DOCSLIB.ORG

Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out Quantum Blackanics: Untimely Blackness, and Black Literature Out of Nowhere By John Murillo III B.A., University of California, Irvine Dissertation Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the Department of English at Brown University PROVIDENCE, RHODE ISLAND MAY 2016 © Copyright 2016 by John Murillo III This dissertation by John Murillo III is accepted in its present form By the Department of English as satisfying the Dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Drayton Nabers), Advisor Recommended to the Graduate Council Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Philip Gould), Reader Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Christina Sharpe), Reader Approved by the Graduate Council Date___________________ ___________________________________ (Peter Weber), Dean of the Graduate School iii VITA John Murillo III was born in Los Angeles, California. He earned a B.A. in English from the University of California, Irvine in June 2011. While at the UCI, Murillo worked as staff, and briefly as Co-Editor, of Umoja News Magazine, and held the position of Director of Communications for UCI’s Black Student Union. During his tenure at Brown University, Murillo taught literature and writing courses, and counseled and mentored students in and beyond the classroom. This carried over to his work as a WISE Mentor for Black students the University of California Irvine, beginning in 2015. iv ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS The ones I love deserve the first, last, and most gratitude. My mother and father, D’Juana and John, cared for and carried, and continue to care for and carry, me on the wings of their continued and boundless wisdom and experience, and their insatiable desire for a dreaming they do not name, but no doubt perform. My brothers, Joshua and Jeremiah, provide me the opportunity to judge my capacity to teach and to be taught; they, in their love and peculiarity—a peculiarity that drives us all to create—drove and drive me to aspire to blur the lines between student and teacher so that I might more carefully and imaginatively consider the words and worlds I sought to put down on paper. My aunt, Veritta, who, like my grandmother, Brenda, stands stalwart through sickness, faithful through trial, and not only embodies a relentless aspiration to heal and be healed, but also puts this aspiration into practice; healing becomes devotional, spiritual, and mobile, through her. And all of my family: their very being nurtures me, drives me, compels me to make and keep making time and space for my own thoughts, and so for them and all they have been and might be. To the love of my life, Chinyere Amobi, I express gratitude that cannot be made v legible in the grammar and language available to me; this is ultimately a failure. But for being refuge and rock, advisor and caregiver, for being my partner, closely journeying with me through the trauma and work of this program, for holding me, my hand, and my head, in the hold of this ship—for being all and more than I could ever need or dream of, I thank her. To Frank Wilderson, Jared Sexton, and Christina Sharpe who, from afar, offered valuable conceptual and philosophical insight into my work, into navigating the academy, into diving deeper and deeper into this oblivion of thought I’ve leapt into, and to never stop moving, writing, thinking, and caring, I offer my most sincere appreciation and thanks. To professors Ellen Rooney, Philip Gould, Deak Nabers, Daniel Kim, Rolland Murray and Stuart Burrows, I offer my thanks for the various iterations of practical insight and advice into my writing and into my career you provided at different points along this journey. To everyone and anyone who might have expressed, in any way, doubt or disbelief in my capacity to find something creative, imaginative, caring, brilliant, beautiful, and Black beyond the event horizon; to everyone who, in that same breath, revealed their unwillingness to take the imaginative and conceptual leap, let alone wish me well as I did so, I thank you for what became fuel to the flame of my drive and my expression, here, in this project, and beyond. And to God, in whom I have been faithful, flawed as my expression of that faith might have been at times; that faith has guided me beyond myself, beyond this work, beyond the imaginable, and into a kind of ceaseless, difficult, promising, unsettling, and vi loving project that, as I envision it, “can never really be done.” vii TABLE OF CONTENTS VITA .................................................................................................................................. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ................................................................................................ v TABLE OF CONTENTS ................................................................................................. viii INTRODUCTION: Turning to the Dark Side .................................................................... 1 CHAPTER 1: Black (in) Time - Untimely Blackness ...................................................... 10 CHAPTER 2: Untimely Wor(l)ds in the Key of Love ..................................................... 66 CHAPTER 3: From Out of Nowhere .............................................................................. 109 CHAPTER 4: Dark and Black Matter - The Gravity of Being Together ....................... 166 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 214 viii INTRODUCTION: Turning To The Dark Side Black “life” and “death” do not matter. This is the structural truth of the antiblack world, and this truth (or “fact”1) telegraphs an unethical, gratuitously violent antagonism between Black folk who “live” and “die,” and the antiblack world that sanctions, desires, and demands the meaninglessness of even those quotation marks.2 The most attentive and radical Black thought and action works to examine the forces that drive the antiblack world, and contend the destructive, terrorizing manifestations and effects of those forces as they position Blacks in space and time. My dissertation attempts to map these forces from a Black position through a careful examination of twentieth century Black literature. Specifically, I am guided by this set of questions: How do the forces that position Blacks in the space and time antiblack world affect the kind of (literary) creation we might produce? How might we engage Black (literary) creation? And what is at stake in both 1 Pace Frantz Fanon, this is an explicit reference to the fifth chapter of Black Skin, White Masks (1967), “The Fact of Blackness.” 2 Pace Hortense Spillers, this is a reference to “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” in which Spillers writes of the dereliction of the idea of “freedom” or “liberation” for Black flesh: “Even though the captive body/flesh has been ‘liberated,’ and no one need pretend that even the quotation marks do not matter, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show movement, as the human subject is ‘murdered’ over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise” (68). I carefully dissect this passage among other key passages from her groundbreaking text in chapter 1, but her work is integral to my thinking throughout and beyond the dissertation. 1 Black (literary) creation, and our engagements with it? “Living,” “dying “ and creating in the “afterlife of slavery,”3 the undying, haunting and structural subjection of Blacks that seals us into “crushing objecthood,” (Fanon, 82) is to “live,” “die” and create in relation to an antagonism that is temporal, spatial, and political-ontological in nature. As Dionne Brand writes in A Map to the Door of No Return, slavery violently disfigures time and space, creating a rift or “tear in the world…a rupture in history, a rupture in the quality of being [and] a physical rupture, a rupture of geography” (Brand, 4-5). Time and space shatter in slavery’s unending wake, such that slavery persists as an afterlife, framing and disfiguring the scenes of subjection4 we endure and to which we bear witness across time and space. My dissertation reads time and space in and through Black literature, and draws from Physics—from modern and emergent theories in quantum mechanics, astrophysics, and general relativity—to help develop a nuanced, unique approach that both merges my interests in Black Studies and theoretical physics, but also illuminates what I understand to be two, underthought— or uncritically thought of—fundamental features of being (time and space). On the one hand, it is as if time “shows no movement,” slavery’s persistence in “endless disguise” (e.g. see: footnote 3) throwing the idea of linear progress (read: temporal movement away from slavery) into violent disarray.5 On the other, it is as if all possible temporal movement and “all moments” in the antiblack world “somehow gesture 3 From Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, in which she writes: “This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Myth, Metatext, Continuity and Cataclysm in Dc Comics’ Crisis on Infinite Earths
    WORLDS WILL LIVE, WORLDS WILL DIE: MYTH, METATEXT, CONTINUITY AND CATACLYSM IN DC COMICS’ CRISIS ON INFINITE EARTHS Adam C. Murdough A Thesis Submitted to the Graduate College of Bowling Green State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of MASTER OF ARTS August 2006 Committee: Angela Nelson, Advisor Marilyn Motz Jeremy Wallach ii ABSTRACT Angela Nelson, Advisor In 1985-86, DC Comics launched an extensive campaign to revamp and revise its most important superhero characters for a new era. In many cases, this involved streamlining, retouching, or completely overhauling the characters’ fictional back-stories, while similarly renovating the shared fictional context in which their adventures take place, “the DC Universe.” To accomplish this act of revisionist history, DC resorted to a text-based performative gesture, Crisis on Infinite Earths. This thesis analyzes the impact of this singular text and the phenomena it inspired on the comic-book industry and the DC Comics fan community. The first chapter explains the nature and importance of the convention of “continuity” (i.e., intertextual diegetic storytelling, unfolding progressively over time) in superhero comics, identifying superhero fans’ attachment to continuity as a source of reading pleasure and cultural expressivity as the key factor informing the creation of the Crisis on Infinite Earths text. The second chapter consists of an eschatological reading of the text itself, in which it is argued that Crisis on Infinite Earths combines self-reflexive metafiction with the ideologically inflected symbolic language of apocalypse myth to provide DC Comics fans with a textual "rite of transition," to win their acceptance for DC’s mid-1980s project of self- rehistoricization and renewal.
    [Show full text]
  • Roots101art & Writing Activities
    Art & Writing Roots101Activities ART & WRITING ACTIVITIES 1 Roots-inspired mural by AIC students Speaker Box by Waring Elementary student "Annie's Tomorrow" by Annie Seng TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction 2 Roots Trading Cards 3 Warm-ups 6 Activity #1: Also Known As 12 Activity #2: Phrenology Portrait 14 Activity #3: Album Cover Design 16 Activity #4: Musical Invention 18 Activity #5: Speaker Boxes 20 Activity #6: Self-Portrait on Vinyl 22 ART & WRITING ACTIVITIES 1 Through The Roots Mural Project, Mural Arts honors INTRODUCTION homegrown hip hop trailblazers, cultural icons, and GRAMMY® Award winners, The Roots. From founders Tariq “Black Thought” Trotter’s and Ahmir “?uestlove” Thompson’s humble beginnings at the Philadelphia High School for Creative and Performing Arts (CAPA), to their double digit recorded albums and EPs, to an endless overseas touring schedule, and their current position as house band on “Late Night with Jimmy Fallon” on NBC, The Roots have influenced generations of artists locally, nationally, and globally. As Mural Arts continues to redefine muralism in the 21st century, this project was one of its most ambitious and far-reaching yet, including elements such as audio and video, city-wide engagement through paint days, a talkback lecture series, and a pop-up studio. Working alongside SEFG Entertainment LLC and other arts and culture partners, Mural Arts produced a larger-than-life mural to showcase the breadth of The Roots’ musical accomplishments and their place in the pantheon of Philadelphia’s rich musical history. The mural is located at 512 S. Broad Street on the wall of World Communications Charter School, not far from CAPA, where The Roots were founded.
    [Show full text]
  • Blast Off Broken Sword
    ALL FORMATS LIFTING THE LID ON VIDEO GAMES Broken Sword blast off Revolution’s fight Create a jetpack in for survival Unreal Engine 4 Issue 15 £3 wfmag.cc TEARAWAYS joyful nostalgia and comic adventure in knights and bikes UPGRADE TO LEGENDARY AG273QCX 2560x1440 A Call For Unionisation hat’s the first thing that comes to mind we’re going to get industry-wide change is collectively, when you think of the games industry by working together to make all companies improve. and its working conditions? So what does collective action look like? It’s workers W Is it something that benefits workers, getting together within their companies to figure out or is it something that benefits the companies? what they want their workplace to be like. It’s workers When I first started working in the games industry, AUSTIN within a region deciding what their slice of the games the way I was treated wasn’t often something I thought KELMORE industry should be like. And it’s game workers uniting about. I was making games and living the dream! Austin Kelmore is across the world to push for the games industry to But after twelve years in the industry and a lot of a programmer and become what we know it can be: an industry that horrible experiences, it’s now hard for me to stop the Chair of Game welcomes everyone, treats its workers well, and thinking about our industry’s working conditions. Workers Unite UK, allows us to make the games we all love. That’s what a a branch of the It’s not a surprise anymore when news comes out Independent Workers unionised games industry would look like.
    [Show full text]
  • The University of Chicago Objects of Veneration
    THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO OBJECTS OF VENERATION: MUSIC AND MATERIALITY IN THE COMPOSER-CULTS OF GERMANY AND AUSTRIA, 1870-1930 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE HUMANITIES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF MUSIC BY ABIGAIL FINE CHICAGO, ILLINOIS AUGUST 2017 © Copyright Abigail Fine 2017 All rights reserved ii TABLE OF CONTENTS LIST OF MUSICAL EXAMPLES.................................................................. v LIST OF FIGURES.......................................................................................... vi LIST OF TABLES............................................................................................ ix ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS............................................................................. x ABSTRACT....................................................................................................... xiii INTRODUCTION........................................................................................................ 1 CHAPTER 1: Beethoven’s Death and the Physiognomy of Late Style Introduction..................................................................................................... 41 Part I: Material Reception Beethoven’s (Death) Mask............................................................................. 50 The Cult of the Face........................................................................................ 67 Part II: Musical Reception Musical Physiognomies...............................................................................
    [Show full text]
  • Passing: Intersections of Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality
    Passing: Intersections of Race, Gender, Class and Sexuality Dana Christine Volk Dissertation submitted to the faculty of the Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy In ASPECT: Alliance for Social, Political, Ethical, and Cultural Thought Approved: David L. Brunsma, Committee Chair Paula M. Seniors Katrina M. Powell Disapproved: Gena E. Chandler-Smith May 17, 2017 Blacksburg, Virginia Keywords: passing, sexuality, gender, class, performativity, intersectionality Copyright 2017 Dana C. Volk Passing: Intersections of Race, Gender, Class, and Sexuality Dana C. Volk Abstract for scholarly and general audiences African American Literature engaged many social and racial issues that mainstream white America marginalized during the pre-civil, and post civil rights era through the use of rhetoric, setting, plot, narrative, and characterization. The use of passing fostered an outlet for many light- skinned men and women for inclusion. This trope also allowed for a closer investigation of the racial division in the United States. These issues included questions of the color line, or more specifically, how light-skinned men and women passed as white to obtain elevated economic and social status. Secondary issues in these earlier passing novels included gender and sexuality, raising questions as to whether these too existed as fixed identities in society. As such, the phenomenon of passing illustrates not just issues associated with the color line, but also social, economic, and gender structure within society. Human beings exist in a matrix, and as such, passing is not plausible if viewed solely as a process occurring within only one of these social constructs, but, rather, insists upon a viewpoint of an intersectional construct of social fluidity itself.
    [Show full text]
  • New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Fund Corporation
    NEW YORK STATE THOROUGHBRED BREEDING AND DEVELOPMENT FUND CORPORATION Report for the Year 2008 NEW YORK STATE THOROUGHBRED BREEDING AND DEVELOPMENT FUND CORPORATION SARATOGA SPA STATE PARK 19 ROOSEVELT DRIVE-SUITE 250 SARATOGA SPRINGS, NY 12866 Since 1973 PHONE (518) 580-0100 FAX (518) 580-0500 WEB SITE http://www.nybreds.com DIRECTORS EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR John D. Sabini, Chairman Martin G. Kinsella and Chairman of the NYS Racing & Wagering Board Patrick Hooker, Commissioner NYS Dept. Of Agriculture and Markets COMPTROLLER John A. Tesiero, Jr., Chairman William D. McCabe, Jr. NYS Racing Commission Harry D. Snyder, Commissioner REGISTRAR NYS Racing Commission Joseph G. McMahon, Member Barbara C. Devine Phillip Trowbridge, Member William B. Wilmot, DVM, Member Howard C. Nolan, Jr., Member WEBSITE & ADVERTISING Edward F. Kelly, Member COORDINATOR James Zito June 2009 To: The Honorable David A. Paterson and Members of the New York State Legislature As I present this annual report for 2008 on behalf of the New York State Thoroughbred Breeding and Development Fund Board of Directors, having just been installed as Chairman in the past month, I wish to reflect on the profound loss the New York racing community experienced in October 2008 with the passing of Lorraine Power Tharp, who so ably served the Fund as its Chairwoman. Her dedication to the Fund was consistent with her lifetime of tireless commitment to a variety of civic and professional organizations here in New York. She will long be remembered not only as a role model for women involved in the practice of law but also as a forceful advocate for the humane treatment of all animals.
    [Show full text]
  • Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen A
    Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen A dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the Requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality in the Graduate Division of the University of California, Berkeley Committee in charge: Professor Darieck Scott, Chair Professor Leigh Raiford Professor Juana María Rodríguez Professor Michael Cohen Summer 2016 Abstract Ordinary Failures: Toward a Diasporan Ethics by Ianna Hawkins Owen Doctor of Philosophy in African American Studies and the Designated Emphasis in Women, Gender, and Sexuality University of California, Berkeley Professor Darieck Scott, Chair In Ordinary Failures I develop a new conception of “diaspora” as the ordinary failure of recognitions and solidarities founded on ideological and ancestral ties. Informed by the queer studies turn toward negativity and the relational turn in African diaspora studies, my project examines the interventions of artists and writers of the diaspora who opt to recite intraracial failure (between blacks) in the face of their structurally overdetermined failure as minoritized subjects. I identify in textual and visual objects an engagement with the promise of intimacy attendant to the artist’s lived experience of diaspora and there I aim to expose the limits of diaspora discourse. My explorations of the failures of diaspora are aided by pushing on queer theories of negativity to speak to race. This project departs from traditional approaches to black failure such as the black mainstream’s condemnation or eschewal of black failure in favor of respectability politics and the black left’s redemption of failure through revisionist narratives of resistance.
    [Show full text]
  • The Ohio State University
    Intersections of History, Memory, and “Rememory:” A Comparative Study of Elmina Castle and Williamsburg Thesis Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University By Ashley Camille Bowden, B.A. Graduate Program in African American and African Studies The Ohio State University 2009 Thesis Committee: Dr. Walter Rucker, Advisor Dr. Leslie Alexander Dr. Ahmad Sikainga Copyright by Ashley Camille Bowden 2009 ABSTRACT The representation of freed and enslaved people of African descent at sites such as Elmina, Ghana, and Williamsburg, Virginia, are subject to much criticism and praise. “Founded” by the Portuguese in 1482 and later controlled by the Dutch, Elmina is distinguished as the first of its kind. Initially established as a trading center between Africans and Europeans, those interactions soon gave birth to Elmina as a dungeon for holding Africans as slaves for sale into slavery. Williamsburg, a living history museum, is identified as the second colonial capital following the Jamestown settlement. On the eve of the American Revolution its citizens were confronted with questions of freedom, independence, and bondage. While many white settlers fought for independence and freedom from England, they simultaneously embodied slavery and unequal treatment towards enslaved and free African Americans. Today, both Elmina and Williamsburg reflect historical spaces as memory of the past. This thesis explores the ways that contemporary historical interpreters depict Elmina and Williamsburg. Some of the goals of this thesis are to study and analyze the sites‟ contemporary flaws, the sources these flaws, the ways that the histories of these sites are packaged for guests, and to explore how the sites‟ guests are encouraged to re-interpret and identify with the trans-Atlantic slave trade and slavery.
    [Show full text]
  • Guide to the Papers of the Capri Community Film Society
    Capri Community Film Society Papers Guide to the Papers of the Capri Community Film Society Auburn University at Montgomery Archives and Special Collections © AUM Library Written By: Rickey Best & Jason Kneip Last Updated: 2/19/2008 TABLE OF CONTENTS Content Page # Collection Summary 2 Administrative Information 2 Restrictions 2-3 Index Terms 3 Agency History 3-4 1 of 64 Capri Community Film Society Papers Scope and Content 5 Arrangement 5-10 Inventory 10- Collection Summary Creator: Capri Community Film Society Title: Capri Community Film Society Papers Dates: 1983-present Quantity: 6 boxes; 6.0 cu. Ft. Identification: 92/2 Contact Information: AUM Library Archives & Special Collections P.O. Box 244023 Montgomery, AL 36124-4023 Ph: (334) 244-3213 Email: [email protected] Administrative Information Preferred Citation: Capri Community Film Society Papers, Auburn University Montgomery Library, Archives & Special Collections. Acquisition Information: The collection began with an initial transfer on September 19, 1991. A second donation occurred in February, 1995. Since then, regular donations of papers occur on a yearly basis. Processed By: Jermaine Carstarphen, Student Assistant & Rickey Best, Archivist/Special Collections Librarian (1993); Jason Kneip, Archives/Special Collections Librarian. Samantha McNeilly, Archives/Special Collections Assistant. 2 of 64 Capri Community Film Society Papers Restrictions Restrictions on access: Access to membership files is closed for 25 years from date of donation. Restrictions on usage: Researchers are responsible for addressing copyright issues on materials not in the public domain. Index Terms The material is indexed under the following headings in the Auburn University at Montgomery’s Library catalogs – online and offline.
    [Show full text]
  • In BLACK CLOCK, Alaska Quarterly Review, the Rattling Wall and Trop, and She Is Co-Organizer of the Griffith Park Storytelling Series
    BLACK CLOCK no. 20 SPRING/SUMMER 2015 2 EDITOR Steve Erickson SENIOR EDITOR Bruce Bauman MANAGING EDITOR Orli Low ASSISTANT MANAGING EDITOR Joe Milazzo PRODUCTION EDITOR Anne-Marie Kinney POETRY EDITOR Arielle Greenberg SENIOR ASSOCIATE EDITOR Emma Kemp ASSOCIATE EDITORS Lauren Artiles • Anna Cruze • Regine Darius • Mychal Schillaci • T.M. Semrad EDITORIAL ASSISTANTS Quinn Gancedo • Jonathan Goodnick • Lauren Schmidt Jasmine Stein • Daniel Warren • Jacqueline Young COMMUNICATIONS EDITOR Chrysanthe Tan SUBMISSIONS COORDINATOR Adriana Widdoes ROVING GENIUSES AND EDITORS-AT-LARGE Anthony Miller • Dwayne Moser • David L. Ulin ART DIRECTOR Ophelia Chong COVER PHOTO Tom Martinelli AD DIRECTOR Patrick Benjamin GUIDING LIGHT AND VISIONARY Gail Swanlund FOUNDING FATHER Jon Wagner Black Clock © 2015 California Institute of the Arts Black Clock: ISBN: 978-0-9836625-8-7 Black Clock is published semi-annually under cover of night by the MFA Creative Writing Program at the California Institute of the Arts, 24700 McBean Parkway, Valencia CA 91355 THANK YOU TO THE ROSENTHAL FAMILY FOUNDATION FOR ITS GENEROUS SUPPORT Issues can be purchased at blackclock.org Editorial email: [email protected] Distributed through Ingram, Ingram International, Bertrams, Gardners and Trust Media. Printed by Lightning Source 3 Norman Dubie The Doorbell as Fiction Howard Hampton Field Trips to Mars (Psychedelic Flashbacks, With Scones and Jam) Jon Savage The Third Eye Jerry Burgan with Alan Rifkin Wounds to Bind Kyra Simone Photo Album Ann Powers The Sound of Free Love Claire
    [Show full text]
  • VAGRANT RECORDS the Lndie to Watch
    VAGRANT RECORDS The lndie To Watch ,Get Up Kids Rocket From The Crypt Alkaline Trio Face To Face RPM The Detroit Music Fest Report 130.0******ALL FOR ADC 90198 LOUD ROCK Frederick Gier KUOR -REDLANDS Talkin' Dirty With Matt Zane No Motiv 5319 Honda Ave. Unit G Atascadero, CA 93422 HIP-HOP Two Decades of Tommy Boy WEEZER HOLDS DOWN el, RADIOHEAD DOMINATES TOP ADDS AIR TAKES CORE "Tommy's one of the most creative and versatile multi-instrumentalists of our generation." _BEN HARPER HINTO THE "Geggy Tah has a sleek, pointy groove, hitching the melody to one's psyche with the keen handiness of a hat pin." _BILLBOARD AT RADIO NOW RADIO: TYSON HALLER RETAIL: ON FEDDOR BILLY ZARRO 212-253-3154 310-288-2711 201-801-9267 www.virginrecords.com [email protected] [email protected] [email protected] 2001 VIrg. Records Amence. Inc. FEATURING "LAPDFINCE" PARENTAL ADVISORY IN SEARCH OF... EXPLICIT CONTENT %sr* Jeitetyr Co owe Eve« uuwEL. oles 6/18/2001 Issue 719 • Vol 68 • No 1 FEATURES 8 Vagrant Records: become one of the preeminent punk labels The Little Inclie That Could of the new decade. But thanks to a new dis- Boasting a roster that includes the likes of tribution deal with TVT, the label's sales are the Get Up Kids, Alkaline Trio and Rocket proving it to be the indie, punk or otherwise, From The Crypt, Vagrant Records has to watch in 2001. DEPARTMENTS 4 Essential 24 New World Our picks for the best new music of the week: An obit on Cameroonian music legend Mystic, Clem Snide, Destroyer, and Even Francis Bebay, the return of the Free Reed Johansen.
    [Show full text]
  • The Excessive Present of Abolition: the Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance
    iii The Excessive Present of Abolition: The Afterlife of Slavery in Law, Literature, and Performance A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School Of Cornell University In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy By Jesse Aaron Goldberg May 2018 iv © 2018 Jesse Aaron Goldberg v THE EXCESSIVE PRESENT OF ABOLITION: THE AFTERLIFE OF SLAVERY IN LAW, LITERATURE, AND PERFORMANCE Jesse Aaron Goldberg, Ph.D. Cornell University The Excessive Present of Abolition reframes timescales of black radical imaginaries, arguing that Black Atlantic literary and performative texts and traditions resist periodization into past, present, and future. Their temporalities create an excessive present, in which the past persists alongside a future that emerges concurrently through forms of daily practice. I intervene in debates in black studies scholarship between a pessimistic view that points backward, arguing that blackness is marked by social death, and an optimistic view that points forward, insisting that blackness exceeds slavery’s reach. Holding both views in tension, I illuminate the “excess” that undermines this binary. The law’s violence in its rendering of black bodies as fungible exceeds its capacity for justice, and yet blackness exceeds the reach of the law, never reducible to only the state of abjection conjured by the structuring power of white supremacy. I theorize the excessive present through literature and performance in contrast to legal discourse – notably the 1783 British case Gregson v Gilbert, which is striking because it records a massacre of 131 people as an insurance case, not a murder case. The 1781 Zong Massacre recurs through each of my chapters, via J.M.W.
    [Show full text]