How Do We Repair?

Abstract

In February 2019, as part of the year of theatre in Chicago, the Chicago Cultural Centre launched a very unusual exhibition: Goat Island, We Discovered the Performance by Making It (curated by Nicholas Lowe). Part archive, part anarchive, this collective proposition was geared toward celebrating Goat Island’s twenty-five year run. In this paper, I turn to this exhibition (curated by Nick Lowe) to ask how repair moves through the site of performance, particularly when oriented by the anarchive – the anarchic share of what exceeds the bounds of the archive but nonetheless remains infused by it. Part paper, part performative engagement with the (non)time of performance, How do we repair? builds particularly on Goat Island’s When Will the September Roses Bloom? Last Night Was Only a Comedy (2004).

Link to the recording of the keynote presentation:

Slides included in the presentation: https://sites.uniarts.fi/documents/16257/462727/How+Do+We+Repair.pdf/85933ca3-3c1f-4125-ab22-7ec3ee3fc3ea.

How Do We Repair?

1 The archive as archive of time passed, as archive of time for the restaging of that past, orients us toward a certain notion of repair. It asks: how to return to liveliness that which has come to pass? How to give the force-of-form to that which is but the event’s afterthought? How to return to the trace of time’s passing the intensity of what could only really be felt in its own time? How to repair what has been left behind? How to repair to that time of wholeness?

Repair and value are always an entwined pair. Repair touches the nerve of devaluation in the same gesture as it names what has been considered useful enough to be reanimated. Or, repair names the necessity of not-living-without. If the archive is that which carries forward the markings of what might remain legible across a breach in time, it also necessarily pulls with it the myriad valuations that give an object its relevance through the passage of time. Choices are made not only in terms of what is kept but also in terms of what, at the time of its making, registers as being worth keeping. The archive is a lens on what is carried forward, giving us a measure of what should be valued in the now. This reanimation assumes a certain capacity for time to be read. Repair moves what was into this reanimation, staging a return that rarely names what is simultaneously created in the passage.

But repair is also creative reanimation. Think of kintsugi, also called “golden joinery,” or kintsukuroi “golden repair,” – “the Japanese art of repairing broken pottery with lacquer dusted or mixed with powdered gold, silver, or platinum.”^[1]

2 In an ethos that I would call a pragmatics of the useless, an ethos that recognizes that the bestowing of value onto use is one of the ways we collectively work to maintain the legibility of our practices at the detriment of what might exceed them or move through them ineffably, I turn to the question of repair through the performance group Goat Island’s work.^[2] I do so in a register markedly different from the ubiquitous notion of repair described above, as fixing what was once whole. I ask what else moves across and through the archive that might be felt without appearing as such. That is to say, I turn to repair in the way it already moves through Goat Island’s work. Contributing to the ineffable that moves across what Goat Island leaves behind of a past conjured in excess of the materiality of its trace, I aim to touch the nerve of a notion of repair that reminds us that what we receive from Goat Island is not an image of what was but a call to engage in the golden joinery that produces not simply a fixed object but one of another nature, resplendent in its difference. Following Goat Island’s own turn to the question of repair in When Will the September Roses Bloom?, taking to heart the urgency of the prompt “How do we choreograph a dance to repair the world?” – a prompt born of the injunction “to lodge ourselves in history,” to “[pursue] the impossible” and “to speak from our irrelevance,” “attempt[ing] less” – I understand the question of repairing the world as distant from the idea of making-whole (Goulish, in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, xvi). I take repair to be a gesture that brings out the process’s differential, cutting across any notion of origins. Like the gold of the kintsugi that does not return the pot to its initial state but amplifies its brokenness to reveal what else it always was and could become, repair is taken as the commitment to variation that reveals the more-than of experience. Repair, then, as the fragile proposition that turns the event toward its immanent futurity, revealing not the lost whole but the force-of-form that moves transversally across it, in an unfolding that is anything but in-time. This, I want to propose, is what performance can do: it can give us time differently, dancing durations of experience in excess of any notion of the in-the-moment we too often cling to. Performance is always out of time like the repair that makes its cleave visible.

3 The practice of entering into the work to touch what is in excess of representation is the task I set myself when I received the call to bring to expression an edge of tenthness in an archive of nine works in the context of exhibiting a response to Goat Island for a retrospective of their work. For this, I was given access to an archive of performances and reviews, of texts and handwritten notes. The aim as I understood it was never to mend the past. Quite the opposite: the work of repair as it was proposed for Goat Island Archive – We Have Discovered the Performance by Making It, a five-month (an)archival exhibition-performance staged at the Chicago Cultural Centre in 2019,was oriented toward the useless, which is to say, toward that which is not yet inscribed in the archive of value.^[3] The gift of the Goat Island archiveas I experienced it was not what it contained so much as what it was capable of proposing for a transversal process that would respond to those singular ways in which Goat Island expressed its commitment to difference and repair. I made it my work to amplify its transversality by bringing it into relation with the cut of other times and other necessities.

The questions that oriented my own process turned on the notion of the pragmatics of the useless. How to value the inexpressible in the work and move it into new registers? How to make felt what most tangibly moved across the archive but couldn’t find expression in it? How to facilitate an encounter with the work’s ethos of repair, a repair that would always be as much about the gesture of repair as return, as navigation, as it would be about the care to create conditions for those tentative tendings that produced the archive in the first place? In my attuning to the archive, the aim was not to recast a time past but to see how Goat Island work carried the seeds for its excess-on-itself.

4 My process took the following path: First, I watched the videos of the nine works made between 1989 and 2009. A notebook open, my eyes on the video, I drew the movement in each work. My aim was not to represent the movement but to follow the movement on screen with my hand. My attention was on the transduction – the movement across planes that would facilitate a dephasing of the process. How might the performers’ movements shift in the passage through the hand to the notebook? What might the notebook record that was in excess of the seeing? I did this for each of the videos, reading reviews and descriptions of the performances in the interim, not so much to understand or locate the work as to touch time’s spiral, the uneasiness of what in the work didn’t connect to the time of its coming-to-be. For it was apparent to me from the outset that what Goat Island’s work proposes is a kind of untimeliness – a time committed to the unfolding and yet uneasy with the present’s manner of narrating itself. The hope was that the drawings would propose not the organization of a narrative but something more attuned to the work’s qualitative momentum – a quality of repetition, an intensity dancing into perception. Once the drawings were done, I created palimpsests on vellum, four pages superimposed for each work, the first of which traced the shape of the stagespace for each performance. There wasn’t much editing here – more a sense of accommodating in the move from the notebook to the vellum palimpsest the repetitions in the layered time signature of each performance. What stood out in this process was the degree to which language became movement in the last four performances, words now themselves mobile gestures of repetition. Language had of course always been present, but in the last pieces it took on a personality that could carry the work in a way movement alone tended to do earlier on.

Anarchiving might be defined as a practice that moves at the pace of a transduction, following the logic not of originality or wholeness but of emergent process. In drawing the shape of movement, what appeared on the page was not a representation of the nine performances so much as an activation of how what they leave behind produces a field of composition in its own right.

The second phase took off from this field of composition produced in the drawing. Three meters each of canvas and cotton batting became the next material for recomposition-in-transduction. This time, the transduction did not return to the Goat Island performances as such. Instead, it worked directly with the movements of the palimpsests, asking what movement-shapes most activated what Francis Bacon might call the “diagram” of each performance.^[4] The diagram here is not spatial so much as intensive. What shape moves the work into its force of form? What movements activate the work’s outdoing of its initial premise? How does the outdoing of the work most intensively take us back to what it was able to express, in excess of itself?

In the transduction from drawing to sculpture, I chose two shapes from each of the palimpsest drawings. As with the drawings, I worked one performance at a time, letting the shapes lead the body into gestures. I moved with the shapes in repetition to orient the constellation. The canvas sculptures were imagined as doubles of the drawing, felt otherwise. Because I knew that not all of us work visually, that a drawing can hold us at a distance, that the vellum carries a fragility that might keep fingers off and bodies still. And I wanted the movement to call to itself. I wanted bodies to feel the call to move into the shape of Goat Island’s diagrams.

As I worked, I realized there was a risk, and that risk was that the gestures intensively carried through what was now a double transduction might sidestep the careful posing of a problem that might be called the work’s politics. And so I began a third phase, creating books that held procedures for moving (back) through the work. These procedures are guides for what might also be caught in the moving. Using words from the performances themselves, they are how the work revealed itself to me politically as I moved across the phases of transduction. I did not watch the pieces again to make them. I trusted the anarchive to lead me back to where the diagram found its shape.

5 Goat Island’s eighth work, When Will the September Roses Bloom? Last Night Was [Only] a Comedy, is the prism through which the question of repair most emphatically emerges. The procedure for this piece, composed for the third phase of the anarchival process, reads:

1. HOW DO YOU REPAIR?
2. AND THE NAME OF IT WAS POWE 
3. AND YOU WON’T BE ABLE TO SEE IT 
4. ONE MORE TIME (AGAIN) 
5. MAKE IT DIFFER (VERSION 1, VERSION 2) 
6. HOW DO YOU REPAIR?
7. SWEET BABY JAMES 

“TORTURE DERIVES FROM TWIST”

As with each of the books, the eighth opens with a citation on architectural procedure by Arakawa and Madeline Gins: “Architectural surrounds stage architectural procedures. A surround constructed to constrain a sequence of actions presents a procedure to be followed: and as soon as someone sets foot into an architectural surround that constrains actions, the architectural procedure it stages gets going” (2002, 54).

6 Architectural procedures for Arakawa and Gins are never limited to existing built enclosures. Architecture is not that which houses us already, or which governs our imagination of the world’s constructedness. Architecture is the quality of worlding that produces the lived expression of what Arakawa and Gins call the organism-person-environment. An organism that persons is of the world in the world’s self-forming: “The momentum an organism is able to gain on being a person, or rather, on behaving as one – that set of conditions, born of actions taken, that makes person-formation possible – depends directly on how it positions its body. Surroundings invite, provoke, and entice persons to perform actions, and the enacting motions of these actions not only serve up alternate vantage points but also inevitably shift sense organs about” (2002, 1). The wager here is that what matters is not architecture or surrounds per se but the procedurality that conditions the surrounds to facilitate other ways of living.

The question of body in its relation to architecture and surrounds is central. “We have adopted the admittedly clumsy term ‘organism that persons’ because it portrays persons as being intermittent and transitory outcomes of coordinated forming rather than honest-to-goodness entities” (2002, 2). The architectural body for Arakawa and Gins becomes the technique to conceive of the way the world bodies: “The toddler, taking its first steps as an organism that persons, drags its whole world along as pull-toy” (2002, 3). The feeling-out of existence is what is at work, a “think(ing) its (way through an) environment” (2002, 3). Refusing a distance between bodying, thinking, and feeling, between environment and architecture, architectural bodies become their own procedures for world-making, “kicking and screaming, alive with process, emphatically, and urgently rushed into a supporting context of embedded procedures” (2002, 4).

It will not come as a surprise, then, that the architectural procedure emerges not from the willful agency of the actor but from the surrounds themselves: “Architectural surrounds stage architectural procedures” (2002, 55). “Tactically positioned constructed procedures” orient action. And, from there, “procedures naturally compound” (2002, 56). Tactically posed surrounds meet tactically posed surrounds. Organisms-that-person thrive not only because the surrounds are generative in and of themselves, but because bodying begins to take shape differently, identitarian and volitional presuppositions at the heart of agency dancing to another logic. “Can it be, then, that in architecture we have the means to construct awareness on a new basis? Oh yes, that is what we have begun to believe” (Arakawa and Gins 2002, 56).

7 In a grant proposal, Goat Island write, “One thing you should know about us is this: how we communicate is as important as what we say” (in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, xiii). This is also the ethos of the architectural procedure. There is such a thing, for Arakawa and Gins, as the “insufficiently procedural” (2002, 95). How a procedure conditions the constellation matters. This includes the steps it proposes. It includes the order and what is left behind. In When Will the September Roses Bloom?, it makes a difference that repair is the contour of a middling that includes power, perception, time, and difference. It matters that we remember, when all is said and done, that “torture derives from twist.” We should never forget the power of movement to catapult a body into its undoing. There is nothing easy about performance. The work must be taken at its word. “And the name of it was power.”

For Arakawa and Gins, the sufficiently procedural involves creating conditions for experience to site differently, producing bodyings capable of carrying experience otherwise. This otherwise always involves a tentativeness: “Play off your tactically posed surround like crazy until you have constructed a precise tentativeness for yourself” (2002, 97). Precise tentativeness allows the bodying to remain attuned to the emergent constellations of existence, the worldings that shape us. Attunement must surpass automaticity – impossible movements, disorientations are required. “Strive to maintain your extended body as more than a single subsuming tentativeness; that is, cast your landing sites out and about to form several extended domains of indeterminacy” (2002, 97). Let precise tentativeness move the bodying into a variety of scales of encounter. “While attending to your front farnearground…or your front nearfarground…try lingering as well within and upon the nearnear and the farfar” (2002, 98). Let the body be made in the shape of the waywardness the impossible produces. Engage with perception’s own precise tentativeness. “Ally yourself that closely with your tactically posed surround that it reads as the perimeter of your extended body” (2002, 98). Unhold. “Have your tactically posed surround’s hold on you loosen even as you loosen your hold on it” (2002, 99). Desubjectify. “Prevent the coming into existence of a world for you” (2002, 99). Waver. “Sporadically play a cleaving (cutting apart from while adhering to) hesitation waltz with tendencies, inclined breezes and pursuits, and rivulets of complexly varied sited awareness” (2002, 100). Make it about “what else will be able to originate” (2002, 100).

8 “What else will be able to originate?” Consider the wayward in Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, a book that pulls from the archive of slavery that which moves transversally across it. Hartman’s “narrative written from nowhere” involves entering into the archive of black life to seek what the archive cannot value (2019, xiii). “I have crafted a counter-narrative liberated from the judgement and classification that subjected young black women to surveillance, arrest, punishment, and confinement, and offer an account that attends to beautiful experiments – to make living an art – undertaken by those often described as promiscuous, reckless, wild and wayward” (2019, xiv). Bringing the illegible to life, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments unfolds “a revolution in a minor key” erased from the accounts that can only situate black life as expendable (2019, xv). Waywardness brought to the archive turns the exorbitant, the excessive, into the force it truly is, revealing its exquisite creativity in the power of its everyday living. Radical thinkers emerge where the archive could see only failure, or lasciviousness. “The wild idea that animates this book is that young black women were radical thinkers who tirelessly imagined other ways to live and never failed to consider how the world might be otherwise” (2019, xv). Waywardness becomes the way toward the architectural procedure of drawing life differently.

Waywardness is a practice of possibility at a time when all roads, except the ones creating by smashing out, are foreclosed. It obeys no rules and abides no authorities. It is unrepentant. It traffics in occult visions of other worlds and dreams of a different kind of life. Waywardness is an ongoing exploration of what might be; it is an improvisation with the terms of social existence, when the terms have already been dictated, when there is little room to breathe, when you have been sentenced to a life of servitude, when the house of bondage looms in whatever direction you move. It is the untiring practice of trying to live when you were never meant to survive. (Hartman 2019, 228)

This is repair in the ethos of a pragmatics of the useless – the force of a gesture that shifts the very conditions of value. In seeking the unregulated, Hartman unregulates the very archive she pulls from, twisting it, giving the past new life in the past, a past alive with the force of the futurity that always moved through it. Time unstraightened. The archive will never be the same. Repair as the force-of-form that calls forth a tending not of a lost whole but of the gestural in its precise tentativeness. Repair as variation on existence. Repair as minor gesture.

9 Repair: the tug of a process, the “small acts” – “Calming the hands in a troubled world. Restoring damage to renewed use. Wiping a stain with a cloth,” “Rebuild something before you go. Listen as you leave” (Hixson in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, xvi, 32). “I cannot teach without you teaching me” (Hixson 2007, 109).

10 “By 1787, it was already too late. It was not too late to imagine an end to slavery, but it was too late to imagine the repair of its injury” (Best and Hartman 2005, 1). Repair is heavy with the call of another kind of return, a return to what should have been, a return to a world unmarked by the violence of use. Reparations are its specter, and these, while infinitely owed, too often bear the marks of that same archival logic, the logic of use-value, the logic of recognition, the logic of property, of capital, of the state. “The logic of reparation is grounded on notions of originary wholeness, on the one hand, and abstract/general equivalence, on the other” (Moten 2018, 167).^[5] How to account for the excess, for the more-than of life-lived? How to amplify the minor that runs through it? How to shift from the logic of credit to the logic of debt unpayable? “Restored credit is restored justice and restorative justice is always the renewed reign of credit, a reign of terror, a hail of obligations to be met, measured, meted, endured” (Harney and Moten 2013, 63). What is repair that engages in creating conditions for a surrounds that procedurally compounds? “You can’t count how much we owe each other. It’s not countable. It doesn’t even work that way. Matter of fact, it’s so radical that it probably destabilizes the very social form or idea of ‘one another’” (Moten in Harney and Moten 2013, 154).

Repair in a minor key is displaced from its alignment to the archive of preexisting value. This is never to suggest that an unpayable debt is not owed, nor is it to negate the campaign for reparations as a social movement, a campaign, as Robin D.G. Kelley outlines, that “was never entirely, or even primarily, about money [but] about social justice, reconciliation, reconstructing the internal life of black America, and eliminating institutional racism, [a campaign] focused less on individual payments than on securing funds to build autonomous black institutions, improving community life, and in some cases establishing a homeland that will enable African Americans to develop a political economy geared more toward collective needs than toward accumulation” (2002, 137). Indeed, minor repair begins here, in what we learn from those social movements that seek debt without credit, that produce capital not for capital’s sake but for an “aesthetic sociality of blackness” (Harris 2018), inviting us to move at the pace of repair at all scales of life-living, including, as Fred Moten emphasizes, the scale of the earth itself (Kelley and Moten 2017).^[6] Repair as that transversality that returns experience to what most potently moves across it, and changes it in the crossing. “Loss gives rise to longing, and in these circumstances, it would not be far-fetched to consider stories as a form of compensation or even as reparations, perhaps the only kind we will ever receive” (Hartman 2008, 4)^[7] “Restoring damage to renewed use” (Hixson 2002, in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, xx).

11 “The assignment of a specific value to the incalculable is a kind of terror. At the same time, the incalculable is the very instantiation of value” (Moten 2018, 169).

12 “One must first expose the damage, just as Paul Celan’s attempts to ‘repair’ the German language after WWII necessitated, for him, an exposure of that language as broken, fragmented, shattered; a weave together of those shards into stuttering, poetry” (Goulish in Bottoms and Goulish 2007, 104). How to write in the idiom of life’s obliteration? “I want to attend to the necessary polyphony. I don’t want to represent anything and I don’t want to repair anything but I do want to be here more, in another way. I want to work it this way … as the history of no repair, as the ongoing event of more and less than representing” (Moten 2018, 170).

13 Repair, in the “spaces between”– “that visible line of the in-between, between the two, of time to come and time elapsed” (Hixson 2007, 110). A “caught-in-the-moment beauty” (2007, 110).

14 Repair: tending and attending – duration become texture. Is this what performance can do?

15 Repair, the very condition of collective survival, “my leaving something behind for others … something through which I become an ancestor” (Mbembe 2018a).

Repair as the gesture that never stopped giving.

Something significant must be going on in these practices of the everyday, the meaning of which we still have to elicit. To repair is to be alive. So that’s the first sense of reparation – to be alive and to take care of something that matters because that thing is a very condition of my survival with others, my being with others, my moving on with others, my leaving something behind for others, something through which they might remember me. All others include my contemporaries, those who came before me as well as those who will come after me [as well as] the environment I live in, the objects I make in my everyday life, in short, the world I inhabit. This is really, at least in the African context, in the continental African archive, what we mean by repair, the becoming other of the living, be it matter or human; the care for not only the living but also other apparently inert entities. (Mbembe 2018b, 5–6).

Repair as care for the earth, as care for the more-than (one).

16 “But I also know that what it is that is supposed to be repaired is irreparable. It can’t be repaired. The only thing we can do is tear this shit down completely and build something new” (Moten in Harney and Moten 2013, 152).

17 Repair as sociality of relation, “that visible line of the in-between, between the two, of time to come and time elapsed”(Hixson 2007, 110). Repair as the work performance can do when performance forgets to perform its self-reproduction. Repair as the waywardness of the archive. Repair, the minor gesture that amplifies difference’s variation, a return that folds time into its spiral, a procedure that tentatively cradles an emergent surrounds, a sidling with the exuberance of a shape revealing itself, a diagram for existence. Repair: an ineffable accompanying, anarchival in its capacity to make felt the anarchic share of worlds in the making, anarchival in its capacity to hear that which barely registered, or didn’t register at all.

We owe each other everything.

Notes

¹ Wikipedia, s.v. “Kintsugi,” last modified February 18, 2020, en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kintsugi.

² Goat Island is a Chicago-based collaborative performance group founded in 1989 and disbanded in 2009. Core members included Karen Christopher, Matthew Goulish, Lin Hixson (director), Mark Jeffery, Bryan Saner, and Litó Walkey. Associate members included Cynthia Ashby, Lucy Cash (formerly Lucy Baldwyn), CJ Mitchell, Judd Morrissey, Margaret Nelson, John Rich, Charissa Tolentino, and Chantal Zakari (Goat Island, n.d.).

³Goat Island – We Have Discovered the Archive by Making It, curated by Nicholas Lowe, officially opened from March 30 to June 23, 2019. Unofficially, the exhibition began in February 2019, however, when artists invited to create performances based on the works in the Goat Island archive came to present works in progress to audiences in the wider Chicago area. Artists invited to create work included Hancock & Kelly (Richard Hancock and Traci Kelly), Augusto Corrieri, Robert Walton, Judith Leemann, Jefferson Pinder, BADco., Vladka Horvat, Ryan Tacata, Ian Hatcher, and Erin Manning (see City of Chicago, n.d.).

⁴ For a more detailed engagement with the concept of the diagram, see Deleuze (2003). Deleuze writes: “The diagram is thus the operative set of asignifying and nonreprescntative lines and zones, lines-strokes and color-patches. And the operation of the diagram, its function, says Bacon, is to be ‘suggestive’. … Not only can we differentiate diagrams, but we can also date the diagram of a painter, because there is always a moment when the painter confronts it most directly. The diagram is indeed a chaos, a catastrophe, but it is also a germ of order or rhythm. It is a violent chaos in relation to the figurative givens, but it is a germ of rhythm in relation to the new order of the painting. As Bacon says, it ‘unlocks areas of sensation’” (Deleuze 2003, 101–102).

⁵ From Hartman’s Lose Your Mother: “Who could deny that the United States had been founded on slavery or disregard the wealth created by enslaved laborers? Or brush aside three centuries of legal subjection? Yet I remain agnostic about reparations. I fear that petitions for redress are forms of political appeal that have outlived their usefulness. Did the bid to make a legal or political claim in an officially ‘post-racist’ society require us to make arguments in a moral language that appeals to the abolitionist consciousness of white folks, who accept that slavery was wrong and believe that racism has ended? Are reparations a way of cloaking the disasters of the present in the guise of the past because even our opponents can’t defend slavery now? Did we want a Federal Bureau of African American Affairs to decide and manage what we were owed? Or did we hope that the civil suits could accomplish what a social movement had failed to do, that is, to eradicate racism and poverty?” (Hartman 2008, 166).

⁶ Moten comments, “Insofar as Black Studies has earned a right to look out for itself now, for a little bit … and insofar as Black Studies has earned a right to look out for itself, what that really means, I think, is that Black Studies has earned the right to try again to take its fundamental responsibility, which is to be a place where we can look out for the earth. I think that Black Studies has a fundamental and specific though not necessarily exclusive mission, and that mission is to try to save the earth or at least to try to save … to save the possibility of human existence on the earth” (Kelley and Moten 2017).

⁷ Hartman writes, “Admittedly my own writing is unable to exceed the limits of the sayable dictated by the archive. It depends upon the legal records, surgeons’ journals, ledgers, ship manifests, and captains’ logs, and in this regard falters before the archive’s silence and reproduces its omissions. The irreparable violence of the Atlantic slave trade resides precisely in all the stories that we cannot know and that will never be recovered. This formidable obstacle or constitutive impossibility defines the parameters of my work” (Hartman 2008, 12).

References

Best, Stephen and Hartman, Saidiya. 2005. “Fugitive Justice.” Representations 92, no.1 (Fall): pp 1–15.

Bottoms, Stephen and Matthew Goulish. 2007. Small Acts of Repair: Performance, Ecology, and Goat Island. New York: Routledge.

Deleuze, Gilles. 2003. Logic of Sensation. Translated by Daniel Smith. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Harney, Stefano and Moten, Fred. 2013. The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. Minor Compositions.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.  Profile Books Ltd. London.

Hartman, Saidiya. 2008 Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Hixson, Lin. 2007. School Book 2. London: Unbound.

Kelley, Robin D. G., and Fred Moten. 2017. “Robin D. G. Kelley and Fred Moten in Conversation.” April 3, 2017. YouTube video, 2:13:29, uploaded June 15, 2017. www.youtube.com/watch?v=fP-2F9MXjRE.

Mbembe, Achille 2018a. “Recognition, Reparation, Reconciliation.” Dec 14, 2018. YouTube video, 1:15:10, uploaded August 20, 2019. www.youtube.com/watch?v=L4oYP44uc2Q.

Mbembe, Achille. 2018b. “Conversation: Achille Mbembe and David Theo Goldberg on Critique of Black Reason.” Theory, Culture and Society, July 3. np

Moten, Fred. 2018. Stolen Life. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.