Writing Projects

I'm going to be using this space as a place to put out some essays from the past year, during my time at DePaul. It was a very meaningful time for me, especially wild as the winter quarter ended right as the pandemic really hit quarantine paranoia & fear before I got used to the  

Many of these pieces started as class writing, but they generally are either 1) critical theory or 2) critical theory on Slave / Neo-Slave Narrative, Intersectionality/Indigenous Feminisms . There are a few that run in a sequence of an attack on representational epistemology, reading Deleuze in Shakespeare & up into Toni Morrison.

I'm taking up the work on a "blog" so as to begin sharpening & refining the pieces in the process of preparing them to post. So, I'm using the decision to put them some where else, this here location, as means of rousing the work from its dormant state & mobilizing the thoughts again.

It's also important to me that I take up this work in a sort of public-facing space where I can engage others & others can engage me. I've spoken with folks for a few months now about the need for intentional comrade writing circles, where comrades support & critique each other in the development of writing projects, so not just reading & writing into one another (which I hope does happen) but that we are invested in each other's work on a critical level as the work moves between different stages.

Here is a list of some of the writing I'm hoping to work on here, that I want to make into sharper, fuller versions of themselves.

Longer (>2.5k)

• Clotel, The Slave Narrative & the Logic of Whiteness
• Exhaustion & Equivocation: Concepts, Gender & Political Violence in Hamlet & Macbeth
• Ghost in the Machine: Production of Home, Blackness & Whiteness in Tar Baby
• Mobilizing Sedentary Thought: Deleuze’s Learning & Freud’s Uncanny
• A Revolutionary Subject is Uncanny

Shorter (<2.5k)

• Get There: Jazz in Toni Morrison’s Jazz
• Rememory in Beloved
• Notes on Contradiction & Resolution
• Intervention: Jodi Dean's Comrade & A Question of Pessimism in Kimberlé Crenshaw's "Mapping the Margins"
• Ontology of Grief
• Reading Hong Reading Lorde: How the Erotic Opens Difference
• Distraction, Neoliberal Fear Manager
• An Existential Problematic of Feminism: Against White Feminism's "Third World Women"
• Literature & the Possibility of a Post-Carceral Subject
• What is Plato Hiding Inside Socrates? A Reading of Derrida's "Plato's Pharmacy"
• Revolution, Organization & Spontaneity in Literature : A Reading of Lukacs' "Realism in the Balance" (Lenin & Literature)
• Whiteness in Dorothy Kim's "The Politics of the Medieval Preracial"

love & abolition

   ruth wilson gilmore     

abolition is presence dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future

   fred moten     

we gotta live a fucked up history in which we can’t escape the fact that freedom & slavery they go together—they’re a matched pair & given that we live in a history that is structured by that brutal fact

    angela davis     

abolition involves both the negative process, overturning and disestablishing, but also the reconstructive process of creating something new—not just one new thing, but addressing all of the enabling conditions.

    jacque derrida     

Writing is inaugural... it is dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future... 

 If writing is inaugural it is not so because it creates, but because of a certain absolute freedom of speech, because of the freedom to bring forth the already-there as a sign of the freedom to augur.

To grasp the operation of creative imagination at the greatest possible proximity
to it, one must tum oneself toward the invisible interior of poetic freedom.
One must be separated from oneself in order to be reunited with the blind origin
of the work in its darkness. This experience of conversion, which founds the
literary act (writing or reading), is such that the very words "separation" and
"exile," which always designate the interiority of a breaking-off with the world
and a making of one's way within it, cannot directly manifest the experience...  

For in question here is a departure from the world toward a place which is neither a non-place nor an other world, neither a utopia nor an alibi, the creation of "a universe to be added to the universe." 

 

 

 

this is in love--poetry, actively making the world in perception, experience, transformation. which is redundant--this is abolition writing. abolition is writing. writing is abolition. invention in the spirit of derrida's writing as  dangerous and anguishing. It does not know where it is going, no knowledge can keep it from the essential precipitation toward the meaning that it constitutes and that is, primarily, its future

neither non-place nor other world -- converting & inaugurating