To highlight the breadth and vitality of Minnesota’s arts community, Mn Artists invites local artists to serve as guest editors of the site’s arts writing platform. Each guest editor designs a series of articles on a central topic or question that arises out of their own artistic research, and commissions local writers in their network to crack open the complexities of each theme. In fall 2018, poet and graphic designer Chaun Webster developed the series Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished, which extrapolates the methods Webster uses to investigate the instability of blackness and black subjectivities, geography, memory, and the body. The complete series is collected here, along with Webster’s editorial statement:
Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished is a grid for inquiry in a series of conversations on the instability of blackness, that blackness itself is on the move in ways that complicate popular discursive practices that represent it as fixed. This grid borrows from Margo Natalie Crawford’s text Black Post-Blackness where they describe the not-yet-finished in relation to “The Unfinished Poem” by Adam Webber, saying, “The idea that the poem will be finished when poetry is no longer necessary suggests that the unfinished poem is battling the dominant cultural power tied to the ‘finished’ poem. This poem sheds light on black post-blackness by emphasizing that there is a politics tied to the unfinished; the black cultural revolution will continue to have a circular, unfinished nature (black-post-black-black…) until the finished, stable nature of global white supremacy is undone.” (116) So too Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished as theme, seeks to emphasize the destabilizing and fugitive force of blackness, its circular ongoing-ness, and asks with Fred Moten, “What will blackness be?”
Writings Commissioned by Chaun Webster for Mn Artists
Blackness and the Not-Yet-Finished
Mn Artists guest editor, poet and sound artist Chaun Webster, critically engages Douglas Kearney’s conceptualization of mess as a way to think about the plasticity of blackness within its spatial temporal continuum.
A case for this: the (new Black) here and now
Writer and cultural strategist Lisa Marie Brimmer sketches an invitation to black post-blackness, a spiral encompassing the resurrection of the everyday, a history comprised of multitudes, and cosmic acts of world building in the here and now.
Out of Place: Black Triage and its Afterlife
PhD candidate in geography and writer Aaron Mallory explores the space between injury and death to discuss the afterlife of triage.
Poet and educator Keno Evol explores “Sci-fi Social Work,” black sociality, and where “wreckage meets possibility.”
Are We Black Yet?: On Blackness as Art
Drummer, composer, writer and professor of African American literature and culture Davu Seru explores a body of ideas belonging to a kind of “un-finishing school” from Coltrane and their excavated recording, Both Directions at Once, to the seminal sermon in Invisible Man and perhaps black literature which asserts “black is…an’ black ain’t,” asking us along the way: “Are we black yet?”
Everything Is Everything, or How Black Women Will Survive the End of the World
Terrion L. Williamson, who serves as Assistant Professor of African American and African Studies at the University of Minnesota, and is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, expounds here on Barbara Christian’s “intentional privileging of black women’s lifeworlds” and celebrates the fugitive practices and lives forged and cultivated by black women every day.
My Blackness. (Still) Unfinished.
Writer, educator, activist and author of the novels See No Color (2015) and Dream Country (2018), Shannon Gibney writes a personal narrative of blackness and its performances and liminality through multiple timelines providing several stunning glimpses at a project both unfinished and ever present.
Even “The Smallest Cell Remembers”: Notes on Research
Mn Artists guest editor Chaun Webster considers the precariousness of research, evidence, and memory in black geographies.
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