Our Meet resumed after a long summer off. We met at the decidedly superior central branch of the Brooklyn Public Library to watch Mimi Onuoha’s fantastic talk and then discuss it along with the excellent piece by Christina Sharpe.
What We Read/ Watched:
[vimeo 233011125 w=640 h=360]
Eyeo 2017 – Mimi Onuoha from Eyeo Festival on Vimeo.
What Was Discussed/ Came Up For Us:
The Middletown Studies / “Middletown represents everyone as long as everyone is not represented.”
The Averaged American: Surveys, Citizens, and the Making of a Mass Public by Sarah Igo
The Politics of Memory (podcast episode on radical archives from the 60s to the present)
Archive That, Comrade! Left Legacies and the Counter Culture of Remembrance by Phil Cohen
“Sometimes there is a difference between the work you want to do and the work people will pay you for.” – Mimi Onuoha (PREACH!!)
Mimi’s National Geographic Pathways Project
Whose Knowledge? is a global campaign to center the knowledge of marginalized communities (the majority of the world) on the internet.
W. E. B. Du Bois’s Modernist Data Visualizations of Black Life (THIS IS GREAT, CLICK ON IT!!)
What is opportunity in the wake of something? What does it mean to defend the dead?
What is the debt that is owed to black people? (How) can any black person “owe a debt” to society?
What does it mean to “get over” slavery when slavery itself is not over?
Slavery and Social Death by Orlando Patterson
What is the relationship between care and indebtedness? Does a child owe a mother?
The Wages for Housework Movement
Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
[youtube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc]
“The loss of indigenous name/land provides a metaphor of displacement for other human and cultural features and relation….Kinship loses meaning since it can be invaded at any given moment by the property relations.” – “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” by Hortense Spillers