whose beautiful/powerful/truthful/wonderful/colorful/painful/importantfull/lovefull
presence on the internet i can't help but keep accidentally discovering more of...
THANK YOU THANK YOU THANK YOU
to you alexis gumbs AND to all those who make you able to do what you do
discovered most recently is the no less awesome free online course, "to be a problem" on radical literature making. this sub-site of gumbs' words/ways i found while looking for sylvia wynter essays online. one of sylvia wynter's pieces is on the Problem syllabus, and participants posted their responses in their own blogs, which i am no less excited about reading. oh, when the world feels small in all the right ways/ huge at the same time, but also in all the right ways!
http://tobeaproblem.wordpress.com/
course description from fall 2007:
Sylvia Wynter for today, 14Sep07
“THE SALVAGING OF OURSELVES, THE RECLAMATION OF VAST AREAS OF OUR BEING, IS DIALECTICALLY RELATED TO THE DESTRUCTION OF THOSE CONDITIONS WHICH BLOCK THE FREE DEVELOPMENT OF THE HUMAN POTENTIALITIES OF THE MAJORITY OF PEOPLES OF THE THIRD WORLD” (83)
- Sylvia Wynter alcheringa/ethnopoetics/two/2/1976
"I am still working through this week’s readings and Wynter has a lot of powerful things to say, but I definitely heard that truth today. I think that yes, this is the work - in so many ways. Because reclaiming vast areas of our being means eventually reclaiming the (birth)right of self-determination, reclaiming the (birth)right of community, and reclaiming the justice and peace which we surely must have been meant to have since the longing for them moves us so deeply.
And, I think that in addition to the vastness beyond our own selves, this must mean reclaiming the vastness that is within us as well. Reclaiming our faith, our trust, our love, our generosity and grace from a social order that cannot make sense of them within capitalist logic. Reclaiming our rage full of power, hope, and sorrow for what should have been from an order that perceives only cost, destruction, and inconvenience when we cry for justice.
Reclaiming our identities and sexualities and erotic power and our friendships and loves and partnerships and also those relationships that our language eclipses (so much of what ties us together is unspeakable, for instance how do I even name my relationship to the other people “in” this “class” - but also our partners in open relationships, our communities that are more like family, or our shared destiny with and accountability to that little 6 year old girl whose body was found raped and hung in her garage in Texas this week) from a social order that chops us into legible bits. And reclaiming our children as a hope and promise of tomorrows from a social order that knows only today and has no vision beyond what our children cost or signify about the proper configuration of families (which of course corresponds to maintenance of the way things are rather than future as possibility). And absolutely it means reclaiming our priceless bonds to mothers and grandmothers and fathers and grandfathers and ancestors from a social order that also sees people as commodities of relative worth, and recognizes neither future in wisdom nor value in history.
And it means we will have to do this ahead of time, before reclaiming is legible as life-giving and while it can only be read as theft. We will have to steal knowledge, time, and dreams from this machine. We will have to do it while still bound to the market relations on which our survival depends. We will have to reclaim the vastness of ourselves in order to claim a future worth hoping for. I believe this is possible."
thank you, sylvia wynter, alexis gumbs, and sebrena sebring, for helping ME to keep believing in the same.
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