Meaning-making here approaches raw materiality at the edge of the conceptual cliff. This reminds me of arguments about human culture reaching the molecular level. See Wark's Molecular Red for example. Not an uncommon frame within eco-criticism. That there is no corner of the planet left without our material influence, and we could add, our meaning-making, intended or not. In this view, to reconfigure the world is to make meaning, and meaning is to be found in the combination of our agency and the resulting configurations. A neat idea.

Love this point.

Hmmm. The archive you speak of is the one housed in modern institutions. In 2024 I would prefer to see the control over such institutions shared, as I do the land on which they sit. I respect non-institutional archives of knowledge, including living oral traditions. I was defending opacity above. I don't think these two positions are contradictory. I think opacity can live within contemporary infrastructures. A mistake, in my view, would be to create a strong border between the colonial archive and the anti-colonial archive. In a sense, I'm advocating for a richer humanism, at the conceptual and material level.

I'm torn about this. On the one hand, I see your point. On the other, your aim is not colonial, but on the surface at least, anti-colonial. You could argue that you're "benefitting" as academic(s) by doing your job, but there are many ways to do this job and you're choosing one I would call good. A critic always takes away from the creator in the act of citation, but only in the sense of copying, of pointing to. Not really a theft when you constantly point to the source and credit appropriately. You even go one step further than most who have looked at this image and offer more agency to Demasduit and Shanawdithit than ush. My next book as you know is a translation of a play that Aimé Césaire wanted destroyed. Many years after his death, I'm like no, the world should read this. I may benefit (as in I'm doing my job) but no regrets. The world should read it. All that to say that it is in the context of scholarship that we make these citation decisions, that there is a right and a wrong continuum in which we make them, and that ignoring these texts would be worse than risking an interpretation.

Begun might be too strong. My unscientific guess would be half of your audience has made these connections already, or at least suspected them. When it comes to knowing the violence of colonialism itself, that number begins to approach 90%... in your audience. I hope so, at least!

Repeating my point about relatively common methods we use to make vises these days. I often find that doing data first is often not the most efficient way to arrive at the same result on really complicated data sets. More often than not it's a combination of both. We can start with drawings of the artistic features, then we plot anchor points using pre-existing data, then we return to digital drawing to make connections, and back and forth, usw. In these practical methods there's no clear sense of causality or precedence between structured data and interface-generated data. Unless I'm missunderstanding something about the point you're making, which is also quite possible.

When I teach mapping, I usually point out the difference between tools that require a table and those that ask you draw first. (Obvs, there are tools that allow you to do both like StoryMaps). The latter usually allow for a certain creativity, but don't require pre-existing data, even if everything becomes data after the fact. "nary impossible" sounds really strong in that context.

This was the central question and worry of our attempt to do precisely that with (Un)Silencing Slavery. Our solution included combining god-trick with micro-histories, and to change the hegemonic graphic conventions that prioritize hard lines to more organic curves (among other things). Parking here for the sake of the other commenters and future readers as an entry into this fraught terrain. https://unsilencing-slavery.org/

I've noticed in some of the comments by some of our colleagues this is still something we haven't internalized properly. A neat conceptual separation between viz and data seems to enable this distancing maneuver. Perhaps stronger language connecting the shape of the data to the shape of the viz will do the trick. I might be wrong. (Still haven't read what's to come).

but not of equal weight or usefulness, no?

Avec hypothes.is

Hello, Alan and Inês!

This is a test.

It's still called this in many parts of the world. As a kid I grew up with Disney's "The Bare Necessities" stuck in my head. It's Pawpaw in that colonial fantasy too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJizAYb7OAk

Some text I find useful in thinking about our collective annotation exercise this week:

Licastro, Amanda. "The Past, Present, and Future of Social Annotation." Laurent Dubois, David Kirkland Garner and Mary Caton Lingold. "The Caribbean Digital & Peer Review: A Musical Passage Hypothesis"

Annotating Grainger was such a different experience for me than annotating the Cashier last year, where we came together in an act of celebration. Trying to stay neutral around vis-a-vis this man's lack of self-awareness, cruelty, dissonance and hypocrisy was point-blank impossible for me. I did get to coin joy-tating and hate-tating. There's that.

I like the commentary by Julie Kim here, which reinstates some of what I've argued about the hiding of African medical knowledges.

In spite of the tendency of colonists and Europeans to dismiss obeah and obeah practitioners, obeah actually was a complex of religious and medical practices designed to alleviate the hardships of working and living on the plantation. If obeah practitioners did not possess perfect knowledge of disease, medicine, and healing, they probably did less harm to their patients than did European doctors, who tended to use such “heroic” forms of medical treatment as dosing their patients with mercury.

Now this is the Césaire scholar speaking in now, but I'm struck by the similarities between the litany of evils that afflict the flesh in here contrasted to a similiar list in Césaire's "Cahier d'un retour au pays natal." Similar list, diametrtically opposed framing. You can read my translation of the poem with Kaiama Glover here. It was last year's collective annotation!

"Here’s the parade of laughable and scrofulous buboes, the culture of freaky microbes, the poisons without known remedies, the pus of ancient wounds, the unpredictable fermentations of putrescible species."

He really keeps assigning this sentiment to the Muse, doesn't he? The Muse is the emancipationist, not him.

That's rich

At least he's aware of class.

So this is what kindness boils down to for Grainger? To start kidnapped labor off easy before prime time at the Sugar Cane fields?

Samuel Johnson was obviously right about these lines. Wrong about the rest.

The infantilization is real. Good thing the grown African warriors once in a while got to chop a few heads using their martial wherewithal. Sometimes I wonder if the infantilization was there to allay the fears of rebellion somewhat.

The Muse now comes in as a sacred figure watching over the colonizer. Even though the real planters are the enslaved.

It is interesting that for Grainger a hurricane is in the category of pests.

Love this. Short and sweet.

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Creating another page level note

Here is where we would annotate Fortunate

Why did Douglass call it a narrative and not a story?

This poem is about forestalling grief.

This was a fantastic conference. You can visit the proceedings here: http://caribbeandigitalnyc.net/2020/

I like how this prophecy falls decades before mass incarceration.

patrols might be better than police here

No takers on the funny typography of debout et libre and below monte, monte...?

I'm surprised no one has touched this one so far. I was gonna stay quiet to see if anyone took the bait. This word "désencastration" is a rabbit hole, and I'm not happy myself with disenchantment. Have at it folks.

I'm always struck by the sheer number of references to a nightmare at sea, to drowning, strewn about the poem outside of the direct references to the Middle Passage: the shipwrecks, the maritime metaphors, the congregations in the Christmas scenes drowning, and even the sea constantly threatening to swallow the paradigmatic Straw Street. If the shape of the pustule is ever-present so is this constant proximity to water and other liquids, and implied, the liquid inside the pustule. I think this marriage of forms in the poem as a whole—the morne and the ocean—is perhaps the strongest argument for calling Césaire's poetry "volcanic." This volcano then aligns with the last scene, since the ocean, the liquid is never too far from that ocean that swallowed so many. I agree with Michael Dash that, "L'imagination de Césaire est hantée par la catastrophe du négrier: le navire funèbre qui représente le destin tragique du peuple antillais. [Et] ce n'est pas l'arche de Noé mais un monstre antédiluvien qui a dévoré un peuple: Le Léviathan." The insurrection at sea, read in 1940s and onward, is then that new explosion, the éclat, that liquid coming out of the pustule, the past of rebellion returning, the ancesters returning from the pent-up liquid grave.

Dash, J. Michael. “Le Bateau ivre de Césaire et la quête de la connaissance.” Aimé Césaire, ou l’Athanor d’un alchimiste : Actes du premier Colloque international sur l’œuvre littéraire d’Aimé Césaire, Paris 21-23 novembre 1985, Editions caribéennes: Agence de coopération culturelle et technique, 1987, pp. 157–63. Library of Congress.

Abiola Irele explains that the names in capital letters can be found in Schoelcher's writings as examples of slave owners who were acquitted of the unjust deaths of slaves. Fourniol was a judge in one of the cases. Mahaudière is not identified by AI. We know at least that one city in north Guadeloupe was named after this gentleman.

According to Balmont, Mahaudière was a "planteur guadeloupéen, réputé pour sa bonté, mais qui fut néanmoins accusé d'avoir gardé une esclave enfermée pendant vingt-deux mois dans un cachot où elle ne pouvait se redresser ; il fut acquitté." This is the same crime that Irele ascribes to Mayencourt, except that the time spent by the victim is longer by more than a year.

Césaire is wrong about this in my opinion. The descendants of enslaved folks in the Caribbean are often and historically the descendants of literal warriors... unless he really just wants to declare kinship with the "wretched of the earth" exclusively. This and a few other lines make it hard for me to read the poem the same way I did when I was younger. It is also evident to us in hindsight that Césaire was working with a very limited historiography of African and Black Atlantic history at the time he wrote this in the late 30's, and that's probably the reason why we end up with a line like this. I get that he's going against the induced "boursouflures" of a mythical glorious African past, but he seems to me to swing too far to the other end.

No clue what this means.

Basically Askia Mohammad I

I could not find evidence of this dance and what it refers to. Any clues?

Césaire is here looking at his hand on top of a physical map. The ellipsoid formed by his hand, fingers spread to make the shape of the minor Caribbean islands, with Martinique in the middle. The four fingers are above the equator. He literally sees himself above the lines of latitude and longitude.

The shapes of cartographic features make other appearances in this poem and in his other writings of his time. In the typescript of Et les chiens se taisaient we find another great example:

La récitante.

Ce pays est maudit. Ce pays bâille, ayant craché l’ankylostome Cuba, une bouche de clameurs vides.

Le récitant.

Ce pays mord : bouche ouverte d’une gorge de feu, convergence de crocs de feu sur la croupe de l’Amérique mauvaise.

Cuba is in the shape of a hookworm, and it does look like Haiti is spitting it from its open mouth—fangs of fire above America's butt. Look at the map and see. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Very interesting passage

The whole essay is eminently tweatable.

Needs elaboration.

hello

Probably broken

Double click

New link: http://www.dutempsdescerisesauxfeuillesmortes.net/fiches_bio/mayol/repertoire/rep_mayol_a.htm

The more independent we are, the more anxiety we create. I say we, because it is not only personal agendas. We have team agendas too. Yes, we must resist this subordination.

She's the best colleague to work with in the world!

This is a great line.

You should check out the work of our Columbia colleague Brent Hayes-Edwards re:Nardal sisters, if you haven't already. His book The Practice of Diaspora in particular is rich with historical detail, and some good critique to boot.

I agree with you. I would say AC is way closer to Deleuze's schizoid mode than the paranoid dialectic.

always at the risk of an ad infinitum: critique also has a pseudo-mythical foundation. I tried to make this point in the end, when I was cut off. When you said that we don't know if we should replace bad myths with good ones. I tried to argue we may not have a choice. What Césaire gives us here is the myth of critique as the radical, stubborn Rebel as a starting point. This aligns with critique as some kind of eternal rebuttal in the form of a Yes to Life, but which ultimately is a No to the bullshit we're confronted with all the time when people try to pretend they're giving us neutral truths. In our times, we invoke this gesture whenever we catch "neutrality" in our institutions, and point out that this neutrality is white and male.

I wanted to link this in my piece to Latour's critique of lab culture, but couldn't fit it in the flow. With Latour, as with Nietzsche, moral => power. Latour was right I think in pointing out that modern labs are producing nature/culture hybrids along an axis of power relations, even while claiming to simply discover nature.

Not completely true of contemporary biology, medicine or physics any more, but yeah.

I want to change this to that.

So easy

You could also call them minimalist editions to endear yourself to the modernists, but remember you will alienate the avant-garde.

Hi Laurent,

If you can read this comment, you are logged in successfully. To reply to my comment type in the box below. To comment on any text in the website, just select some text and click the comment button on the tiny pop-up box that pops above the selected text. A comment box should open up. Good luck!

Use color

Yes, how? We should be clearer here.

need an update

Who is it this year?

change to selected countries

This should remain the #1 motivation

Look for all instances of LLC on the site and replace.

Some info from 2015 CSDH-SCHN that could be moved back to historical.

Update the location of the conferences. This might be a good place to place links to the pages for past conferences.

Who compiles the list?

Update the Modern Language Association sponsored sessions.

Separate historical stuff from static pages.

Update to alternating years in Europe, North America and somewhere else in the world.

Who is doing this?

Fix font size

Update council of representatives

Dead link

Remove comments?

Give a description. Replace "here."