Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974)
(We originally discussed this text on 2/4/20. This post began as an email offering contextual information and light analysis of Angela Davis's 1974 Autobiography, edited by Toni Morrison.)
I hope everyone is doing well. Next week, we will discuss the first chapter of Angela Davis's 1974 autobiography. It has two titles, curiously enough: Angela Davis: An Autobiography and With My Mind on Freedom. Davis wrote this autobiography in her late twenties during the years following her spectacular evasion of the FBI and her internationally-publicized trial in which she was charged with multiple felonies, including the conspiracy to murder. Prior to her life as a fugitive and global symbol of Black radical resistance, she studied German philosophy under the Marxist thinker and activist Herbert Marcuse at the University of Frankfurt. After earning her PhD in philosophy, Davis returned to the US and became a professor of philosophy at UCLA, where she worked with Communists, the Black Panther Party, and many of her undergraduate students to protest the Vietnam War and the persistence of racial, gender, and sexual inequality in the US and around the world.
As a child, Davis lived in the "Dynamite Hill" area of Birmingham, Alabama, which earned its name from the bombings enacted against working- and middle-class Black people by Klansmen and other varieties of white supremacists. Davis was also personally affected by the 1963 bombing of the 16th Street Baptist Church, in which four little Black girls-- Addie Mae Collins (14), Cynthia Wesley (14), Carole Robertson (14), and Carol Denise McNair (11)-- were murdered by Klansmen. Davis, who was 19 at the time, was a close family friend and neighbor of Wesley and Robertson.
While reading Davis's autobiography, I want us to read her descriptions of her paranoia, fear, trauma, and "hysteria" through the lenses of Sula (which Toni Morrison wrote while she edited Davis's autobiography), Hortense Spillers' essay on incest, Patricia Hill Collins' work on the three controlling images (the mammy, Jezebel, and Sapphire), and the musical work of the City Girls, Solange, and SZA. How are we to reconstruct the constellation of Davis's trauma as a young Black woman thrown into extreme and perhaps even unspeakable conditions? How does Davis develop defense mechanisms or performances to cope with the experience of being constantly triggered? How does Davis's trauma affect her relationship to "reality," to language, and to her community? Davis's training as a continental philosopher is particularly crucial to her analysis of the "rational" and the "irrational" within the space of the women's psychiatric prison--how does Davis invaginate the continental philosophical tradition for her own purposes? Also please pay attention to the descriptions of family and kinship ties--what does it mean for Davis as a traumatized subject to develop loving relationships based on trust, compassion, and vulnerability? What can we learn from Davis's ability to use language not only to work through her traumas, but also to inspire others to take radical political action?
With consideration toward the length of the Angela Davis chapter, I think it would be best to allow for an extra week of reading time. We will meet again on Tuesday, February 4. If you develop any ideas or questions about the reading before then, please feel free to shoot me an email. Additionally, at the Feb 4 meeting, I would like to discuss a news article about the city of Durham's response to the recent discovery of instances of carbon monoxide poisoning at MacDougald Terrace, a housing project located in a rapidly-gentrifying area of Durham. As you will read in the article, the city of Durham is admitting that at least 8 (black) people (including children and babies) have been treated for carbon monoxide poisoning. However, as I mentioned to a few folks at the reading group meeting this week, I have learned from black Durhamites that two black babies have already died of carbon monoxide poisoning within the Terrace. This does not appear in the article. Instead, the article focuses on the individual efforts of a single black woman activist named Ashley Canady, whom the article's author accuses of "going off" on the Durham City Council, as well as having uncontrollable "outbursts" and being "still hot" over the lack of attention paid to the overwhelmingly black and lower-class (former) residents of McDougald Terrace. The actual language of the article frames Canady as hysterical, aggressive, and irrational, a rhetorical move which is designed to encourage the reader to dismiss the severity of her accusations. How does the language used to describe Canady compare to the linguistic and structural ways in which the federal government attempted to invalidate Angela Davis's critiques of US imperialism and state-sanctioned violence?
Comments
Post a Comment