The Counterpublic Papers vol. 9 no. 4

I moved here in August 2004, having no idea that the move would more or less be permanent, that I’d not only never live in Saint Louis again, but that Baltimore would be the second place I’d truly call home.  

The official anniversary came and went but two events over the past few weeks drove it home. 

The first was Morgan State’s homecoming, which was this past weekend. I can’t say enough about my Morgan State family. Dr. Kim Sydnor is the reason I’m here—I may write more later because I don’t think I’ve told the entire story about how I ended up in Baltimore. Long story short I applied for three postdocs in 2003 hoping to get back to Detroit to turn my dissertation on gender and political participation into a book, lost one postdoc legitimately, lost another one illegitimately, and ended up getting a phone call from Dr. Sydnor later in the semester for the third.        

The second was The Baltimore Book Festival. I didn’t take any pictures the first year I went, at least I can’t find any. But I remember seeing the radical book pavilion and thinking that I was home.  

I ended up buying a lot more than I thought. 

I haven’t torn into them yet, and expect to do so here. But some of them raise more than a few thoughts. 

I’ll begin with Adrienne Maree Brown’s trilogy, of which two (Maroons and Grievers) are out. I think the third will come sometime this summer. Brown’s at the forefront of writers influenced by the great Octavia Butler—part of her brood as it were. She spent several years in Detroit working with Grace Lee Boggs and the folk at Allied Media, and although I’d known her before her move, it was there we became friends. I’ve long thought that Detroit and her people had a lot to offer us, giving us lessons about the 20^th century, about the early 21^st century, and about the mid 21^st century. For Grace and Jimmy Boggs, Detroit basically offered a way help people wrestle with the fundamental changes of deindustrialization and the hollowing out process associated with the neoliberal turn. Certainly one of the reasons the urban farm movement takes hold in Detroit is because of the way both it and its population had been discarded by capitalism. And perhaps no better picture used to capture this than Detroit’s Grand Central station. 

I took this about 15 years ago. It doesn’t look like this anymore.

But one of the assumptions embedded in the Boggs’ ideas was that capital wouldn’t come back. And for decades it didn’t, with exceptions. But no longer. For the first time in my life, not my adult life, my life, Detroit’s population is increasing. And when I go back home, the city feels different, although there are still large swaths that are empty. 

This, for example, is a block on the east side of Detroit. I grew up playing on this block—it was where my father grew up. When I was a child this block was filled with houses—at least thirty or more. They’re all gone—my grandmother’s house too. There’s two houses left—one occupied by the same family—when I took this picture I talked to its occupant to make sure they knew I wasn’t running game and when I told them who I was they remembered my father and his sisters. They remembered me too, from when I was a baby. 

I no longer expect this block to look like this. Not sure when it’ll be redeveloped. But it will. Perhaps even by Detroiters. 

What this means is that any afrofuturist account designed to wrestle with Detroit should wrestle with the possibility that Detroit, particularly given climate change, could become a city of 2 million again, if not more. There are a number of different stories to tell about this transition. 

….

While I’ve been really enjoying the time away from university work, such work usually finds me. Such was the case on Monday Oct. 7. One of the smartest things I’ve done, and I’m surprised I didn’t do it a lot sooner, is start scheduling my classes on Tuesday. It gives me a full weekend, gives me a Monday to class prep, and then enables me to stay home if I want. 

I was this close to having a full Monday at home, until I got an email from a colleague. Hopkins administration installed temporary security cameras on campus. Given the date, and nation-wide concern about pro-Palestinian protest, I read the move at first as one designed to stave off student protest. So I raced to campus to shoot the cameras before they were taken down. Although my colleague only saw one, I knew as soon as he told me there was more than one. One wouldn’t be big enough to cover the whole yard.

Sure enough.

And there are three more on my campus. Again, as I took these pictures on Oct. 7 and thought, given the date, that these units were temporary and put on campus to assuage fears of violence (or, more likely, fears of student protest). I’m writing this draft several days later, and they’re still there. Here’s the firm responsible. And here’s the unit:

I can’t recall an email that informed us these units were coming. Over the past several years, Francois Furstenberg has been excellent at charting the way private universities like Hopkins have relied on crisis to justify a series of problematic decisions, including but not limited to ending faculty and staff retirement contributions (until the results of an independent audit proved Hopkins had far more resources than Hopkins administrators suggested), and most recently taking the sword to our grad student program. He’s written an article connecting what appears to be the slow death of our graduate program to a series of decisions designed to shift decision making authority from faculty to administration. Hopkins, for those unaware, is arguably the first American research university. We were created to train doctoral students.  (As an unfortunate aside, I used to think this was unique to Hopkins. It is not.)

Quick notes:

Obama’s gone on the campaign trail, and it wasn’t that long before he tried to speak Pookie back into existence, shaming black men for their voting choices. What’s special about this moment is that for the first time there appears to be pushback. This is welcomed—both because shame doesn’t tend to work that well as a GOTV tactic and because his rhetoric is basically racist.

Ta-Nehisi Coates began a book tour for his new book The Message here in Baltimore a few weeks ago—I just missed him. More about the book later, but the response he’s been getting to the last chapter on Israel is telling. I literally laughed out loud when I read the first line of Compact’s Why Ta-Nehisi Coates Hates Israel (“Ta-Nehisi Coates’ fundamental problem is that he is a narcissist.”) and could only shake my head at this quote:

There you have it. Coates is a narcissist with failed black nationalist dreams. Coates’ argument, his message, is that writing matters. It matters for world building. It matters for world saving. More perhaps next week, but the response to his work suggests he may not be all the way wrong.