D E E E E E E V E

‘No Pipelines in the Great Lakes’, by Dylan Miner – high resolution available here.

A massive PDF compilation of writings about black radical and revolutionary movements in the US in the 20th century.

What Socialism Means to Us - Hubert Harrison

An Appeal to the Conscience of the Black Race to See Itself - Marcus Garvey

Program of the African Blood Brotherhood - The African Blood Brotherhood

Report on the Negro Question - Claude McKay

Application for Membership in the Communist Party - W.E.B. Du Bois

The Negro Nation - Harry Haywood

An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman! - Claudia Jones

The Revolutionary Answer to the Negro Problem in US - C.L.R. James

Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American - Harold Cruse

Is the Black Bourgeoisie the Leader of the Black Liberation Movement? - Harry Haywood with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall

The American Revolution - James Boggs

Message to Grassroots - Malcolm X

The 12-Point Program of RAM - Revolutionary Action Movement

Speech in Beijing - Robert F. Williams

Black Power - Stokely Carmichael

Beyond Vietnam - Martin Luther King, Jr.

The Pitfalls of National Consciousness - Frantz Fanon

The Correct Handling of a Revolution - Huey P. Newton

Power Anywhere Where There’s People - Fred Hampton

On the Ideology of the Black Panther Party - Eldridge Cleaver

On the Defection of Eldridge Cleaver … - Huey P. Newton

Prison Letters - George Jackson

White Blindspot - Noel Ignatin

Without a Science of Navigation We Cannot Sail in Stormy Seas - Noel Ignatin

Liberation Will Come from a Black Thing - James Forman

General Program (Here’s Where We’re Coming From) - League of Revolutionary Black Workers

From Repression to Revolution - Ken Cockrel

Black Women’s Manifesto; Double Jeopardy: To Be Black and Female - Frances M. Beal

Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves - Angela Davis

The Combahee River Collective Statement - Combahee River Collective

Negro National Colonial Question - Communist League

Critique of the Black Nation Thesis - Racism Research Project

Revolutionary Review: The Black Nation Thesis - Congress of African People

National Liberation of Puerto Rico and the Responsibilities of the U.S. Proletariat - Puerto Rican Revolutionary Workers Organization

Revolution, the National Question and Asian Americans - I Wor Kuen

Chicano Liberation and Proletarian Revolution - August Twenty-Ninth Movement

straight people don’t get to decide what it homophobic

cis people don’t get to decide what is transphobic

white people don’t get to decide what is racist

people in positions of power

don’t get to decide what is considered oppression

When I think about nostalgia I am reminded of this opening card from Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s “Run" movie promo. What I like most about nostalgia is that it is a form of yearning that specifies its aim as beyond its reach a priori—or without the fancy talk: Nostalgia knows it can’t have what it wants. 

Nostalgia, as an affect (which we should understand here as a subset of ‘hardwired’ or pervasive emotional stances that are enduring in their character), is interesting to me because it is both deeply invested in and simultaneously defiant of temporal structures. It is precisely because I recognize something as having happened long ago and no longer possible in my present life that I can experience nostalgia (that rosy wine-filled feeling of looking back) but it is also because I want something from the past to return that nostalgia exists. Nostalgia requires a dual exercise: I acknowledge that something is lost to me—then I reject that acknowledgment in favor of impossible desire. 

Weird, right? 

This is, by definition, a moment that we could describe as “coming never.” But there’s another thing here that strikes me as immediately worth considering: the fact that nostalgia is not limited to looking back from a distant future. We’ve all, at some point, been caught up in a meta-moment at some party, in some kiss, where we realized that we would remember the moment in the future and look back on it fondly. And raise your hand if you have taken it the step further and begun to feel nostalgic for something that was still happening? 

Everyone? Good. 

So nostalgia then can take place in vivo (ewwwww, Latin) before the moment has even passed. How? Via the same mechanism as before. It merely requires that I understand, fully and completely, that the moment I am in will never happen again. At that point my joy can undergo the alchemical change necessary to transmute it into mourning. And this is nostalgia: a fusion of joy and mourning. 

This, incidentally, is why we are justified in calling nostalgia an affect and not an emotion. Given that, in the original formulation, there are only nine affects a common critique of affect theory is that is postulates behaviors and stances as affective when they bear no relation to the nine affective states but are more properly described as emotional. But in this instance nostalgia represents a fusion of joy (one of two prime positive affects) and anguish (one of six prime negative affects). This gestalt factor by which two affects are fused into another state gives rise to emotion and mood, but can also give rise (I believe) to other affects.

This fusion of joy/anguish creates the scaffolding on which we create a number of states but nostalgia strikes me as one of the most important because it diminishes neither of the formative states in its final articulation. I am equal parts joyful and anguished about the moment/memory I am enraptured with. This is, fundamentally, queer.

Queerness has come to occupy precisely this valence of simultaneous celebration and mourning. If your identity is constituted as a threat to the pervasive power structures then celebrating it becomes a sort of necessary defense (visible bodies are harder to disappear—although not impossible e.g. Ferguson) but at the same time your celebration is also a mournful act because you acknowledge that you must undertake this effort in order to be seen. 

Queer identities (particularly cismale identities) are very often held in relation to pastoral past images; both in the lifespan (the teenage lover from a secret golden time) and in the societal image (the pre-AIDS, free love(er) from a secret golden time). Of course these formulations, in pertaining predominantly to cismales, are also heavily white and erase the intersectional places that other bodies (bodies of color, women, trans* bodies) had to navigate that precluded them from ever occupying “the golden time” but it doesn’t shift the underlying nostalgic formulation of that is exultation and mourning. 

Taken out of academicese: nostalgia is the cornerstone of 21st century queer life because our identities are nostalgic structures. We’re sad/happy (or happy/sad) most of the time as a direct result of the situation we have arisen in. 

That’s still sort of academic. Let’s try again: 

At the party there is a beautiful man and seeing him reminds me of the other beautiful men I have seen and knowing that I will not be in love with this man and that he won’t be in love with me reminds me of all the other men I haven’t loved and couldn’t love so my relationship to him is already nostalgic. 

And I am nostalgic because I have gone through all those experiences of not being able to love/be loved. 

When aloofshahbanou talks about the way I valorize nostalgia I am thinking (indianajosh this is not a drill, I repeat, this is NOT a drill) of a rhizomatic understanding of nostalgic identities that understands and upholds my right to enter an exit my own narrative at multiple temporal points simultaneously. I valorize nostalgia because it gives us an affect from which we can reject history at the same time that we accept its finality. In that way nostalgia becomes a deeply political affect. Nostalgia may very well be queer hope.