i haven't been able to write on here much lately. i just wrote a big long post and it's in the drafts folder along with everything else i've written lately.
i couldn't get travel funding for the princeton conference so i'm not going. which is a bummer to the extent that another line on my cv is always good at this point in my 'career' and i could've met folks at princeton (which is also my MA advisor's alma mater, so i could have had a conversation with her about the pleasures and perils of central new jersey). at the same time, figuring out flights to new jersey was not going well for me. and then transportation and lodging would be further issues. i don't always travel terribly well.
but speaking of lines on my cv, the article i sent to mosaic was accepted and it's going to be out in march of 2015. throughout the revision process i was nervous that the piece was incomprehensible, no matter that everyone who read it seemed to comprehend it. now i'm worried that the ideas aren't good enough. that was an anxiety that cropped up as soon as i thought about it in print.
like, no future is ten years old! is my take on edelman really so compelling that it needs to be in print? ugh...
but still it's a big deal. it's what constitutes a professional success. but now i'm just worried about the next article i'm submitting at the end of this month. or that's on the official things for me to worry about. but like any to-do list, i'm actually worried about items much further down the list, or not on the list at all.
i've been spending time with derrida over the summer. i'm trying to think through the connections between Black feminism and poststructuralism. or to rethink the relationship to see how poststructuralism falls within the purview of Black feminism. rather than Black feminism simply being one of many poststructuralist projects, how is poststructuralism contained within Black feminism?
and the crux of the connection, from a historical perspective, is that they developed at about the same time (under far different circumstances). but if Black feminism is, in part and at a particular historical moment, an immanent critique of Black Arts and Black Power, and deconstruction is an immanent critique of structuralism... and these critiques are immanent to the extent that they arise 'within' the movements and only upend the movements to the degree that they articulate a radical potential always-already within the movement.
and if we have the first Fisk Black writers' conference (that was a major early meeting of Black Arts and established Black literary criticism) and the Hopkins conference (that first brought derrida, lacan, barthes and company to the US) both in 1966... and the structuralist controversy appears in 1970 alongside Toni Cade's The Black Woman...
so i'm trying to think about Derrida's work alongside the work of Bambara and Spillers. just using Derrida to help elaborate particular points in their work. the deconstructive operation as he articulates it is a lot like Bambara's critical/political operation. what Bambara articulates as a choral opposition to 'solo-voice thinking' is what Derrida calls a 'grouped textual field,' and so forth. i think an elaboration of 'ungendering' in Spillers' work is enriched by Derrida's readings of geschlect & ontological difference.
it's all very anxiety-inducing, though, to try to elaborate the argument because i'm not sure what i'm doing with derrida. rather, what am i doing with derrida? the idea behind the project is that the entire project of critical theory, to the extent that there is a project, can only properly be understood as an effect of Black feminism.
but there's an inertia that subsumes Black feminism beneath critical theory. when i explain the project to editors and fellowship people, i'm supposed to (which is to say everyone has instructed me to) emphasize the (white) critical theory elements. and if i blow that smoke for the gatekeepers, i can go into the project itself and do what i really want to do.
is that really the case? do you ever get to write the book or article or dissertation you really want to write? it's hard because there are people who can read what i'm doing and what i want to do and get it and not want it compromised, only strengthened. but how many of those people are on editorial boards or are writing checks?
i'm afraid of what the project can be... but, then again... derrida says that invention is always the invention of the impossible, it is only by passing through the impossible that some thing is produced. and consider that alongside Nannie Burroughs' famous motto, 'we specialize in the wholly impossible,' as a crystallization of Black feminism as such.
but that's the essay i haven't really written yet. i need to figure out all the stuff i want to take from derrida and then figure out how it fits with and helps me elaborate what i've written about Bambara and Spillers (and what I still have left to write about them for this essay). i need to get my intersectionality essay up to snuff to submit to a journal in the meantime. and i'm terrified of that essay because, wouldn't you know it, the scholarship on intersectionality has exploded into a big ugly mess since i first drafted the paper.
and at some point everyone became an 'intersectional feminist'... i guess because if your feminism will be intersectional or it will be bullshit, and a whole lotta white people needed for their feminism to not be bullshit. so of course you start calling it 'intersectional' without, you know, changing the (bullshit) content of the white feminism.
who am i to judge, though? just a dusty old nerd trying to read (what is worthwhile in) derrida as a shadow cast by Black feminism.
[trundles off into the night to a chorus of fart sounds]
