Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Denise Ferreira da Silva &&

Wednesday:  Polls are showing a wide Black/white divide on reaction to the Zimmerman verdict.  What can be learned about race relations in the US in a post Trayvon world?  How did we get to this place?

Also reaction to President Obama’s speech on Trayvon Martin and the Zimmerman verdict: our guests Peniel Joseph, professor of history at Tufts University and Black-Latino relations and UCLA Professor Robin Kelley.

And our daily update on the California Prisoners Hunger Strike. 

Sojourner Truth Wednesday July 24th

Sojournertruthradio 7-24-13 Robin Kelley

Sojournertruthradio 7-24-13 Robin Kelley w/ Peniel Joseph

AFTER YEAR ZERO Geographies of Collaboration 1945
19.09 - 24.11.2013 | Haus der Kulturen der Welt, Berlin
www.hkw.de/en/afteryearzero

Recording of Fred Moten's contribution to "Geographies of Collaboration I. Writing History."

“Geographies of Collaboration” reflects the framework conditions of the new political order following the “catastrophe of civilization” that was World War Two. 


The image of the twentieth century is dominated by the historico-philosophically charged, bipolar confrontation between liberal universalism and socialist internationalism. The greater and ongoing challenge to the chronicling of history, however, is the revision of the modern era against the background of colonial history and the critique of what the European historical narrative has included and excluded. The first day of “Geographies of Collaboration” examines the fundamental role of Africa in the European construction of universal history, as well as the continuities at the nexus of colonial rule and fascism.

Fred Moten (Los Angeles) is a poet and student of the black radical tradition. He is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), and The Feel Trio. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

Fred Moten | Keynote | After Year Zero - Geographies of Collaboration I. Writing History

Portland State, "Black Studies Center public dialogue.  Pt. 2," May 30, 1975.

Series: Public Dialogue on the American Dream Theme.

Panel Members: Toni Morrison, Primus St. John (Professor, Portland State), John Callahan (Lewis and Clark), Judy Callahan (Lewis and Clark), and Lloyd Baker (student, Portland State).

VANGUARD: Friday May 30th 1975: Novelist Toni Morrison will speak on "A Humanistic View."

Transferred to digital format from original ¼ inch reel to reel audio recording.

Transferred and preserved by Portland State University Library’s Special Collections with the generous support of the Institute of Museum and Library Services through the Library Services and Technology Act, administered by the Oregon State Library.

This digital access copy is made available as streaming media for personal, educational, and non-commercial use only. It cannot be reproduced in any form, distributed or played for commercial purposes. It is made accessible because of one or more of the following situations: the rights are owned by State Board of Higher Education, on behalf of Portland State University; Portland State University has permission to make it accessible; it is made accessible for education and research purposes under "fair use"; or there are no known restrictions on use. In the event that previously unknown information is shared that may change the status of this item, it will be immediately removed from public view until pertinent rights issues are clarified.

Portland State, "Black Studies Center public dialogue.  Pt. 2" May 30, 1975.

Fred Moten Lecture, 3/13/14

Conversation recorded with Alexander Weheliye in Chicago on July 28, 2014
http://the-archipelago.net/2014/08/10/alexander-weheliye-claiming-humanity-a-black-critique-of-the-concept-of-bare-life/

ALEXANDER WEHELIYE /// Claiming Humanity: A Black Critique of the Concept of Bare Life

Dr. Pamela Brewer with Dr. Frank B. Wilderson III on Frantz Fanon 11/13/2009

This is a prayer, chant, guided meditation, poem, towards our collective breathing and remembering by Alexis Pauline Gumbs. 

C(h)ant. Breathe.: Returning to Breath for Eric Garner and Many More

Fred Moten "Blackness and Poetry"

Fred Moten on the ongoing war on black social life.

Fred Moten on Black Social Life and Policing

Friday Reading Series

STEFANO HARNEY
Stefano Harney teaches in Singapore at Singapore Management University. He is one of the artistic directors for the upcoming Bergen Assembly Triennale in Norway in 2016. He is founder with Tonika Sealy of the art and education collective Ground Provisions, and with Emma Dowling of the organisational anti-consultancy Immeasure.

FRED MOTEN
Fred Moten is author of In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition, Hughson’s Tavern, B. Jenkins, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (with Stefano Harney), The Feel Trio and The Little Edges. He lives in Los Angeles and teaches at the University of California, Riverside.

This event was funded in part by Poets & Writers, Inc., through public funds from the New York City Department of Cultural Affairs, in partnership with the City Council.

Stefano Harney & Fred Moten - April 24th, 2015

In the Name of the Motherfucker: Naming the White Symbolic Father


How do we name the violence of a paradigm of antiblackness that is still going? Hortense Spillers essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book" outlines a revolutionary theory of the violence that created and continues to create Blackness through the rape, murder, incarceration, and misnaming of Black people by a central figure in the psychic formation of western society: the Name of the (white) Father. Spillers reading helps us understand Fanon's notion that African "metaphysics [were]...abolished [by] a new civilization that imposed its own" and calls for a radical renaming of Black people by ourselves.

Black "fathers" or "father figures" have no structural power. The position has been taken by the structural position of the Master. But it would be a mistake to call the Master the "Father." Even Thomas Jefferson cannot be called one of the "founding fathers" by Black America. The best one can say of such a structural position (and the people who filled it) is the rapist, the one who "fathers" children by raping "mothers" to reproduce his property and facilitate enjoyment. Spillers calls this the "mocking presence." and really, all it is is one who fucked the mother. hence, the position should be called the "Motherfucker." Since it is a structural position, white women too can occupy it, and Spillers gives an example of this from Harriet Jacobs.

Bio
Omar Ricks is an educator, writer, artist, activist, and baker in Berkeley, California. He holds a Ph.D. in Performance Studies with a Designated Emphasis in New Media from UC Berkeley, where he used film, television, literature, and new media to study the ways that the performance of Black leadership is conditioned within, and resistant to, structural antiblackness. Dr. Ricks teaches Africana Studies at the Peralta Colleges in Oakland. He is a member of the editorial collective of The Feminist Wire and has published in TDR, ASTR Online, ERIC Digest, and Slingshot. He helped found the afropessimist blog Cosmic Hoboes.

Ricks, Omar - UC Davis MF Talk 8 - 31 - 15.MP3

Fred Moten - Blackness And Nonperformance

Renéo’s Open House by Fred Moten

Issue 1 Podcast feat Fred Moten et al

Denise Ferreira da Silva offered at Contour Biennale 8’s Public Programme notes on a theory of transformative justice, assessing contemporary (total, institutional, symbolic) violence and raciality while interrogating a value-based proposal for practical decolonisation (ie, construing and then demanding the wealth back). She speaks to Cafe Univers about Brazilian radio novelas, cultural value extraction and hip hop, among other personal subjects.

Episode 7: Denise Ferreira da Silva (part II)

In this episode.... we can listen to Pt. 2 of the conversation I had with Fred Moten where we explore the ideas set forth by radical thinkers ranging from anti-colonialist such as Sylvia Wynter and Aimé Césaire to scholar-activists such as W. E. B. Du Bois and Amiri Baraka. You can catch Pt. 1 of our conversation on our SoundCloud archive. 

Professor Fred Moten is currently Professor of English at the University of California, Riverside, where he teaches courses and conducts research in black studies, performance studies, poetics and literary theory. He is author of  number of books including, but not limited to In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition; B. Jenkins; The Feel Trio, A Poetics of the Undercommons; consent not to be a single being; and co-author, with Stefano Harney, of The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study.

We then shift our mental energy a bit…

In a January 2017 article in the Boston Review, Robin D. G. Kelley asks: So what did Robinson mean by “racial capitalism”? 

Professor Kelley answers this question, by arguing that: Cedric Robinson, building on the work of another forgotten black radical intellectual, sociologist Oliver Cox, challenged the Marxist idea that capitalism was a revolutionary negation of feudalism. Instead capitalism emerged within the European feudal order and flowered in the cultural soil of a Western civilization already thoroughly infused with racialism. Capitalism and racism, in other words, did not break from the old order but rather evolved from it to produce a modern world system of “racial capitalism” dependent on slavery, violence, imperialism, and genocide. Capitalism was “racial” not because of some conspiracy to divide workers or justify slavery and dispossession, but because racialism had already permeated Western feudal society. The first European proletarians were racial subjects (Irish, Jews, Roma or Gypsies, Slavs, etc.) and they were victims of dispossession, colonialism, and slavery within Europe. 

Cedric Robinson goes on to suggest that racialization within Europe was very much a colonial process involving invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy. Insisting that modern European nationalism was completely bound up with racialist myths… "

What we will hear next, Professor Kelley reflect on race, class, and movements using Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Cedric Robinson) in the wake of the emergence of the Movement for Black Lives. 

Dr. Robin D. G. Kelley is Distinguished Professor of History and Black Studies & Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History at UCLA, and current Chair of the Department of African American Studies. His work explores the history of social movements in the U.S., the African Diaspora, and Africa; black intellectuals; music; colonialism/imperialism; organized labor; constructions of race; Marxism, nationalism, among other things.

He is author of a number of books, which include, but not limited to, Africa Speaks, America Answers: Modern Jazz in Revolutionary Times; Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression; Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class; and Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Our show was produced today in solidarity with the native, indigenous, and Afro-descended communities at Standing Rock; Venezuela; Cooperation Jackson in Jackson, Mississippi; Brazil; the Avalon Village in Detroit; Colombia; Kenya; Palestine; South Africa; and Ghana; and other places who are fighting for the protection of our land for the benefit of all people. 

Enjoy the program. 

Music:
J Dilla-African Rhythms
Amiri Baraka-Why's/Wise
De La Soul-Stakes is High
John Coltrane-Kulu S Mama
Robert Glasper-Somebody Else ft. Emeli Sandé

Pt. 2 - Conversation With Fred Moten & Race Class and Social Movements

Historian Robin D.G. Kelley explores the radical Black politics of scholar Cedric J. Robinson - from his historical understanding of race and capitalism an inherently inseparable systems, to his vision of the possibilities of politics, rooted deep in struggles past and present - setting the groundwork for new grounds in Black radicals thought and action for generations to come.

Robin wrote the essay "Winston Whiteside and the Politics of the Possible" for the Verso collection Futures of Black Radicalism: https://www.versobooks.com/books/2438-futures-of-black-radicalism

Finding ways to be one: The making of Cedric J. Robinson's radical Black politics.

This episode features Jackie Wang and her recently released collection of essays titled “Carceral Capitalism.” She provides a framework to understand how racial capitalism produces gratuitous violence against Black bodies as well as profit-generating technologies of extraction -- from Ferguson to Flint and beyond.

Saidiya Hartman, Fred Moten, Stefano Harney, Denise Ferreira da Silva &&

andrea popelka