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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
she/her, mwana wevhu | writer, associate editor w/
@Parapraxis_Mag
, assistant prof of photography at RISD
zoesamudzi.comJoined January 2015
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
Join us for the second iteration of our seminar series! Coordinated by
@HZeavin
,
@re_colston
,
@NoorAlainah
, Patricia Ekpo, and myself, we’re diving into questions of repair and irreparability. Registration is sliding scale, more here: eventbrite.com/e/parapraxis-s
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Psychosocial Foundation
@PsychosocialFo1
With @Parapraxis_Mag, starting next month we will host Seminar 02: Possibilities of Repair. Syllabus information, speakers, and registration are available below. thepsychosocialfoundation.org/seminars eventbrite.com/e/parapraxis-s
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Seminar Two: Possibilities of Repair Reparation has long been held out as the goal of psychic work. This seminar troubles the question of repair by moving between the psycho- and socio-political questions of repair, reparations, and irreparability. The seminars engage old and new theories and critiques of repair to focus on its status in psychoanalysis and in society from a wide variety of disciplines: Freudian-Marxist critique, Black Study, Legal Studies, trauma studies, and the history of psychoanalysis. Below, we have arrayed a full list of readings and presenters, who include Frank Wilderson, Grace Lavery, Rinaldo Walcott, Anthony Farley, and more.
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Zoé Retweeted
Jay - Hyphenated History UK
@HyphenatedJay
Editorialising was par for the course for white abolitionists, esp with Black women. Mary Prince, who escaped to England from the Caribbean, is another example of the power dynamic between writer and subject (as many were actually illiterate and needed to rely on someone else).
Pringle, Phillips and Strickland had very carefully edited Prince's words to present her as an archetypical female victim of slavery, a form of personality commodity that could be successfully marketed to women to encourage their much-needed support for abolitionism. Prince herself, it seems, was more interested in telling her story than in her image.
Prince's ability to contradict Pringle, tonally or substantively, was of course severely limited by the effects of both gender and racial hierarchies in British society. Pragmatically speaking, she could ill-afford to upset Pringle, since she depended on him for her home and employment.
This does not mean that he was willing to completely disregard concerns over the polite sensibilities of his female readership. As Sue Thomas and others have shown, Pringle and Strickland edited out all mention of Prince's consensual premarital sexual relations from the History.58 Yet, significantly, he chose to retain episodes where sexual violence was heavily implied. He recognised that such depictions were precisely what was needed to marshal and extend British women's support for the abolition of slavery in the early 1830s.
Even taking into account his openly interventionist approach, Pringle's intrusions into the text itself were occasionally quite obnoxious. His footnotes ranged from the explicatory (telling the reader that fifty-seven Bermuda pounds was worth about £38 sterling) to the translational (informing the reader that 'Buckra' was a 'Negro term for white people') to the outright intercessional ('She means West Indians').12 At other times, he used his footnotes to remind the reader of the role he and Strickland had played in the production of the text.
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黒田理沙・Lisa HK
@lhkuroda
By transcribing Truth’s speech in what she imagined to be southern Black vernacular, Frances Gage uses Truth as a prop for the abolitionist movement, and simultaneously casts slavery as an exclusively southern problem.
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Zoé Retweeted
黒田理沙・Lisa HK
@lhkuroda
Did you know Sojourner Truth’s first language was Dutch? The version of her speech we are taught today “aint I a woman” was a version transcribed years later by a white woman who rendered her speech in what she imagined to be Black southern vernacular. That’s not how Truth spoke.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
All this reminds me of how, when we reflect on Depression/Dust Bowl era FSE photographs, we conveniently skip past Dorothea Lange's focus on what she saw as the distinguishing feature of southern poverty: Jim Crow. This is “Ex-Slave with a Long Memory," taken in Alabama in 1938
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
The article is a Steinbeckian update – literally framed as "Grapes of Wrath revisited" – and so it very badly veers into "white, i.e. rural, poverty is the real populist emergency" in an uncritical way that I can't even give to my students lol
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
There's a line that says "The rural poor are not welfare cheats, as the far right would have you believe about people who live in shacks and trailers"; the whole article is giving anti-blackness because it's not a competition, poor people are all losing.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
Scouting an article about "Let Us Now Praise Famous Men," found a Nation article from 1999 that says: "Rural poverty is far worse than its inner-city counterpart. Excluding crime, someone is now actually better off being poor...in the South Bronx, Compton or Liberty City." Why
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
Does anyone remember a web feature about California freeways as carceral technology/architecture? It was about how the roads structure but also obscure carceral networks and I can't for the life of me remember.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
I recently learnt that, at any given time*, it's really just one nostril doing the breathing work and your body alternates between the two and this both helps you smell and protects the cilia in your nostrils from drying out *caveats for sinus issues, deviated septums, etc.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
The very American thing of simply eliminating a useful public health service because, due to ineffective messaging and intervention planning, people don’t use it enough so it’s taken away from people who need it and do…
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
You know you’re in the terminal with all the people head back to the states because it’s filled with some of the most swagless people you’ve ever met (ie people dressed like they’re about to climb a volcano and also Pats jerseys)
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
I retract my temper tantrum because I didn’t realize there was a time change and I’m not actually going to miss anything, but my point stands!!!
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
If you miss a flight because of technological or bureaucratic error or slowness, you shouldn’t be on the hook for your replacement!!!
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
If you miss a flight because of technological or bureaucratic error or slowness, you shouldn’t be on the hook for your replacement!!!
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
She was, by my guess, a bit younger than my mother, so the session also turned into “which tattoo will she find next” (she found and was very entertained by one that I often forget about because I don’t see it regularly lol)
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
I got a really wonderful Swedish massage from this lovely Brazilian woman and I genuinely didn’t realize how much the past couple months have taken a physical toll. All the usual suspects were in knots but why did my triceps hurt so much, can’t neglect stretching like this again.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
Tired: I’m feeling some diasporic angst because I can’t speak my mother tongue and that’s why I’m learning Shona Wired: I’m going to learn Shona specifically so I can understand praise poetry/nhetembo dzemadzinza
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
This was great! The Zim/Moz borderlands were such critical spaces for the liberation struggle, and Nick describes local indigenous peoples’ (“borderlanders”) notions of sovereignty as contestations of colonial boundaries & state technologies of power/capture of land wonderfully.
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The_Honde Valley_Caretaker 🇿🇼
@NickNyachega
Sharing again. This talk is happening this week, at the Interdisciplinary Center for the Study of Global Change, University of Minnesota. It would be great if you join us. Excited!
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
I didn’t see the sweatshirts, but they were selling the Sarr-Savoy Report and Savoy’s “Africa's Struggle for Its Art” 🤡
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Kim Todzi
@KimTodzi
Replying to @rob_heinze and @ztsamudzi
I forgot to take a screenshot of the Shop of the Humboldt Forum, where they sold sweaters with a "Decolonize" print.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
The question is in terrible faith because if it were actually taken seriously then the museum could not exist. But again, existential wounds of imperialism are just *thought exercises* for Germans and white tourists.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
I know that “woke” is anti-black and otherwise skewers conservative in present parlance, but who at Humboldt actually thought these weird pseudo-woke banners were a good idea to hang in the lobby of an ETHNOLOGICAL MUSEUM?
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
Also, like the African hall, the Oceania hall is dimly lit because, in the words of the awful tour guide I overheard, these objects are vulnerable to light and must be protected. These objects from sunny equatorial places must be protected in your dark German vaults. Naturally.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
The you walk into the Oceania hall, and it again resembles the African one: full of canoes, war items, totems imbued with spiritual significance, items that would adorn otherwise nude bodies. This curatorial organization reinforces my political commitments to the black Pacific.
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Zoé
@ztsamudzi
This isn’t to say communities aren’t calling for restitution, it it feels really astonishing to see “Asia” as this continent of sound and “Africa” as this place full civilizational objects of significance for the taking.
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