Black being in the wake as consciousness and to propose that to be in the wake is to occupy and to be occupied by the continuous and changing present of slavery’s as yet unresolved unfolding.

we insist Black being into the wake.

How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?

“water is an element ‘which remembers the dead’”

The latter is a dysgraphia of disaster, and these disasters arrive by way of the rapid, deliberate, repetitive, and wide circulation on television and social media of Black social, material, and psychic death. This orthography makes domination in/visible and not/visceral. This orthography is an instance of what I am calling the Weather; it register

“autobiographical example,” says Saidiya Hartman, “is not a personal story that folds onto itself; it’s not about navel gazing, it’s really about trying to look at historical and social process and one’s own formation as a window onto social and historical processes, as an example of them” (Saunders 2008b, 7). Like Hartman I include the personal he

how does one memorialize chattel slavery and its afterlives, which are unfolding still? How do we memorialize an event that is still ongoing?

I am interested in how we imagine ways of knowing that past, in excess of the fictions of the archive, but not only that. I am interested, too, in the ways we recognize the many manifestations of that fiction and that excess, that past not yet past, in the present.

I mean wake work to be a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives.