Ep. 54 – Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive

Always Already Podcast, a critical theory podcast

In this episode, James is joined by AAP Fanon correspondent M. Shadee Malaklou as they welcome a new guest, Derrais Carter, assistant professor of Black Studies at Portland State University. The trio discuss Alexis Pauline Gumbs‘ forthcoming M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke UP, March 2018), the second book of her “planned experimental triptych.” M Archive is a speculative documentary project that chronicles the end of the world from an unspecified position of futurity. We sit with the ways Black poetics enact forms of knowledge that resist grammar and structure, and how Gumbs’ work exceeds genres and disciplinary boundaries. We also tease out the polemical strains of Black feminist metaphysics and ecocriticism that resonate throughout the imagined otherwise world that Gumbs conjures for her readers. What happens after the world ends? How can we take the act of breathing as the project of Black feminism? Take a listen and discover the ways that Afro-pessimism, Black optimism, and Afro-futurism fold into each other and open onto other dimensions of Black life in the Anthropocene.

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https://alwaysalreadypodcast.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/02/gumbs.mp3

Links:

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ website – with lots more links to her spaces and places online
• “We Stay In Love with Our Freedom: A Conversation with Alexis Pauline Gumbs” from the Los Angeles Review of Books
• Hortense Spillers and Alexis Pauline Gumbs in conversation on Left of Black
• Kodwo Eshun’s 1998 The Wire article “Drexciya: Fear of a Wet Planet” archived at Last.fm