SOVEREIGNTY
The Sojourner Project - South Africa / with Deborah Thomas, Gabrielle Goliath, Savannah Shange & Khwezi Mkhize
VIAD is excited to announce the second activation of The Sojourner Project - South Africa, a Black Studies mobile academy presented by the Practicing Refusal collective.
ZOOM Session: 25 Februray 2021 | 7pm SAST / 12pm EST
Though sovereignty has become something of a disavowed category within Black Studies, it remains conceptually and materially pertinent for Black people across many locations - for those in the so-called “post”-colonial world, of course, and also for those in majority Black spaces.
Many of us are obsessed with sovereignty and with what sovereignty feels like, but this obsession is not one that is framed by the state, or within the parameters of its institutions. For us, the point of bearing witness to state violence (and other forms of violence), of creating different archives and affective relationships to violence, is to chart new terrain upon which sovereignty can be elaborated and radiated. We are always imagining something that looks like sovereignty, and if it feels out of reach we are compelled to reach toward it anyway. Sovereignty cannot be disavowed as either false consciousness or ontological impossibility, as these frames rely too heavily upon masculinist notions of revolution and human-ness. Instead, we want to privilege the ephemeral, the performative, the affective, the non-linear and unexpected ways something that feels like sovereignty circulates and is transmitted from one to another. This sovereignty is not an event; there is not a moment when we will be able to point to something and identify its achievement. Instead, it is constantly in process; it is both internal and communal; it both frames and enacts love and response-ability.
The Sojourner Project
The Sojourner Project is a Black Studies mobile academy initiated by the Practicing Refusal Collective, an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence and black futurity in the twenty-first century.
Structured as a mobile academy that intentionally aims to exceed the literal and figurative walls of the university, The Sojourner Project convenes transnational and diasporic gatherings in which conversations, workshops and art activations create multi-directional encounters with histories of struggle and practices of refusal that have emerged in different black communities. The intention of each convening is to respond to the cultural, intellectual, political, and social landscapes of African and African diasporic localities through collaborative engagements between members of the Practicing Refusal Collective and resident artists, scholars and community and cultural workers. Our goal is a dialogue on national and regional inflections of anti-blackness (including black-on-black violence and Afrophobia), the resulting formations of black precarity and fungibility, and the possibilities for creating alternative futures. Our dialogues seek to formulate critical toolkits for exploring the role of Black Studies in creating intellectual frameworks for black communities to mobilize in the struggle for social transformation.
The first international convening of The Sojourner Project was held in Paris in 2018 and hosted by the Columbia Institute for Ideas and Imagination at the Paris Global Center at Reid Hall. The Sojourner Project Paris: Dialogues on Black Precarity, Fungibility and Futurity featured panel discussions, a film screening, a poetry reading and collaborative working group sessions. The event welcomed over three hundred participants and was jointly funded by the Barnard Center for Research on Women, the Columbia Center for the Study of Social Difference, The Institute for Gender Studies, and The Institute for Ideas and Imagination.
The Sojourner Project South Africa was scheduled to launch in 2020 as a dual-city programme in Durban and Johannesburg. Due to the outbreak of the Coronavirus pandemic and following extensive engagement with local partners and communities, the envisioned program of diasporic exchanges, screenings, performances and workshops has now been reimagined as an interactive, online, community-based Black Studies curriculum. With the help of design collective Black Chalk & Co, The Sojourner Project South Africa will convene virtually via thesojournerproject.org from November 2020 through Spring 2021. The website will support a series of scheduled activations including listening sessions, screenings, pop-up learning modules and workshops, hosted by members of the Practising Refusal Collective and collaborating artists, collectives, curators and scholars from Durban, Johannesburg and across the continent and diaspora.
Anticipating the official launch of The Sojourner Project website in 2021, our first release is Frequency – an online listening session and workshop hosted by Tina Campt and Alexander G. Weheliye of the Practicing Refusal Collective, with South African artist and vinyl selector Zara Julius and award-winning London-based artist and director Jenn Nkiru.
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The Sojourner Project - South Africa is supported by Art for Humanity, Durban University of Technology (link); Black Visualities Initiative, Cogut Institute for the Humanities, Brown University (link); and the Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration, Yale University (link).
The Practicing Refusal Collective
Formed in 2015 by Professors Tina Campt and Saidiya Hartman, the Practicing Refusal Collective (PR Collective) is an international Black feminist forum dedicated to initiating new dialogues on blackness, anti-black violence, and black futurity in the twenty-first century.
The Collective comprises sixteen members from multiple disciplines of the humanities, including two Columbia faculty, four Barnard faculty, and ten additional members from nine universities in the US and Canada.
The group’s point of departure is a set of overlapping interests and investments in theorizing black agency in the face of contemporary circumstances of imperilled blackness and vulnerable black bodies. The public events and working group sessions hosted by the Collective have created a cutting-edge platform for thinking through refusal as a generative rubric for understanding everyday practices of struggle, often obscured by an emphasis on collective acts of resistance. Convened in response to the proliferating forms of violence facing black populations in the US and in the African diaspora, the mission of the PR Collective is to articulate black feminist strategies for addressing the precarious state of black communities resulting from policies that treat black bodies as disposable and expendable – a state of duress we describe as black fungibility. The ‘practice of refusal’ referenced in the group’s title names its rejection of this current status quo as liveable. It is a refusal to accept black precarity as inevitable, and a refusal to embrace the terms of diminished subjecthood through which black subjects are presented. We seek instead to develop strategies for confronting black fungibility and creating alternative possibilities for living otherwise.
In 2018, the Collective launched an ambitious program of transnational conversations under the title The Sojourner Project. The Sojourner Project expands the conversations begun by the PR Collective by creating multi-directional dialogues in a range of sites in Africa and its diasporas with local artists, activists, scholars and thought leaders working to develop their own strategies for addressing black precarity, fungibility, and anti-black violence.
Members:
Rizvana Bradley, Dionne Brand, Tina Campt (VIAD RA), Denise Ferreira da Silva, Kaiama Glover, Saidiya Hartman, Arthur Jafa, Tavia Nyong’o, Darieck Scott, Christina Sharpe, Maboula Soumahoro, Deborah Thomas (VIAD RA), Françoise Verges, Alexander G. Weheliye, and Mabel O. Wilson (VIAD RA)