Reimagining Citizenship Round #1: Meena suggestions for creative assignments

Can you read the writing in the photos of my previous text?

Questions and thoughts first. You don't have to answer.
 
i) Moten makes numerous theoretical interventions here to disrupt the Western European canon of usual suspects by not only centralizing, but visibilizing Black intellectual thinkers who have predated the work Western European thinkers. But never credited. What would happen if PNC worked with the lens of Blackness in addition to all the other lenses PNC uses? Name a non-Black theorist you love and an argument the theorist makes that you love. Find out what was happening around the same time of your theorist. Find a Black intellectual around the same era who was making a similar claim, or was in conversation with the ideas of the theorist you love.

ii)  Do you consider Tolliver's prayer a performance? Do you consider the Middle Passage a sort of durational contact improvisation performance? How does this change our notion of performance, of contact improv, of duration performance?

iii) How have your ancestors been subjected to philosophical and legal underminings of wholeness? 

iv) I have thought about the ramifications of accepting the gift, in the ways that I partially understand what Moten talks about when he talks about the gift that Black people have to give. Gift as loss.  I feel I have accepted partial aspects of the gift when I was more active in issues of Indigenous self-determination and sovereignty years ago still living in Canada. In the post-colonial context, there is a notion of longing for that home that once existed. Here, there is no luxury of once upon a time. Giving up a sense of home, citizenship, belonging, owning property. How can I own property, own a home, on this land where this land is not, should not, cannot be my own?

v) I get the need non Black people have to compare Blackness to concepts that we might know more about. Cross-comparing to try to get even a sliver of partial understanding. Even though I feel it is destructive. In the case of queer theory for example, Moten does say that queer theories also support the "more than and less than ONE" theory that he talks about in Blackness. And that all minoritarian subjects are aware of the fantasy of whole subjecthood. But he also believes that the historical and legal traumas to Black people, to Black notions of selfhood is beyond/on the other side of any other conception of self. What is different or similar between working from Blackness as a theoretical lens and queer theory? What is similar and different about post-colonial theories?

Suggestions for creative assignment: 

A) Create a contact improvisation of your fragmented non-whole bodies, within the context of Black fragmented selfhood; try to work through knowing that your fragments are not the same or to the same extent as Black selfhood.

B) I'm trying out a version of this task as a dancer/facilitator in the upcoming exhibition of taisha paggett "School for Technicolor People" at LACE. Isolate sentences of Fred Moten that really stand out to you. Say those sentences out loud a few times to get a feeling for the rhythm and feeling of the sentences. Create a rhythm sequence with your feet that repeats or responds to the feelings, structures, syllables, of those phrases that you chose. You should have a movement sequence of foot rhythms. One sequence can incorporate some of the words (from your written response of Moten's talk). A second sequence should have no words spoken, just your feet in conversation with Moten's words quietly living within your interior you.