Have you registered for the New Generation Scholars Intergenerational Institute courses yet? My course, Revolutions in the Diaspora, ends tomorrow, but some beautiful classes are coming up through May and June.
Archival sketches of the Amistad captives via the Bienecke Library:
“dear Sir Mr Tappan -- I will write you a few lines because I loves you very much Cinque want you to go and see him do come my friend can you come in down to see Menda people one day do come pray for all this people make this Menda men free to go to African nor go to bad country to havan [Havana] O please to let us go to the Africa thein his very good country no buy any men there is very presents Mr Tappan Mr Cinqiue want you to come here very soon when you come you come to new haven you tell Mr James and Mr Townsend Cinque want ask you one thing you dear friend -- Mr Cinque.” (x)
Marlene Daut: What The Haitian Revolution Tells Us About The U.S. Movement For Racial Equality https://www.npr.org/2021/07/04/1012978325/what-the-haitian-revolution-tells-us-about-the-u-s-movement-for-racial-equality
Marlene Daut: Haiti Isn't Cursed. It Is Exploited. https://www.essence.com/news/haiti-isnt-cursed-it-is-exploited/
Marie Vieux Chauvet, The Person and the Writer ; témoignages de Lilian Vieux Corvington et de Marie-Cécile Corvington-Charlier (vidéo). - Île en île http://ile-en-ile.org/marie-vieux-chauvet-temoignages/
(Sidenote: Sites like these remind me it is okay to believe in blogging. As a pedagogy and as a radical consciousness-raiser. Especially after certain social media purchases this wek. It is okay to believe in blogging again)
“Toussaint said ‘lets go to haiti’
i said ‘awright’
& packed some very important things in a brown paper bag
so i wdnt haveta come back….”
ntozake shange, lady in brown, “toussaint”
“‘Twas mercy brought me from my Pagan land,
Taught my benighted soul to understand
That there’s a God, that there’s a Saviour too:
Once I redemption neither sought nor knew.
Some view our stable race with scornful eye,
“Their colour is a diabolic die.”
Remember, Christians, Negros, black as Cain,
May be refin’d, and join th’angelic train.”
Headline: "Voodoo in Harlem: Girl Anthropologist Who Takes Fling at Voodoo Pronounces It Pleasant but Trying"
“The book while interesting was not what I was looking for at that time. In its pages, Castrillo was not advocating for revolution, free love, or abolition. Instead, he was a proud member of the Socialist Party – whose leadership supported the annexation of Puerto Rico to the United States. My initial reading of the text was framed through a lens that understood radical politics within a firm binary of resistance or integration to US Empire. This gaze overlooked the other ways the book challenged contemporaneous white supremacist logics. Castrillo was a Black self-taught cigarmaker that carved a space within Puerto Rico’s world of letters, even if the position he occupied was marginalized.” A Brief Reflection on Thinking Against the Archive of Puertorriqueñidad — The Caribbean Philosophical Association https://caribbeanphilosophy.org/blog/archive-puertorriqueidad