Dear all,
I uploaded an interview with Denise that I conducted awhile back in the extra readings file. We spoke extensively on her text, "Black Feminist Poethics" that we're reading for next week, and I thought it might be complimentary to read the interview alongside it. Hope you enjoy.
Nasrin
I uploaded an interview with Denise that I conducted awhile back in the extra readings file. We spoke extensively on her text, "Black Feminist Poethics" that we're reading for next week, and I thought it might be complimentary to read the interview alongside it. Hope you enjoy.
Nasrin
Thanks Nasrin! Thoughts -
ReplyDelete- the "h" > how do we move from poetics to poetHics and what are the consequences of that move. "A poetics can take you only so far without an h. If you’re
to embrace complex life on earth, if you can no longer pretend that all things are fundamentally simple or elegant, a poetics thickened by an h launches
an exploration of art’s signi cance as, not just about, a form living in the real world. That as is not a simile; it’s an ethos. Hence the h. What I am working on is quite explicitly a poethics of a complex realism.”"
- getting beyond cause-effect: " too am interested in a kind of thinking that does not rely on notions such as cause and effect (ef cient causality) and linearity as well as the principles of identity and noncontradiction."
- moving from attitude to praxis: "I was not seeking for a descriptor for an attitude (to use her term), but really for a praxis"
- what is colonial time? Nasrin: "Subject in Time, colonial Time that constitutes the Category of Blackness" "between (colonial) Time, as in what entraps Blackness in the Category of Blackness, and Poethics as a practice that reveals this Time’s limits." Ferreira: "nspired by the possibility of imaging existence without Time (both as flow and duration)"
- moving with and beyond writing: "I’m trying to capture something that extends beyond what
a text can accomplish, but I am also betting on that text" [how is writing itself an activist gesture; how does it participate in what Brian Massumi calls 'activist philosophy'?] - "writing without separability, determi- nacy, and sequentiality"
- what is the reticence around imagination, and particularly the reticence to articulate it in writing? "the question of the imagination is not one I am interested in trying to answer in writing."
- on the body beyond inscription [beyond spacetime and its linear ordinances] and Hortense Spillers: "what has always attracted me in Butler’s novels, since I read Dawn back in the mid-1990s, and even before I could give a name to it, is how she writes the body — any body, every body before the ‘powers’ of the bodies of her black female protagonists. Even while writing articles in which I looked at blackness as an inscription, an effect of racial knowledge — which it is — I could also imagine the body, the black body, and the female body, without that inscription."
- on being ready to write blackness > "before I found myself ready to write blackness — and the total and productive violence (modern knowledge) it consistently signi es — as an expression (not a signi er) of a whole different mode of thinking, which an academic text can only announce as such, but which poetry, ction (science fiction and conventional), music, and other knowledge practices always already are/do."
- bringing about the end of the world: "The question about the end of the World and ction: it is a Black Feminist Poetic intention to bring about the end of the world as we know it. By that I mean that we need to know differently." ******"I don’t think that the end of the world as we know is a prospect/a hope that can only be carried by ction. How is the end of the world as we know it possible? It is possible if we deploy and design (make) other ways of knowing the world. They
exist. Everywhere."
comments above from Erin
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