Suchergebnisse

In early 1787, as American vessels flooded the Gold Coast with rum and as the French worked to extend their coastal position, the Cape Coast Castle governor Thomas Price, reported that the Fante, England's coastal allies, 'are too politic a people, and too well acquainted with their own interests, ever to wish to confine their trade to one nation'. Price's summation of the issues affecting Anglo-Fante relations on the late eighteenth-century Gold Coast (modern Ghana) provides the foundation for this article. This article contributes to West African coastal historiography in that it examines the relationship between the Gold Coast and the Atlantic World through the trans-Atlantic slave trade. The article expands upon this foundation by narrowing the focus to one Gold Coast trade/administrative enclave. It examines the enclave during a period of change, the 1770s to the early 1800s that culminated in radical reconstruction of coastal relations. The article utilises the Fetu city of Cape Coast, also the administrative centre for England's Company of Merchants Trading to Africa (hereafter CMTA), to examine the relationship between Atlantic (external) and coastal (internal) factors within an African trade enclave. To accomplish this, it eliminates the dichotomy that exists between exploring general coastal trends within a diverse coastal region. This raises a question concerning the consequence of these general trends upon diverse states, cultures and peoples. Do the general trends affect each group similarly or differently and, if so, why? The focus upon one Gold Coast enclave expands our understanding of the consequences caused by the interaction of Atlantic and coastal factors.

When Hortense Spillers speaks of 'the hieroglyphics of the flesh', she closes in on the lethally generative coincidence between racialized violence and symbolic production. Reading backward from her essay's last words, in which she incites an emergent praxis of naming, this study of 'Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe' moves with attention to the unsettling of figure and ground that Spillers's writing induces. In doing so, I draw out her insights into theoretical abstraction's complicity in extracting value from colonial slavery's dispossessing mark on black flesh. Kazimir Malevich's Black Square models this dynamic, insofar as the dereliction of those who are epidermally marked grounds, in eclipse, the freedom of ostensibly non-racial abstraction. For Spillers, a corresponding differential between the figural and literal becomes a site of intervention for discomposing grammars that codify asymmetrical laws of use, such that the forcible inscription of non-whites serves instrumentally as raw material for the predication of 'Human' meaning. Spillers's disruption of the tropological offers an occasion for working through theory's 'death' as a problematic re-centered on the intransigence of flesh to theoretical reflection; and, further, points the way to a feminist practice of reading, living, and dying that does not forsake racialised literality.

The Hawthorn Archive, named after the richly fabled tree, has long welcomed the participants in the various Euro-American social struggles against slavery, racial capitalism, imperialism, and authoritarian forms of order. The Archive is not a library or a research collection in the conventional sense but rather a disorganized and fugitive space for the development of a political consciousness of being indifferent to the deadly forms of power that characterize our society. Housed by the Archive are autonomous radicals, runaways, abolitionists, commoners, and dreamers who no longer live as obedient or merely resistant subjects. Gordon creatively uses the imaginary of the Archive to explore the utopian elements found in a variety of resistive and defiant activity in the past and in the present, zeroing in on Marxist critical theory and the black radical tradition. Fusing critical theory with creative writing in a historical context, The Hawthorn Archive represents voices from the utopian margins, where fact, fiction, theory, and image converge. In this workshop, participants are invited to respond and contribute to the Archive, with a text, image, little bit, concrete question mark, thread, or other fragment. The session will begin with a discussion of the collectively compiled materials, and then lead into an experimental writing workshop guided by a series of responsive prompts from the Hawthorn Archive's 'keeper' Avery Gordon. ; 'Illegible Escapes: Writing and Archiving with Avery Gordon', workshop presented at the lecture Avery Gordon, Haunted Futures: The Utopian Margins , ICI Berlin, 9 November 2021

Weathering is atmospheric, geological, temporal, transformative. It implies exposure to the elements and processes of wearing down, disintegration, or accrued patina. Weathering can also denote the ways in which subjects and objects resist and pass through storms and adversity. This volume contemplates weathering across many fields and disciplines; its contributions examine various surfaces, environments, scales, temporalities, and vulnerabilities. What does it mean to weather or withstand? Who or what is able to pass through safely? What is lost or gained in the process?