Poetic Narratives of Black Fugitivity w/Fred Moten

okay so so I want to try to say a few words about fugitivity and um and maybe extend that towards a word or two about about uh refusal and I'm these are terms which um you know I'm very interested in and have been in my own work as a teacher and a writer but but these are also terms that a lot of other people have been involved in and interested in too um and and and I won't try to speak for all the various ways that that these terms have been taken up all of which I think are extraordinarily important and necessary but I I wanted to say a little bit about where where I got these terms from and um and and say a little bit about the teachers who made um who who who sort of you know made these terms available for me okay um so um so there's sort of three three key figures um for me at least who who sort of you know um lay lay who basically formulate the Notions of fugitivity that I'm that I try to work with um one is the great poet Nathaniel Mackey um who's an extraordinary poet and critic who um you know works and teaches at Duke University in in North Carolina in Durham North Carolina the other is Amir Baraka who in a way is a sort of you know precursor figure for for Mackie as as well as for me and for for just about anybody who's interested in in in poetry um in in in this country and particularly anybody black who's interested in in in Black poetry um not only in the US but all over the world and then the third person um the third person for me is is Harriet Jacobs and she's maybe the most fundamental figure um Jacobs was born in Edenton North Carolina uh Born Into Slavery um her she's most famous for writing one of the most important of the you know antibellum slave narratives that emerged in the United States her book came out in the early 1860s um and the book is called incidents in the life of a slave girl um and the book is written um under the pseudonym of Linda Brent as a kind of autobiographical text um and it really is uh a text which is not just about incidents in her life of enslavement but also Al an incident or a series of incidents that occurs in the wake of what might be called her Escape although the nature of her Escape is such that it's kind of complicated to even think about it as having a wake which is to say as having a kind of uh a moment of of of of of definable completion um one way to think about Harriet Jacobs is that she not only embodies but also articulates a notion of fugitivity that um is kind of predicated on the idea that that escape is constant that it's never complete that um and in this regard her her her her movement let's say against slavery and when I'm saying movement I'm explicitly not saying the word flight from slavery it's not that it doesn't include flight it's just that often we think about flight as if it were in opposition to fight and it's not flight and fight kind of always go together and and another way to think about that convergence is through the word movement so that her movement against slavery which is also always a movement as it were you know within slavery is is still going on right it is a movement her Escape extends Beyond you know the boundaries of her birth and death is in other words her Escape predates her and it also postdates her too um and this is you know this is another one of the kind of complicated let's say spatial and and temporal um sort of anomalies that fugitivity um sort of points to right it's both before and after her and it is not confined within the limits of what could be called her own body right and and and I know I don't have that much time so I won't maybe we can get into that a little bit more you know when uh when we start you know actually talking with one another um but but the reason why for me you know Jacobs has a kind of pride of place within the context of this notion of fugitivity as at least as I understand is because I think it's important to acknowledge that um that for me at least on a real on the most fundamental and basic level fugitivity is a is a black feminist practice okay um it is it is black women's work um and uh and it's it's just important always to I think you know to keep to keep that in mind um and and there's other things that we could say about it within that framework which again I'm we we may hopefully we can get into a little bit little bit later um I because of the influence of Baraka and macki both of whom are writers whose work is really just infused you know with black music and whose writing emerges um as a function of what Mackie calls a kind of bone deep listening to to black music um but because of that I think it's important to also note that there is a a phonic or a Sonic or even a musical component to to to the way in which fugitivity operates in Jacobs and in her text um and one of the most fundamentally one of the most fundamental moments of that that that force or how at least that force is enacted is a moment so that the for those of you who are not familiar with the text the the book is a again it's a it's a story of her confinement as well as her Escape but her Escape is inseparable from confinement the form that her Escape takes in the first instance is that she confines herself into a crawl space in her grandmother's house in Edenton North Carolina and basically lives there hidden hiding if in a way you could say on the run right from the ownership of a of a predatory of a sexually predatory as well as economically predatory master so this is one of the fundamental paradoxes of Jacob's notion of Jacob's Escape is that her Escape in the first instance occurs by way of her own confinement okay um again it's like this fundamental kind of Trope that kind of animates a lot of afrodiasporic discourse how it is that people move without moving um how it is that people um you know can somehow both fly even at the same time as they can't necess as that they stand still and in her and in her case she couldn't even stand still because the crawl space was so small that she couldn't stand up straight right so again it it lets us know that that this this this notion of Escape is is complicated not just complicated but but maybe kind of more complicated for our own Comfort even for those of us who valorize it even for those of us who can't do without it when we say we can't do without fugitivity what we're also saying is that we can't do without this thing which is deeply deeply complicated and deeply deeply contradictory right to to speak of the constancy of Escape is to speak about the fact is to basically imply that there is a constant Need to Escape right that one of the things that that is very problematic about fugitivity even though I think that at the same time is problematic it's also true is that you never you never you never fully Escape right and what that means is that on some fundamental level Freedom remains Out Of Reach okay now here's the double bind that makes this you know I think deep and important um and it also makes this not necessarily A matter for despair it's not just that freedom remains Out Of Reach but it also might be the case that freedom becomes that which we refuse again this possible refusal of freedom is a fundamentally important black feminist Insurgency and it plays itself out with regard to Jacobs in this very particular way So eventually Jacobs does leave the confinement of the crawl space and finds passage to the north and eventually is in Massachusetts where she works as a as a domestic servant with abolitionist family and eventually um begins to write and to record and to be involved in in in in what we would call you know the sort of typical you know activities that we associate with abolitionism but at the same time um Jacobs continually is under under the duress and under the pursuit you know of the family that she fled and who claimed ownership over her and because she was in constant danger especially in the wake of the passing of the so-called Fugitive Slave Act um in in 1850 um her Freedom again was never really it was not a matter of her Freedom having been somehow given to her or won by her or gained by her simply as a function of fleeing or or leaving the plantation her Freedom was always in question and so and she was under such duress and she was under such um danger that eventually some of her friends actually bought her freedom from the family that claimed ownership over her and what's interesting is that Jacob's response to this was not one of Triumph or Jubilee what she says at the moment in which she's informed that they bought her freedom is how she describes it in her writing is that they had taken her Victory away from her which is to say that for Jacob's part of what Freedom will have meant okay is that she never operated within the economy that is structured by being bought or sold so the fact that she was bought okay means and the fact that she had been sold meant for her that the freedom that she had anticipated that she had been reaching after was always on some fundamental level forever out of her grasp now one way we could think about this is that a is that is that is that it's a pretty deep and Rich commentary roughly coterminous with some of the formulations that Marx is making at that same moment in the 1860s about the relationship between so-called slave labor and so called Free Labor or wage labor that's one of the things that we could say if we want to dig into that but but another thing is that it just seems to me that Jacobs is extraordinarily brilliant in her understanding that the nature of slavery was such that ownership right is most emphatically established when that which is owned is sold right this is something that also comes in interview in another one of the famous antibellum slave narratives uh within this within a sort of transatlantic frame the the the life of gustavis Vasa you know written by ol iguano he sort of teaches us the same thing right is that the thing is owned in in in that that that that ownership is finally on certain fundamental level established at the moment in which the thing which is owned is passed right from one owner to another okay um um and and again this is this is this is something that that I think that that that Jacobs also knows and that she helps us to to understand even though it's a hard thing to understand because again what it's asking us to do is calling to question the very thing that seems to have been our goal namely freedom and one way to think about it is that I think that what Jacobs does is she creates the kind of a sort of press ENT for us to do something on the order of to refuse the freedom that had been refused to us if Freedom depends upon right this condition of having been bought and sold right she's asking us to call into question the thing that we thought had been most important and perhaps that we thought had been most important because it had been so brutally denied to us the thing that the great Robert hoo uh great poet Robert Hayden calls the the needful thing right okay this problematic of refusing that which has been refused again for me it's like another real fundamental element of black feminist practice the example that I often like to use as the example of Fanny ler right so you how do we so it's like it's kind of cool anomaly with Fanny Lamer she goes immediately in 1964 from demanding that she be seated you know with the Miss as as part of the the legitimate Mississippi delegation to the National Democratic to the Democratic parties's National Convention in uh you know in Atlantic City and by 1965 she's given speeches against the American involvement in Vietnam on spraw Plaza at Berkeley right and one way I think about the movement between those two things is that HR was like saying I don't I don't want to just be an American citizen right I don't want to just be free under the terms that have been established within the so-called context of American within the context of socalled American citizenship and again that moment to me is a moment of refusing that which had been refused to you at the same time as it is also refusing the power right and the so and the legitimate right or the the notion of the legitimate right of the ones who had refused it right okay so again that that's another notion element of this notion of fugitivity another really cool moment in jacobs's text is when she talks about listening to the sound of her children playing through the chinks in the wall that she in the in the crawl space where she was confined right and she was listening to the sound of her children knowing that specifically her son knew that she was in that crawl space there's this moment in which her s his sound for her constitutes a kind of Beacon a way in which they share something together even though they can't touch even though they can't and and what they're sharing in right is precisely this movement of Escape they're sharing in this practice of fugitivity because her son knows that she's up there and he knows that he can't reveal that he knows that she's up there in other words she he is her accomplice he accompanies her in this Escape even though she has to leave him there behind when she leaves okay one way to think about it is that this fundamental sense of the accompanyment that constitutes fugitivity is important that and one in the way that I like to think of it especially along with some friends and collaborators of mine especially my writing partner Stephan o Harney is that the thing about fugitivity is that it calls into question any idea we might have of the singular definable separable figure of The Fugitive okay right so what's at stake is this accompanyment between the between Jacobs and her son is which is a phonic accompaniment right that that constitutes the fugitivity that they share okay there is no single fugitive fugitivity is something that is Shar it's a communal Force okay it never resolves into the figure of The Fugitive right it is dispersed and diffused throughout a social field okay um and so one one way to think about it is that because it doesn't resolve into the figure of The Fugitive right that manifests itself musically and this is one of the things that is so important in in baraka's work and which Macky picks up on in his work particularly in in an essay called K Morrow which I I sent to folks I I can put this stuff in the chat if y'all want me to uh some text to read I got PDFs of Jacobs if you want and and of some of a couple of pieces by Macky and so forth But but fugitivity so one way to think about fugitivity is that it is a kind of process of self- accompanyment but if it's a process of self- accompanyment that means it's also a process of self- disruption of self- interruption right okay um and so the notion of a singular you know strictly bounded individuated self is disrupted by fugitivity and it's not just that so and this produces again another kind of paradox that the history of slavery makes particularly difficult for us because one way to think about slavery especially if we understand it as a denial of freedom is that is the denial of the individuality of the slave right it is not just a denial but it is but it is a denial which is enforced by law okay and it is a denial which is also justified by you know by by by knowledge by by Philosophy by science right okay and and so this is and so often when we think about Freedom we think about it as the final achievement of one's individual the final achievement or coming into one's into it into its own of one's subjectivity okay but that's not what it was for Jacobs and that's not what it is I think for the musicians that Baraka and also macki are talking about instead it is this self-d disruptive self- accompaniment okay a kind of multiplication at and and simultaneous multiplication and division of the so-called individual figure right or figuration of the figure or even you could say a figuration through the figure right um this moment in which what it is it had been called the self is understood and characterized by its own internal differentiations right and those internal differentiations turn out to be a kind of mechanism that might allow us to try to claim right not just the internal differentiation of the self but the abolition of the self now a lot of the music that Mackie and Baraka are interested in is music that we associate with the term free jazz and one way to think about it is that it's this music that you know in which that that sort of self- accompaniment is made really clear and emphatic so when we were listening to the music beforehand there's that great song by ran Roland Kirk that macki talks about called the business ain't nothing but the Blues in which Kirk who's famous for playing two or three different Wars at the same time literally accompanies his flute playing with his voice and his voice is almost he's he's singing as while he's playing the flute and sometimes he's not only singing while he's playing the flute but his singing takes the form of a kind of commentary on his flute plan right um it it's it's it's a it's a it's this this profound moment again of self- disruption okay and self self- accompaniment and what it produces is a kind of a kind of growl a kind of a kind of what what in what what African musicologists often talk about or what musicologists of African you know scientists or who study African music talk about as a sort of dirtying of tone a complication of the CH of tone a a de purification of tone right a recognition that that undertone and overtone and microtone are enrichments right okay of sound and not to be understood as somehow impoverishment of sound as they are often understood within Western classical musical discourse right okay so this dirtying or or or or or this sort of strife the internal differentiation of tone in the voice well a great you know French critic and theorist Rolan Bart called that the grain of the voice and he's making using a metaphor that comes from way maybe the way we think about the grain of wood and and what and what you know when you see wood grain all you're seeing is a kind of internal disruption that is also augmentation of the wood which is actually just another way of saying growth right the the grain of the wood is just the the visual marker of its growth right where growth is both A disruption of self and an augmentation of self okay to the point I think where can get to something like what one might call a kind of selflessness and I'll end with a famous formulation that Baraka makes um in in this beautiful essay that he wrote that constitutes the liner notes for uh an album that he helped to produced called the new black music and the last line of of that formula of of the essay that Baraka wrote is when he says this the new black music is this find the self then kill it okay and if and if I guess that to me is maybe the most emphatic and the most sort of concise let's say definition of fugitivity okay it is this practice of finding the self and then killing it okay um so uh I'll stop there I think I probably went over my time I apologize so great um is there any questions in person before we start going to questions on Zoom we have a question yes first thank you so so much that was really a wonderful really really wonderful I don't have a a well formulated question really I just wanted to hear you talk more about kind of experimentation while you were speaking and talking about the where you get roots for fugitivity I was thinking of beautiful beautiful lives social experiments by Sadia Hartman I think I'm butcher in the title um where she's talking about characters throughout history Who miror characters who appear up here in Tony Morrison's work and a lot of them are have fugitive characteristics and um she frames it as experimentation so I just wanted to hear you talk more about that term um okay okay thank you um yeah I mean I think uh I think uh experimentation is a is a fundamental part of it um but and and again it's another one of those sort of double-edged kind of swords so to speak um I I think that we you know we there's a certain kind of uh oh okay I I'm sorry I'm interrupting myself just to say that um I can't uh it turns out that I can't really put the text that I was referring to in the chat because um because the way this Zoom thing is set up is it won't let me uh load stuff up through my from my computer um so what I will do instead is uh is just write my uh my email address in the chat and if anybody wants some of these texts um then you could just email me and I and I can uh and I can send uh send them to you so okay now um experimentation um yeah I mean so well one way to think about about you know um the black experience in in the so-called new world is that it's just one long vicious brutal you know experiment you know conducted by uh Mad Men Who are also scientists you know so um you know it to to to take millions and tens of millions of people from one continent to another um in a way that is in fact unprecedented you know in world history is is is an extraordinarily you know um experimental thing to do you know to you know let one way to think about it is simply as a kind of epistemological initiative you know what will happen What will be the ecological and economic impact of of of doing this horrifically brutal thing you know and way to think about it is that you know the the the fact that the world now you know is both burning and drowning you know at the same time is Testament to the fact that this experiment you know really didn't work right it is literally an experiment that um that radically diminishes the capacity of human life to sustain itself on the earth okay um uh and maybe proves in a certain way that uh that human life ought not be given the chance to sustain itself you know uh if there's a disproof of that second formulation though one fundamental resource for the disproof disproving that second formulation would be the massive and extraordinary and beautiful structures and and effects of fugitivity that have been enacted by the people who were submitted to that experiment and those practices have themselves of necessity also been experimental right one could argue that that experimental work began in the hold of the slaveship when you know um when Yuba and Ebu and you know uh pH and various mandinka had to figure out ways to communicate with one another in in in in the in that space so that you know how the brutality of the uh of the hold of the ship is not me is not ameliorated by the fact that this communicability actually took place it's kind of exacerbated by it but the fact of the matter is is that the hold of the slave ship was also a language lab and new language was being built or a range of new languages were being built in that very brutal space of of experimentation again so that's just that's a double edge of the term you know um and I think uh yeah I mean Hartman's book you know uh wavered lives beautiful experiments is is again a you know very you know extraordinary Testament to to this doubleness to this double edge of of experimentation that that you know that we continue to live in and through you know to this day thank you Fred and Ben you can go ahead and ask your question hi thank you so much for this talk this has been really amazing um I'm wondering about intentionality and so especially because you talked about kind of the way that these practices are polyvocal and dissolve the self and so is it can people be doing these practices by accident or who don't even support sort of the political end of them like what I'm thinking is if you if you read a poet for instance who had bad politics or something like that um then but you find in them a voice that seems to you to to be performing a practice that they can't even themselves hear in their voice is that like is that as legitimate as someone who's kind of trying to sit in the space and produce a practice in a more intentional way well I would say you know uh being you know that uh well there's you know great great philosopher from and poet from Martinique named Edward gon wrote a lovely book called poetic intention but I also but I kind of feel like you know that book is is I think also in a way a kind of a critique of of of poetic intention or another way to put it would be that it what it's interested in is something like what we might call the the already existing sociality um and so ization of intention now usually you know within the Western philosophical frame intention is understood to be the domain of an individual subject but again if if fugitivity is all about the disruption and augmentation um of of the individual subject then then you can see that that intention is sort of is going to be placed under a certain amount of trouble so another way to think about slavery is that it is the radical uh denial of the capacity to exercise intention and it is at the same time a sort of radical set of so philosophical and pseudoscientific assumptions that the enslaved as a function of you know racial inferiority are not capable of intention right right so this this is you know the let's you know Sara will call this this is like the bad faith that animates slavery right they assume an incapacity and then create a set of laws and customs which which which which absolutely enforce the incapacity that they assume right we don't think y'all can do this but just in case you can we're gonna make sure that you can right okay that's bad faith and and and uh you know great philosopher Lewis Gordon the so Ates it you know with antiblack racism okay um but what if it turns out that the very thing that they thought they were refusing to us namely intention was a fiction any damn way okay so one possible example of that would be how it is that a right-wing poet you know for instance my favorite right-wing you know anti-black poet is Wallace Stevens and and and one way to think about this is that this problem this troubling of intention goes both ways I feel like he's a straight up antiblack you know racist sexist evil poet whose work is infused with fugitivity against the grain of his own intentions he can't help it there's some flowing through him that he would love to stop if he could but he can't okay in the same way that Wallace Stevens is in my head in a way that I wish I could get him out of it okay and you know so this is now the difference here's the point one of the ways in which Wallace Stevens's anti-blackness manifests itself is precisely as this continual desire to valorize the fiction okay of intentionality okay and one of the things that characterizes fugitivity in Black poetry in a way that I think is especially true in Macky is the Embrace of what it is that disrupts one's own intention right now Macky talks about this in very specific way in this moment in uh in this essay called K Morrow and I'll read it to y'all he says this the way in which fugitivity asserts itself on an aesthetic level at the level of Poetics is important as well the way in which baraka's poems of this period move Intimates fugitive Spirit as does much of the music that he was into Baraka writes of a solo by saxophonist John chai on an Archie Shep album it slides away from the proposed that gets into again the cultivation of another voice a voice that is other than that proposed by one's intentions tangential to one's intentions angular oblique the the obliquity of an Unbound reference right so what what what what Mackie is saying is that what Baraka loves and wants to emulate from John chai's sound is precisely this cultivation of something that is alternative to and at the same time disruptive of and then at the same time accompanying or augmenting what one thought to be one's own intentions that's what it is is that Baraka is talking about when he says you know that he wants to find the self then kill it he wants to kill the basic metaphysical unit okay right that is that establishes the regime of antiblackness and more and and maybe more fundamentally establishes a regime of what people have now come to know under the You Know lesson of Cedric Robinson and and also some great South African political economists of the 1960s what it is that people call racial capitalism right okay the basic unit of racial capitalism is the self okay okay and the basic mechanism of of racial capitalism right which is predicated on the Assumption of private property and is predicated on the notion that to be a true self to be a fully fledged self you have to own something right okay that basic formulation is uh is is again it's all bound up with with um with this problematic notion of intention okay and and and I guess to sorry I'm so long- winded with these answers but the the main thing I guess I would say being is it you know the Poetry that we love the the art that we love is art that goes beyond the intention of the artist right um so we we got a question in person hi my name is main um okay I'm a student of black studies and I've read your and harney's uh underc comments a lot on black study and I think something I've been suing with that I'm really concerned about is is this preemptive naming of fugitivity um specifically within academic spaces where folks are are naming their practices as fugitive um or naming their resistance or naming their radicality um as their practice or as part of the process of their practice and I was wondering if you could speak to the dangers of naming and coining fugitivity um and if if that could even exist I know you mentioned Jacobs and we can post date kind of fugitive practices but I'm I'm wondering about the relationality of it and can one be a fugitive call themselves a fugitive publicly and name their Works their practices as such as they're doing them and and I'm wondering what good is that if I guess the second question then is how do we find fugitive peoples without naming them how do we how do we find each other and then how do we find each other at the risk of oversharing and and kind of giving our secrets to those who we are against well um okay thank you for the question M it's like a uh there's a bunch of different angles to it um so I try to see if I can address some of them in a real simple way and then others I think they they don't lend themselves to to any kind Simplicity um so again I try to be more emphatic and just say I I I act for me I genuinely genuinely believe in fugitivity I don't believe in any such thing as a figure of The Fugitive okay um uh uh so I mean that's the the so so when people call themselves fugitive or call themselves a fugitive or want to place that not moniker on themselves I I would say that it's a it's a mistake you know um I I I don't you know such people might mean well it might be a an effect of wishful thinking but it is in fact a violation of the the the term and then I would also say that even the term fugitivity um to the extent that it could become something like a name name or brand then it also participates in that mistaken and it's just one word it's just one name um it's not the unique name of the phenomenon that we're invested in it's just it's the name that that again that I learned you know from the folks who who whom I was reading I think it has a particular kind of resonance for for black folks in the new in the so-called new world and and those of us who have you know uh who are marked you know and share you know in in the heritage of the enslaved the the notion of fugitivity and that name even is important to us but the practice that we call fugitivity operates in excess even of the name fugitivity right so and that's not just a fundamental part of this practice that's got something to do with the very nature of naming all right and of the relationship between let's say what we might call names and things okay now which then gets us to another problem which is a kind of larger problem um I mean I don't know that I believe that there could be such a thing as oversharing okay but I do believe that there is such a thing as theft okay all right and and and what we give okay what we share is subject to having to being stolen okay but but I believe that property you know I'm I'm a kind of old-fashioned Anarchist when it comes to certain things and so PR's formulation that property is theft I subscribe to that that includes my own property or anything that we could might want to call our own property which is why for me what it is that we have we only have it in so far as we share it okay and and this is this is not about the retention of one's own property or black people's cultural property what because what's at stake is you know um will it be possible for you know for us to live on the Earth right that's that's the problem now okay is it possible for us to live on the earth okay or will the earth at a certain point finally say you know what we sick of you um and we can't have y'all no no more you're too dangerous um you you have to go you know can we get better at at at Living can we get good enough at living right to to to be able to actually contribute you know to rather than extract from you know the Earth and in so far as I believe that black culture and Blackness has something to contribute to that project I don't think there's enough sharing of it that we can do okay particularly in so far as part of what it is that black PE culture teaches again what Macky says explicitly right in K Morrow is that Fugi AC ity is on the run from ownership that means it's on the Run even from our ownership of it no matter how legitimate we think that ownership might be okay so um you know but again that doesn't mean that we countenance theft or simply accept the brutalities of thieving right of theft and the brutalities of extraction but but the sad you know the real complicated part of it is is that we have to now come to grips with the fact that um what if it turns out that most of the extraction of Black Culture within the framework let's say of the art world is being perpetrated by black artists okay and and this extraction of Black Culture by black artists one way to think about it is that it is a manifestation of class Warfare of internal class Warfare within the so-called black community I mean these are some questions that we have to address and and for me you know they they they don't they don't require that we displace this whole problematic of what it is to share but but but but they but they have to accompany right any any any meditation that we might have on this whole problematic of what it is to share or um or potentially overshare and there was so much more to your question which is a brilliant question but but I kind of lost the threads because I'm I'm getting old I hope I address some of it and I I try to do more if I if I can so if you want me to Kenneth as I never thought about Harriet Jacobs as a return to the hold are there ways black life is asked to return to the hold in contemporary times and I'll also retype it okay um yeah I mean well that that phrase return to the hold is a u is a phrase of Frank wilderson that's in the uh I I can't remember if it's the preface or the intro or maybe it's the acknowledgements of of his uh of his book red white and black and and to me it it remains to be as a you know extraordinarily resonant phrase he says we sometimes we have to return to the hold um in despite our fantasies of flight and of course one of the things is really you know trenching you know about that phrase is that it it feels like it it kind of perfectly it almost perfectly describes Harriet Jacob's own itinerary okay except for the fact that she doesn't return to the hold despite her fantasies of flight she returns to the hold to operationalize her fantasies and flight okay and that's a and it's of and and there's a couple things we could say one would be that's extraordinarily uh that's an extraordinary arily experimental exercise okay and it is also at the same time uh an ex to the most severe forms of brutality right okay um and uh you know so so yeah and and of course part of what it is that wilderson is suggesting in that moment in his book is that we have to do that right we we we we have to return to the hold um you know and again I I just would want to suggest that it's not not in spite of our fantasies and flight but again in order to to to operationalize them and and of course there's a bunch of different ways in which we can you know sort of imagine what what that would be to return to the whole you know um yeah thank you and I do want to mention that we are running long on time we don't have a member team meeting so we can go a little bit over so um after the questions that are already in the chat uh we're not taking any more but I do want to go to haid's question um as a black feminist would you like to hear more from him oh as a black feminist would like to hear more from him about why he says fugitivity is a black feminist space Oh I think it was meant for me to ask in third person but I chat well um so I guess I've always been kind [Music] of you know so one one way to think about it is that uh so here's here's this sort of so the you know one of the words that the Greeks used for slave is metos okay and and the me met you know that's meta you know uh that's the same root that that the our prefix meta comes from and and meta usually means outside of okay and oos you know is the is the you know Greek word for house or home so that the slave is one who is outside of the home right um which indicates not just a kind of homelessness but a kind of exilic you know cast out sort of homelessness one who cannot become a citizen you know and that's the fundamental opposition between Matos and the citizen you know um so that the slave is the one who is outside the house but we also know that at the same time the slave is the one who who makes the household possible okay so what it is to be enslaved is to be both radically incorporated into the household and at the same time radically detached from or exiled from any kind of notion of home or of the house it's both right um sort of neither inside nor outside because both inside and outside right and and and it seems to me that this figure of the one who is outside the house but who makes the house or home possible that figuration has been most brutally and viciously imposed upon black women okay and just and it's like you know are are you know are for me you know are are most important you know like if we have to think about individual figures as individual black intellectuals then if I got to think about Black intellectuality by way of the individual figure then the most important and indispensable individual figure for me is Hortense Spillers and as she says in her great essay called mama's baby Papa's maybe she begins with the formulation that if the black black woman hadn't existed she would have had to have been invented right to occupy this position to carry out right this horrific charge okay right to sort of build the house or enable the house from a position of radical exclusion from the house okay and in so far as black women have been drafted into this position and into this sort of infernal activity okay black women have also therefore been the epicenter of the resistance to the regime that is predicated on that okay um and that resistance has manifested itself as a as again as as for me at least feminist practice and it's feminist practice within what under the you know influence of Spillers I think can be called you know the continual cultivation of a Eternal ecology okay um and and so for me there's no way to think about any of this stuff outside of constant reference to black women's experience and to black women's work which is to say not just the work that black women have been constrained to do but also the work that black women have um done Against the Grain you know of that of that constraint um it's uh there's a whole lot more to say and be said and and you know and and and I um you know I I I probably shouldn't keep going on but but but if y'all haven't had a chance yet to read this extraordinary essay that Spillers published in 1987 called mama's baby Papa's maybe you should read it you know because it's really important and uh it's an interesting fact that that essay published in 1987 happens at the same time as a publication of Tony Morrison's beloved and and for the kind of work that I do you know as a teacher and a professor these are probably the two most influential texts you know that have emerged in Black studies since their since their publication like they're foundational like you can't do nothing without them um and and and you can't do nothing without them and and you shouldn't want to do anything you know without him as far as I can tell so thank you and I will pass it to will who had a question um to read the question out loud hello and thank you so much um just for all of the knowledge and and sharing that you've dropped um my question is if the experiment of transatlantic slavery shapes the conditions of our present day then can you share with us a vision for a black experiment that would shape the conditions of tomorrow uh okay is Will yes will okay thank you thank you will um no man I've been thinking about this a lot you know and um the other thing I would say you know uh is it my you know what I'm trying to do you know the work that I actually you know do you know how I make a living is very much influenced like I said you know by Spillers and some of the other folks mentioned you know and you know uh you know Hartman and uh Morrison but so Al very much influenced by my own mom and my grandma and when it comes time to thinking about the future you know um I there's these phrases that my grandma used to say that I that are very that that keep that resonate so strongly in my mind that it makes me think that she's still talking to me and that I need to follow this up you know um and just just oldfashioned you know sort of black religious phrases about how the future is pro tomorrow is promised to no one you know and um I I guess man I've always had and I don't like to say this because I don't see I believe that we can differ you know without arguing I guess would be or we can make arguments even without arguing and one of the things that I really truly it's I'm not saying that I don't fall into it cuz sometimes I do but I really don't want to argue with with black folks um and and especially within the context of of a public sphere which is you know kind of loves to see that you you know um I just don't um but I want to be able to to differ you know and want to be able to ask some questions you know in a respectful way and so I know that there's a lot of important work and also a lot of important desires that are being enacted or carried out under the rubric of f but I bring myself to to use that term very much you know like I believe that one of the most horrific and debilitating elements of Western philosophy and sort of modern political economy is its futurism and I don't believe that there can be an afro futurism that actually constitutes a genuine antidote to whatever you want to call it Euro futurism in in other words we live in the nightmare of of Euro Futurity right that's what we live in okay um you know a easy way to describe it would be you know what's a what's a perfect emblem of Euro Futurity the projects right even the very term right as a projection to I mean literally we we again we we live you know within the the ongoing Futurity of a of a of a of a eurocentric project okay and it's and it's a up project you know and and I believe that part of what we need to do is to call into question this desire to determine you know the future I I believe that what we need to be trying to figure out a way to do something to do is we need to try to figure out how to make an impact on the present which is always with us right it's it's you know we need to be involved in this practice of pres sing so to speak you know um and uh and and and uh you know it's it's uh it's a it's a and like I said I I I I know it's you know everybody's ready to go I don't want to keep going on forever we we can talk about it another this this whole thing of dealing with and working in the present you know seems to me to be really really really important you know um and and sort of detaching ourselves you know from this dream of being able to determine the future right um that's a that's a really important that's that's something worth yeah let's put it this way I could be wrong and I'm happy if somebody proves that I'm wrong and I'll say I'm wrong but I I do think that what I'm saying at least deserves some some consideration you know so