Arts for the 21st Century

Catherine John

B L A C K S P A C E AND RITUAL FABULATION ERNA BRODBER AND THE AFTERLIFE OF LIVITY

“Well, the work that I’ve tried to do is to make people aware of the history of kinship. And to make aware that their history is the history of the one beside them, and the one around them and so on, in the hopes that people will see each other as blood relations to be loved rather than disregarded or despised.”

Blackspace

“For me, narrating counter-histories of slavery has always been inseparable from writing a history of present, by which I mean the incomplete project of freedom, and the precarious life of the ex-slave, a condition defined by the vulnerability to premature death and to gratuitous acts of violence.”        —Saidiya Hartman