<div dir="ltr"><span style="font-family:Cochin">Thank you Alessandra for
the invitation to participate.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I’ve been
following the discussion with great interest and am still processing the
various ways that participants have been theorizing blackness in and as liquidity.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>I think I see my current work (both singly
authored and collaboratively composed with J. Kameron Carter—those distinctions
really always undone the more our collaborative engagement grows--) connects to
this concept of “liquid blackness” in several ways.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>To begin, my second monograph in progress is
called <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">Black Gathering: Toward an
Aesthetics of Un/Holding. </i></span><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal"><span style="font-family:Cochin">Black
Gathering </span></i><span style="font-family:Cochin">thinks
about modes of assembly that intervene against long historical operations where
gathering itself is coextensive with anti-blackness and settler colonialism. Engaging
with post 1960s black literary and cultural production, I think about forms of
gathering that bespeak a notion of blackness unmoored from the calculative
constraints and spatiotemporal suffocatings engendered by post-Enlightenment
sense-making.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That is, an enduring logic
of settler colonialism and the anti-blackness that was slavery’s condition and
ongoing legacy presumes that blackness ambles as to be-held and settled matter.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>According to Denise Ferreira da Silva’s
enormously influential essay (at least for my work and the work Jay and I do
together), “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics:<span style="mso-spacerun:yes">
</span>The Quest(ion) of Blackness at the End of the World,” "</span><span style="font-family:Cochin">the Category of Blackness
consistently </span><span style="font-family:Cochin">reproduce
the effects of efficient causal</span><span style="font-family:Cochin">ity.</span><span style="font-family:Cochin"> Stuck
in the always already there (of) Thought—as reproduced in concepts and
categories—where the Category of Blackness (like other social categories),
because </span><span style="font-family:Cochin">it
refigures formalizations (as laws, calcula</span><span style="font-family:Cochin">tions,or measurements), arrests Blackness’s creative
potential. (84)” </span><span style="font-family:Cochin"></span>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Cochin"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Cochin">This
arrest—or seizure, what Frank Wilderson, Omise’ekeTinsley, Fred Moten, Christina Sharpe and Jay
Carter have described as the state/ship hold—presumes that Blackness can be
held, used, contained, that if it exists as liquidity, that liquidity can be
governed.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Against such (post) Enlightenment
logic, however, Black people have enacted, created, participated in forms of
gathering that not only forego its hegemonically regulative features but that
presumes that integral to such re/assemblage is the ethical commitment to
release.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>That is, the condition and ‘end’ of
such movement is a notion of blackness as an ongoing letting go-ness.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Unfettered travel and other/wordly communion.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span><span style="font-family:Cochin">An example of a hold that heals, a
gathering that releases, appears in Toni Morrison’s <i style="mso-bidi-font-style:
normal">Beloved </i>(1987).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In this
ex-slave narrative, the former slave and “unchurched preacher” Baby Suggs held
communal prayer amidst previously gathered life within previously gathered
space, in a “wide-open place […] nobody knew […] known only to deer and whoever
cleared the land in the first place” (106).<span style="mso-spacerun:yes">
</span></span><span style="font-family:Cochin">“Cry,” she told them. “For the living
and the dead. Just cry.” And without covering their eyes the women let loose.
It started that way: laughing children, dancing men, crying women and then it
got mixed up. Women stopped crying and danced; men sat down and cried; children
danced, women laughed, children cried until, exhausted and riven, all and each
lay about the Clearing damp and gasping for breath” (107).</span><span style="font-family:Cochin"><span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Poignantly </span><span style="font-family:Cochin">this
gathering coalesces precisely in a “refusal to coalesce” (Moten, “Blackness and
Poetry”), where dancing became crying becomes the ecstatic time for
breath-recovery.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>In many ways, Morrison
helps us to consider what’s at stake in a (non or anti) notion of blackness that
at once moves as tired flesh and ethereally ambles as the breath that comes out
as gasp, caress?<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>Rustles in the tree,
otherwise knowledges ushered in by another kind of gravitational
inhabitation.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span></span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Cochin"> </span></p>
<p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><span style="font-family:Cochin">Flesh, breath, the
fluorescence and immeasurable weightiness of life in between category.<span style="mso-spacerun:yes"> </span>It is toward and in the interest of this
“poethics” of unholding where my research questions and modalities of
engagement reside.</span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style="text-autospace:none"><br><span style="font-family:Cochin"></span></p><p class="MsoNormal" style=""><span style="font-family:Cochin">thanks, Sarah<br></span></p>
<br>-- <br><div class="gmail_signature"><div dir="ltr"><div>Sarah Jane Cervenak, Ph.D.<br>Assistant Professor, Women's and Gender Studies and African American and African Diaspora Studies<br>UNC-Greensboro<br><br></div><i>Wandering: Philosophical Performances of Racial and Sexual Freedom</i><br><a href="https://www.dukeupress.edu/Wandering/?viewby=author&lastname=Cervenak&firstname=Sarah&middlename=&sort=newest&aID=28646" target="_blank">https://www.dukeupress.edu/Wandering/?viewby=author&lastname=Cervenak&firstname=Sarah&middlename=&sort=newest&aID=28646</a><br></div></div>
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