Kathryn Yusoff: A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None (2018)
Filed under book | Tags: · anthropocene, black people, blackness, colonialism, critique, earth, earth system, geology, materiality, politics, race, slavery, theory
“No geology is neutral, writes Kathryn Yusoff. Tracing the color line of the Anthropocene, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None examines how the grammar of geology is foundational to establishing the extractive economies of subjective life and the earth under colonialism and slavery. Yusoff initiates a transdisciplinary conversation between black feminist theory, geography, and the earth sciences, addressing the politics of the Anthropocene within the context of race, materiality, deep time, and the afterlives of geology.”
Publisher University of Minnesota Press, 2018
Forerunners series
ISBN 9781517907532, 1517907535
xiv+115 pages
Commentary: McKenzie Wark (Verso Blog, 2019).
Comment (0)Alexander G. Weheliye: Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014)
Filed under book | Tags: · assemblage, bare life, biopolitics, black people, feminism, freedom, human, property, race, racialization, racism, slavery, theory
“Habeas Viscus focuses attention on the centrality of race to notions of the human. Alexander G. Weheliye develops a theory of ‘racializing assemblages,’ taking race as a set of sociopolitical processes that discipline humanity into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans. This disciplining, while not biological per se, frequently depends on anchoring political hierarchies in human flesh. The work of the black feminist scholars Hortense Spillers and Sylvia Wynter is vital to Weheliye’s argument. Particularly significant are their contributions to the intellectual project of black studies vis-à-vis racialization and the category of the human in western modernity. Wynter and Spillers configure black studies as an endeavor to disrupt the governing conception of humanity as synonymous with white, western man. Weheliye posits black feminist theories of modern humanity as useful correctives to the ‘bare life and biopolitics discourse’ exemplified by the works of Giorgio Agamben and Michel Foucault, which, Weheliye contends, vastly underestimate the conceptual and political significance of race in constructions of the human. Habeas Viscus reveals the pressing need to make the insights of black studies and black feminism foundational to the study of modern humanity.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, 2014
ISBN 9780822356912, 0822356910
x+209 pages
Reviews: Ashon Crawley (LARB, 2015), Marianna Szczygielska (Parallax, 2015), Aditi Surie von Czechowski (Comp Stud South Asia, Africa and Middle East, 2015), Marianela Munoz and Charles Holm (Afro-Paradise, 2015), Megan H. Glick (Hypatia Rev, 2015), Shelleen Greene (Somatechnics, 2016), Amber Jamilla Musser (philoSOPHIA, 2016), Gabriela Radulescu (Allegra Lab, 2016), Ander Mendiguren Nebreda (Athenea Digital, 2017, ES).
Comment (0)Coco Fusco: Young, British and Black: The Work of Sankofa and Black Audio Film Collective (1988)
Filed under catalogue | Tags: · black people, documentary film, film, postcolonialism, third cinema, video
“Sankofa Film/Video Collective and Black Audio Film Collective are the most celebrated and controversial Black media groups to emerge from the British workshop movement of the 1980s. Their work focuses on the representation of the Black subject in mainstream and alternative media, also touching on such issues as institutionalized racism, sexual politics and national identity in postcolonial Britain. Challenging stylistic conventions of both documentary and fiction film, their work provides a basis for critical reflection on the history of Black film culture, Third Cinema, and their future directions.” (back cover)
Featuring essays “A Black Avant-Garde?” by Coco Fusco (originally published as “Black Filmmaking in Britain’s Workshop Sector” appearing in a 1988 issue of Afterimage Vol 14, No 7); “An Interview with Martina Attille and Isaac Julien of Sankofa Film/Video Collective,” and “An Interview with Black Audio Film Collective: John Akomfrah, Lina Gopaul, Avril Johnson and Reece Auguiste,” both interviews by Coco Fusco.
A publication designed to accompany a touring film exhibition of the same title curated by Coco Fusco and produced by Ada Gay Griffin.
Publisher Hallwalls, Contemporary Arts Center, Buffalo, NY, 1988
ISBN 0936739150, 9780936739151
65 pages
via publisher