#Rizvana Bradley

[notchainedtotrauma]

I think that one of the things that happens both in Du Bois and in C. L. R. James is that at one moment they are addressing the slave, the ex-slave, the fugitive — then suddenly this figure has been translated into the narrative of the worker. And in the worker’s narrative, the very figure that I’m concerned with, the Black female, the fungible life, the minor figure, totally falls out of the frame of what constitutes the political notion of struggle. The “everyday resistance of enslaved women” in the context of a slave economy, for example the refusal to reproduce life, has never been considered as a component of the general strike. Yet, they too were involved in a fundamental refusal of the conditions of work and intent on destroying an economy of production in which their wombs and their reproductive capacity were conscripted along with their labor.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[yngsuk]

For many a reader, indictments of the depth and extent of antiblackness are taken as a solicitation for empathy. Empathy, in these receptions, is generally taken as a kind of bridge between two divided subjectivities or positionalities. Within this orientation, empathy is figured as a means of transcending violent differentiation or the hierarchization of difference. But empathy is not innocent. As [Saidiya] Hartman writes in her indispensable study Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, “Properly speaking empathy is a projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or ‘the projection of one’s own personality into an object with the attribution to the object of one’s own emotions.’” In other words, although empathy is frequently elaborated in the name of solidarity with black liberation, more often than not, such instances of empathetic identification serve as the mechanisms for the (non-black) liberal subject’s renewal of their subjectivity in and through the projective objectifications of empathy.

Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

[fabiansteinhauer]

Bild- und Rechtswissenschaft

In Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form, Rizvana Bradley begins from the proposition that blackness cannot be represented in modernity's aesthetic regime, but is nevertheless foundational to every representation. Troubling the idea that the aesthetic is sheltered from the antiblack terror that lies just beyond its sanctuary, Bradley insists that blackness cannot make a home within the aesthetic, yet is held as its threshold and aporia. The book problematizes the phenomenological and ontological conceits that underwrite the visual, sensual, and abstract logics of modernity.

Moving across multiple histories and geographies, artistic mediums and forms, from nineteenth-century painting and early cinema, to the contemporary text-based works, video installations, and digital art of Glenn Ligon, Mickalene Thomas, and Sondra Perry, Bradley inaugurates a new method for interpretation—an ante-formalism which demonstrates how black art engages in the recursive deconstruction of the aesthetic forms that remain foundational to modernity. Foregrounding the negativity of black art, Bradley shows how each of these artists disclose the racialized contours of the body, form, and medium, even interrogating the form that is the world itself. Drawing from black critical theory, Continental philosophy, film and media studies, art history, and black feminist thought, Bradley explores artistic practices that inhabit the negative underside of form. Ultimately, Anteaesthetics asks us to think philosophically with black art, and with the philosophical invention black art necessarily undertakes.

1.

Gründliche Linien, gründliche Farben, gründliche Ästhetik: Rizvana Bradely ist eine der Autorinnen, die an die dogmatische und normative Herkunft der Ästhetik aus den ordnenden, sortierenden und urteilenden Institutionen, aus der Teilung der niederen und höheren Sinne und aus ziehenden Erscheinungen oder erscheinenden Zügen, d.h. auch aus Trakten und Trachten erinnert. Schwarz ist bei Bradley Farbe/ Farbfläche und Körper/Kontur, kommt dazu auch begrifflich abstrakt als Schwarzheit vor und ist dann auch eine Formel für etwas, durch das Passion und Aktion geht. Schwarz hat etwas erlitten und kann agieren. Trakt und Tracht, das sind Engramme, verleibte Mahle. Ich paraphrasiere Bradley nicht, ich übersetze ihren Text aus einer frühen und ersten, vielleicht verfälschenden Lektüre heraus.

Schwarzheit [Blackness] sei grundlegend für jede Repräsentation lautet einer der Thesen, die als Grundsatz juridisch und instituierend formuliert ist. Die Ästhetik wird nicht juridisch, sie wird nicht verechtlicht, sie wird nicht dogmatisch. Da kommt sie her. Repräsentation wird nicht korporatistisch, wird nicht inkorporierend, wird keine Korporation: Das kommt sie her.

2.

Der Begriff des Bildregimes ist eine barock oder aber lungenhaft atmende, nämlich kontrahierende und distrahierende Tautologie. Die zwei Worte, die in einem Moment auseinandergehen, um im nächsten Moment sich zusammenziehen zu können, aber nur, damit sie dann wiederum auseinandergehen können (und so weiter bis zum Ende der Illusion des Überlebens), das ist doppelgemoppelt, damit es vorerst besser hält.

Bild ist Recht: Soweit ein Bild regt, soweit also durch ein Bild Regung geht, soweit regiert es auch. Soweit reicht es, soweit reigt es, tanzt, lässt die Füße springen und protokolliert, soweit zieht es, soweit regiert es, soweit regnet es und rechnet, zählt, misst und billigt es: soweit geht etwas durch, soweit passiert es. Manche behaupten, die Idee der Grundlage und des Bestandes sei nicht aus der Lunge heraus, sondern aus dem Takt des Herzschlages, dem Muskel der Blutpumpe geboren, darum glaubten die Menschen für's Erste an das Erste, also wegen des deutlich wahrnehmbachen POCH.

Bradley spricht darüber, wie heute in manchen Szenen Leute mit der Teilung der Geschlechter und mit der Unterscheidung zwischen Allem und Nichts umgehen, warum sie glauben, etwas zu dekonstruieren, Negativität greifen oder sogar stellvertreten zu können. Die Teilung der Geschlechter, für die sich Bradley besonders interessiert ist den Dogmen des Rassismus assoziiert, dabei besonders dem Dogma des Schwarzen und seiner Frontstellung zum Dogma des Weißen. Das Cover ihres Buches zeigt einen Torso in braunen Farben. Weiss und schwarz sind institutionelle Trakte/ Trachten. So weit zu gehen und zu behaupten, sie kämen als farbliche Körper in der Natur nicht vor, will ich nicht sagen, weil ich zum Dogma der großen Trennung nicht beitragen will. Aber sie entwickeln sich besonders gut in Bereichen, in den schwarz und weiß als zwei klar getrennte Schichten auftauchen, also zum Beispiel in den Kanzleikulturen, ihrer Studio- und Bürokratie. Dort, wo man die Schwarz- und Weißheit schwarz auf weiss hat. Bradleys Text ist akademisch, Universität und Akademie ist kein Biotop, das ist ein Epistemotop. An wem haftet das moderne Subjekt? An dürftigen Passagen bei Hegel. Na dann.

Bradley inauguriert, wir hören gespannt zu, oder?

Vortrag

Forschungszentrum Historische Geisteswissenschaften

Goethe-Universität Frankfurt, Campus Westend, Norbert-Wollheim-Platz 1,  60323 Frankfurt am Main, Raum IG 4.152

24.04.2024, 18 Uhr

[hiraeth-found]

Alien trilogy and Altered Carbon season 2 approaching the question of black metaphysics (as an ontology of terror as per Warren and Bradley) and the black body from entirely different angles, both can be meaningful when approaching it from Sylvia Wynter’s stance on redefining the human.

I think the Southern reach series is also particularly useful and can be read diffractively against Wynter, Warren’s and Rizvana Bradley work, I have some ideas on how I want to do that but I think that will be after I figure out the above.

Octavia Butlers work and the Ambergris series would fit in another bucket, not necessarily concerned with the actual body within a transitional environment but more focused on hauntology, lost or budding wordlings and post-human relationships.

[endlessandrea]

"The poethical work tends toward the revelation that such an effort to reduce, discipline, and contain the unwieldy materiality of the world is always already an exercise in futility. We might think both of seriality and deformation not as formal deviations from the major paradigms of modernist art, but as aesthetic practices which enact the decomposition of the art historical canon, and of canonicity as such. Such decomposition is achieved not by a method of subversion, but by the accumulation of surreptitious (re)turns, which gather ruinously beneath the sign of the authoritative artwork. The serial proliferation of returns exposes the autonomous artwork as itself nothing more than a re/de/composition, a contaminated assemblage of citations and de/formations."

[unusualmodesofresistance]

This practice of regard for one another is so important, so critical because Black women are treated with such little regard, such little regard in the world. We — the surplus life, the nobody, the thing who falls out of the scheme of representation, the void, the tool — expect to be rough-handled. What we think and imagine has been dismissed and ignored. What we want has been belittled and mocked. So when our lives aren’t handled brutally or indifferently, but treated with care, you feel the force of that.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[wanderingandactingout]

I like that. In focusing on riotous sound, I wanted to emphasize the creative making that is at the heart of tumult and upheaval, at the heart of Black noise. I wanted to engage the radical art of undoing, to regard it as a practice of improvisation, but one not tethered to the cult of male genius. So how do we think of the space of collective practice and generative disorder and recognize it as essential — both to survival and the making of beauty — in this most terrible of places.

Saidiya Hartman in conversation with Rizvana Bradley

[ahistoryofanxietyandanxietyand]

Having to transfer knowledge to your child about the anti-Black structures of the world is an ethical charge which is as impossible as it is enduring. I’m trying to say that there are weird, strange affective strategies that Black mothers have probably developed in order to grapple with the weight of having to carry and convey this knowledge. Perhaps it’s the hardest thing to do — to instruct your child in the ways of a world that wasn’t meant for them.

Rizvana Bradley in conversation with Saidiya Hartman

[lovehigher]

anyway submitted 2 out of 4 grad apps I will b finishing up the others soon and then gna finish my 2 post bacc apps + which,,,,all the schools I’m into are kinda super “reach” in regards to what ppl think but they’re on the east coast and my best friend is moving to the east coast and I honestly think might as well see what else is out there + if I get into y*le’s post bacc and work with my dream professor I LITERALLY won’t know what to do bc I know for a Fact I’d def shake the fuck outta some art history n black studies department but besides that I’m rly into the other schools and what they offer in terms of their program + support for me

[brandonshimoda]

R.I.P. (Rest in PDFs), Part II

in progress ...

Part I (A-M) is here.

Note: If you see your work on here and prefer that it not be made freely accessible, please email me at: brandonshimoda@gmail.com, and I will remove it. Thank you!

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Naomi Murakawa, The origins of the carceral crisis: Racial order as "law and order" in postwar American politics

Natasha Ginwala, Maps That Don’t Belong

Nathaniel Mackey, Other: From Noun to Verb

Nawal El Saadawi, Woman at Point Zero. Translated by Sherif Hatata.

Nick Estes, Liberation, from Our History Is the Future: Standing Rock versus the Dakota Access Pipeline, and the Long Tradition of Indigenous Resistance

Occupy Poetics. Curated by Thom Donovan

Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment

Patrick Chamoiseau, School Days. Translated from the French by Linda Coverdale

Patrick Wolfe, Settler colonialism and the elimination of the native

Pëtr Kropotkin, Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution

Phil Cordelli, New Wave

Phil Cordelli, Tidal State

Poetry of Resistance in Occupied Palestine, translated by Sulafa Hijjawi

Reece Jones, Violent Borders: Refugees and the Right To Move

Rinaldo Walcott, Moving Toward Black Freedom, the first chapter of The Long Emancipation

Rinaldo Walcott, The Problem of the Human: Black Ontologies and “the Coloniality of Our Being”

Rinaldo Walcott, Queer Returns: Human Rights, the AngloCaribbean and Diaspora Politics

Rizvana Bradley, Aesthetic Inhumanisms: Toward an Erotics of Otherworlding

Robert Yerachmiel Sniderman, from CEDE; [Truesse, Unknown Worker, Charles]; Chaos and Rectification

Roberto Tejada, In Relation: The Poetics and Politics of Cuba’s Generation-80

Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination

Robin D.G. Kelley, Hammer and Hoe: Alabama Communists During the Great Depression

Roland Barthes, A Lover’s Discourse. Translated by Richard Howard.

Roland Barthes, Mythologies. Translated by Annette Lavers.

Roland Barthes, The Pleasure of the Text. Translated by Richard Miller.

Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard.

Rosemary Sayigh, Palestinians: From Peasants to Revolutionaries

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Fatal Couplings of Power and Difference: Notes on Racism and Geography

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Forgotten Places and the Seeds of Grassroots Planning 

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Globalisation and US prison growth: from military Keynesianism to post-Keynesian militarism

Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California

Saidiya Hartman, The Plot of Her Undoing (Notes on Feminisms)

Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue

Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Translated from the Arabic by Robin Moger.

Saniya Saleh, Seven Poems. Various translators

S*an D. Henry-Smith, Flotsam Suite

Shosana Felman & Dori Laub, Testimony: Crises of Witnessing in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and History

Simone Browne, Introduction, and Other Dark Matters; Notes on Surveillance Studies; Branding Blackness (from Dark Matters: On the Surveillance of Blackness)

Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace. Translated by Emma Crawford and Mario von der Ruhr

Simone Weil, The Iliad, or the Poem of Force. Translated by Mary McCarthy

Simone Weil, The Need for Roots: Prelude to a Declaration of Duties towards Mankind. Translated by Arthur Wills

Simone Weil, Oppression and Liberty. Translated by Arthur Wills and John Petrie

Simon Leung and Marita Sturken, Displaced Bodies in Residual Spaces

Solidarity Texts: Radiant Re-Sisters

Sophia Terazawa, I Am Not A War

Sora Han, Letters of the Law: Race and the Fantasy of Colorblindness in American Law

#StandingRockSyllabus, compiled by NYC Stands with Standing Rock Collective

Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study

Steve Biko, Black Consciousness and the Quest for True Humanity

Stokely Carmichael and Charles V. Hamilton, the Black Power chapter of Black Power: The Politics of Liberation in America

Sukoon Magazine, Volume 4, Issue 2, Winter 2017

Suzanne Césaire, 1943: Surrealism and Us; The Great Camouflage (from The Great Camouflage: Writings of Dissent (1941-1945)

Sylvia Wynter, Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World

Sylvia Wynter, “No Humans Involved:” An Open Letter to My Colleagues

Sylvia Wynter, Novel and History, Plot and Plantation

Tamara K. Nopper, The Wages of Non-Blackness: Contemporary Immigrant Rights and Discourses of Character, Productivity, and Value

Tavia Nyong’o, Racial Kitsch and Black Performance

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha, Dictee

Thom Donovan, “In The Dirt of the Line”: On Bhanu Kapil’s Intense Autobiography

Tina Campt, Listening to Images

Tina Campt, The Lyric of the Archive

Toni Cade Bambara, The Lesson

Toni Morrison, The Future of Time: Literature and Diminished Expectations

Toni Morrison, Memory, Creation, and Writing

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Documentary Is/Not a Name

Trinh T. Minh-ha, The Walk of Multiplicity

Trinh T. Minh-ha, Woman, Native, Other: Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism

Veena Das, Life and Words: Violence and the Descent into the Ordinary

Võ Nguyên Giáp, People’s War, People’s Army

Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project. Translated from the German by Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin

Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa

W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction

W.E.B. Du Bois, The World and Africa: Color and Democracy

Wendy Brown, States of Injury: Power and Freedom in Late Modernity

Wendy Trevino, Brazilian Is Not A Race

Wendy Trevino, narrative

Winona LaDuke, Traditional Ecological Knowledge and Environmental Futures

Worker-Student Action Committees, France May ‘68, by R. Gregoire and F. Perlman

Yanara Friedland, Abraq ad Habra: I will create as I speak

Ye Mimi, eleven poems

Yerbamala Collective, Our Vendetta: Witches vs Fascists

Yi Sang, The Wings. Translated from the Korean by Ahn Jung-hyo and James B. Lee

You Can’t Shoot Us All: On the Oscar Grant Rebellions

Youna Kwak, Home

Yūgen, edited by LeRoi Jones & Hettie Cohen (1958-1962), #1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8.

Yuri Kochiyama, The Impact of Malcolm X on Asian-American Politics and Activism

Yuri Kochiyama, Then Came the War

Zora Neale Hurston, Mules and Men

[notchainedtotrauma]

“Doing the work. Doing the work of spilling over. Here, where the singular virtuosity of the performer is bound up with the drama of heartbreak. How do we attune to this melancholic structure of feeling that lies at the interplay between heartbreak and breakdown?”

from A Gathering Of Aporetic Form by Rizvana Bradley

[yngsuk]

Partus sequitur ventrem was a blueprint for a world in which those who were made to give life to its designs had no place in its plans. Here the gendered significance of Édouard Glissant’s figuration of the hold of the slave ship as “the belly of the boat,” the boat as “a womb abyss”—a belly which “dissolves you, precipitates you into a nonworld from which you cry out,” a womb abyss which “expels you”—comes into full view. [Saidiya] Hartman and other black feminist theorists help us to read the displacement of gender back into Glissant’s agonistic formulation: the (re)productive imperative singularly borne by black femininity in its ceaseless conscription before the world is a womb abyss. For as “enslaved women’s reproductive capacities are rendered as violent conduits of human commodification,” so too was “a kinlessness born in a woman’s womb.” The black maternal womb became a singular site of violent passage, of (dis)possession and (un)making, leaving every black child irrevocably “touched . . . by the mother.”

Rizvana Bradley, Anteaesthetics: Black Aesthesis and the Critique of Form

[fabiansteinhauer]

Bild- und Rechtswissenschaft

1.

Nach den monotheistischen Religionen und ihrem Konzept der Ebenbildlichkeit sowie dem davon abgeleiteten Menschenbild (z.B. Böckenförde) und Persönlichkeitsideal (z.B. Vesting) sind es heute auch Bewegungen um Gerechtigkeit und Sichtbarkeit, die unter einem Bild, das Norm ist, den Körper und das Gesicht verstehen, das Bild insoweit als Norm und Körper händeln und behandeln.

Nächste Woche wird Rizvana Bradley dazu an der Goethe-Universität sprechen und ihre neuen Arbeiten dazu vorstellen.

2.

Der Torso vom Belvedere, Nachbar des Laokoon, ist in der Moderne das Beispiel schlechthin für eine Norm, die Bild und Figur, dazu arché und Fragment sein soll. Rilke schreibt diesem Torso ein Gebot zu: Du sollst Dein Leben ändern! Ist die Norm trransgressiv, wenn sie, wie Rilke auch schreibt, aus allen ihren Rändern ausbricht? Sind wir nicht alle ein bisschen Bluna, dafür aber alle Normen archaisch, schon weil es das, was Norm ist, schon so lange gibt? Diese Norm, der Torso vom Belvedere, ist es, sie ist dazu Bild, Standbild sagen die einen, Figur andere. In diesem Torso ist Beuge und Torsion, unbewegt und ohne Regung ist sie/er nicht. Die Torsion, d.i. Drehung, ist nach einer modernen Kosmologiei auch eine Konstellation, käme insofern auch als Element von Warburgs Atlas in Betracht. Rilke schreibt: wie ein Stern.

[samueldelany]

Wayward Lives is divided into books, each of which serves as a unique compendium, or minor anthology, that demonstrates how Black women’s labor, artistic experiments, and performative practices, constituted strategies of survival that clashed with the violent policing of Black lives, state-sanctioned segregation, city-wide austerity measures, and the systematic discrimination and inequality that led to the impoverishment of Black urban populations.

[endlessandrea]

One of the problems with time-based endurance performances like my crawl works is they have this marvelous creamy nougat center operating inside the performer, and this space is unfortunately not available in the images and mythologies that surround the work. So, typically, the surface of the work becomes the life of the work. Most folks only get the neatness of the feat. How many miles? How much pain? How many people said or did not say this or that? I am not interested in that.

William Pope.L