he was nominated for and won an Academy Award for it. However, he was also a huge Natives rights activist, and boycotted the ceremony because he felt that Hollywood’s depictions of Native Americans in the media led to the Wounded Knee Incident (which I was always taught as “the second massacre at Wounded Knee” but apparently that’s not the real name). He sent Sacheen Littlefeather, an Apache Native rights activist, in his stead. Wikipedia’s article on her explains the rest:
Brando had written a 15-page speech for Littlefeather to give at the ceremony, but when the producer met her backstage he threatened to physically remove her or have her arrested if she spoke on stage for more than 60 seconds.[5] Her on-stage comments were therefore improvised. She then went backstage and read the entire speech to the press. In his autobiography My Word is My Bond, Roger Moore (who presented the award) claims he took the Oscar home with him and kept it in his possession until it was collected by an armed guard sent by the Academy.
That is what this gifset is about.
You have GOT to read up on this. The Wounded Knee Incident, Marlon Brando and Sacheen Littlefeather, Anna Mae Aquash. ALL OF IT.
Her name was known in my house, I hope it’s known in many, many more in the future.
“Every tale of creation I have ever read began in a place like this-in the underworld, in the bowels of the earth, in the gloom of man’s prehistory. The cradle of life bore an uncanny resemblance to the grave, making plain the fact that the living eventually would assume their station among the ranks of the dead. Human life sprang from a black abyss, and from dust and muck we traced our beginning….
Adam and Eve were created in this filthy pit. So the British called the first man and woman plucked from the dungeon and bound aboard the slave ship, replaying the drama of birth and expulsion in the Africa trade.”
– Saidiya Hartman, Loser Your Mother, page 110.
image of a Ghanese slave hold, taken by Christina Agubretu, 2009, from http://worldmeets.us/myjoy000001.shtml#axzz2M2KvQ0nY
Salon on Racism, Misogyny, and The Onion
When this article was originally published, writer Falguni A. Sheth titled it “The Onion’s Hipster Racism.” She has since replaced the word racism with misogyny. However, in the middle of the article, she makes provocative and relevant claims regarding the loaded racial implications of misogynistic profanity in a world that is “very-uncolorblind”, (specifically in reference to The Onion’s “ironic” tweet referring to Quvenzhane Wallis as a “kind of a cunt”.)
Country of Liberia
On page 102 of Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman speaks about the slave colony of Liberia. I didn’t know too much about it, so here is some basic info about it’s foundation.
“Now only his [Kwabena’s] bearings in the world were the groans and cries that echoed through the chamber, the ring and clank of the chains, the smack and hiss of the whip.” (Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 125)
“As the men filed out of the dungeon, he rightly suspected there was no way back his parents’ house in Ajumako. But he told himself otherwise. Like every other person who crossed the threshold before him, he promised he would find a way back. But the sight of the ocean made even the stalwart crumble. When Kwabena boarded the slaver he knew why the men had clenched the muck of the floor as though it were the soil of their country.” (Lose Your Mother, p. 125)
These quotes and image pairing came to me as I was researching images of Kwabena, the young boy stolen from his parents and sold into slavery. I wanted to find some sort of visual representation of this man so that I could bring him to some level of tangibility. Although I am unsure if this is the same Kwabena that Saidiya Hartman speaks about, it does speak to his struggle nonetheless. This image brings to life the sound of the whips mentioned in Hartman’s narrative. It also brings to life his legacy as a grown slave, displaying his welts as a sign that his permanent markings would mobilize the urgency to find his way home.
This is the afterlife of slavery in a “post-racial” society.
It is interesting to me that the critique surrounding this photo brought up the discussion of the lack of black models in the fashion industry. While this is a prevalent issue, my dissonance with this photo comes from the problematic representation and excoticization of the black female body and furthermore, black womanhood. This editorial speaks to the historical White construction of the exoticization and appropriation of the Black female body as entertainment. The photo also displays the historical legacy of the Black body and Black female body as entertainment from the slave auction block, the ethnological displays of Saartjie Baartmen(Venus Hottentot) to blackface minstrelsy. The term coined by Patricia Hill Collins, “Controlling images” comes to mind when I see this model’s bronzed skin next to the words, “African Queen”. Despite the rhetoric surrounding a “post-racial” society, this photo very clearly demonstrates that we have not moved passed slavery in our collective imagination. The historical construction of the black female body is present in todays popular culture.
-Aisha
Who is Nana Taabiri?
“Nana Taabiri watched over all the creatures on the earth and in the sea. When the fort was built, the shrine was displaced and the gods exiled.”
–Lose Your Mother by Saidiya Hartman, pg. 112
Nana Taabiri was one of 77 tutelary gods (Source). A tutelary deity is a “spirit who is a guardian, patron or protector of a particular place, geographic feature, person, lineage, nation, culture or occupation…An analogous concept in Christianity is the patron saint, or to a lesser degree guardian angel (Source).”
“The apologetic density of the plea for recognition is staggering. It assumes both the ignorance and the innocence of the white world. If only they knew the truth, they would act otherwise.”
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (p.169) م
-Dan
“The furtive glances if the women made her feel pitiful and weak. Had she been capable of tears, they would have streamed down her face. Had her tongue not made speech impracticable, had it been possible for a corpse to speak, she would have said, ‘You are wrong. I am going to meet my friends.’ All they could see was a girl slumped in a dirty puddle and not the one soaring and on her way home.” – Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother (p.152)
Image:
https://twitter.com/GhanaDecides/status/257049249538273280/photo/1
Answering Chimamanda Adichie’s Warning of the “Single Story” with an Animation
As an aspiring animated documentarian and a multi-cultural animation enthusiast, I thought it’d be great to share this link with you all. It’s a project on Kickstarter in which two artists are looking to fund an action-fantasy cartoon which features an African setting and themes and a female protagonist. The creators used Chimamanda Adichie’s Ted Talk on the single story concept to articulate why funding this type of project is important. Considering our discourse about the role of storytelling as well as some of the critiques or contentions that have come up regarding Hartmans portrayal of Ghana or “Africa” as a concept, I think it relates. Click the Link and check it out!
~Posted by Br!aan
Answering Chimamanda Adichie’s Warning of the “Single Story” with an Animation
Quvenzhané Wallis
One take on the completely baseless and vulgar verbal assault on child actress
Quvenzhané Wallis. At just 9 years old, she is the youngest ever to be nominated for the Best Actress Academy Award, and was still trivialized and decimated in such a way. Post Racial America??? Not so sure. I don’t recall this happening to other child actors such as Jodie Foster, Dakota or Elle Fanning, or even Lindsay Lohan for that matter. None of them had to face this at the prime, peak or start of their careers.
“I’m certain the police officer could not have imagined his daughter saying the awful things I said to him. A black girl with two ponytails and ashy knees and a plaid school jumper had shared her view of the world and it frightened him or it shamed him. He recoiled from the ugliness of it. To put on that uniform each day, he needed to believe it wasn’t true. As he drove away, I’m sure he was thankful that no child of his lived in the same country I did.”
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (p. 131)
-Dan
3/5 Compromise Controversy
From: mausland@brandeis.edu Colleagues, Many members of this list may have been following the continuing controversy at Emory University over President Jim Wagner's column in the alumni magazine, citing the three fifths compromise in the US Constitution as an exemplary illustration of the spirit of compromise. The original letter to the Alumni and the President's subsequent apology are at: http://www.emory.edu/EMORY_MAGAZINE/issues/2013/winter/register/president.html Other media coverage includes: 1. Interview with Leslie Harris on National Public Radio: http://southernspaces.org/2012/enslaved-labor-and-building-smithsonian-reading-stones 2, New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/24/education/emory-university-president-revives-racial-concerns.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0 3. Atlanta-Journal Constitution: http://www.ajc.com/news/news/local/presidents-reference-to-thee-fifths-compromise-gal/nWTry/ If nothing else, the controversy is striking evidence of how deeply challenging discourse about slavery remains in universities and many other settings all the best, Mark __________ Mark Auslander Associate Professor of Anthropology & Museum Studies Central Washington University
Spirits in “Beloved”
I found the following passage in many ways to be a dialogue with Toni Morrison’s Beloved:
“Because of this cycle of departure and return, exile and homecoming, demise and destruction, the spirit child is also called the ‘come, go back, child.’ The spirit child shuttles back and forth between the worlds of the living and the dead because of the stories not passed on, the ancestors not remembered, the things lost, and the debts not yet paid. The ‘come, go back, child’ braves the wreckage of history and bears the burdens that others refuse.”
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (p.86)
An interesting article from JEZEBEL about the lack of black representation in the fashion industry.
http://jezebel.com/5985110/new-york-fashion-weeks-models-are-getting-whiter
“The dead were reborn as new identities were foisted upon them. But what slaves knew immediately was that ‘neither death nor rebirth was glorious’; rather, they were part and parcel of the life of the commodity. Slavery annulled lives, transforming men and women into dead matter, and then resuscutated them for servitude.” 68
“Each woman seized by the Portuguese had her right arm seared with the cross.” 63
-Dahlia
Racial Americana 