Scenes at 20: Afternoon, Oct 7th

This symposium at Rutgers University celebrates the 20th anniversary of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America and its impact on studies of Black lives in the past, present, and future. Please join us as we consider the work’s impact within its intergenerational intellectual context and theorize new possibilities for Black life and Black freedom in these perilous times.
This event was sponsored by the Office of the Chancellor of New Brunswick, School of Arts and Sciences, Department of English, Department of History, Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis, Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies, Consortium for the Study of Diversity and Culture in the Americas, Center for Cultural Analysis

[@jatellah]

Rinaldo was right.

[@omalone1169]

Walcott

[@yansande]

Walcott seems to have missed altogether the originator of Black Girl Magic, CaShawn Thompson, and her declaration about BGM. The co-opting of it is tied directly to her being a working class, dark skinned Black woman and loving all of us Black femmes, girls, and women. He’s not wrong about the associations of capital. I don’t think a single person here named CaShawn and that’s a huge problem. BGM (and BBJ as a response) came from someone who these folks probably would never include in their work or even invite into the room.

[@nkozi]

🌚

[@omalone1169]

@@nkozi “Throughout the first years of our lives we were forced not just to internalize a few aspects of capital, but to build up a structure of internalizations. As our capacity for coherent natural self-regulation was systematically broken down, a new system of self regulation took its place, a coherent system, incorporating all the aspects of self-repression. We participated in capital’s ongoing project of colonization by colonizing ourselves, by continually working at the construction of a unitary character-structure (character armor), a unitary defense against all drives, feelings, and desires which we learned were dangerous to express. In the place of our original transparent relations to our world, we created a structure of barriers to our selfexpression which hides us from ourselves and others.”Jay Amrod and Lev Chernyi, “Beyond Character and Morality: Towards Transparent Communications and Coherent Organization.” Howard J. Ehrlich ed. Reinventing Anarchy, Again (San Francisco, California: AK Press, 1996), 321
👻 omalone_2

[@tezeruteshome1796]

@@omalone1169 woah...could this be the enslavement we desire as much freedom Sexton at 3:08