an invocation to remember

This is a place for me to work and work through things.

My intention is to use this space to think through some things, develop, and understand the constellations between my ideas related to my work.

By “work,” I mean my research interests as I pursue my PhD in African & African Diaspora Studies. The ever-expanding environs of which are (currently): Blackface minstrelsy, contemptible collectibles, kitsch, and the subversion of racial tropes. I want to consider these visual cultures in the context of the capitalist/colonial/imperial machine. I also think a lot about Caribbean nationalist identity and the temporal/spatial bounds of pan-liberation movements.

In other words, this is a place for me to imagine a room where Octavia Butler, Mickey Mouse, and Christina Sharpe all talk about time and place. This is where Toni Morrison and Cedric Robinson and M. Jacqui Alexander might meet us in the clearing and tell us about the rememory. This is where La Madama and Yemaya clean Aunt Jemima’s floors, first with fabuloso, then with florida water. This is where Celia Cruz, Pedro Albizu-Campos and Victoria Santa-Cruz read to each other what Yunior De Las Casas said about fuku.

Finally, the diaspora was born on the Middle Passage; Blackness, ahead of its time, has always been a networked, dematerialized and de-territorialized culture. Digital landscapes foster connections between the scattered Black diaspora. This space is a digital Mojuba.

Mojuba: an expansive memory refusing to be housed in any single place, bound by the limits of time, enclosed within the outlines of a map, encased in the physicality of the body, or imprisoned as exhibit in a museum. A refusal that takes its inheritance from the Crossing, which earlier prophets had been forced to undertake from the overcrowded passageways in a place called Goree, the door of no return, still packed centuries later with the scent of jostled grief so thick that no passage of human time could absorb it. [M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred, (Durham & London: Duke University Press, 2005), 288]