On Sunday March 3rd, 2-4pm, we gathered to discuss the overlapping histories of blackness and trans identity through C. Riley Snorton's award-winning text, Black On Both Sides: A racial history of trans identity (2017).

"In Black on Both Sides, C. Riley Snorton identifies multiple intersections between blackness and transness from the mid-nineteenth century to present-day anti-black and anti-trans legislation and violence. Drawing on a deep and varied archive of materials, Snorton attends to how slavery and the production of racialized gender provided the foundations for an understanding of gender as mutable." -- University of Minnesota Press C. Riley Snorton is associate professor of Africana studies and feminist, gender, and sexuality studies at Cornell University and visiting associate professor of American studies and ethnicity at the University of Southern California. He is author of Nobody Is Supposed to Know: Black Sexuality on the Down Low (Minnesota, 2014).

FB event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/238997970345408/

On 2/10/19, Nousotros explored of the work of Abbey Lincoln, Max Roach, and Fred Moten for Black History Month! We met to explore the contours of the song "Triptych" (1960) by Lincoln and Roach and then discussed Moten's own interpretation and utilization of the song in his book, "In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition" (2003). "Triptych," is featured on Roach's 1960 album, We Insist: Freedom Now Suite. The song can be heard here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kMaUDAeiSIY We began with a brief introduction to the music, the artists, and some key contemporaneous events surrounding "Triptych." From there we watched a performance of the song ( https://youtu.be/YTeacoeAm9o?t=340 ) and discussed. 

From there, we read key passages from Moten's book, "In the Break," that directly reference this track. Lastly, we discussed what parallels, continuities, and discontinuities we hear between the song and Moten’s text. Abbey Lincoln (August 6, 1930 – August 14, 2010), was an African-American jazz vocalist, songwriter, and actress, who wrote and performed her own compositions. She was a civil rights advocate and activist from the 1960s on. Maxwell Lemuel Roach was an American jazz drummer and composer. A pioneer of bebop, he worked in many other styles of music, and is generally considered alongside the most important drummers in history. Fred Moten is a poet and scholar whose work explores critical theory, black studies, and performance studies. Moten is professor of Performance Studies at New York University.

ON Saturday, January 19th, 2-4pm, We gathered to discuss the ideas of Christen A. Smith and her book Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil.

https://www.facebook.com/events/737681779951854/

«Tourists exult in Bahia, Brazil, as a tropical paradise infused with the black population's one-of-a-kind vitality. But the alluring images of smiling black faces and dancing black bodies masks an ugly reality of anti-black authoritarian violence. Christen A. Smith argues that the dialectic of glorified representations of black bodies and subsequent state repression reinforces Brazil's racially hierarchal society. Interpreting the violence as both institutional and performative, Smith follows a grassroots movement and social protest theater troupe in their campaigns against racial violence. As Smith reveals, economies of black pain and suffering form the backdrop for the staged, scripted, and choreographed afro-paradise that dazzles visitors. The work of grassroots organizers exposes this relationship, exploding illusions and asking unwelcome questions about the impact of state violence performed against the still-marginalized mass of Afro-Brazilians. Based on years of field work, Afro-Paradise is a passionate account of a long-overlooked struggle for life and dignity in contemporary Brazil.»(https://press.uillinois.edu/books/catalog/59mec2dt9780252039935.html) Christen A. Smith is Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and Anthropology at The University of Texas at Austin.

In November 2018, Nousotros went to "A Taste of the Philippines" food festival to eat and talk about African, Asian, and Indigenous anti-imperialist solidarity together “at Reading Terminal Market, Sunday November 11th, for "A Taste of the Philippines" food festival for tastings, demos, discussion, and cultural performances that celebrate the vibrancy & history of the city's Filipino community.

Afterwards, from 6:15pm-9pm, consider joining us for the screening of Ulaam at the Lightbox Film Center (as pat of the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival 2018) with a reception to follow. 

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2209566512656011/

In August 2018, we hosted a Bring Your Own Radical Ideas Sticker-Making Workshop.

“Join us as we move through the steps of designing and creating our own sedition-minded stickers. Come ready with your own radical slogans, images, ideas or borrow some of our favorite beauties plucked from the minds of the world’s most revolutionary Black and non-Black people of color.

Meet some rad folx, learn a little bit more about what Nousotros is all about, and leave with brand new skill-- as well as a stack of ready-to-use stickers you made yourself!!”

In December of 2018, we gathered to discuss  the ways in which The State makes accommodations for certain marginalized demographics in order to hide their continued degradation of other, often more marginalized, demographics. In specific, this means Pinkwashing, The Right to Maim, and how Rights based equality platforms fail to liberate. 

"In The Right to Maim Jasbir K. Puar brings her pathbreaking work on the liberal state, sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of disability. Drawing on a stunning array of theoretical and methodological frameworks, Puar uses the concept of “debility”—bodily injury and social exclusion brought on by economic and political factors—to disrupt the category of disability. She shows how debility, disability, and capacity together constitute an assemblage that states use to control populations. Puar's analysis culminates in an interrogation of Israel's policies toward Palestine, in which she outlines how Israel brings Palestinians into biopolitical being by designating them available for injury. Supplementing its right to kill with what Puar calls the right to maim, the Israeli state relies on liberal frameworks of disability to obscure and enable the mass debilitation of Palestinian bodies. Tracing disability's interaction with debility and capacity, Puar offers a brilliant rethinking of Foucauldian biopolitics while showing how disability functions at the intersection of imperialism and racialized capital." (https://www.dukeupress.edu/the-right-to-maim) Jasbir K. Puar is Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University and the author of Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, also published by Duke University Press.

Facebook event here: 

https://www.facebook.com/events/236480263667840

Our first meeting was on Saturday, 11/18/17, at 2PM--Room 405 at the Central Free Library on Vine Street. 

The first text was Katherine McKittrick's Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006). "Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, Katherine McKittrick addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs's attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter's philosophies."

Katherine McKittrick is a professor of gender studies at Queen’s University in Kingston, Ontario, Canada where she teaches of black studies, anti-colonial studies, studies of race, cultural geographies and gender studies with an emphasis on embodied, creative, and intellectual spaces engendered in the African diaspora. Follow her @demonicground. See her further publications here: http://www.katherinemckittrick.com/publications/

The facebook event: https://www.facebook.com/events/427847850946349/

For the month of November we read and discussed Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State by Ira Bernard Dworkin!

"In his 1903 hit "Congo Love Song," James Weldon Johnson recounts a sweet if seemingly generic romance between two young Africans. While the song’s title may appear consistent with that narrative, it also invokes the site of King Leopold II of Belgium’s brutal colonial regime at a time when African Americans were playing a central role in a growing Congo reform movement. In an era when popular vaudeville music frequently trafficked in racist language and imagery, "Congo Love Song" emerges as one example of the many ways that African American activists, intellectuals, and artists called attention to colonialism in Africa.

In this book, Ira Dworkin examines black Americans’ long cultural and political engagement with the Congo and its people. Through studies of George Washington Williams, Booker T. Washington, Pauline Hopkins, Langston Hughes, Malcolm X, and other figures, he brings to light a long-standing relationship that challenges familiar presumptions about African American commitments to Africa. Dworkin offers compelling new ways to understand how African American involvement in the Congo has helped shape anticolonialism, black aesthetics, and modern black nationalism." (https://www.uncpress.org/book/9781469632711/congo-love-song/)

Ira Dworkin is assistant professor of English at Texas A&M University.

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/303603913543938/

In November 2018, folx Joined Nousotros at the Light Box Film Center for a screening of Ulaam: Main Dish as part of the Philadelphia Asian American Film Festival 2018!

"In this delicious new documentary, Filipino-American filmmaker Alexandra Cuerdo follows the rise of Filipino food via the award-winning chefs who are crossing over to the center of the American table. Ulam: Main Dish stages this new culinary movement as not only a remarkable achievement for American restaurateurs but also as a validation of Filipino culture. The film confronts issues inherent in representing both Filipino and American identity as well as challenges from both the Filipino community and the world at large. Ultimately, Ulam is a celebration—and confirmation—that Filipino food and Filipinos are here to stay. Director Alexandra Cuerdo expected in attendance for a post film Q&A followed by a catered reception featuring Filipino food." 

https://www.ulamthemovie.com/

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/341909979903277/

In November of 2018, Nousotros played Sweet Chariot: The Long Journey to Freedom Through Time. 

Sweet Chariot is a part walking tour part scavenger hunt through time and Philadelphia. On November 11th we'll be played Sweet Chariot, an app by Marisa Williamson created for Monument Lab 2017. The app is an interactive story and walking game using your smart phone's GPS system. It begins in Congo Square and narrates (to) us different memories about (Black) historical sites in the city. Each location becomes permeated by a video on your phone to offer a memory in Philadelphia's History to contest the dominant geography of the city. Learn about Philadelphia's history with us and Sweet Chariot's protagonist Amelia Brown. 

More about the App can be found online here:https://www.sweetchariotml.com/https://www.muralarts.org/artworks/monumentlab/sweet-chariot-long-journey-freedom-time/

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1116359245205515/

We discussed Radical Sensations: World Movements, Violence, and Visual Culture (2013) by Shelley Streeby in September 2018!!

"The significant anarchist, black, and socialist world-movements that emerged in the late nineteenth century and early twentieth adapted discourses of sentiment and sensation and used the era's new forms of visual culture to move people to participate in projects of social, political, and economic transformation. Drawing attention to the vast archive of images and texts created by radicals prior to the 1930s, Shelley Streeby analyzes representations of violence and of abuses of state power in response to the Haymarket police riot, of the trial and execution of the Chicago anarchists, and of the mistreatment and imprisonment of Ricardo and Enrique Flores Magon and other members of the Partido Liberal Mexicano. She considers radicals' reactions to and depictions of U.S. imperialism, state violence against the Yaqui Indians in the U.S.-Mexico borderlands, the failure of the United States to enact laws against lynching, and the harsh repression of radicals that accelerated after the United States entered the First World War. By focusing on the adaptation and critique of sentiment, sensation, and visual culture by radical world-movements in the period between the Haymarket riots of 1886 and the deportation of Marcus Garvey in 1927, Streeby sheds new light on the ways that these movements reached across national boundaries, criticized state power, and envisioned alternative worlds." Abstract via Duke University Press

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1814726725263888/

For the month of August 2018 we discussed Sanctuary: African Americans and Empire by Nicole Waligora-Davis!

"This book examines the anomalous legal status of black Americans and its influence on the formation of American citizenship, the relationship of U.S. to other states, and the government’s conceptualization of its imperial reach and power. The coordinated relationship between U.S. international and domestic interventions helped produce an alienated black American community whose status resembles refugees and stateless persons. This book underscores the substantive legal, social, and political consequences of the state’s persistent misrepresentation of black citizens as aliens and refugees. Attending to the convergences among refugees, stateless persons, and African Americans, This book exposes the aggressive legal and political dislocations historically confronting black Americans in a new manner, and reveals how the anomalous status of black Americans impacted U.S. empire expansion and black civil rights. Fixed on forms of legal, political and social desubjectivation, dispossession, and violence that collectively transfigure black life and warrant the call for safety, this book illustrates how sanctuary remains perpetually deferred, tragically unsustainable, or simply untenable precisely because blacks continue to occupy something akin to Gerald Neuman’s “anomalous legal zone,” where law is suspended and a new juridical order is effectively produced." Via oxfordscholarship.com

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1710870228950586/

For the month of July 2018, we discussed Hannah Mary Tabs and the Disembodied Torso (2016) by Kali N. Gross!

"Shortly after the discovery of a headless, limbless torso on the bank of a pond just outside of Philadelphia, investigators homed in on two black suspects: Hannah Mary Tabbs and George Wilson, a young man Tabbs implicates shortly after her arrest. The ensuing trial spanned several months, with court proceedings lasting from February to September—a record length of time for the late-nineteenth century. The crime and its adjudication took center stage in presses from New York to Missouri. The nature of the case allowed otherwise taboo subjects such as illicit sex, adultery, and domestic violence in the black community to become fodder for mainstream public discourses on race, gender, and crime. At the same time, the near-white complexion of the victim and one of his assailants further inflamed public anxieties about shifting notions of race and the prospect of miscegenation in the post-Reconstruction era. Hannah Mary Tabbs and the Disembodied Torso gathers evidence from bills of indictment, trial testimony, coroner’s reports, and detective registers to explore intraracial and gender violence among black Philadelphians. Yet by mapping the crime and its investigation as events unfolded, this book also spotlights the chasm between African Americans and the legal system and shows how biased policing helped foment to urban crime." Abstract via Oxford Scholarship Online

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/217369855553307/

For the month of June 2018 we read: The Militarization of Indian Country (92pgs) by Winona LaDuke with Sean Cruz.

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/23461 "When it became public that Osama bin Laden’s death was announced with the phrase “Geronimo, EKIA!” many Native people, including Geronimo’s descendants, were insulted to discover that the name of a Native patriot was used as a code name for a world-class terrorist. Geronimo descendant Harlyn Geronimo explained, “Obviously to equate Geronimo with Osama bin Laden is an unpardonable slander of Native America and its most famous leader.” The Militarization of Indian Country illuminates the historical context of these negative stereotypes, the long political and economic relationship between the military and Native America, and the environmental and social consequences. This book addresses the impact that the U.S. military has had on Native peoples, lands, and cultures. From the use of Native names to the outright poisoning of Native peoples for testing, the U.S. military’s exploitation of Indian country is unparalleled and ongoing."

Winona LaDuke is an internationally renowned activist working on issues of sustainable development, renewable energy, and food systems. She lives and works on the White Earth reservation in northern Minnesota, and is a two time vice presidential candidate with Ralph Nader for the Green Party.

http://www.unm.edu/~erbaugh/Wmst200fall03/bios/LaDuke.html

Sean Aaron Cruz is a Chicano activist, writer, and editor.

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/2062004327389244/

On March 31st, 2018, from 2:30pm to 4:30pm at the Central Free Library branch on Vine St, We met to discuss Butch Queens Up in Pumps: Gender, Performance, and Ballroom Culture in Detroit by Marlon Bailey. 

https://www.press.umich.edu/5905062/butch_queens_up_in_pumps

"Butch Queens Up in Pumps examines Ballroom culture, in which inner-city LGBT individuals dress, dance, and vogue to compete for prizes and trophies. Participants are affiliated with a house, an alternative family structure typically named after haute couture designers and providing support to this diverse community. Marlon M. Bailey’s rich first-person performance ethnography of the Ballroom scene in Detroit examines Ballroom as a queer cultural formation that upsets dominant notions of gender, sexuality, kinship, and community."

Marlon M. Bailey is a professor of gender studies and American studies and an adjunct assistant professor of theater and drama. He currently teaches at Arizona State University and is a visiting professor at the University of California, San Francisco, in the Department of Medicine.

Bailey is also a director, actor, and performance artist. The most recent play that he acted in was in 2006, “The Hard Evidence of existence: a Black Gay Sex (Love Show),” directed by Cedric Brown. His most recent Directing was in 2002 “Blackness: Perspectives in Color” in the Durham Studio, UC-Berkeley.

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1951643665153896/

On February 24th, 2018, from 2pm to 4pm we met to discuss Robert Love's Warnings: Searching for Strangers in Colonial Boston by Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger. 

Our location was The Last Drop Coffee House, 1300 Pine St, Philadelphia, PA 19107. 

remixed from the publisher's site:

"Between 1765 and 1774, Robert Love warned four thousand itinerants, including youthful migrant workers, demobilized British soldiers, recently exiled Acadians, and women following the redcoats who occupied Boston in 1768.

In colonial America, the system of "warning out" was distinctive to New England, a way for a community to regulate those to whom it would extend welfare. Robert Love's Warnings animates this nearly forgotten aspect of colonial life, richly detailing the moral and legal basis of the practice and the religious and humanistic vision of those who enforced it.

Historians Cornelia H. Dayton and Sharon V. Salinger follow one otherwise obscure town clerk, Robert Love, as he walked through Boston's streets to tell sojourners, "in His Majesty's Name," that they were warned to depart the town in fourteen days. This declaration meant not that newcomers literally had to leave, but that they could not claim legal settlement or rely on town poor relief."

This exclusion from legal settlement or welfare entitlements sought to de facto exclude members from the community as a whole. These exclusion can also be used to map the specific details Colonial Boston's notions of community, undesirability, criminality, and worthiness.

Cornelia H. Dayton is Professor of History at the University of Connecticut and author of Women Before the Bar: Gender, Law, and Society in Connecticut, 1639-1789.

Sharon V. Salinger is Dean of the Division of Undergraduate Education and Professor of History at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author of "To Serve Well and Faithfully": Labor and Indentured Servants in Pennsylvania, 1682-1800 and Taverns and Drinking in Early America.

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/160463201267510/

For our January book we read Every Twelve Seconds, Industrialized Slaughter and the Politics of Sight by Timothy Pachirat

This meeting was held at the Free Library on Vine St on January 20th, 2018, Conference Room 108 from 3:00 PM to 4:30 PM. 

"This is an account of industrialized killing from a participant’s point of view. The author, political scientist Timothy Pachirat, was employed undercover for five months in a Great Plains slaughterhouse where 2,500 cattle were killed per day—one every twelve seconds. Working in the cooler as a liver hanger, in the chutes as a cattle driver, and on the kill floor as a food-safety quality-control worker, Pachirat experienced firsthand the realities of the work of killing in modern society. He uses those experiences to explore not only the slaughter industry but also how, as a society, we facilitate violent labor and hide away that which is too repugnant to contemplate.

Through his vivid narrative and ethnographic approach, Pachirat brings to life massive, routine killing from the perspective of those who take part in it. He shows how surveillance and sequestration operate within the slaughterhouse and in its interactions with the community at large. He also considers how society is organized to distance and hide uncomfortable realities from view. With much to say about issues ranging from the sociology of violence and modern food production to animal rights and welfare, Every Twelve Seconds is an important and disturbing work."

Timothy Pachirat is Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Facebook event here: https://www.facebook.com/events/1524041844340955/