I’m terrified at the moral apathy — the death of the heart which is happening in my country. These people have deluded themselves for so long, that they really don’t think I’m human. I base this on their conduct, not on what they say, and this means that they have become, in themselves, moral monsters. It’s a terrible indictment — I mean every word I say.
—
It doesn’t matter any longer, and I’m speaking for myself, for Jimmy Baldwin, and I think I’m speaking for a great many Negroes too. It doesn’t matter any longer what you do to me; you can put me in jail, you can kill me. By the time I was 17, you’d done everything that you could do to me. The problem now is, how are you going to save yourselves?
Retrograde
Mourning
Epigonen
Praisesong
technê
epistêmê
ékstasis
Reparative
Lamentation
Cartography
Orthogonal
Elation
Women’s Diasporic Literature:
– No Telephone to Heaven, Michelle Cliff (1987)
– The Dew Breaker, Edwidge Danticat (2004)
– Sula, Toni Morrison (1973)
– Citizen: An American Lyric, Claudia Rankine (2014)
+ Short Stories and Essays
Weird Fictions
– Kindred, Octavia Butler (1979)
Butler’s obituaryÂ
– Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
Something about Kathy…
– Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1955)
The Ghosts of Comala
– Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)
The Evolution of Vampires
+ Short Stories, Essays and films
“How do we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly?â€
—Avery F. Gordon, Ghostly Matters: Haunting and the Sociological lmagination
Gordon explains that “[t]he ghost is not simply a dead or missing person, but a social figure, and investigating it can lead to that dense site where history and subjectivity make social life. The ghost or the apparition is one form by which something lost, or barely visible, or seemingly not there to our supposedly well-trained eyes, makes itself known or apparent to us.â€Â Most importantly, seeing ghosts gives us the experience of being haunted, and “haunting is a very particular way of knowing what has happened or is happening. Being haunted draws us affectively, sometimes against our will and always a bit magically, into the structure of feeling of a reality we come to experience, not as cold knowledge, but as transformative recognition.â€Â (8)
Adrian Piper
My Calling(Card) #1, 1986
Offset lithograph on brown paper; published by Angry Art
Image/sheet: h. 2 x w. 3 1/2†(5.1 x 8.9 cm)
“Whereas I, on a lovely spring day in 1955, suddenly came to the realization that there exists only one reality, and that is me, my own life, this fragile gift bestowed for an uncertain time, which had been seized, expropriated by alien forces, and circumscribed, marked up, branded – and which I had to take back from “History”, this dreadful Moloch, because it was mine and mine alone, and I had to manage it accordingly.”
“If the world is an objective reality that exists independently of us, then humans themselves, even in their own eyes, are nothing more than objects, and their life stories merely a series of disconnected historical accidents, which they may wonder at, but which they themselves have nothing to do with. It would make no sense to arrange the fragments in a coherent whole, because some of it may be far too objective for the subjective Self to be held responsible for it.”
