Prof. Walcott returning us to psychoanalysis and Fanon and visuality.

Lewis Gordon on Fanon.

How a turn to theorizing global blackness was not engaging Caribbean thinkers

And Prof. Walcott's turn to Kamau Brathwaite.

Slave narratives never described the middle passage.

Capture from and arrival into mentioned, but not the journey.

Prof Walcott assembled works that wrote about the middle passage

(too many names for me to grasp right now, a rich archive)

("at a certain point "psychoanalysis broke down for me"

it does for all of us!
all of us!)

(and, yes, Anne Cheng and David Eng and Chris Lane and Tim Dean and others working through Lacan made psychoanalysis do other things

for a little bit)

What goes missing in Black diasporic discourse?

The question of the sea is important.

(I'm paraphrasing.)

(I've found the sea so very difficult to think about and with, so glad Prof. Walcott is doing this work)

(the persistence of bodies of water

the ocean
the sea
the lake
the stream
the creek

to which I'd add
the flash flood
the drought)

"Bodies of water join Africa and its diaspora back together in deeply profound ways."

thinking of the place of the aesthetic in this talk and thinking

what it enables
how it enables it

Lwando Scott moving to Koleka Putuma's "Water"

(I love this poem so much)

Lwando pointing to Ethiopian workers in Lebanon, as ways to think through Rinaldo's liquid and liquidation, the inextricability of water and capital in thinking blackness.

Sibongile: "I'm going to be frank"

self-making and world-making

(this is going very fast

can't tweet

will try to listen)

(this is going way too fast

I can't follow

I hope the paper response will be uploaded at some point)

"if we keep playing with the metaphor of monumentality . . . and the history of the bleached monument, it kind of begs the question of whether or not the only existence one can have is whiteness"

(I've paraphrased)

Prof. Walcott on a set of tropes that have run their course.

Yet.

There are other questions to be asked. Questions we have yet to engage more consistently.

Prof. Walcott keeps returning to Paule Marshall's Praisesong for the Widow.

"Walker's monumentality is stuck in a representational gutter, and no longer crosses into the kind of conversations it pretends/attemps to have"

(paraphrased)

"I can't remember the second question"

I never remember the second question.

second question: the relationship between the Black Aquatic and climate change

Drawing on Wynter, "climate change begins with the capture of Black people to the Americas, to where landscapes are changed by new plants"

(paraphrased)

On climate change: "how the sea is now a territory for colonization and exploitation"

Now Lwando on climate change:

brings up drought in the Eastern Cape and in Cape Town

climate change is not an abstraction

Prof. Walcott on the place of comparative seas and oceans.

Being very generous.

"other oceans and other seas are often researched as a counter to the Atlantic

and that's a particular kind of problem"

yes, I find it very troubling and dangerous

Yes.

Blackness sutures Africa and the Diaspora, as I keep saying. And we can't get to it without that 1492 moment.

Which is a globalizing moment.

Three works:

Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother

M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!

Dionne Brand, At the Full and Change of the Moon

(Prof. Walcott is generous.

Me? I know the British moved from enslaving people in the Americas, as did the French and Portuguese and Dutch, to colonizing Africans, and they brought EVERYTHING with them: the knowledge, the cruelty, the hierarchies, the forms of administration)

Prof. Walcott on suppressed cosmologies, ways we are estranged from the ocean

thinking with Earl Lovelace's Salt and Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eater

Glad to see how Prof. Walcott keeps returning to Prof. Eve Tuck and Prof. Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, to think with Indigenous thinkers on settler colonialism, to suture Black and Indigenous thinking, at the place of land and water

(see Tiffany Lethabo King's The Black Shoals)

Should have added Prof.

Prof. Tiffany Lethabo King

character limits!)

"I try to play with repetition in my writing and editors always try to edit it out, and I don't fight them."

EDITORS TRY TO REMOVE MY REPETITION AND I FIGHT THEM! I FIGHT THEM ALL THE TIME!

DON'T TOUCH MY REPETITION!

"repetition also speaks to something about the Caribbean that I know"

"there's a way that Caribbean thinkers get transformed in Black studies into Caribbean thinkers and something else . . .

their Caribeanness slips away—Glissant, Wynter, Hall, Brathwaite")

paraphrased

Yes.

Very. Much. So.

There's a reason I keep repeating I'm from Nairobi in my work.

Whew!

Whew!

Whew!

Whew!

(someone needs to get on that ADOS and AP link

but I've promised to be good and know my lane)

"I see a certain limit to how far I can roll with them and the typology of the figure of blackness and the figure of the slave"

"ethnocriticsm and the ethno-cultural track both from Wynter"

Prof. Walcott bringing in ENTANGLEMENTS

the ENTANGLEMENTS of the Black Aquatic

Waters and bodies of water don't only mark trauma.

They also offer something else.

Something mapped in aesthetic works.

"We are more than those who suffer and carry trauma in our histories and bodies and relations and imaginations."

I HAVE PARAPHRASED SO HARD!