Discourse that allows us to express a wide range of ideas, opinions, and analysis that can be used as an opportunity to critically examine and observe what our experience means to us beyond the given social/cultural contexts and norms that are provided us.
Black Scare / Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States by Charisse Burden-Stelly University of Chicago Press, 2023
[Publication date: November 14, 2023]
A radical explication of the ways anti-Black racial oppression has infused the US government’s anti-communist repression.
In the early twentieth century, two panics emerged in the United
States. The Black Scare was rooted in white Americans’ fear of Black
Nationalism and dread at what social, economic, and political equality
of Black people might entail. The Red Scare, sparked by communist
uprisings abroad and subversion at home, established anticapitalism as a
force capable of infiltrating and disrupting the American order. In Black Scare / Red Scare,
Charisse Burden-Stelly meticulously outlines the conjoined nature of
these state-sanctioned panics, revealing how they unfolded together as
the United States pursued capitalist domination. Antiradical repression,
she shows, is inseparable from anti-Black oppression, and vice versa.
Beginning her account in 1917—the year of the Bolshevik Revolution, the
East St. Louis Race Riot, and the Espionage Act—Burden-Stelly traces
the long duration of these intertwined and mutually reinforcing
phenomena. She theorizes two bases of the Black Scare / Red Scare: US
Capitalist Racist Society, a racially hierarchical political economy
built on exploitative labor relationships, and Wall Street Imperialism,
the violent processes by which businesses and the US government
structured domestic and foreign policies to consolidate capital and
racial domination. In opposition, Radical Blackness embodied the
government’s fear of both Black insurrection and Red instigation. The
state’s actions and rhetoric therefore characterized Black
anticapitalists as foreign, alien, and undesirable. This reactionary
response led to an ideology that Burden-Stelly calls True Americanism,
the belief that the best things about America were absolutely not Red
and not Black, which were interchangeable threats.
Black Scare / Red Scare
illuminates the anticommunist nature of the US and its governance, but
also shines a light on a misunderstood tradition of struggle for Black
liberation. Burden-Stelly highlights the Black anticapitalist organizers
working within and alongside the international communist movement and
analyzes the ways the Black Scare/Red Scare reverberates through ongoing
suppression of Black radical activism today. Drawing on a range of
administrative, legal, and archival sources, Burden-Stelly incorporates
emancipatory ideas from several disciplines to uncover novel insights
into Black political minorities and their legacy.
REVIEWS:
“Burden-Stelly is not content with simply contributing to existing scholarship. She shakes things up. And Black Scare / Red Scare
hits with volcanic force, sweeping away the prevailing tendency to
underestimate the Black Marxist threat to racial capitalism and the
embedded anti-Blackness driving state repression. Burden-Stelly details
precisely how the ‘political economy of capitalist racism’ played a
decisive role in the super-exploitation and subjugation of the Black
working class, resulting in a protracted war on Black radical movements.
A powerful, pathbreaking work that not only reorients the long history
of anticommunism on Black liberation but moves the theory of racial
capitalism to an entirely new level.” -- Robin D. G. Kelley, author of
Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination
“Burden-Stelly is one of our most brilliant radical thinkers and scholars. In Black Scare / Red Scare
she recounts, reassesses, and reframes the historical relationship
between white supremacy and anti-communism. In light of growing racist
authoritarian movements today, the book could not be more timely.
Powerful and powerfully relevant.” -- Barbara Ransby, historian,
activist, and author of the award-winning Ella Baker and the Black
Freedom Movement
“Engaging various disciplines including Black studies and political theory, Black Scare / Red Scare is
a highly sophisticated and timely book. Beginning with the Bolshevik
Revolution and ending with contemporary federal campaigns aimed at
surveilling and quelling radical Black thought and activism,
Burden-Stelly’s deeply researched study presents the long history of two
overlapping panics: the Black Scare and Red Scare. A major contribution
to the field of African American history, Burden-Stelly brilliantly
illuminates how anti-Black and anticommunist sentiments unfolded as the
United States pursued capitalist and global dominance. Black Scare / Red Scare is
certain to transform our understanding of the origins of anti-Black
radicalism and histories of Black activists’ collective fight for
liberation and struggle against ‘US Capitalist Racist Society.’” --
LaShawn D. Harris, Michigan State University
“This book is truly one of a kind. The subject matter is timely, and its analysis could not be more original. Black Scare / Red Scare will
spark widespread debate and continue to be read for many years to
come.” -- Jonathan Fenderson, Washington University in St. Louis
“Black Scare / Red Scare
is a historical and theoretical tour de force. Burden-Stelly explains
how the development of anti-Communism and the suppression of Black
radicalism became intertwined central governing priorities that
bolstered US capitalism from the First World War to the Cold War and
beyond. The eventual construction by government officials of what
Burden-Stelly calls ‘True Americanism’ legitimized business interests’
racialized profiteering by condemning its critics as radical alien
outsiders. These trends reshaped all branches and levels of government.
No previous book has analyzed the dizzying array of committees and
organizations whose purpose was to quash democratic opponents to US
capitalism: the FBI and its Dies Committee, paid informants and
infiltrators, and the courts all dedicated untold resources to smashing
threats to US racial hierarchy and the economic inequality it fostered. Black Scare / Red Scare
ultimately reveals a countersubversive political tradition, developed
over the past century, that connects to current attacks on ‘Black
Identity Extremism’ and ‘wokeism’ as distractions from actual fascist
developments in American society. All scholars and activists interested
in antiracism and democracy in America need to engage with this
pathbreaking book.” -- Erik Gellman, University of North Carolina at
Chapel Hill
“With Black Scare / Red Scare,
Burden-Stelly enters the pantheon of Black radical thinkers, past and
present. Analyzing phenomena ranging from the structural location of
Blackness to the resurgence of fascism, Black Scare / Red Scare demystifies
the processes that subjugate Black lives and sustain economic
domination. Do not miss this meticulous and uncompromising study.” --
Vaughn Rasberry, Stanford University
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Charisse Burden-Stelly is associate professor of African American studies at Wayne State University. She is the coauthor of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History and the coeditor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writing and Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State, a collection of essays by Percy C. Hintzen.
Death's Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power by Sampada Aranke Duke University Press, 2023
[Publication date: February 24, 2023]
In Death’s Futurity
Sampada Aranke examines the importance of representations of death to
Black liberation. Aranke analyzes posters, photographs, journalism, and
films that focus on the murders of Black Panther Party members Lil’
Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton, and George Jackson to construct a visual
history of the 1960s and 1970s Black Power era. She shows how Black
radicals used these murders to engage in political action that imagined
Black futurity from the position of death. Photographs of Hutton that
appeared on flyers and posters called attention to the condition of his
death while the 1971 documentary The Murder of Fred Hampton
enabled the consideration of Hampton’s afterlife through visual
meditations on his murder. Printmaking and political posters surrounding
Jackson’s murder marked the transition from Black Power to the prison
abolition movement in ways that highlighted the relationship between
surveillance, policing, incarceration, and anti-Black violence. By
foregrounding the photographed, collaged, filmed, and drawn Black body,
Aranke demonstrates that corporeality and corpses are crucial to the
efforts to shape visions of a Black future free from white supremacy.
REVIEWS:
"The
author’s close readings of the role of visual artifacts in generating
consciousness, agency, and a sense of futurity about a better future in
their audiences is both compelling and original, and her engaging prose
makes it a pleasure to read."―Simon Stow, European Journal of American Studies
"Aranke
provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how the Black
Panther Party for Self-Defense mobilized a range of visual media,
objects, and tactics. . . . In the process, Aranke not only reorients
our understanding of 'the political' in art of the 1960s, but also puts
tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such as 'the curatorial,'
which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean protecting priceless
artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather involves preserving
the bloodstained objects left in [Fred] Hampton’s apartment in order to
make visible the anti-Black violence that enables the coherence of
American 'civil society" and the ongoing expansion of the carceral state
undergirding it."―Artforum
“Sampada
Aranke’s writing represents what is most exciting about contemporary
cultural inquiry situated at the intersection of Black studies and
art-critical praxis. In this provocative and bracing book she enriches
our political and philosophical understanding of the Panthers’ ambitions
and takes up the challenge laid down by Black radical thinkers to
consider forms of death as revolutionary acts, all while reframing our
assumptions about the work of writers who have become foundational to
the project of critical theory in the United States. This rich and
highly compelling contribution to Black studies will be of immense
interest to students and scholars across the humanities.” -- Huey
Copeland, author of ― Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
Sampada Aranke is Assistant Professor of Art History, Theory, and Criticism at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Professor Huey Copeland’s conversation is featured on the cover of the October issue of Artforum.
October 2, 2023
Let's Ride: Art history after Black studies
by Huey Copeland, Sampada Aranke, and Faye R. Gleisser
October 2023 |Artforum
BLACK
STUDIES—as modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary
thinkers such as Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya
Hartman, Kara Keeling, Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred
Moten, and Frank B. Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to
critical thought in the art world and the academy, with especially
urgent implications for art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s
notions of objecthood and objectivity shift in light of transatlantic
slavery’s production of persons as property? How must art-historical
methods, given their origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist
epistemologies, be retooled to engage with complexities of Black life
and expression that are designed to evade capture? What becomes of art
history as an intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and
liberatory horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both
the discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This
year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address
these questions.
Doug Lawler/East Bay Media Collective, This Monster, 1971, screen print on paper, 20 × 30".
BLACK STUDIES—as
modeled by the transdisciplinary work of contemporary thinkers such as
Kimberlé Crenshaw, Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Saidiya Hartman, Kara Keeling,
Katherine McKittrick, Christina Sharpe, Fred Moten, and Frank B.
Wilderson III—has grown increasingly central to critical thought in the
art world and the academy, with especially urgent implications for
art-historical praxis: How do the discipline’s notions of objecthood and
objectivity shift in light of transatlantic slavery’s production of
persons as property? How must art-historical methods, given their
origins in racist, sexist, and colonialist epistemologies, be retooled
to engage with complexities of Black life and expression that are
designed to evade capture? What becomes of art history as an
intellectual enterprise when the ethical imperatives and liberatory
horizons of Black studies occasion an interrogation of both the
discipline’s objects of analysis and its political imaginaries? This
year marks the publication of two groundbreaking books that address
these questions.
In Death’s Futurity: The Visual Life of Black Power,
Sampada Aranke provides a lyrical and materially nuanced account of how
the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense mobilized a range of visual
media, objects, and tactics to commemorate the tragic deaths and extend
the revolutionary lives of three assassinated party leaders: Fred
Hampton Jr., Bobby Hutton, and George Jackson. In the process, Aranke
not only reorients our understanding of “the political” in art of the
1960s, but also puts tremendous pressure on art-historical conceits such
as “the curatorial,” which in the Panthers’ hands does not mean
protecting priceless artworks within neoliberal institutions, but rather
involves preserving the bloodstained objects left in Hampton’s
apartment in order to make visible the anti-Black violence that enables
the coherence of American “civil society” and the ongoing expansion of
the carceral state undergirding it.
A similar set of investments animates Faye R. Gleisser’s Risk Work: Making Art and Guerrilla Tactics in Punitive America, 1967–1987,
which takes a complementary tack by homing in on the social
reproduction of white supremacy and its import for art-historical
inquiry. Organized around a diverse cast of Conceptual and performance
artists and collectives, the book tells the riveting story of how
US-based practitioners working in the shadow of the third-world
guerrilla adapted themselves and their tactics to a nation increasingly
reliant upon the prison-industrial complex, among other modes of
racialized enclosure. Key to these efforts, and to Gleisser’s framing of
them, is the notion of “punitive literacy,” which she defines as “the
cumulative knowledge that allows for self-protective mobility in a penal
society. It is a calculus of risk based on the body, spaces, and
networks one inhabits. . . . Broadly speaking, punitive literacy is the
ability to assess how one’s body will, or will not be, subjected to
state violence.”
Taken together, these books’ foregrounding of Black radical
histories and hermeneutics helps to model the discipline’s
intersectional paths forward and enrich the African-American art
historian’s methodological toolbox. Just as important, they set a
rigorous standard for further work that moves beyond opportunistic
engagements with African/diasporic art, whether produced by art
historians with purposefully delimited understandings of Black culture
or by cultural theorists with only a glancing familiarity with the
aesthetic and the racialized historicity of its conventions. Here,
contributing editor Huey Copeland, author of Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America,
speaks with fellow travelers Aranke and Gleisser about their books as
well as about the impact of Black studies on their scholarly and
pedagogical practices, both present and future.
HUEY COPELAND: First off, I want to thank you both
for these important interventions, which radically reframe our
understanding of American visual culture post-1967—both its objects and
histories as well as its figures and structural considerations. I think
this is in no small part because of your projects’ sustained engagements
with Black studies, which is still a relatively rare phenomenon within
art history.
I had the privilege of seeing these books at earlier stages, and I
wonder how, in bringing them into the world, you thought about
negotiating both the demands of the art-historical discipline—the
container in which we operate, departmentally and discursively—and the
ethical imperatives of Black study, in Stefano Harney and Fred Moten’s
sense, which push against and want to rupture precisely those kinds of
disciplinary frameworks?
FAYE R. GLEISSER: Thank you for this invitation to
be in conversation, Huey. It’s really such an honor. I’m thinking about
how the art-historical discipline traditionally assigns value to
arguments. I’m thinking about how these arguments are expected to be
steeped in visual evidence that relies on formal analysis and
classifications that are observable. The discipline uses comparative
frameworks, and it relies on chronology and linearity.
All these demands of art history are at odds with artists’ tactics
that subvert institutional power and thwart legibility and knowability.
And, really, the Black radical tradition has been absolutely necessary
to thinking through the work of artists’ tactics. I think, in some ways,
what has been most useful in this challenge to art history is that
Black studies provides methods for thinking about the relationship
between vulnerability and power and how it’s maintained and normalized
under white-supremacist conditions that manufacture and legalize
gendered and sexualized anti-Black precarity.
From Black studies, I’ve learned that the call is not to become an
expert on these subjects but to literally find ways to survive and
collectively dismantle these structures. This approach has been critical
to helping me understand that art history doesn’t merely tell stories
about artists and art. It’s really through its own structural insistence
on chronology, comparison, and classification that it reproduces
anti-Black and colonial power structures.
These power structures have been scrutinized in necessary ways by
scholars like Fred Moten, who show us that it’s not just looking but
looking away—that it’s a particular kind of looking within the “hegemony
of the visual”—or Saidiya Hartman’s work on the violence of empathy
under conditions and afterlives of slavery. Or the work and writing on
Black livingness that Katherine McKittrick names as the“praxis” of Black
subjectivity.
This arena of scholarship has been a real toolbox for thinking about
the politics of risk-taking and its racialized and gendered conditions.
And that’s really what I’ve been trying to do in this study of “risk
work,” which wants to think about more than just the romanticization of
individualism and radicalism that we typically see in art history.
Because there’s the celebration of the Artist with a capital A
and the individual and their agency, but there’s also this story about
the racialized, gendered work of taking risks that’s completely left out
of a white-centering art history, which reconsolidates power in the
stories we tell about resistance and intervention because it leaves
white supremacy and anti-Blackness unaddressed.
HC: Word.
SAMPADA ARANKE: I’m so grateful to Huey for
convening us. It’s a dream come true for many reasons, but key among
them is what Faye just dropped. I’m sitting here like, Finally.
It’s just this renewed energy, Faye, to hear you talk about the
discipline of art history from a place of seeing where it recapitulates
the same violence that some of us are aiming to undo. We’re a generation
of scholars who have had the joys of coming up from within that
critique. That was our starting point, working with people who
trailblazed that. Huey, you’re among them. Krista [Thompson]is among
them. Fred and Frank Wilderson are among them. Saidiya. We are able to
start our work where we do only because of the work that you all have
done to create an environment for scholars like us to be able to say
brilliant things like what Faye just dropped unequivocally and without
any fear or trepidation.
I feel like I can exhale, like, OK, we’re within our people.
Which is such a big part of the work of Black studies: It forms and
informs where you’re able to start a sentence. I call myself a bad art
historian. I don’t have an art-history degree. My degree is in
performance studies, so I feel like I’m on this strange path. And it’s
because of people like Huey, who are like, “Come, find shelter in this
section of the discipline that is a refuge for people invested in the
things that aesthetics can make outside the burdens of market value,
outside the teleological inheritance that Faye’s talking about, the
construction of agency along racial vectors that don’t fit most of us.”
For me, the other piece that is so generative for the project—and
just for the way that I think about what art can do—is how Blackness
helps us rethink the intersection between objects and objecthood. Not
only as a site of the production of extreme violence in the way that
[Frantz] Fanon describes, but also in the uncanny way in which the
aesthetic object is somehow constructed with Blackness always already in
mind. There’s this fork in the road: You can—and we should—think about
the extreme violence this mandates. And it also creates the opportunity
to think about Blackness as an aesthetic formation that produces other
forms that are both attached and unattached to a fixed or essential
subjectivity.
Another way to put it is Blackness as a field, Blackness as a
formation that almost turns upside down whiteness as the standard. That
is a project, or maybe a language, that Black studies has given us and
that I don’t take for granted. It still makes heads turn if you’re
coming from a space so beautifully detailed, an idea of the aesthetic or
an idea of objecthood that is bound to this white-supremacist ideal.
HC: It’s just amazing to hear both of you. What your
accounts speak to, I think, is a fundamental shift in the temporal
relation between Black studies and art history. I usually think of art
history as belated in relation to Black studies—and to be honest, to
many other things, methodologically! Folks like Moten and Hartman have
been taken up in a broad way within the discipline only since, say,
2020, when they began to have more “mainstream” visibility and acclaim.
There are many folks now trying to wrap their heads around those
discourses, and sometimes it happens to be in ways that at best
misconstrue and at worst instrumentalize them as opposed to y’all, who
have been deeply engaged with the work from the get-go. To me, that
speaks to a different orientation in terms of what one wants the
discipline to do because it has a much broader horizon of ethical and
political commitments.
That brings me to a second question. Your books share a lot in terms
of period and praxis—particularly their move away from singular artistic
actors—and I think, importantly, your insistence on framing the
American project as a carceral one, particularly as articulated for both
of you by the work of Ruth Wilson Gilmore. But your interventions do
differ in emphasis. To put it in baldly reductive terms, in Death’s Futurity,
the project, it seems, is to understand the aesthetics of Black Panther
politics as a revolutionary response to state violence. While Risk Work,
we could say, reframes Conceptual and performance artists in relation
to the ongoing production and reproduction of that same violence.
I’m hoping that you each might speak about how the aesthetic, the
political, and their complex relation get recast in these books and
about the implications for future studies not only of this period but of
American art and contemporary art more broadly.
SA: Faye, I can’t wait to dig into this with you, because I feel like what you’re helping me do, in the aftermath of Death’s Futurity,
is reconfigure the impact of the carceral in retrospect.I was so
focused on the book being a microhistory. There are so many books on the
Panthers. I just wanted this to be a trailer that I could hitch as a
little addendum to something like Leigh Raiford’s Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare [2011] or [Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin Jr.’s] Black Against Empire [2013].
One thing that I was really moved by when doing research is the way
that the visual has always been constituted within the logic of the
political. And because of that, the idea that the aesthetic is something
that can be unbounded from the political imperatives of the mandate to
be Black and live while there is an ongoing war against you—that,
somehow, an aesthetic thing would be extra or abundant in relation to
that—was completely false, (a), but (b), it’s also a misunderstanding of
the political, which always mandates the formation of an aesthetic
wing, whether that’s ideological or material or visual. It’s always
already constituted within the logic of what it means to live in a world
that is constantly out to kill you.
One of the things that really struck me was the way that documentary
photography and documentary film were the technological apparatuses by
which these aesthetic objects formed. That’s not because drawing or
painting wasn’t happening. It’s because, within the logic of
photographic technology, there is this relationship to capture, to
fugitivity, to the ways that the history of the photographic is
always dependent on anti-Black violence. It’s impossible for us to
untether the things that apparatus makes, the way that apparatus gets
perfected, for example, through Louis Agassiz and J. T. Zealy’s use of
enslaved peoples in their experiments in daguerreotype, through these
histories of extreme violence. It’s impossible for us to think about
what those things produced, their aesthetic accumulations, as somehow
separate from the politics from which they form. And because of that,
Black radicals of the time turn to those very mechanisms, with their
roots in anti-Black violence, to generate another form of resistance,
rebellion, revolutionary existence.
I was committed to this idea of one story and one object, but it was
so incredible to read your project, Faye, and all the multiplicities
that it created for me in terms of recasting the entanglements of
politics and aesthetics in the very same moment that my book is trying
to unpack.
“It’s really through
art history’s structural insistence on chronology, comparison, and
classification that it reproduces anti-Black and colonial power
structures.” —Faye R. Gleiss
FRG: That gives me so much to think about, and I
loved reading your book. One of the reasons I’m excited to teach it is
because it models this intentional closeness with following the
mutations of images or the different contexts in which they accrue these
important instances of resistance. But you really have to be looking
for it, and your transparency about letting the objects lead, not
covering up those gaps or those “imperfections” of the chronologies—what
that’s teaching us is really powerful.
In my project, one of the things that came out was this desire to
stay close to the centrality of the carceral within art history, how art
history as a form reproduces carcerality through the ways that the
discipline hasn’t adequately engaged with surveillance, violence, and
force. It’s not ancillary to performance art, to Conceptual art,
especially the artists I’m looking at, like Adrian Piper, Tehching
Hsieh, and Pope.L and the groups PESTS, the Guerrilla Girls, and Asco,
among others. They are anticipating arrest or the presence of police,
and not as an afterthought. But that’s often how it’s talked about in
art history when the police are mentioned anecdotally: “An artist did
this thing in public, and then a police officer showed up and halted the
piece.” That’s unsatisfactory; it discounts how artists differently
anticipated that there would be police there and choreographed their
movement and its documentation accordingly. Pope.L, for example, crawled
through Times Square, a small space that was nevertheless one of the
most heavily policed areas in all of New York City at that time.
Not looking away from the carceral is what allowed the naming of
“punitive literacy” to come through in the book. In the United States,
we have a lot of conversations around literacy. We talk about media
literacy, financial literacy, cultural literacy, legal literacy. But
becoming aware of how punitive relations shape our decisions to move, to
act—how each of us is differently positioned, differently vulnerable to
state-sanctioned violence—is a literacy, too. Artists who are
thinking about form and aesthetics are great theorists of punitive
literacy because within the guerrilla tactics they deploy in public,
they are not only anticipating arrest but simultaneously theorizing how
mobility, visuality, and materiality align within this reality.
Harry Gamboa Jr., First Supper (After a Major Riot), 1974, C-print, dimensions variable. From left: Patssi Valdez, Humberto Sandoval, Willie Herrón III, and Glugio “Gronk” Nicandro.
I think of when Harry Gamboa Jr., one of the cofounders of Asco,
spoke about anticipating police presence in East Los Angeles and needing
to enact and document performance-based works on the street very
quickly. He said you just have to be in a place for “a thousandth of a
second” to take the photograph. I’m interested in how an image like First Supper (After a Major Riot)
[1974] materializes this kind of temporality of being there and
surviving punitiveness. And how the punitive temporality that informs
Asco’s occupation of space is linked directly and dialectically to the
timing of what Chris Burden is doing in the same city but in the gallery
district, with a piece like Deadman [1972], where he feels
comfortable lighting flares on the street and expecting them to last the
full fifteen minutes he needs to perform. And he is shocked when police
officers come and actually arrest him on charges of a false emergency
being called in.
Those temporalities, those literacies, and punitive relations are
linked. They are a form within the work. It’s not an ancillary
aesthetic. And that’s also a politics of enablement, one that reveals,
for example, Burden’s relationship as a white man to assumed protections
under the law and the underpolicing that occurs in predominantly white,
upper-class, English-speaking areas and neighborhoods. The book is
thinking, too, about how artists’ punitive literacies are specific to
the places where these artworks are happening in the United States, yet
this is also a much larger story because policing is global. The United
States plays a massive part in the manufacture of weaponry and the
training and enhancement of militarized police violence worldwide. These
relations shape art and its interpretation but have not yet been
adequately named. We’re seeing a necessary, emergent critical vocabulary
change art history now—thanks in no small part to methods of inquiry
rooted in Black studies—with concepts like Nicole Fleetwood’s “carceral
aesthetics” and Simone Browne’s “dark sousveillance.”
“Within the logic of photographic technology, there is this relationship to capture, to fugitivity, to the ways that the history of the photographic is always dependent on anti-Black violence.” —Sampada Aranke
SA: Hearing you talk about Pope.L, Gamboa, and
Burden so brilliantly teases out how we think about the artist as a
social formation. So often, we have to turn to the biographical to make
our case.But your work posits a different matrix of formation, which is
organized specifically around these structural realities like place,
policing, the temporal registers of whatever medium is at play. And then
it allows us to make the case for the way that the artist’s subject is
formed precisely, maybe even primarily, through their relationship to
the carceral versus the way that the carceral is embedded in their life
story.
There’s a way, for example, that with the Pope.L crawl pieces, people
turn to his relationship to being houseless, or his relationship to
poverty, and the proximity of his life story to those systems. It is
directional: from the singular person out. But you help us think about
the structures that give rise to moments of artistic subjectivity
instead of the ways that artistic subjectivity points to structures. I’m
blown away that you’re able to get us to a nonessential, maybe even anti-essential notion of artistic subjectivity.
HC: Both projects are so smart in how they emphasize
these fields of relation and how different actors can and cannot move
within them—clearly, the lessons of performance studies have served you
both well! Faye, you have this notion of interlacement, which I
found incredibly compelling.I would love it if y’all could speak about
the process of constructing a method that allows you to produce these
narratives, which have different frames of reference and different
understandings of what the individual artistic actor is and is not in
relation to a wider constellation of possibilities.
FRG: I love writing, but it was really a struggle to
write this book. Along the way, I got feedback saying that this wasn’t
“art history.” I would get excited, like, “Why isn’t it art
history? What are the narratives in place that suggest that we should
limit our understanding of knowledge production and artistic practice?”
But on the other hand, there is something about the book format that
feels antagonistic to the story of artists’ tactics. Especially an
art-history book, which is often based on these expectations of “high
quality” visual documentation.Some of the images I’m working with don’t
exist. Or they’re black-and-white, they’re grainy; they get swept up in
the complications of collectives working together around possession and
authorship and property rights.So the writing of the book just continued
to reveal these larger power structures in which it is trapped or
conditioned.
One of the ways that the writing of the book came together was
through curation, and one of the earliest experiments with this question
of literacy as a constructed condition was through a show called “The
Making of a Fugitive” at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago in 2016.
An inspiration for the show was a 1970 cover image of Life
magazine that features Angela Davis; the title of the story was “The
Making of a Fugitive.” I remember noticing how, in this dramatically
cropped, blown-up image of her on the cover, another story in the
magazine hovers nearby: “The Sculpture of Matisse.” And just sitting and
looking at this cover, I realized I was seeing a composite image, an
object lesson in the entanglement of power and form, wherein the making of a fugitive and the making
of sculpture are cultural processes codetermined by racialized,
gendered, and sexualized notions of innocence, beauty, and deviance.
That cover, to me, is a case study in what you were saying earlier, Sam:
The aesthetic and the political are deeply imbricated.
Cover of Life September 11, 1970 PHOTO: Angela Davis
In that exhibition, I was thinking alongside artists like Glenn Ligon
and Burden, Hương Ngô and Xaviera Simmons, looking at how we learn to
know what fugitivity is or how that form takes shape in art history, in a
museum collection. The writing is in some ways belated to the story
that needs to be told. I don’t think necessarily that the book format is
the best one for a history of guerrilla tactics, but I see the
importance of writing it down on at the scale of a book alongside
exhibitions and documentaries. It feels like a very cinematic story
because it’s in motion, so I’ve struggled with the writing of it, and I
think the interlacement is thinking about artists relationally but also
the sites of knowledge production: archives, museums, police
headquarters. Thinking about how art-history archives are also archives
of policing and about how police archives are archives of art history.
Interlacement was a strategy for thinking about those interconnections,
those entanglements, as consistently as possible.
“The story of
American art is a story of racial formation, and if you’re not willing
to tell the story in that way or see it on its own terms, that’s not my
problem.” —Sampada Aranke
SA: My first response to the question of method is
the question of urgency, which I think is actually related to Faye. When
you conduct this kind of research, be it archival or institutional,
you’re returning to scenes that arose out of necessity.In the immediate
aftermath of the murders of Bobby Hutton, Fred Hampton [Jr.], and George
Jackson, there was this sense of a state of emergency. We were at war,
and so we needed to create opportunities and occasions for the visual to
help us fight that war.Which is already a different temporal register
than conventions of art history, which assume that art comes after the
war it’s about because it takes five years to make that painting about a
war.
When you’re a historian decades out looking at this particular
moment, if you’re doing it with a certain kind of attention, that
urgency makes its way through. Then there’s the second layer, writing
with that same urgency, by which I don’t mean doing it quickly, but
holding on—in method or in voice or in form—to the fact that the scenes
you’re turning to were responsive, that they had a certain political or
ethical weight.
When it came to thinking about method, I also tried to think about
how to tell the story through the object instead of through the
ecosystem from which the object might appear for a few sentences or a
few sections and then trail back off. I tried to hold on to the same
urgency with which those objects were created, by letting the objects be
the thing that propelled the narrative or that guided me through these
other arenas. I wanted to tell the story of the object.
HC: I wanted to ask about the archive. Your frames
of address are radically interdisciplinary, engaging the best of all
these different fields, but you have really different means of expanding
and critiquing the archive—both its violence and its silences, which,
of course, have been a major preoccupation of scholars like Saidiya and
Krista. How have your approaches to the archive evolved over the course
of research and writing in relation to the specific material, political,
and ethical concerns unique to each study and in the stories you wanted
to tell about them?
FRG: I’ll start by saying that I really was in awe,
Sam, of your work with the archive and your ability to name your own
struggle with what you called “archival chasing,” this desire to find
these stories, and then describing coming up short and really
understanding that that is a big part of the story. Early on in this research, I wanted to write about Asco’s Decoy Gang War Victim,
a significant media intervention in the ’70s, during which the artists
created a staged image of gang-war aftermath that ended up on the local
news as an authentic depiction of violence. It’s usually dated 1974. I
wanted to find the footage of the news program that the artists had
disrupted with their media hoax. So I went to UCLA, to the Film &
Television Archive, and searched news programs from that year, but I
couldn’t find the footage. What I found instead, as I continued to
research this piece in exhibition catalogues, articles, and the artists’
archival papers, was that Decoy has been given many different dates: ’74, ’75, ’76, ’78. It jumps around, and initially I was like, How do I write about this act of sabotage if I can’t find it? Then I realized that’s what’s guerrilla. It’s fugitive within the archive, and what I’m seeing is the duration of its own misinformation as it’s moving around.
That was a turning point in my thinking about what the archives are
when it comes to the story of guerrilla tactics in art. The other
turning point was when I began to understand the long-lasting
significance of when artists solicit arrest and when they evade arrest.
For example, Pope.L evaded arrest in Times Square Crawl [1978]
because crawling isn’t technically illegal. Because, as he says, “I
wasn’t loitering, I was actually moving.” That is punitive literacy.
He’s moving in a particular way that draws attention to these structures
of legality around mobility. But his evasion of arrest is a present
absence in legal discourse, one that impacts future court rulings: His non-arrest
is not covered in studies of art and law. Instead, you start to see
arrests of white men like Burden and Jean Toche, who are differently
enabled and protected by police, become fundamental case studies for the
emergent art law that is developing out of Stanford [University] in the
mid-to-late 1970s. Those instances of punitive encounter become
standards that set legal precedents around risk-taking in art, and
they’re almost entirely shaped by the arrests and acquittals of white
men.
I now have different questions about what is actually being
constituted in art archives. I have interviewed artists who have
recently evaded arrest while making performance art in public. The
book’s epilogue considers today’s expanding carceral environment, and it
became clear that I couldn’t include some of these examples. It was
important to avoid bringing renewed and potentially harmful legal
scrutiny to [these artists’] actions. That turns into another question
of just how much of art history or these archives is shaped by the
ability and necessity of people differently vulnerable to
state-sanctioned violence to evade the historical record. What is the
ethical imperative to talk about that shape in the archive, that shadow
archive of non-arrest and what it does by remaining illegible?
Sam, you do such an amazing job of staying with those moments of not
knowing. It’s so easy to retroactively think about what we know now—the
proof of [the illegal FBI project] COINTELPRO, for example. You keep us
in that moment of the archive, of exactly when and why the Black
Panthers needed to create evidence of the state-sanctioned murders
before this information was publicly accessible, and it’s really
incisive.
Bobby Seale and Bobby Hutton, detained by the Oakland Police Department while their guns are checked, Oakland, CA, 1967. Photo: Ron Riesterer.
SA: I feel so seen right now. I too, Faye, have
images and stories that didn’t appear in the book because they weren’t
mine to tell. Kara Keeling in The Witch’s Flight [2007] I think
embodies this spirit so beautifully. Reading that book taught me the
importance of trying not to betray the very thing that you want to live.
Certain archives were not meant to live; some objects in the book
were meant to die. They were just supposed to be conduits to make the
revolution happen, and then we wouldn’t need political posters or
documentary films like this. They were cheaply made because they were
popular objects and they were supposed to be accessible and democratic
with a lowercase d, and they were stuffed in folders and pinned
on walls, and they weren’t archival pigment. For me, trying to approach
those objects in their livingness, in the ways that they were meant to
be used, was fundamental.
I think you and I have this in common, Faye. We keep talking about
artists. I’ve taught in art schools for ten years, and I want artists to
be able to use this book. And I hope that they use these objects to
make other histories so that there isn’t a unified consensus.
HC: I’m really interested in how these projects have
shifted your pedagogical practices, above all in terms of what it means
to narrate the story of American art or contemporary art. What does it
even mean to tell the story of American artists? Do we care about Robert
Smithson anymore? Or do we care about him because of Hotel Palenque [1969–72] instead of Spiral Jetty [1970]?
“We talk about
media literacy, financial literacy, cultural literacy, legal literacy.
But becoming aware of how punitive relations shape our decisions to
move, to act—how each of us is differently positioned, differently
vulnerable to state-sanctioned violence—is a literacy, too.” —Faye R. Gleisser
FRG: I really love this question about pedagogy. I
think of it in terms of the structures of art history, the
visual-analysis paper, the exhibition project, the chronologies, and the
comparisons that are the bedrock of the discipline, especially in these
introductory classes. I’ve been trying to rethink pedagogical exercises
that make sure we are having conversations in the classroom around
constructions of power through the stories we tell about art. Something
I’ve been implementing alongside visual-analysis assignments are
wonderment exercises, where I invite students to sit and ask questions
about artworks based on things they cannot know. To really show
that the practice of sitting with and asking questions about what you
don’t know is a skill, that it’s knowledge-producing, and that it could
be the basis of art or a research project.
I’ve also shifted away from relying on the exhibition project, where
we invite students to curate shows around a theme. Alongside that, I now
like to assign acquisition reports. It might sound boring to them at
first, but that’s the point: “If you think this is bureaucratic, that is
where power and knowledge are reconsolidated and normalized.” They’re
writing a proposal for why a museum should acquire work and what that
would do long-term. This makes them aware that these proposals are what
curators do at collecting institutions: They have to go in front of a
board of trustees. I’m trying to demystify the romanticized version of
art history and get them involved in recognizing how structures of
authority and whiteness are reinforced and the histories they come from.
The other, I think bigger takeaway for me pedagogically is that
teaching art history or American art or contemporary art is also about
teaching advocacy and collaboration. I want students to see that they
have a part to play right now in changing the way things are done and
that there are tactics at their disposal. Some of the really exciting
work has happened when I’ve understood my own internalizing of
noncompensation. I remember having teachers say, “Go interview an
artist. You’re a student, they’ll think it’s cute and they’ll talk to
you (for free).” But there’s no follow-up about payment or talking about
the ways that universities normalize noncompensation for artists and
how this model hides and exacerbates class, gender, and racial
hierarchies within economies of exchange. So I worked in my department
to create a fund so that students get in the practice of raising money
for artists. If they’re interviewing artists for one of their projects,
they compensate them, and this has been incredible, seeing students
understand that they are part of institutions, that universities are not
neutral, and that they can be advocates. We can have conversations
around these structures that normalize extractive power relations and
think differently about access and accountability.
I also rely on and teach the work of curators who are attuned to
these concerns, like Allison Glenn and her recent collaboration with Amy
Sherald in creating a coacquisition of the painting by Sherald of
Breonna Taylor. Shifting this idea of just one institution owning an
object, what it means to even think about coacquisition or to really
care for art objects and the lives of the people connected to them,
opens alternative possibilities. I also teach Thea Quiray Tagle’s work
on “relational curation.” Thea is centering the care of artists and
their trust and needs and prioritizing that over an exhibition schedule
or object maintenance.
Tehching Hsieh, Wanted by U.S. Immigration Service, 1978, printed paper, 11 × 8 1⁄2″.
SA: I wish I could take your class. When I teach
certain kinds of intros to American art, I basically teach it as an
intro to African American art. I always start with a lecture about the
Middle Passage, turning upside down this idea that the making of the
modern world is anything other than anti-Black at its core. If you start
from there, it allows students to self-select if they want to be in
that class, but it also clarifies certain stories in art history.
Suddenly, Surrealism doesn’t become something that’s so psychedelic or
about a flight of fancy. It becomes shaped by the horror of the
transatlantic slave trade: “If that is what constitutes the real, then
fuck.”
I’ve really been unabashed about this since writing the book: “I don’t tell the story in this way. I tell the story in this
way.” From there, I fill in everybody in relation to Black American
artists. Then maybe the story isn’t just Smithson; the story is Smithson
in the wake of Benjamin Patterson or, more directly, Smithson in
conjunction with Noah Purifoy or Thornton Dial. Those are the artists
who tell the dominant story, and then other stories are positioned in
relation to them.
That is absolutely an ideological argument I’m making, and I tell
students that outright. But for me, it’s also fundamentally about
naming, without fear, whiteness as an aesthetic formation and white
supremacy as a vector of power. Blackness is an aesthetic formation that
reflects something about white supremacy but is actually not primarily
about that. It’s a very simple thing, just flipping it around so I don’t
have to name the phenomenon of a certain story of American art as a
story about a white canon or a white Western canon or a white male
canon. It does that for me.
I’m disinterested in code-switching between being the African
Americanist in the department and then having to do the service of these
bigger classrooms and pretending to be a generalist. Instead, it’s just
like, “This is what I do. If you would love for me to do it in this
way, let’s ride.” The story of American art is a story of racial
formation, and if you’re not willing to tell the story in that way or
see it on its own terms, that’s not my problem.
Guerrilla Girls, You’re Seeing Less Than Half the Picture, 1989, screen print on paper, 16 7⁄8 × 22″.
HC: More and more, for the students I’m
encountering, intersectionality is the floor. If you can’t speak to that
analytic, they’re like, “Um . . . what are you talking about?” [Laughter.]
In closing, I want to ask, What is on the horizon for each of you?
How does what you’re working on now extend, redirect, radically depart
from, or build on the lessons you learned writing these books?
SA: Toward the end of my research, I started seeing
the works of Black American artists who weren’t directly a part of the
Black Panthers or weren’t even organizers in their own right but who
were making works that were responsive to the same kinds of political
events that the Panthers were responding to. Artists like Melvin Edwards
and Benny Andrews and Faith Ringgold. That cracked open a whole turn
that I’m hoping to take up in the second project, which is loosely
called “The Hammons Effect.” It’s not about David Hammons, really, but
about the ways that David Hammons presses on certain methodologies and
conventions of contemporary art history that help us reconfigure the
role of the Black American artist as we think about how to stage stories
in an exhibition setting.
It may or may not be a book. But as of now, that project will look at
artists, curators, and collectors who are impacted by methodological
turns that Hammons himself performs to help us assemble modes of
storytelling that fall out of some conventions. And, quite honestly,
forms of policing, to your point, Faye, that art history mandates that
we perform, which completely recapitulate the violences that we want to
undo when we tell stories about Black arts and Black aesthetics.
FRG: I can’t wait to learn more about that project. Coming out of Risk Work,
I’ve taken a turn toward embodiment that combines the sensorial, the
haptic, and its relationship to racial formation. This new project is
tentatively called “The Color of Hormones.” I’m going to be a research
fellow at the Kinsey Institute and a College Arts and Humanities
Institute research fellow at Indiana University in the fall, and I want
to spend time in the archive thinking about and looking for material
articulations of hormonal management and relations of hormones and
perception.
Part of this research extends the interest in Risk Work
around punitive literacy to the ongoing criminalizing of gestational
bodies and surveillance of hormonal management. I’m looking to better
understand the narration of hormones. Hormones, in the scientific sense,
were “discovered” in the early twentieth century, but the story of
hormones goes much farther back, obviously. I’m interested in the
history of trying to know what happens inside our bodies and how this
narration of hormones is also a history of how the desire to know has
been enacted within a society that largely prioritizes visual evidence
and documentation and criminalizes illegibility, nonlinearity, and
nonnormative desires. I’ve been really influenced by the work of artist
Elizabeth M. Claffey and her questions around hormonal consciousness and
radical kinship and am looking to her and a number of artists
investigating somatic knowledge.
This research is unfolding at a very particular moment. The Kinsey
Institute [originally the Kinsey Institute for Sex Research] has been
hosted at Indiana University since the late 1940s, and it’s always been
under assault by conservative and religious groups because of the way it
documents and celebrates and legitimizes human sexual desires. This
past spring, Indiana State legislators banned the use of state funds to
support the Kinsey. That’s become a very complicated event, with large
implications for the existence and role of the Kinsey, and I think that
will also be part of the story I’m tracing. It’s not just how hormones
have been narrativized but how the archives or the sites for their study
are increasingly policed.
HC: That’s fascinating! It’s interesting, too,
because one of the things you say toward the end of your introduction
is, “Look, this is a study that I realize is focused on people that are
cis-gendered and heteronormative.” It seems like this new project is
trying to sit more within that complicated space that wasn’t centered in
Risk Work because of how the artists’ own identities and identifications informed their actions.
FRG: Thank you for mentioning that. That is definitely something I’ve been thinking about. In a lot of ways, Risk Work
is about canon revision, and I think this next project is less invested
in the canon as a structure to navigate. I’m drawn to the work that’s
emerging in critical trans* and disability studies that is challenging
rights-based or representationally based politics or modes of
resistance. Hormones hopefully open up powerful modes of connection that
resist this ocular-centric needing to see, needing to know. Because
it’s impossible to adequately describe these internal hormonal
experiences, and yet there is a desire to do that. I’m drawn to this
tension.
HC: That so beautifully underlines how what animates
the work, for both of you and for us as readers, is that willingness to
sit with these impossible-to-narrate moments and to allow them to open
onto other sets of possibilities than the ones scripted for us. So thank you.
The artist’s compelling and predictive use of aphorisms has blurred the lines between political slogans, poetry and the language of advertising, offering a dark mirror for our meme-driven age.
by Megan O’Grady
October 19, 2020
New York Times
PHOTO/IMAGE:
Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Questions)” (1990/2018), on view at the
Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Elon
Schoenholz
Barbara Kruger (born January 26, 1945) is an American conceptual artist and collagist associated with The Pictures Generation. Most of her work consists of black-and-white photographs, overlaid with declarative captions, stated in white-on-red Futura Bold Oblique or Helvetica Ultra Condensed text. The phrases in her works often include pronouns such as "you", "your", "I", "we", and "they", addressing cultural constructions of power, identity, consumerism, and sexuality. Kruger lives and works in New York and Los Angeles. Kruger is a Distinguished Professor of New Genres at the UCLA School of the Arts and Architecture.
Books:
My Pretty Pony (1998), text by Stephen King, illustrations by Barbara Kruger, Library Fellows of the Whitney Museum of American Art
Barbara Kruger: 7 January to 28 January 1989 by Barbara Kruger, Mary Boone Gallery, 1989
Barbara Kruger: 5 January to 26 January 1991 by Barbara Kruger, 1991
Remote Control: Power, Cultures, and the World of Appearances by Barbara Kruger, 1994
Love for Sale by Kate Linker, 1996
Remaking History (Discussions in Contemporary Culture, No 4) by Barbara Kruger, 1998
Thinking of You, 1999 (The Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles)
Barbara Kruger by Angela Vettese, 2002
Money Talks by Barbara Kruger and Lisa Phillips, 2005
Barbara Kruger by Barbara Kruger, Rizzoli 2010
Film and video
"The Globe Shrinks". 2010
"Pleasure, Pain, Desire, Disgust". 1997
"Twelve". 2004
Bulls on Parade video clip, Rage Against the Machine (1996)
"Art in the Twenty-First Century". 2001
"Cinefile: Reel Women". 1995
"Picturing Barbara Kruger". 2015[51]
See also:
Art & Language
You Are Not Yourself, 1981 work by Kruger
Feminist art movement in the United States
Shepard Fairey
Emi Fontana
Jenny Holzer
Martin Firrell
Louise Lawler
Cindy Sherman
Mike Kelley
Joel Wachs, Los Angeles City Council member who helped Kruger get permission for an outdoor art piece
PHOTO/IMAGE: Barbara Kruger’s “Untitled (Questions)” (1990/2018), on view at the Geffen Contemporary at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. Elon Schoenholz
NOTE: This post can also now be found here at the Panopticon Review On Facebook
page.
"I'm for truth, no matter who tells it. I'm for justice, no matter who it's for or against."
W.E.B. DuBois (1868-1963)
"There is but one coward on earth, and that is the coward that dare not know."
Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)
"Change does not roll in on the wheels of inevitability, but comes through continuous struggle. And so we must straighten our backs and work for our freedom. A man can't ride you unless your back is bent. "
James Baldwin (1924-1987)
"Precisely at the point when you begin to develop a conscience you must find yourself at war with your society."
Aimé Césaire (1913-2008)
"A civilization that proves incapable of solving the problems it creates is a decadent civilization. A civilization that chooses to close its eyes to its most crucial problems is a stricken civilization. A civilization that uses its principles for trickery and deceit is a dying civilization."
Nina Simone (1933-2003)
"There's no other purpose, so far as I'm concerned, for us except to reflect the times, the situations around us and the things we're able to say through our art, the things that millions of people can't say. I think that's the function of an artist and, of course, those of us who are lucky leave a legacy so that when we're dead, we also live on. That's people like Billie Holiday and I hope that I will be that lucky, but meanwhile, the function, so far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times, whatever that might be."
Amilcar Cabral (1924-1973)
"Always bear in mind that the people are not fighting for ideas, for the things in anyone's head. They are fighting to live better and in peace, to see their lives go forward, to guarantee the future of their children ....Hide nothing from the masses of our people. Tell no lies. Expose lies whenever they are told. Mask no difficulties, mistakes, failures. Claim no easy victories..." .
Angela Davis (b. 1944)
"The idea of freedom is inspiring. But what does it mean? If you are free in a political sense but have no food, what's that? The freedom to starve?”
Duke Ellington (1899-1974)
“Jazz is the freest musical expression we have yet seen. To me, then, jazz means simply freedom of musical speech! And it is precisely because of this freedom that so many varied forms of jazz exist. The important thing to remember, however, is that not one of these forms represents jazz by itself. Jazz simply means the freedom to have many forms.”
Amiri Baraka (1934-2014)
"Thought is more important than art. To revere art and have no understanding of the process that forces it into existence, is finally not even to understand what art is."
Frederick Douglass (1817-1895)
"Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did and it never will. Find out just what any people will quietly submit to and you have found out the exact measure of injustice and wrong which will be imposed upon them, and these will continue till they are resisted with either words or blows, or both. The limits of tyrants are prescribed by the endurance of those whom they oppress.” --August 3, 1857
Cecil Taylor (1929-2018)
“Musical categories don’t mean anything unless we talk about the actual specific acts that people go through to make music, how one speaks, dances, dresses, moves, thinks, makes love...all these things. We begin with a sound and then say, what is the function of that sound, what is determining the procedures of that sound? Then we can talk about how it motivates or regenerates itself, and that’s where we have tradition.”
Ella Baker (1903-1986)
"Strong people don't need strong leaders"
Paul Robeson (1898-1976)
"The artist must take sides. He must elect to fight for freedom or for slavery. I have made my choice. I had no alternative."
John Coltrane (1926-1967)
"I want to be a force for real good. In other words, I know there are bad forces. I know that there are forces out here that bring suffering to others and misery to the world, but I want to be the opposite force. I want to be the force which is truly for good."
Miles Davis (1926-1991)
"Jazz is the big brother of Revolution. Revolution follows it around."
C.L.R. James (1901-1989)
"All development takes place by means of self-movement, not organization by external forces. It is within the organism itself (i.e. within the society) that there must be realized new motives, new possibilities."
Frantz Fanon (1925-1961)
"Now, political education means opening minds, awakening them, and allowing the birth of their intelligence as [Aime] Cesaire said, it is 'to invent souls.' To educate the masses politically does not mean, cannot mean, making a political speech. What it means is to try, relentlessly and passionately, to teach the masses that everything depends on them."
Edward Said (1935-2003)
“I take criticism so seriously as to believe that, even in the midst of a battle in which one is unmistakably on one side against another, there should be criticism, because there must be critical consciousness if there are to be issues, problems, values, even lives to be fought for."
Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937)
“The challenge of modernity is to live without illusions and without becoming disillusioned. There must be pessimism of the intellect and optimism of the will.”
Susan Sontag (1933-2004)
"Do stuff. Be clenched, curious. Not waiting for inspiration’s shove or society’s kiss on your forehead. Pay attention. It’s all about paying attention. Attention is vitality. It connects you with others. It makes you eager. Stay eager."
Kofi Natambu, editor of The Panopticon Review, is a writer, poet, cultural critic, and political journalist whose poetry, essays, criticism, reviews, and journalism have appeared in many literary magazines, journals, newspapers, and anthologies. He is the author of a biography MALCOLM X: His Life & Work (Alpha Books) and two books of poetry: THE MELODY NEVER STOPS (Past Tents Press) and INTERVALS (Post Aesthetic Press). He was the founder and editor of SOLID GROUND: A NEW WORLD JOURNAL, a national quarterly magazine of the arts, culture, and politics and the editor of a literary anthology NOSTALGIA FOR THE PRESENT (Post Aesthetic Press). Natambu has read his work throughout the country and given many lectures and workshops at academic and arts institutions. He has taught American literature, literary theory and criticism, cultural history and criticism, film studies, political science, creative writing, philosophy, critical theory, and music history and criticism (Jazz, Blues, R&B, Hip Hop) at many universities and colleges. He was also a curator in the Education Department of Detroit’s Museum of African American History. Born in Detroit, Michigan, Natambu currently lives in Berkeley, California with his wife Chuleenan.
