Readings: Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother
Kyle Mays, “The Political Discourses of Black Indigeneity, And Why It Matters” (Blog)
Introduction to what we mean when we say “indigenous,” “native,” and “diaspora.” What epistemological traditions have shaped our thinking on what it means to be “native or part of a “diaspora”? Do the two term rely on each other for definitions? How? In what ways does our history of colonialism and slavery give rise to these two terms?
Class Begins:
This course is part of a larger “student movement” here at UCSC–the movement to get Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES) and other demands fulfilled.
What is Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES)?:
There has been a student movement for ethnic studies on campus for decades. UCSC for sometime was the only UC that did not have an iteration/version of Ethnic Studies specific curriculum and/or courses.
The latest iteration of the student movement gained momentum in 2011, amongst and against a U.C. budget crisis. A rally took place which then led to the takeover of the UCSC Ethnic Resource Centers. This action was not described as an occupation, for students asserted that the ERC was built for them to begin with. Students demanded to negotiate w/ Executive Vice Chancellor and made a list of demands. Students of color specifically held demands for an Ethnic Studies program. Other equally important demands included:
1)Expansion of the ethnic resources center beyond its current space
2)Creation of an ethnic studies department and major, a promise denied since 1981.
3) End to surveillance of student organizers
4) Participatory budget and institutional set-up of CRES with students, campus workers, and faculty
5) Disarming of campus police, with the ends to remove police from campus entirely
Furthermore, they demanded the realization of various issues and immediate implementation of various changes.
After undergrads took the ERC, they met amongst themselves regularly and created their own ethnic studies courses. Some grad students went to an Ethnic Studies conference in Riverside. They came back and wrote of their own proposal for a Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Department.
The movement had some wins. We have a major and minor and a professor we must share with the Feminist Studies department. And, very importantly, students got faculty to agree that all CRES program meetings are open to public so that community, students, and adjuncts can attend.
Now that we have a major, CRES still has some challenges. First, although students and faculty got a program, they didn’t get a department. With ethnic studies it’s not just about the classes. There’s a need for fundamental change in the way the university is run. We got a program, so there’s an idea of CRES on campus, but there is no stable actual support in resources as other “departments” have.
There are some important differences between a program and a department. For example, with a department we would have a department head, staff, and funding. With the program as we have it now, CRES has to share staff with Fem studies and HisCon, and this consequently means less time with students. There is no promise that the program will exist in the future. We have less stability. There needs to be a continuous struggle to achieve original list of demands. There has to be a continuous struggle that incorporates other things into CRES.
So it is important to stay involved and push towards desired changes.
CRES explores what it means to look at these studies as a system. We should ask ourselves what are the conditions that led to separate bodies of literature and institutional areas of study for Native American studies and African-American studies. What are the benefits of addressing these separately? Together? Can we begin to deconstruct the categories as separate?
Overall, Critical Ethnic Studies is to be understood as an intellectual and political process, which focuses on the dynamics and interrelatedness of colonialism, settler-colonialism, and imperialism as economic and political structures that produce nations and peoples as subjects.
Our Reading for the Day: Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman is a professor of English at Columbia University and author. She explores the idea of social death and anti-Blackness, and the material and discursive systems of slavery and subjection.
Hartman’s first book was Scenes of Subjection.
-It delineates the slave as a liminal subject. There is a paradox because the slave is
understood as both property and person. How is someone recognized as a person and as property simultaneously?
-Violence through slavery is productive. It produces the slave as socially dead, thereby producing the master and the social relations that anchor the slave as both property and person.
Black gender is also produced through violence. For example, black femininity has been produced through rape and the ability of the slave woman to reproduce more slaves.
Therefore, if one is to discuss the concept of “freedom” in the United States, the reality is you can’t talk about freedom without talking about slavery and racial and gendered violence.
Hartman on “freedom” (1997, 116) – “the texture of freedom is laden with the vestiges of slavery and abstract equality is utterly enmeshed in the narrative of black subjugation.”
We must be precise when talking about what type of slavery.
Chattel (slavery) OED definition: property, goods, capital, or a moveable possession, any possession of property other than real estate of a free holder.
Orlando Patterson wrote an influential book on slavery titled Slavery and Social Death.
-It explores and argues that slavery was more than a material / property relation, what slavery means and meant in terms of ideology, as well as how slavery is produced and is anchored in violence
-Slavery is more than just slaves as property.
-Slave master acts as a parasite.
-A slave was condemned to be a socially dead subject.
-He also argues that slavery is understood as a substitute for death. This comes from Hegel.
Hegel early 19th century philosopher. He wrote a philosophy of history
– History is a process over the struggle of ideas
– Master/slave dialectic: Fight to the death between subjects leaves a series of outcomes, most notably, both die in the process or one wins and the other loses.
– Master wins/ slavery is substituted for death. In other words, when one human can overpower another, but chooses not to kill him/her…so slaves live at the mercy of master. Patterson sees this substitution for death as key to understanding chattel slavery in the United States.
“Natal alienation” (important class concept)
-Natal alienation is the idea that slavery separates the slave from legitimate kin, one becomes isolated and detached. The slave may not have kin, no ancestors, no legitimate children, no genealogy, no heirs.
-Violence produces the slave as socially dead: isolated non-being.
Social death (important class concept): no existence at all, only that which is mediated by the master.
-We can’t talk about freedom unless we talk about slavery.
-We will be looking the relationship between being sovereign and being free in this course.
Lose Your Mother:
-Hartman’s second book is a memoir, but she makes theoretical arguments about the afterlife of slavery.
-It explores what happens when one wants to do archival research, but the people they research have no archives. This is to do archival research on slaves, particularly those who died during the “middle passage.”
-Her question is how do we learn from the dead when there is no way to revisit the past through official archives.
-There is a connection between slavery and capitalism.
– Hartman (p38) Explores the Language of ex-slaves ——->Emotions as integral to a sense of belonging as a mark of colonialism: nostalgia of a lost home/country/space of belonging —> attachment to Home —>sort of political promise : belonging -”Where do you want to go home to?”… Middle class African Americans engage in tourism to Ghana and stay in elite hotels and live above the people. Going “home” is never really the same.
-“Attachment to home”… Dystopia and utopia of Africa in chapter 1 Afrotopia.
Belonging-afrotopia dystopia/ utopia
Close Reading of Hartman “Lose Your Mother” (p28-30)
Explored the significance of the category “African American” while being aware of the transatlantic slave trade that produces the connection between disconnection a “past.”
–Thus it is a mistake to project a shared culture with those in Africa: although, this does reveal the complexities of an imagined community and how belonging may or may not be negotiated.
-Hartman is consistently referred to as an “Obruni” (stranger) in Ghana. We can read this through the lens of natal alienation.
-Where do we see diaspora in the text?
Radical black internationalism
Look at US Black intellectual expertise was used in postcolonial Ghana and the relationship between Ghana and the United States
-How else can we imagine a yearning to belong to particular spaces?
Hiraeth (Welsh term shared in class): longing for a homeland that one has never experienced- not rooted in the slave experience- just an expression
Brief Discussions of Borderlands and Gloria Anzaldua and what it means to belong to land: ancestors : cultural heritage : Mestiza– consciousness – and spirituality.
Questions to think about posed at the end of class?
-How can we imagine what “home” can mean to those displaced, throughout history and contemporaneously, while being mindful of the personal, cultural and institutional/structural forms of neo-colonialism, neoliberalism and imperialism?
-In thinking with Saidiya Hartman, how dangerous can a Afrotopia be? How are utopias and dystopias intricately bound to one another? Do utopias ever turn out as envisioned?
-What potential do claims of the diasporic to land reinforce, or not setter claims and entitlements to land as part of a greater settler/colonial logic?
-Is the US black dream of a black promise land in Africa a settler move? What similarities could it share with Zionism? Differences? Is this a relationship we’re willing to draw and if so, why?
Class ended with a discussion on: “The Political Discourses of Black indigeneity, and why it matters: intricacies of our position.”
Black Diasporas and Indigeneity 