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journal of art HAUNT - 2018 : Cover Image: Andrea Welton Untitled | ink, acrylic, and pumice on canvas | 54x102” | 2018 HAUNT Journal of Art Issue 005 November 2018 TABLE OF CONTENTS Artwork: Portrait of a Super Predator Who We Never Taught to Cry | 5 Antoine Williams Comfort | Coverage Notes from the Editor-in-Chief | 6 Charisse Pearlina Weston Poetics Against Notes from the Managing Editor | 12 Linette Park A Natural History of Inequality | 17 Douglas Kearney Noord Street | 24 Frank Wilderson III Civil Rights | 25 Frank Wilderson III Artwork: Cheaper to Keep Her | 26 Cosmo Whyte The Blind Eye | 28 John Pluecker Future Dated Eulogy for the Carefree | 31 S. Erin Batiste In Conversation with Erin Christovale | 34 photos by Brian Forrest Artwork: Fiction Diptych (Drape no. 2) | 43 Regina Agu Pedagogy of Ridiculousness | 44 Prathna Lor acrylic and thread on skin | 36”x70” 2018 The Jacket | 47 Mali Collins-White a broken silence | 49 Traci-Ann Wint-Hayles Artwork: Portrait of a Super Predator Who Was Made to Believe She Was Cute to Be Dark | 54 Antoine Williams Eskimo (After Wiley) | 55 D.S. Marriott Essay on Demand | 58 Prathna Lor African Rainbow Lizard | 61 Terrance Hayes Portrait of a Super Predator Who We Never Taught To Cry | To Taught Never We Who of a Super Predator Portrait Contributor Biographies | 72 Antoine Williams Williams Antoine Portrait of a Super Predator Who We Never Taught to Cry Antoine Williams NOTES FROM THE EDITOR IN CHIEF Charisse Pearlina Weston COMFORT | COVERAGE I begin this meditation while sitting in the neighborhood of Roma Sur in Mexico City, Mexico. I arrived the day Andrés Manuel López Obrador (AMLO) was voted into office by a landslide. As I am writing this, I’ve been here only a week and half. However, I have already been forcefully struck by the ways in which this country’s complicated histories of resistance turn over on themselves again and again, alongside that of the agents of those histories. Individuals who wore failure and revolt as human embodiment in an oft unwavering rejection of foreclosed freedom. Individuals like Cipriano Ricardo Flores-Magón, a man who lived his life disrupting from the margins, from afar, and failed only to begin again from the beginning. I am also struck by the ways those histories still sit atop the consciousness of those living here now, like a fog, as if to say: “the work is never quite done, never finished,” especially when the past is always at risk of being romanticized, encapsulated in glass by the present like exotic flesh. If I were to attempt to speak through and alongside, not as, the past to the present, it might sound like poetry: if stripped of its juridical maskings if made un-split sutured yet with drives reconciled, you and yours the uninitiated, those ones among us in fragile possession of themselves yoking terror as kinship for their full enjoyment would live submerged without lungs to starve as you sink down with the ship eyes wide and starry weighted weighted finally weighted by a surprising suppression made forthright this sometimes of needing this sometimes of wanting HAUNT 6 the dull cracked burner of thirst an erosion of exterior terrains which relieves the unwavering adherence of your/my/our/own inside to the out. But what is apparent to me now and was even before arriving here in such a way to have very much motivated my wanting to themetize this issue on the question of the radical, is the ways histories of defiance, by being so readily subsumed into linear narratives of progress, can become the very forces that stifle generations that follow. For how can we conceive of resistance now when we define it from a then, a then in which its urgent need could not be concealed? And must it be so explosive here now, in a time when, to keep focus, one must navigate what I would will call the coverage of comfort? Maybe it’s because of this coverage that we need explicit resistance. Or, perhaps, in acknowledging the failures or missteps of past tactics that have brought us again to these questions, we might re-conceive the power found in small gestures like touching, writing, falling down and staying there—and deploy them as our new resistance, while also acknowledging the ways in which such provocations of “newness” are always already, in and of themselves, repetitions. this breach occurring is temporally catastrophic. this breach occurring is a Red colored Root so lowdown into the earth into a progress once felt in the heart as well as uttered in the mouth this breach occurring is a groveling servile and abject submission to a notion of freedom poured into the soil and enriched by blood. this breach occurring is a rain of fury the likes of which the world has already seen. this breach occurring promiscuously fell falls is pushed from memory so as to come again faintly as a forking path of convenience 7 HAUNT as a forking path of nausea deployed in hopes to render everlasting within this forlorn symbolic order the markers that your ancestors hunched their backs with sweated brows so as to sew, with a smile, their salvation onto the flesh of mine/our/own. And more importantly, if what we do must and always will be a repetition, how to take it—this second chance, this second time—and carry it, all the way to the limit when society is structured to give us enough comfort to forget? How to do this work when we buy into the fallacy that we can and should forget what’s at stake—or not see what’s at stake at all? How can we go beyond the borders of the historical and/ or the political in a meaningful way which allows for transformation when we are so invested in comfort, so much invested in our pursuit of a sustained happiness that receives its value from the very fact of its inherent capriciousness? These are hard questions with no easy, neat answers but we must cultivate some kind of practice towards, at minimum, an expansion of their depth and complexity. Because if we do not try and instead choose to rest in the overdetermination of these totalities as they are now, a state, as Derrida puts it, “contaminated by the events of language (...by the events of the mark),”1 we will be speaking more than acting, satiated by the temporary results of battles won and too blinded by this pleasure to see the war rages on, even in peacetime. For the comfort of coverage is being inside, it is being a part of. So what can we do when attempts to go beyond that positionality are obstructed by conceptions of outsideness which function to mask the fact that most of us are only ever really on the precipice : standing with one foot on either side of the threshold so as to enable a moving back to safety when the time is right. This contradiction, to me, is what Audre Lorde announced when she said “survival is not an academic skill” and “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women [and men] who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”2 1 Derrida, Jacques. Aporias. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1993 : 7. 2 Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider. Trumansburg, NY: The Crossing Press Feminist Series, 1984. HAUNT 8 recall and swallow. recall and swallow. for what good has come from reason, lost or found when in all your days and dreams and ends you remain everlasting in a deathly dash for a seat at the throne which you and yours, yourselves built from thorns poisoned ivy and quicksand. and upon which you and yours, yourselves refuse to now lay down your/my/our/own heads for execution. It is perhaps true, then, that through the small gestures mentioned above one may begin to address these problematics, but only by way of the simultaneous acknowledgement and embrace of the discomfort from which we’ve been trained to pull away. In other words, it is from not backing away from darkness, not backing away from upheaval and disquieting difference that we find a path through that does not necessarily emulate. This path could truly be a “repetition with a difference” tilting the fight in our favor by making, finally, visible to us that thing left there, by those before, for us to pick up.3 These comments should not be mistaken for an espousal of chaos as pleasure, but instead as a call for an understanding that our house (or at least the house in which we all have been made to dwell) has always been ablaze. Its foundation damaged beyond repair makes this the moment to tear it down, but for real this time. Equally important is the consideration that this call, this demand for starting over has gone out many times before. So why do we never follow through? What or who gains from holding on to this edifice of oppression and violence and how have we melded ourselves in its grooves? An integral part of all of our responses must be the acceptance that “any claim that we represent a progressive social force while our activities are directly subsidized by the engines of inequality can only contribute to the justification of that inequality.”4 3 Snead, James A.

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