#blacktheory

“Mary Prince was enslaved in Devonshire Parish, Bermuda by birth, born in 1788. In her narrative, she recounts how her Mistress one day asked her, “who had put freedom into my head.” Mary Prince responded: “to be free is very sweet.” She did not answer the posed question but responded to the path on and through which she already traversed: thinking, conceptualizing, and yes, living free even against the brutality and violence of enslavement. Her answer, her reply, was a non sequitur, a black non sequitur. Mike and Dorian were told, by Darren Wilson, to get the fuck on the sidewalk. Their response: “we’re almost where we’re going.” Mike and Dorian are in the tradition of black non sequiturs, a refusal to answer to disciplinary power. Their performance of the black non sequitur acknowledged the presence of, without ever submitting to, the authority of the nation-state vested in Wilson. And disciplinary power doesn’t know how to deal with these various modes of non-responses, these responses that disrupt normative function and form. Disciplinary power of the state would rather obliterate than allow for these various non-responses to violent encounter. And the non-response is as true for Dorian and Mike, as true for Mary Prince, as it is true of the various vigils and protests, teach-ins and meetings held in Ferguson. Paramilitary responses to such being in the world, such non sequiturs, have been found in the various attempts to kill us.”

Ashon Crawley, “Otherwise, Ferguson,” Interfictions Online (blog), October 2016, https://ift.tt/1zBMKS0

“There were several kinds of irony in being told by male, one-author, literary-critic types — acting as if they were the overlords of an archaic fiefdom called “the canon” — that working on the Caribbean was too “narrow.”“

Marlene Daut (×)