Stefano Harney

So maybe I don't know.

Maybe one of them that I briefly touched on was The Undercommons by Fred Morden and Stefano Harney.

To me, this is such an essential text, I think, for people to read.

Yeah.

Because no, I don't think anybody in Black studies is confused about how their intellectual life is a form of activism, right? That when they think about their commitments, their investments, right? And yet in practice, right, we are, uh, straitjacketed in many ways, right? There is a...

And, and I think this has to do more with the university as a, as a, as a place where, as Harney and Moten say, "It's hard to study."

Mm.

Mm-hmm.

Mm-hmm

... we gotta figure out.

We gotta stay nimble and, and continue to, you know, conspire without a plot, as, as Stefano Harney puts it.

And, and the plot is, is, is crucial that conspi- the conspiracy doesn't have a plot, meaning the conspiracy, again, is for the means, not the ends.

The task of the scholar becomes that of curating performances of fugitive Black grace, all responsive to the founding experience of Blackness, the constitutive exclusion manifest in the slave ship.

As Stefano Harney and Fred Moten put it, quote, "The hold's terrible gift was to gather dispossessed feelings in common to create a new feel in the undercommons." Even as contemporary Black activists are weary of Christianity, it is hard not to see the Christian theological imagination at work in accounts of Blackness that the Instagram vernacular would label with the hashtag extra.

Uh, the morning after Obama's eulogy, a thirty-year-old activist named Brittany Ray Newsum put on another performance of grace and Blackness that echoed and transformed Obama's words.

Um, Newsum used the back of her white co-collaborator, James Jimmy Tyson, to step over a fence protecting a flagpole in front of the South Carolina State Capitol.