<div dir="ltr"><div><div>Thank you for this profound and moving meditation, Jay. I just watched "Situations" on Claudia Rankine's website and kept thinking about the filmic both as poly-atmospheric but also, in some ways, imbued with an otherworldly texture. On the one hand, it might be the case that blackness and black life, the simultaneously unlocatable and already phantasmatically incarcerated "brothers," move as part of the atmospheric--given but never isolated as part of the "transubstantiative" movement of clouds, the unpredictable shift from reds to blues. I also wonder too if atmosphere might endow freedom with a buoyancy that exceeds the regulatory economies that endanger black people's unfettered time with sky. Put another way, it seems what "Situations" harbors, protects, keeps safe even if for seven minutes, is that time with sky--A time that might find kinship with Baby Suggs' gaze into the blues of her quilt. <br><br></div>Also, that later line of the poem "in memory of Mark Duggan": You tell the English Sky, to give him an out." is terribly instructive with respect to histories of British weather. That is, according to Jan Golinski, "in the eighteenth century, the discourse of climate became twinned with theories of the development of civilization....For the British, the question of the influence of climate on civilization was an urgent one and not merely of academic interest." Golinski continues to argue that weather emerged as an ensemble of atmospheric facts that could be calculated and through recording (be it in diaries and later during the Jefferson administration the development of the National Weather Survey) controlled. Weather was said to be a reflection of the people who inhabited a particular place; the heat in "Africa" supposedly a reflection of uncontrolled passions and the tranquility of British climes an indicator of civilizational prowess. The Great Storm of 1703, according to Golinski, represented a threat to Enlightenment, the unruliness of the weather figuring as a punishment from god; weather recording responded to offer another way of sovereignizing the atmosphere. Making sense of it. In many ways, thinking with Jay here, the control of the weather was never far from the twinned mobilities of Enlightenment reason and British imperialism; blackness figuring as a threat to civilized atmosphere. To write weather is to enclose it, to fraudulently suture the sky into a reportable claim. What Rankine poeticizes, as Jay powerfully argues, is atmospheric's rightful unfettered return--its capacity to offer a 'loophole of retreat' from the body forced to always run for cover.<br><br></div>Thanks Jay, Sarah <br></div><div class="gmail_extra"><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Fri, Apr 29, 2016 at 11:28 AM, J. Kameron Carter <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:jkameroncarter@gmail.com" target="_blank">jkameroncarter@gmail.com</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin:0 0 0 .8ex;border-left:1px #ccc solid;padding-left:1ex">----------empyre- soft-skinned space----------------------<br><div style="word-wrap:break-word">
<p class="MsoNormal">Dark Church, Black Ether (Part 1)</p><p class="MsoNormal">I would like to offer a few thoughts in contribution to this
wonderfully probing and illuminating conversation. Liquid blackness raises for
me questions about the im/possibility of black assembly or what I call “dark
church.” In a book I’m putting the final touches on I disarticulate “church”
from institutional religion in order to think about blackness as deregulated
sociality. I draw on the etymology of the word “church” (<i>ek-klesia</i>; <i>ek</i>=out,
<i>klesia</i>=assembly) to elaborate blackness as the practice of assembled
out(sider)ness. Black assembly as perhaps liquid and atmospheric sociality. After
a few words elaborating on the idea of “dark church,” I then consider one of the
poems in Claudia Rankine’s <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i> to think about
this a bit more. In a second post, I offer an excerpt from a forthcoming essay
by Sarah Jane Cervenak and me in which we develop the notion of “black ether,”
which we believe is linked to questions of liquid blackness, suspension, and
gathering or deregulated congregationality.</p><p class="MsoNormal">I.</p><p class="MsoNormal">I’ll begin by saying a little something about my book
project <i>Dark Church: A Poetics of Black Assembly</i>, particularly insofar
as in it I engage varied African diasporic cultural productions (particularly
poetry, visual art works, and music, or what Nate Mackey has called matters of
“Sound and Sentiment” and “Sound and Semblance” and “Sound and Cerement”) to
think the aesthet(h)ics of blackness.</p><p class="MsoNormal">In this work, I’m interested in how ocean and ether, how proliferating
and mutating if not mutinous form and that which exceeds form (let’s call this
the informal) converge atmospherically. One way of understanding blackness is
that it indexes this convergence as the open, the “surround,” a convergence
that gives rise to the thought of blackness as an “atmospheric condition,” as
Ed Roberson has put it. Sky or atmosphere figure both flight and communion or
an otherwise assembly. It indexes an/other world or another way of being in the
world, an alternate world-ing, we might say, an extraneous reaching toward an
earth that’s been both lost and yet ethereally not lost, notwithstanding the violence
of a settler colonial world built on top of the earth. Such violence is never
not a ge(n)ocidal practice of racial terror, just as such recovery of the earth
is never not about breathing, which is to say about air, which is to say about
the alternative, an alternative inhabitation of atmosphere. In this way,
blackness—perhaps like wind or sky, the domain of (holy) ghosts—bears a surreal
weightiness that’s both earthy and fleshy; it’s metaphysical in its
physicality.</p><p class="MsoNormal">What might it mean by way of blackness to “see the earth
before the end of the world” (Roberson again) and to take seriously that such
possibly Du Boisian second-sightedness is atmospheric?</p><p class="MsoNormal">II.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Claudia Rankine aids me in working through this question,
the question of the atmospherics of blackness and the question of black “ek-klesiality,”
blackness as sheer, queer out(sider)ness, as liquid sociality. There is a
particular moment that comes to mind from <i>Citizen: An American Lyric</i>
(which if nothing else is a text about how that lyric is always already broken
to the extent that America is a lyric of racialized violence) that bears on
this.</p><p class="MsoNormal">In a prose poem written in memory of Trayvon Martin, Rankine
thinks about the im/possibility of kin, of assembly, of black communions. At
issue is gathering with her brothers. Not just her biological brothers but even
more her many brother who, she says, “are notorious.” Their notoriety or
perhaps impropriety isn’t that they’ve been to prison. They’ve not.
Nevertheless, “they have been imprisoned. The prison is not a place you enter.
It is no place” (89).</p><p class="MsoNormal">Rankine then repeats herself: “My brothers are notorious.” What’s
the point of such repetition? Rankine repeats herself both to indicate the
contemporaneity or afterlife of slavery and to “nonperform” that would-be
entrapment. That is to say, she enacts a poetics of black congregationality
under duress, under conditions of wounding. Hence, there is never not more
going on at the site of the wound. I’m thinking about the relationship between
the wound and the blessing; I’m thinking about the relationship between
severance and severalness or communion in/as broken multiplicity. Rankine’s poetic
script unfolds as a meditation precisely on this phenomenon, on that scission and
yet sociality of the dis/assembled. More still, Rankine stages her poetics by
turning to atmosphere, to the “sky,” and by way of atmosphere to the ocean blue. </p><p class="MsoNormal">The scission or the cut involves, Rankine tells us, the sky
being made “pink” because it’s “bloodshot of struck, of sleepless, of sorry, of
senseless, shush” (89). Antiblackness here is an atmospheric invasion, a
weather condition, of “pink sky.” Given this, recovery, entails an
improvisational movement through “pink sky” in atmospheric flight. The poem
itself is this flight, ensemblic reach or extension. More still, it is an
ethereal movement of <i>sonic</i> flight, of <i>atmospheric</i> address, whose
yield is sky’s transubstantiation from pink to blue: “The sky is blue, kind of
blue” (90).</p><p class="MsoNormal">How might we understand this trans-atmospheric movement from
pink to blue sky? I think that something towards an answer to this emerges from
the “moving poem” version of the prose poem that appears in <i>Citizen</i>. The
moving poem is Situation #5 on Claudia Rankine’s website (<a href="http://www.claudiarankine.com)" target="_blank">www.claudiarankine.com)</a>. The prose
poem that appears in <i>Citizen </i>is a kind of ethereal and liquid residue of
website’s moving poem, which I read as a poem on “blackness as nonperformance,”
to purloing a formulation from Fred Moten by way of Sora Han.</p><p class="MsoNormal">Moving across the screen of the moving poem are “brothers.” Against
the backdrop of blackness’s movement across the screen is the sky, often bloodshot
pink in color. This is the filmic movement of the images. But there’s more
going on. While the images move across the screen, Miles Davis’s “Kind a Blue” plays
in the background. Moreover, Rankine, reading her poem (which, it is also worth
noting, at key points diverges from what appears in <i>Citizen</i>; poetic
surplus), accompanies Miles’ “Kind of Blue.”</p><p class="MsoNormal">I argue that Miles’s music coupled with Rankine’s mused and
musical voice combine as ether. They are atmospheric, the atmospheric that
exceeds the weathered “pink sky.” This is the nonperformance of lyric, the announcement
of an/other “lyric,” that of atmospheric blackness. Lyric here can’t help but
be in quotations inasmuch as Rankine’s blue/s lyric arguably defies lyric’s
grand presupposition: the sovereign “I” in propertied self-possession. “Sometimes
‘I’ is supposed to hold what is not there until it is. Then <i>what is</i>
comes apart the closer you are to it. / This makes the first person a symbol
for something. / The pronoun barely holding the person together. . . . / You
said ‘I’ has so much power; it’s insane. . . . / the first person can’t pull
you together” (71). Rankine’s atmospheric poetics is an insovereign ante-lyric.</p><p class="MsoNormal">More still, it is significant that “Kind of Blue” is playing
in the background, for the blue here both recolors the pink sky and does so
because it reflects the ocean into the atmosphere itself. There’s as relay
between ocean and atmosphere here. Indeed what emerges is a poetics of oceanic
and atmosphere. “Ictic-blueness,” as Mackey might say, an ethereally ictic
poetics. Or in Rankine’s own words given in accompaniment to “Kind of Blue”:</p><p class="MsoNormal" style="margin-left:.5in">On the tip of a tongue one note
following another is another path. . . . Those years of and before me and my
brothers, the years of passage, plantation, migration, of Jim Crow segregation,
of poverty, inner cities, profiling . . . accumulate into the hours inside our
lives where we are all caught hanging, the rope inside us, the tree inside us .
. . a throat sliced through and when we open our mouth to speak, blossoms, o
blossoms, no place coming out, brother, dear brother, that kind of blue. The
sky is the silence of brothers all the days leading up to my call. . . . The
sky is blue, kind of blue. The day is hot? Is it cold? Are you cold? It does
get cool. Is it cool? Are you cool? My brother is completed by sky. The sky is
his silence.” (89)</p><p class="MsoNormal">Or again as Rankine says later in <i>Citizen </i>“in memory
of Mark Duggan”: “You tell the English sky, to give him an out” (117).<u></u><u></u></p>
</div><br>_______________________________________________<br>
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<a href="http://empyre.library.cornell.edu" rel="noreferrer" target="_blank">http://empyre.library.cornell.edu</a><br></blockquote></div><br><br clear="all"><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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