Well that happened. We knew it would, sort of. Already the Twitterland is quieter.
I was already moving in this direction. But this is certainly the end of an era. Not the end of Twitter, obviously. But the end of something. Tumblr felt this way after the NSFW ban came down.
In any case, I’ll be over here more. And a few changes:
There are now new paid subscriptions options. Substack, in its pedagogy of capitalism, doesn’t let me set the rates lower than they are ($5/month or $36/year). But I do have a comp link for graduate students, community organizers, activists, etc. If you need a comp, shoot me an email at my work email and I’ll send you a link. And anyone who was already subscribed before this post date has already been comped a free subscription forever. You’ve been here. I’m grateful.
Subscribers receive access to the #landofwomen posts and can leave comments, etc. But otherwise, most of what is here will stay the same: occasional scrapbook posts, research hauls, and the rare comment on what is happening in the world.
So then why subscription? Because the amount of intimacy in my #landofwomen posts, the excavating of information about my family and ancestors, academic Mom rants and more, I think require a bit of skin in the game to share on here. I would have set it at $1/month if I could. I don’t think a lot of skin is required, lol. “Low barrier for entry.” But if Musky followers find their way over here from Twitter or elsewhere, the last thing I want is them to have easy access to my digital ancestor altar.
Cool? On to the scraps….
We are not going to use this platform to rail against imperialism. An African saying very common in our country says: “When your house is burning, it’s no use beating the tom-toms.” On a Tricontinental level, this means that we are not going to eliminate imperialism by shouting insults against it. For us, the best or worst shout against imperialism, whatever its form, is to take up arms and fight. This is what we are doing, and this is what we will go on doing until all foreign domination of our African homelands has been totally eliminated. - Amilcar Cabral, 1966, “The Weapon of Theory” https://www.marxists.org/subject/africa/cabral/1966/weapon-theory.htm
Colectivo Ilé
“Creemos en la capacidad de la gente oprimida —empobrecidas, racializadas como inferiores, ninguneadas, no binarias, gays y lesbianas, con diversidad funcional y otras en los presuntos márgenes— para identificar sus propias necesidades, prioridades y soluciones. La falta de poder en nuestras comunidades, el bombardeo de servicios asistencialistas y de caridad, sin embargo, nos convencen de lo opuesto y pretenden hacernos cómplices de nuestra propia desposesión, desplazamiento y opresión. Somos susceptibles a la concienciación, capaces de superar las cargas intergeneracionales de esa opresión. Nos hemos dado a la tarea de implantar procesos reflexivos, de planificación estratégica que promuevan el bienestar y el desarrollo integral (económico, social, cultural y político), que sean participativos y garanticen la vida plena y el buen vivir.” About
Native Slavery
“One of the goals of Native Bound Unbound is to gather documents related to indigenous slavery and reclaim the voice of the millions of enslaved Indigenous people of the Americas, telling the stories of their lives through the surviving historical documents. In order to achieve this goal, NBU will need YOUR support. If you have skills in Spanish paleography or a desire to learn, contact us at nativeboundproject@gmail.com. We have slide presentations and training videos to help you get started.” Native Bound Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery https://fromthepage.com/nativeboundunbound/native-bound-unbound-archive-of-indigenous-slavery
THE HEALERS PROJECT Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions
“The Caribbean Women Healers Project: Decolonizing Knowledge Within Afro-Indigenous Traditions, is a collaborative research project built as a result of our journeys within Caribbean communities throughout the Dominican Republic, Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the U.S. Pacific Northwest region. In 2016, after four years of meeting and spending time with Caribbean women that keep their Afro-Indigenous, Indigenous and Afro-descendant healing traditions alive, we were inspired to conceptualize a project that validates their knowledge in a world where Eurocentric notions of health and medicine vilify and dismiss them. As we pursued the project, the women we interviewed and document here have shared a collective investment in sharing their knowledge across generations at a time when migration disrupts the ways in which their communities have passed down knowledge.”
Gwendolyn Midlo Hall
“Three decades after Hall’s groundbreaking Africans in Colonial Louisiana, what’s striking is not only how visionary it was, but also how far we have yet to go in Louisiana to integrate the key insights she offered about our past and our present. People still think Cajuns created gumbo. People still think mostly in binary terms about race in Louisiana. But as Hall herself said in an interview for Callaloo magazine in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, speaking of Louisiana culture and New Orleans in particular, “It’s one of the few examples, maybe the greatest example, of a universalist culture that’s grown up through great diversity and mutual borrowing among people. In that sense, it’s the future.” - Joshua C. Caffery https://64parishes.org/gwendolyn-midlo-hall-and-the-future-of-louisiana-studies
Reading List
Bárbara Idalissee Abadía-Rexach, “Centro y periferia: las identidades en el nuevo movimiento de la bomba puertorriqueña,” Centro Journal 31, no. 2 (Summer 2019): 40–57.
Cathy N. Davidson, “Humanities 2.0: Promise, Perils, Predictions,” PMLA 123, no. 3 (May 2008): 707–17, https://doi.org/10.1632/pmla.2008.123.3.707.
Ruth Nicole Brown et al., “Doing Digital Wrongly,” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 395–416, https://doi.org/10.1353/aq.2018.0028.
Franny Gaede et al., “Afro-Indigenous Women Healers in the Caribbean and Its Diasporas: A Decolonial Digital Humanities Project,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 016, no. 3 (July 22, 2022).
Romi Ron Morrison, “Voluptuous Disintegration: A Future History of Black Computational Thought,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 016, no. 3 (n.d.), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000634/000634.html.
Alanna Prince and Cara Marta Messina, “Black Digital Humanities for the Rising Generation,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 016, no. 3 (July 22, 2022), http://www.digitalhumanities.org/dhq/vol/16/3/000645/000645.html.