1 time scorpion rode turtle and scorpion acted like scorpion. on Nov. 8, 2016, the American Electorate acted like the American Electorate, lol.
if we is a living thing and must continue being represented and treated as such (damn damn damn) then ain’t nothin right neath the sun. ain’t no religion nor color nor creed nor way toward or validation or reparation. assorted armaments of whiteness finna see our asses dirtnap. US-OUR-WE ofc, in the royally disenfranchised sense is POC, women folx, queers, differently abled folx, yung folx, etc c c.
but i think i’m extra hot about all this bc we learned our student learning outcomes / we earned what it means to tinker and twink thesis statements and principals and offer warrants and consider evidence and variance of thot. but like, face to face w an emerging [loljk bitch is already present oops] white nationalist, i’m finally prepared 2 dismiss all. no more. no moar. no mas. g’nite. after witnessing severe failures of white logics, moralities, and liberal thot / space has been made for a genuine unchaining. unshackling. i’m finna Fallout FOUR this shit. it’s time to craft, from the terribly caustic rubble of this white society, the tools to burn the master’s house and record a highlight tape so niggas kno where we goin w this. an early step in this process is a rejection of creative nationalism.
no MLA, APA, Chicago, and questions of the Oxford comma. no OED, stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, and nielsen ratings. nun these will keep us bleeding in the right direction. colonized formsa communication got us dreamin on a ‘right’ direction. some shit, hm? alls i’m swaying on here is that rationality and western, logical thot hav left us engaged in systemsa meaning that hav failed in the face of the #POTUS. because we was all wrong / all wacky feeling about it: there’s no way he’ll win the nomination / there’s no way he’ll make it to election / o nO WAY HE WILL ACTUALLY BAN BODIES BASED ON REAL LIVE BODY AND DOING OF THEMSELVES?
so how can i-we make art inside the same systems that assisted in the rise of Trump? all cumplicit all the time / how can we rely upon “k n o w l e d g e[1]”? or “f a c t s[2]” brought to you by… obsessions w western enlightenment / a simultaneous demand-dismissal of credential? k n o w l e d g e wants you 2 cite yr sources, says urban 2 often, and is constructed inside an academy dedicated to whiteness in sum really impressive ways.
but there’s a sliver lining tho / Gore Vidal writes of his, now infamous, encounter with William F. Buckley Jr. during the Presidential Nominating Conventions of 1968,
…on Wednesday, August 28, at nine-thirty o’clock, in full view of ten million people, the little door in William F. Buckley Jr.’s forehead suddenly opened and out sprang that wild cuckoo which I had always known was there but had wanted so much for others, preferably millions of others, to get a good look at. I think those few seconds of madness, to use his word, were well worth a great deal of patient effort on my part.
in short, now we kno. technologies of whiteness hav, finally and publicly, identified themselves as ever-present and varied. after all, how else does a genuine white-nationalist get described as possessing “prom-king good looks”? like, is there another word for failure? 1 that might move closer 2 me existential malaise? idk but Vidal helps. Vidal does the quiet work of letting whiteness[3] perform itself and expose a viciousness that lies at the heart of the right-white-conservative-alt-neo-nazi movement[4]. the “few seconds of madness,” ofc, refer to Buckley addressing Vidal as a “queer.” a slur of the moment if there was 1. in this way, Vidal successfully baited Buckley perform the ugliest parts of his ideological frame work, and i wonder if there are lessons 2 b gleaned here / in our movement from creative nationalism
k but also like, what, exactly is creative nationalism? it’s creative, certainly, lol, informed by artistic and creative practices / it is a kind of nationalism / certainly / i prefer this definition / “a complex, multidimensional concept involving a shared communal identification with one’s nation.[5]” / bc i think it speaks 2 the problems of feeling too sentimental in a slave state lol / but, lyk hao kan art support nationalism, kam? it’s art zomg just calm down lol not all art is political jeezzz[6] // nah nah nah / nay nay nay. the tricky-smart-delicate thing about beauty (also a generally white-hetero thing) is that it de politicizes itself, not to say that it is deracialized, but to say the politics of aesthetics tend to ground themselves outside of race / as if they transcend race. because race, as any POC / queer / woman folx kno, has no implicit space inside of art. art concerned with identity politics is LESS THAN, somehow, and it is this displacement that is centrally fuccy. this displacement is such a site of rage / rage that generates from a hybrid process of erasure-pigeonholing-hyper-visibility that leaves the disenfranchised body furious / confused / scattered / unconfident / and chill-less. but creative nationalism is even sharper than this, yo! consider the art of The Hudson River Valley School, John Winthrop’s “City on a Hill,” or Miley Cyrus’ “Party in the USA” / how these texts all work to construct a vision of the US that both high quality and positive / even sublime / that kind of feeling where the self becomes terrified and jubilant all at once / in the face of a text that exposes a kind of higher / scarier joy // gud trick, America.
no moar “New Colossus”es / no “America The Beautiful” / no A M E R I C A N LITERATURES / no commitments to or leverages of iconography / no no no 2 creative nationalism / no Hamilton / no Thomas Cole / no putting our queer shoulder to the wheel / no wondering what to the slave is the fourth of july? we have learned what to the slave the fourth of july is! / no curiosity about indigenous removal no more “indigenous removal” / no soft shoe academia / no Smithsonian / no museum of the American Indian / no museum of the African American / no Bishop Museum /
rather, this must, and will be theory / social space / historiography / music / drama / literature / visual arts / performativity / separate from a nationalism that seeks to destroy and mollify those bodies who sit outside the futuristic / nationalistic compliance. TL DR: NO MORE ART THAT ENSURES POSI VIBEZ 4 THE SLAVE STATE.
what if we say f u c k t h i s? what if, instead of working in the glorious tradition of Baldwin or Didion to complicate, challenge, and improve the United States, what if, instead, we seek to expose the United States for what it is: an amnesiatic slave empire? what if we Vidal this mofucca? what if we reject the impulse to make films like Amistad[7] or Gone With the Wind? what if, instead, we commit to a long term campaign of accurate artifact creation? there is, in my approximation, a responsibility to make work that holds witness to the passage of time (thx, Forche). this work seeks to reify bodies stuck in processes of erasure and identify the many many armaments of these erasures.
these works do NOT MAKE ANY SPACE FOR DW GRIFFITH AS A MASTER OF FILM these works do NOT MAKE ANY SPACE FOR BERRYMAN’S BLACKFACE / this is a work so viciously committed to anti-nationalistic erasure that there is no argument for bigotry under the guise of creative dissonance. call it truth / call it beauty / there is no space for nationalistic damage in this work. this is not a work of damage, nor rage, nor shitty feelings, nor pettiness. this is a work of uncovering. we seek (lmao hopefully we, lol) to call in the thing that is the United States and ask it to reckon with itself.
lastly, this is a try. this is an attempt. i can’t wait to be read and dragged for my gaps and fuckups because that, too, is part of the thing, ya dig? aint no thing / think monolithic. the light is breaking. the light is hereeee.
[1] certainly is a mofucca.
[2] dubious, specific, tangible, apparently DIY lol
[3] whiteness exists in collusion w heterosexuality in order to protect what Puar (who is the shit btw yo) described as a “homonational state”
[4] i’d argue that this shit really does pop off in the 1968 Prez election and just pounds steroids and cocaine for the rest of American history
[5] from Wikipedia / which i think is a responsible move / this is just a small note to say that a dismissal of Wikipedia implies an inability to t r u s t an open access database // talk about a problem of the commons, no?
[6] if dis is you / you got other issues to mediate lol
[7] brief note on Amistad: literally a catalogue of inaccuracies / but more problematically / it constructs the American legal system as the hero of the narrative / and asserts that if nothing else / rationality and morality will always rule out here lol
