Podcasted conversation on critical and literary theory, drawing on a range of theorists from Europe, the United States, Caribbean, and Latin America. Our title is drawn from Audre Lorde's essay "Poetry Is Not a Luxury," where she writes that poetry fashions a language where words do not yet exist. How does theory make words and world new, attuned, and embedded within inventive and inventing lived-experience, tradition, and cultural production?
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a LATTO thought evaluates contemporary misperceptions about mixed raceness through the lenses of history, science studies, and personal perspectives in a way that is pro-Black, antiracist, and self-critical. The intent is to arm individuals with the clarity of how systems of law and power shape our feelings about who — not ‘what’ — we as individuals are so that we can begin to reshape the societies in which we collectively live. After all, we’re all already mixed. We’re simply taught to not ...
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Wynter and Quijano on Politics, Coloniality, and the Human
55:20
55:20
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A discussion of Sylvia Wynter's essay "Toward the Sociogenic Principle" and Aníbal Quijano's "Coloniality of Power" essay, with particular attention to how each diagnoses the pathologies of the colonial relation, the world is buoys, and the kinds of racial and national identities it produces. How can we think outside the coloniality of power? How c…
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Glissant on Difference, Opacity, Traces, and Creolization
39:04
39:04
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A conversation about Édouard Glissant's work on creolization, with particular emphasis on how that conceptualization of relation emphasizes both the right to opacity and the necessity of cultural contact. What happens to concepts, to art, to expressive life when it is put in contact with differences? How do vulnerable communities and traditions pro…
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Celan, Levinas, and Derrida on Representation and the Unrepresentable
44:04
44:04
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A discussion of Paul Celan's essay "The Meridian," along with companion pieces of Emmanuel Levinas. Claude Lanzmann, and Jacques Derrida, with particular focus on the poetic word's capacity to bring the deconstructive, dismantling, and interruptive function of absence in reckoning with traumatic experience. How does such a word reflect an ethics of…
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Spillers on Gender, Race, Naming, and Possibility
59:20
59:20
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A discussion of Hortense Spillers' essay "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," with particular emphasis on the critical possibilities opened up by her interrogation of naming, gender, and race after The Moynihan Report. What does the Report tell us about the status of the phrase "Black woman"? And what remains to be thought after w…
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Kristeva on Abjection, Misogyny, and the Symbolic-Political Order
1:01:29
1:01:29
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Long discussion of Julia Kristeva's The Powers of Horror, with special attention to how her theory of abjection informs political strategies of oppression and exploitation rooted in the body. Our discussion works through the conception of the abject and its relation to misogyny and patriarchal cultural formation and reproduction, with particular at…
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Spivak on the Subaltern, Epistemic Violence, and Representation
38:30
38:30
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A discussion of Gayatri Spivak's "Can the Subaltern Speak?," an essay that interrogates the discursive conditions of speaking and the coloniality of such conditions. We focus here on silence, withdrawal, and the refusal to enter into discourse as a form of resistance and ethics. In particular, we are here interested in why Spivak makes this claim -…
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Derrida on Origin, Supplement, and Deconstructive Practice
31:36
31:36
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A discussion of Jacques Derrida's deconstructive practice, which seeks to identify "the supplement" to any origin story or set of claims in a text. What are the characteristics of this readerly practice? What motivates Derrida to make these kind of readerly, critical interventions? And where does deconstructive practice bring us as thinkers, critic…
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Morrison on Memory, Imagination, and Place
42:45
42:45
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A discussion of a cluster of Toni Morrison's non-fiction pieces concerned with gender, memory, and the imagination. We explore the relation between Morrison's meditations and our previous conversations about place and memory, in particular how transcendence is brought to sites through memory-work and the imagination. As well, the ways in which memo…
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Murray and Ellison on Blues, Memory, Embodiment, and the Origins of Tradition
52:24
52:24
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This podcast is bookended by musical pieces by Arthur Cooper, Malaco Records recording artist and great grandfather of participant and University of Maryland doctoral student Timmy R. Bridgeman. A conversation about Albert Murray's The Hero and the Blues and two essays by Ralph Ellison, "Living with Music" and "Blues People." In this discussion, we…
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On Heidegger, Dwelling, Art, and the Fourfold
37:57
37:57
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A process piece reflecting on our discussion of two essays by Martin Heidegger, "The Origin of the Work of Art" (1936) and "Building, Dwelling, Thinking" (1951), with particular emphasis on how he rethinks the object of art and our sense of place. Heidegger's essays attend to the experience of alienation from what he calls "the fourfold," our relat…
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Violence, Love, and Influence in Bloom and Senghor
46:59
46:59
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Discussion of Harold Bloom's 1973 book The Anxiety of Influence, with attention to the limits of the book and also how a perversion or transformation of revisionary ratios might provide insight into anti- and even post-colonial literature and cultural production. In particular, we discuss how Bloom's work presupposes and needs antagonism and violen…
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By John E. Drabinski
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Augustín Fuentes (Prof. of Anthropology, Princeton) "joins" us again by way of a segment from his interview captured a year ago centered on the conflation between race and DNA—for that enlightening conversation, check out the episode "kinfolk, not skinfolk." However, in this segment, Augustín helps dispel another, related half-truth: the myth that …
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A quick check in from CA on the year to come for a LATTO thought and a sneak peek at the next feature story. // Music by Makaya McCraven and the Impressions Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/alattothought) Use my special link https://zen.ai/alattothought and use alattothought to save 30% off your first three months of Zencastr professional.…
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The conclusion of a LATTO thought's first miniseries traces how Indigenous kinship has been damaged by centuries of racist and colonial American policies. Marilyn Vann (Cherokee Nation) and LeEtta Osborne-Sampson (Seminole Nation) share the painful fight that the descendents of Indigenous Freedmen have waged for civil rights within their own nation…
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This Loving Day, CA reflects on the history of anti-miscegenation laws that were enforced on Filipino migrant workers as they moved further into the valleys of Southern California, as written in Alex S. Fabros Jr's (former Professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University) article "When Hilario Met Sally." // Music by Makaya McC…
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In Our Blood: One Equal Citizenship
1:17:12
1:17:12
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This Memorial Day will mark the 100th anniversary of one of the most destructive racial massacres in U.S. history. But when we think back about the Greenwood District in Tulsa, Oklahoma, what are we missing? The inspiring and heartbreaking story of the fabled Black Main Street is indeed unique, but not because of the devastation that Black folks su…
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In this first chapter of a LATTO thought's first miniseries, CA attempts to contain centuries of indigenous history in order to better understand the dynamics and consequences of the United States's concept of blood quantum — the racial calculus that led to Indigenous detribalization, land infringement, and how it began to collide with Jim Crow's a…
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*TRIGGER WARNING: This conversation mentions rape and suicide** CA Davis's full interview with Seminole Councilwoman and Chief of the Caesar Bruner Band, LeEtta Osborne-Sampson. If you would like to help the Seminole Freedmen's fight to regain their full rights within their nation, feel free to send donations by... Checks made out to Attorney John …
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a LATTO thought's first miniseries is a deep examination and comparison of America's inversely related and foundational racial mechanisms: blood quantum and the one drop rule. Over the next three episodes, guests Kim TallBear (University of Alberta), Guy Emerson Mount (Auburn University), Doug Kiel (Northwestern University), Marilyn Vann (Founder a…
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In this ~little~ LATTO thought, Nitasha Sharma (Northwestern University) and Kaneesha Parsard (University of Chicago) speak on the impact of Kamala Harris' presence in American politics on racial consciousness, nonwhite mixed ancestry, creole nationalism, and Asian indentureship in American and Caribbean history. Music by Makaya McCraven. Support t…
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What do the 2020 US presidential election, an unending obsession with ancestry tests, and COVID19 have in common? The same thing we all have in common—99.9% in common, to be precise. Join CA as he traces the long winding thread that misleads us to believe that race is determined by DNA. Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/alattothought) Use m…
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Contrary to what a "postracial" America believed when Barack Obama was elected, mixed race people are older than the New World itself. Three origins—New Spain throughout the 17th and 18th centuries, the Virginian Commonwealth in 1655, and Africa's Gold Coast at the start of the transatlantic slave trade—reveal how the concept of race was constructe…
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a LATTO thought podcast evaluates contemporary beliefs about mixed raceness through the lenses of history, policy making, and personal perceptions in a way that is pro-Black, antiracist, and self-critical. The intent is to arm listeners with the clarity of how systems of law and power shape our feelings about who — not ‘what’ — we as individuals ar…
…
continue reading
A ~little~ LATTO thought to reflect on the real end of slavery, a big step towards Black liberation, and the ripples that continue extending from it and into the future. Music by: Cyrus Chesnut and Makaya McCraven Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/alattothought) Use my special link https://zen.ai/alattothought and use alattothought to save …
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A ~little~ LATTO thought celebrating Loving Day during an incredibly important year of worldwide protests. Music by Makaya McCraven Support the show (https://www.patreon.com/alattothought) Use my special link https://zen.ai/alattothought and use alattothought to save 30% off your first three months of Zencastr professional. #madeonzencastr…
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