a slow archive of black study
a djones project
South High School - Youngstown, OH
“blackness is not only what we study
but how we study.”
“a slow archive of black study” moves between theory and practice to apply a liquid blackness praxis: blackness is not only what we study but how we study. To study blackness as practice and practice blackness as study, this theoretical and creative digging in the crates is an archive in motion; a gathering of, with, and for one another—remixing, rewriting, rewinding, reiterating, reforming, and reshaping in its liquidity. Resisting. At stake is the disruption of the institutional infrastructure of intellectual, creative, and social life. Studying. A slow archive of black study practices to a sociality that cares for blackness as it is being, seeing, and being seen.
the mixtape
“A Slow Archive of Black Study: The Mixtape” approaches blackness as practice through critical and creative engagement, imagining my dissertation as a mixtape, organized as a series of tracks. Inspired by my late father’s mixtape-making practice, I follow a mixtape methodology of theory, practice, curation, and black life that creates something new, engaging objects as albums, or recognized wholes not intended to be fully accounted for. Inherently archival and fugitive, the slow archive that emerges through a mixtape methodology is also a practice of black study.
a slow archive
I inhabit Elissa Blount Moorhead’s articulation of a slow archive as something that grows with you. When Blount Moorhead named the archive as slow, she was referring to her home, her family, and the archive and archival practice of their black lives. Her articulation gave language to the archive of my black life. A slow archive provides an account of material and social black life as well as systems of knowledge production that refuse the expectations of what would be called institutionally legitimate organization. Slowness, a mode of enacting blackness as practice, complicates institutional logics. How might a slow archive practice towards abolition and exodus?
black study
Black Studies, the academic discipline, the institutional acquisition performs under institutional constraints at the expense of knowledge production while centering the voices of heterosexual men. This creates a paradox of academic anti-intellectualism. Alternatively, black study is thinking away from institutional requirements. I often ask myself, “how do I say this without getting in trouble?” Then I tell myself, “I’m already in trouble.” The more I remind myself of this, the less time I spend being antagonized about the possibility of an antiblackness that is already present. I am more heavily invested in refusing whiteness than I am in critiquing it. As I see it, black study rejects the practice of whiteness.
care
Care is my tick. I cannot help this; it simply is how I am wired. But I do not care to exhaust the notion of care through deep textual analysis or extensive literature review. I am more curious about how care grounds my practice whether I am aware, yet-to-be aware, never-to-be aware of the origins of such thought. At the same time, I am inspired to place language around my experiences, my creative output, and my being in and with the world around me so that I may express myself more precisely, more specifically.
The impact of “urban nu-sense” on its place and moment in time (particularly in Bowling Green, OH from 2010 to 2012) can’t be fully accounted for. We did not ask for receipts to reimburse for per diems. There was no per diem. All you can eat
The resources of the institution provided an opportunity to study with and against the institution. It wasn’t solely the university’s doing, but at the same time, the university couldn’t have done it alone. Students, hungry for study, gave life to cross-cultural community engagement, inviting “urban nu-sense” into study and allowing “urban nu-sense” to take them away to study some more.
Here rests an archive of “urban nu-sense,” to highlight where it has been and chart its development towards its present-future.
All images courtesy of the artist and can’t be used without permission.