scrapbook post for the Monday after Holiday Break: week ending 2021 November 26
Belated musings while I eat leftover sweet potato pie
This scrapbook and research haul is from all around the desktop and all before the break. Give thanks, give land back, and give Guanina her flowers.
Puerto Ricans and the Census
There was a conversation I missed while in Twitter jail this summer about the census, blackness, Puerto Ricans and the kind of organizing happening that has been happening in Afro-Latinx/Black Latinx/Black Puerto Rican circles around census data. I remember being on the LatiNegrxs Project when the organizing for the 2020 census started; from my vantage point I saw it through the work the Afrolatin@ Forum was doing. Rest in peace to Miriam Jiménez-Román, founding director of Afrolatin@ Forum and member of Black Latinas Know.
Now that the census returns are beginning to be compiled, despite the clusterfuck that was 2020 has bled into the process of compiling the census (on the island as well as in the U.S.), the results are amazing. The discussion that ensued also took me down a rabbit hole of past organizing and conversations. Amazing what can change in a decade.
For example, in 1995, Minority Rights Group International issued a publication called No Longer Invisible: Afro-Latin Americans Today (Minority Rights Publications, 1995). I think I read this book in 2005 or 2006? Since then, they have a website with resources and encyclopedic entries in a World Directory of Minorities and Indigenous Peoples. It includes Afro Puerto Ricans.
There’s more where this came from. More soon.
Digital Humanities
Katherine Dunham’s global travels are a thing of beauty.
In the Same Boats: “In the Same Boats is a work of multimodal scholarship designed to encourage the collaborative production of humanistic knowledge within scholarly communities. The platform comprises two interactive visualizations that trace the movements of significant cultural actors from the Caribbean and wider Americas, Africa, and Europe within the 20th century Afro-Atlantic world. It presents opportunities for unearthing the extent to which Caribbean, Latin American, African, European, and Afro-American intellectuals have been in both punctual and sustained conversation with one another: attending the same conferences, publishing in the same journals and presses, active in the same political groups, perhaps even elbow-to-elbow in the same Parisian cafés and on the same transatlantic crossings––literally and metaphorically in the same boats––as they circulate throughout the Americas, Africa, Europe, and beyond.” PIs: Alex Gil and Kaiama Glover
Juncture is a new way to make a map via JStor: https://juncture-digital.org/
The Data Notebook, an open and free resource co-written by Peace Ossom-Williamson and Kenton Rambsy, Jr. is a thing of beauty: “The Data Notebook is an online suite of open interactive resources that provides instructional materials for introductory data analytics and data visualization approaches relevant to a wide range of subjects and disciplines. Specifically, this book focuses on principles related to data storytelling, and provides tangible research steps and include case studies, mini-lessons, and interactive instructional components.”
#amreading
There’s a black speculative fiction short story series on Amazon calles “Black Stars.” Just finished my first: C. T. Rwizi's These Alien Skies. Bloodchild meets Garveyism in outer space. Really enjoyed it. Is this what holiday break looks like?
Writing with Wynter
"I write not to fulfill a category, fill an order, supply a consumer, but to attempt to define what is this thing to be--a Jamaican, a West Indian, an American." - Sylvia Wynter "We must Learn to sit down together and talk about a Little Culture: Reflections" Jamaica Journal 1968
TBR
Sarah Juliet Lauro, “Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment: Beholding the Gap in Commemorations of Resistance,” TDR 65, no. 3 (September 2021): 24–41, https://doi.org/10.1017/S1054204321000307.
Abstract: Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.
Lesley Wolff, “From Raw to Refined: Edouard Duval-Carrié’s Sugar Conventions (2013),” African and Black Diaspora: An International Journal 12, no. 3 (September 2, 2019): 355–74, https://doi.org/10.1080/17528631.2019.1611322.
This article argues that Sugar Conventions (2013), an unstudied, mixed media work by the Haitian-born artist Edouard Duval-Carrié, challenges established notions of Eurocentric visuality to locate creolization as a process entangled with, though historically veiled through, canonical Western image production. By destabilizing and denaturalizing Eurocentric conceptions of originality, ‘whiteness,’ and colonialism, Sugar Conventions negotiates the consequences of sugar cultivation and its product, ultimately raising new questions about the complicity of images in producing and obscuring colonial dynamics. To consider the myriad ways in which Sugar Conventions medially and figuratively elevates the physical, moral, and material costs of sugar, this article looks to the three layers, rendered on Plexiglas, that together comprise the work. This article suggests that each layer – background, middle ground, and foreground – negotiates visual, medial, and cultural tensions, which illuminate processes of creolization through the very forms and subjects that construct and perpetuate it.
Sonya Donaldson, “The Ephemeral Archive: Unstable Terrain in Times and Sites of Discord,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs, accessed October 20, 2021, https://dhdebates.gc.cuny.edu/read/the-digital-black-atlantic/section/b5c2c6f7-c1a2-4645-8cf7-9d5cc70aa019.
Other Things
“No. At times black thought is not always a refusal outright; it is not a denial or a rejection. Black thought is the intellectual praxis of living this world and seeking liberation; living this world and seeking liberation engages and disrupts this world and, importantly, allows us to gather and learn about ways of liberation that are already here, while imagining better futures. Sometimes refusals refuse too much. I, we, refuse what they want us to be while also gathering clues (notes, songs, grooves, memories, the forgotten) within and in excess of our present system of knowledge. The clues are insurgencies.” — Katherine McKittrick. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021, page 67, footnote 31.
Also
“If DH cannot, or will not recognize Indigenous data sovereignty—that is Indigenous peoples inherent right to steward and mobilize their own knowledges without interference—it will remain, even when mobilized with the best of intentions, part of the problem.” — “Recoding Relations: Dispatches from the Symposium for Indigenous New Media | In the Moment,” accessed May 4, 2021, https://critinq.wordpress.com/2020/01/21/recoding-relations-dispatches-from-the-symposium-for-indigenous-new-media/.
Lagniappe
Reminiscing on how BLACK and AFRICAN and MUSLIM flamenco is. ASWAD 2017 in Sevilla, España:
always learning,
jmj