(Re)Citation — A Reflection on Negro Reading Hour
Have I ever had an original idea? If the answer is yes, then do I “own” that idea? Is that ownership automatic? Do I have to file the correct copyright paperwork? Is it possible for me to own ideas that did not originate with me? Academic writing is distinguished by the necessity of citation — meaning that when we produce work, we are expected to locate the precise origins of our ideas in the work of others. This infinite loop continues, breathing life into the ruse of intellectual sovereignty, or the fiction that ideas can be parsed into little packages and trademarked. And yet, citing your sources ain’t all bad. Even as ideas evolve, they can never escape their histories — even as people attempt to erase or distort those histories.
Negro Reading Hour was an attempt at doing political education “otherwise,” to approach what it means to disseminate liberatory learning experiences in a different manner. It began with a collective cry. On social media, I saw so many black people imploring white and nonblack people to see us, to struggle with us, to fight white supremacy. All this amid the ever-present spectre of black death once again displayed in a spectacular salvo of suffering on our screens with irreducible uniqueness yet agonizing familiarity.
What I saw on my timeline was the endless cry of black folks pleading for human recognition. Pleading for white and nonblack people to speak up and act in defense of black life. The futility of such efforts haunts my soul. A younger, less mature me would’ve jumped into the fray, imploring black folks to cease what I believe to be totally ineffective appeals — to tell them that if there is any room for hope, it is not to be found in the terrain they were searching. Instead of saying all of that and reproducing the hierarchy of the “learned critic” and the listening “masses” — I chose to offer something else. But what? Not more knowledge — at least not in the traditional form of teaching — but a different kind of space. One in which we could share in the circles and circles of sorrow without attending to what nonblack people are doing.
I had been a fan of Claudia Rankine since her fascinating book Citizen was assigned as Pomona College’s freshman year reading. A genre-promiscuous work, Rankine’s ability to bear poetic perspective on those large and small snapshots of surreality that constitute a racist world left me shook. The book has long served as an inspiration for my writing — both stylistically and in terms of the ability to describe the uncanny aspects of life in an antiblack world. So I offered a space on social media for people to come and listen to me read excerpts. No analysis. Slim introduction. Just us being-together curated by Rankine’s masterful pen.
I didn’t have a goal beyond this. But as I reflect, I’m thinking about the politics of citation. I want to call what I did (re)-citation, both an invocation of profound black ideas and a conjuring of those beautiful black beings who produced them. This conjuring itself was a form of theoretical work. My voice, cadence, and flow worked as a performance — turning the traditional academic presentation into a concert. Or late-night bar performance. The root of “citation” is the conversion of ideas into property, to establish a linear chain of property relations. Too many conversations around the “accessibility” of radical (often black) ideas are boring and reductive. People do want to learn. And they have the ability to learn “jargon” or complex concepts by sitting with them. And so in the spirit of black study, each week for the next few months I drew from a range of black writing, from scholarly articles, poems, thinkpieces, manifestos, and undefinable work. There’s no way to measure what I accomplished, but I think I prefer that.
