THEMES + READINGS

THEME I – PUBLIC STUDY: RESEARCH + INSTITUTION

Public Study is an ICA program logic where the primary mode of working is driven by a desire to work collaboratively and with transparency so as to continuously leave the possibility of learning open, in process, and in collaboration with our publics. At its core, Public Study is concerned with collective research—including the marginalia, the side conversations, the notes and sketches, and the differing points of view, which together inform alternate ways of conducting research and learning.

Readings:

• The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning & Black Study, Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 
• Total Education, How Institutions Think (Excerpt), Fred Moten and Stefano Harney 
• In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (Excerpt), Christina Sharpe

THEME II – PLANTATION LOGIC: RACIAL CAPITALISM + ANTI-COLONIAL POETICS

Plantation logic is dedicated to the history of settler colonialism in the United States and its lasting impacts on people and natural environments. The texts included in this section consider the colonized landscape, plantation capitalism, forced migration, cultural erasure, architecture and space. Additional texts and poems also consider spiritual survival, kinship, ritual, and language across cultures and space.

Readings:

• Sustainability as Plantation Logic, Or, Who Plots an Architecture of Freedom?, K. Wayne Yang
• Development Arrested: The Blues and Plantation Power in the Mississippi Delta, Clyde Adrian Woods (Book, Chapter “The Enclosure Movement”)
• Novel and History, Plot and Plantation, Sylvia Wynter
• Postcolonial Love Poem (Excerpt), Natalie Diaz
• The Dryzgraphxst (Excerpt), Canisia Lubrin

THEME III – EROTIC CONSUMPTION: SEX, DESIRE, AND PROPAGATION

Erotic consumption features themes around sex and desire from feminist, queer, and post humanist studies. These texts consider how the erotic is mobilized through consumption of human and non-human subjects ranging from pornography to speculative plant theory.

Readings:

• Cumming to Power, Mireille Miller-Young
• Sex in the Archives: The Politics of Processing and Preserving Pornography in the Digital Age, GVGK Tang
• Radical Botany: Plants and Speculative Fiction, Natania Meeker and Antónia Szabari (Book, Chapter “The End of the World by Other Means”)
• The Delectable Negro, Vincent Woodard (Book, Chapter “Sex, Honor, and Human Consumption”)
• Ain’t I a Bottom? Mandy Harris Williams