Quote Stash

We can disagree and still love each other unless your disagreement is rooted in my oppression and denial of my humanity and right to exist. – James Baldwin

Theory is always a detour on the way to somewhere more important. – Stuart Hall

There is no such thing as a single-issue struggle because we do not live single-issue lives. – Audre Lorde, Learning from the 60s

If metaphors are employed in the social sciences as a detour from or supplement to empirical explanation, their use in literary, aesthetic, or cultural works operates rather differently. While the former use of metaphor expresses a faith in representation to denote fixed, unchanging truths, aesthetic metaphors often thematize the impossibility of static reference and mark themselves as incomplete, in excess of what can be contained by representation. To the extent that a metaphor expresses a “closed” operation, it suppresses the nonequivalence between the signifier and what it represents, contributing to misrecognition of the social relations under globalization. To the contrary, other uses of metaphor may create an “open” relation, drawing the reader, viewer, or audience into the incommensurability of the figure and its allusion. In this process, incompletion or impasse implicates us in the conditions within which figuration and its exegeses occur. – Lisa Lowe

Beauty is not a luxury; rather it is a way of creating possibility in the space of enclosure, a radical art of subsistence, an embrace of our terribleness, a transfiguration of the given. It is a will to adorn, a proclivity for the baroque, and the love of too much. – Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Queerness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. Queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing. Often we can glimpse the worlds proposed and promised by queerness in the realm of the aesthetic. The aesthetic, especially the queer aesthetic, frequently contains blueprints and schemata of a forward-dawning futurity. Both the ornamental and the quotidian can contain a map of the utopia that is queerness. Turning to the aesthetic in the case of queerness is nothing like an escape from the social realm, insofar as queer aesthetics map future social relations. Queerness is also a performative because it is not simply a being but a doing for and toward the future. Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world. – José Esteban Muñoz, Cruising Utopia

And here I give my last injunction: to give up smoking and give up the idea, the commitment to the politically pure. The future belongs to the impure. The future belongs to those who are ready to take in a bit of the other, as well as being what they themselves are. After all, it is because their history and ours is so deeply and profoundly and inextricably intertwined that racism exists. For otherwise, how could they keep us apart? – Stuart Hall, Subjects in History

It is from this devalued side of social reproduction, the life-making practices of those designated for living in varying degrees of proximity to a social state of valuelessness, that we might glimpse the immense though not inexhaustible plethora of acts, capacities, associations, and aspirations in practice and sensibilities whose expressive figurations, in the liminal cultural-lingual social formations within which they are exercised, remain minoritarian terms of living, elements of an immanent, transformative political world that is in the making and yet to be realized as such. – Neferti Tadiar, Remaindered Life

The word ‘enforceability’ reminds us that there is no such thing as law (droit) that doesn’t imply in itself, a priori, in the analytic structure of its concept, the possibility of being ‘enforced,’ applied by force. There are, to be sure, laws that are not enforced, but there is no law without enforceability, and no applicability or enforceability of the law without force, whether this force be direct or indirect, physical or symbolic, exterior or interior, brutal or subtly discursive and hermeneutic, coercive or regulative, and so forth. – Jacques Derrida, The Force of Law

The analogy I want to make here is this. That if the ostensibly divinely ordained caste organizing principle of the Europe’s feudal-Christian order was fundamentally secured by the Absolutism of its Scholastic order of knowledge, (including its pre-Columbus geography of the earth and its pre-Copernicus Christian-Ptolemaic astronomy), the ostensibly evolutionarily determined genetic organizing principle of our Liberal Humanist own, as expressed in the empirical hierarchies of race and class (together with the kind of gender role allocation between men and women needed to keep this systemic hierarchies in place), is as fundamentally secured by our present disciplines of the Humanities and Social Sciences. – Sylvia Wynter, No Humans Involved

Abolition is about abolishing the conditions under which prison became the solution to problems, rather than abolishing the buildings we call prisons. – Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Abolition is about presence, not absence. It’s about building life-affirming institutions. – Ruth Wilson Gilmore

Racism, specifically, is the state-sanctioned or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. – Ruth Wilson Gilmore, Race and Globalization

“To be called out for being puro arte is to be questioned about one’s veracity and authenticity. Another variation is “O tingnan mo, puro arte talaga” (“Just look at her put on a show”). This version highlights the attention-seeking element of puro arte, directing notice to the performing body, already perceived to be overacting. What compels the speaker’s admonition is the body’s performative extravagance, a spectacle making that must be disciplined, reined in. To be called out for being puro arte at once exposes the performing subject’s propensity for histrionics and puts her in her place for showing off. It is a complex construction that foregrounds the overdramatics of performance precisely to make light of it. Yet, to be puro arte is to strategically refuse unmediated or clear-cut expression. The invocation of puro arte also carries an acknowledgment, almost an admirable recognition, of the theatrics at play. Putting on a show calls for an awareness of the labor of artful expression, of the creative efforts required to make something out of nothing. Furthermore, puro arte expresses an appreciation of the gall, the guts, and the sheer effort needed to put on such a display.” – Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns, Puro Arte

In his foundational writings developing the conceptual framework of the Black Atlantic, Paul Gilroy defines sound and music, in particular, as a crucial modality of what he calls “a politics of transfiguration.” His musical transliteration of a sonic politics of transfiguration invites us to attend to the “lower frequency” through which these transfigurations are made audible and accessible (37). Taking inspiration from Gilroy, it is through sound that I seek a deeper engagement with the forgotten histories and suppressed forms of diasporic memory that these images transmit. I theorize sound as an inherently embodied process that registers at multiple levels of the human sensorium. To invoke another counterintuition that serves as a second point of theoretical departure, while it may seem an inherent contradiction in terms, sound need not be heard to be perceived. Sound can be listened to, and, in equally powerful ways, sound can be felt; it both touches and moves people. In this way, sound must therefore be theorized and understood as a profoundly haptic form of sensory contact. – Tina Campt, Listening to Images

The concrete is concrete because it is the concentration of many determinations, hence unity of the diverse. It appears in the process of thinking, therefore, as a process of concentration, as a result, not as a point of departure, even though it is the point of departure in reality and hence also the point of departure for observation [Anschauung] and conception. – Karl Marx, Grundrisse