Nikita Gale and Alexander Provan are joined by Derica Shields, a writer, researcher, and cultural worker living in London. She speaks about her book-length oral history of Black experiences of the welfare state, “A Heavy Nonpresence,” and the value of listening to Black peoples’ accounts and analyses of their own lives. Shields reflects on her effort to share the stories of Black people who are mistreated and monitored by the state, while also being made to feel that they should be grateful for receiving the assistance to which they’re entitled. Her work shows how, in Britain, liberal nostalgia for the ...

Inspired by the scholars, activists, and everyday citizens who spoke out, marched, and protested against police killings of African-Americans, we present this collection of short essays that put Black lives at the center of our thinking about architecture and its history. Note to new readers: This project was published in early 2015, as a rapid response to the emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement. These articles are (sadly) sill relevant, and we hope they will be useful. We also wanted to direct readers to more recent texts that address the intersections of race, space, and activism.

In these last several days, I’ve been thinking about what to do on this channel. It persists that I feel like I have a responsibility to say something. It’s been in our mandate to include those unheard, underrepresented, marginalized voices from the beginning—not through some attempt at tokenism but because we felt good work and important voices were being overlooked and are necessary to the overall conversation. I have tried in both what I publish and broadcast to keep these voices in mind, to hold Talk as a platform that continues to boost these signals. Black Lives Matter. So not to ...

This conversation with Alondra Nelson focuses on the socio-historical descriptions of her book Body and Soul (University of Minnesota, 2011) that unfolds the work of the Black Panthers (late 1960s – 1970s) to resist against the highly discriminatory mechanisms of the politics of health in the United States. Following the structure of the book, we discuss the discrimination against the African American community, both in its negligence (inappropriate healthcare response to disease, prohibitive cost of care) and in its active medicalization of marginalized bodies (scientific research on convicts and women, experimental brain surgery). Against this systemic oppression, the Black Panther Party created its ...

New Models speaks with Z, founder of the BLACK SOCIALISTS of AMERICA (BSA), an online channel turned IRL organization providing a forum and voice for black American leftists as well as education around the values of socialism (per Marx). In this episode, we discuss the inherent racism of the “American Dream” (i.e., capitalism), the promise of worker co-ops, identity politics’ tactical deficiencies in big stack activism, and how to leverage online traction to effect real world political change. This item is publicly available as part of the Library Stack Public Branch at NN Contemporary Art.

Visual artist Binta Oxossi Ayofemi creates urban forms inspired by black abstraction through sound, movement, and space. Her first building as artwork, COMMONS, opens in Oakland in 2020, in collaboration with renowned architect Bonnie Bridges of Studio BBA. Studio BBA transforms buildings with historic fragments into contemporary buildings. COMMONS began with Oxossi’s strategic cuts into the building as performance, next shaped as an opening or flow between form and function in dialogue with Studio BBA. The space transforms a formerly vacant music building in downtown Oakland, into a portal for gathering, sound, and sustenance. Inspired by both Black Panthers and Black ...

Civilizations at their peak present curious spectacles. They ooze wealth and pride, produce fantastic art and technologies, all while shredding the foundations of their prosperity. Their citizens seem to believe they eclipse mundane restrictions of time and space. The monuments their predecessors have left in Rome, on Easter Island, in Egypt, in Venice, littered like warning beacons elsewhere throughout the world, demonstrate such faith may not match reality. A rock thrown skyward must believe, at the top of its arc, fleetingly, that it is flying. When we admire our great cities, we find it hard to believe that they will ever ...

Charles Mudede joins us from Seattle to read “White Knee, Black Neck,” published in the June 2020 issue of e-flux journal.

This conversation with Alexander Weheliye is built upon the critique he made of the work of Giorgio Agamben, in particular in his essentialization of the muselmann in the context of the Holocaust. Alexander argues that slavery functions as a better paradigm to understand the “layering” of bare lives and the racial aspects that this understanding involves. He explains how he is interested in finding other ways to “claim humanity” than the traditional judicial one that attributes this status in a retroactive manner to suffering bodies. In order to do so, we evoke the works of major African-American and black Caribbean thinkers such as ...

Ann Laura Stoler and I begin this conversation by introducing the political context lexicon that she co-curates and edits. We then discuss the work she had done around the colonial management of sexuality and reproduction. The existence of the métis (mix-blooded) child in the colony renders more complex the binary distinction between colon citizens and colonial subjects. Biology is nevertheless not merely the only site of recognition for the colonial administration, behavior is also extremely important in the access to citizenship. We examine how space, whether corridor or school, is built to accommodate the administrated behavior of the colony. Finally, Ann gives us a preview ...

Across the American criminal justice system, the Northpointe corporation’s COMPAS algorithm is one of many that are used to determine the likelihood that a prisoner will commit further crimes and return to prison, known as recidivism. After extensive tests and analysis on the prison statistics of a single county in Florida using a custom set of tools, the journalism foundation ProPublica found that COMPAS disproportionally mis-identitied black prisoners as having higher recidivism likelihoods and white prisoners as having lower ones, affecting sentencing outcomes and treatment by the system. Though Northpointe disputed their results, ProPublica found that the dataset produced for ...

The enemy of my enemy is my friend. Turn the proverb around a time or two and you might be able to locate yourself and your allies in the confusing terrain of the present. The question of how to define an enemy as distinct from a friend has been a longstanding preoccupation of politics. Today, some conventions for deciphering alliances have become complicated. For instance, you can’t look into someone’s eye or shake their hand while safely practicing physical distancing, and still others are intensified as the ability to track a person’s positions through the convoluted archive that is the internet. ...