Movement and Time: A Diasporic Response to Grounded Light

Abstract

Movement and Time: A Diasporic Response to Grounded Light Shona N. Jackson (bio) En nuestras cosmovisiones, somos seres surgidos de la tierra, el agua, y el maiz. —Berta Cáceras, 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize Christina Sharpe situates her most recent book in terms of the lived experiences of her family with death. Much of the beginning of In the Wake: On Blackness and Being reads as a deliberate archaeology of interment. This propels Sharpe, drawing from Saidiya Hartman and Patricia J. Saunders, toward an “analytic” for Black scholars that might resist the exigencies of fields and disciplines whose teleological capacity to reproduce objective existence is antagonistic to the unfolding of Black life as life itself. Too often, she says, we are expected to discard, discount, disregard, jettison, abandon, and measure those ways of knowing and to enact epistemic violence that we know to be violence against others and ourselves. In other words, for Black academics to produce legible work in the academy often means adhering to research methods that are “drafted into the service of a larger destructive force” (Saunders 2008a, 67), thereby doing violence to our own capacities to read, think, and imagine otherwise. . . . We must become undisciplined. The work we do requires new modes and methods of research and teaching.1 This new methodological “undiscipline” broadly emerges from Sharpe’s insistence that we do “wake work,” research that might better account for the peculiar relationship to time that Black life and death acquired after entering the abject and unmarked time of the hold.2 This wake work is a deeply affirmative response to our social realities, historical calamities, political deaths, quotidian fugitivities, and ontological crises, across which loss is the recurrent rupture marking the time signature of Black life.3 I begin my response to Roderick Ferguson’s 2018 ASA presidential address, “To Catch a Light-Filled Vision: American Studies and the Activation of Radical Traditions” with Sharpe because this new method, what one of my graduate students refers to as “woke work,” is implicit in Ferguson’s address.4 It is so even given his reticence to the [End Page 343] more formal encounter with afropessimism that informs Sharpe’s call. It is, however, through a more deliberate engagement with the range of historical and geographical iterations of slavery’s “afterlives,” what some might indeed call a pessimism, that I want to respond to Ferguson’s address.5 Ferguson’s own writerly method animates for us a history of relation to place, land, and people not from abstract categories but from “615 Bridge Street in Manchester, Georgia.” He charts a history of Black, native, and white relationships to place and property that often blurs the lines that distinguish settler, native, and citizen, challenging any normative notion of history, place, and time. As he does so, Ferguson elaborates an intellectual trajectory from dissident kitchen-classrooms, through the civil rights struggle, through straight and queer Black empowerment, all parallel and para-ontic curricula that lead to his own situatedness at the nexus of critical race and sexuality studies.6 In his address, the metaphysical properties of his mother’s singing “created sounds and pictures . . . hills and mountains traveled over, storms that were the settings for toiling and waiting, baptisms in the Jordan River (‘Everybody shouting; nobody doubting!’), and bells that rang and rang.” Her auditory landscapes echoed over and across the metaphysics of juridicality that would produce or “organize” Georgia out of Muscogee Creek and Cherokee lands, out of lands never unto themselves, but always between two rivers. It is the “heterogeneity” of how his family lived the rural, he affirms, that leads to the links between indigeneity and Blackness where they cannot be separated in the blood: “so common” he says, “that as a child I thought that Blackness and Indianness were denominations of each other.” It also led to fractures caused by the apparatus of settler colonial raciality, in which “British colonizers contracted with neighboring Indians to return the fugitives [Black slaves] whole or in pieces,” or further still when Frederick Douglass and Maria Stewart affirm settler citizenship and belonging by accepting the suppression of Indigenous right to land.7 In my work, I address...