2022 Momus Emerging Critics Residency Application
Statement of Intent
The first time that I wanted to end the world was when I saw my grandfather as he lay dying on what could have been his deathbed. Poisoned by cancer years after being touched by Agent Orange — a lover who had made an intimate home in his body after he was targeted and deployed to Vietnam for engaging in student protests back in the 60s. Whoops, I guess I lied. I didn’t really know what I wanted back then, if I even do now or ever will. I think the French call this ressentiment, that strange phenomenon when hatred boils but doesn’t evaporate, becoming disfigured by the weight of its own thwarted attempts to transform its state.
Can I think together with you and you and you and them until ”that within“ bursts from our insides?
I see my relationship to critique in all its guises as guided not by an object, but by an insatiable hunger. Something like my African reclaiming of the ”politics of the belly“ in order to disarticulate desire so much so that invention can be brought into existence. Maybe I‘ll name it a quiet hunger like Kevin Quashie wrote about, or a non-utilitarian stillness like Dionne Brand penned. Sylvia Wynter alerted me to the fact that we need to think about ritual and ceremony, and these rings are dishes best served when we are alone together. That‘s what the Haitian slaves taught me when I closed my eyes and imagined the fire on that night in 1791. It is only through convening the circle that we can (de)cypher together, disrupting the promise of harmony held by form and surrendering to blackness as the frustrating ”n‘est pas“ of, and in, and through, the void. I need to get better at mumbling so that I argue less. Fred Moten said ”I want to sound like something“ and I feel him but the record in my ear is telling me that Momus Emerging Critics Residency will push me to embrace sounding like nothing. The thought pleases me.
What does it mean to be in solidarity with the slave?
I got really pissed off with the social sciences when Zakiyyah Iman Jackson reminded me that ” measurement is a doing and a making.“ I let that frustration fuel my fingers as I highlighted the screen reading Lewis Gordon‘s lullaby to me about ”teleological suspension of method.“ Am I one of those vampiric social scientists who awkwardly walks over to the humanistic writers and thinkers in order to rejuvenate my own stagnant thinking and production? I leave those concerns to the gods that have yet to be named because they never lived in the first place. I‘m looking to write my own erasure somewhere between opacity and tortured display. Perhaps my ambivalence with the black radical tradition began when I fell in love with it. I study sound sans rhythm, I am haunted (”by what?“ I continue to ask) as I navigate the space between violence and brutality, and I wish to wade through the mud to deal with how black cultural production rearticulates our collective relationship to desire.
How do I maintain an unsettled relationship to questions of method?
