Against Enclosure, Against Fascism, Against Empire
Black digital practice after November 5, 2024
“Fire dreams” are quite literally born in flames.”
- Laura McTighe with Women With a Vision in Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (2023)
In a book that is part manifesto, part history, part toolbox, and all radical vision, Laura McTighe, alongside Deon Haywood, Shaquita Borden, and the Women With a Vision collective, past and present, described the fire that burned down their offices in 2012. Women With a Vision was founded in 1989 in Central City, New Orleans, Louisiana, as a collective of Black women engaged in work around reproductive justice, HIV/AIDS activism, decriminalizing sex work and battling intimate violence. For thirty-five years, WWAV has been among the radical Southern vanguard described by the late Clyde Woods, the “many individuals, families, communities, racialized ethnic groups, and indigenous nations” that “have traveled the tortuous roads of Deep South enlightenment.”
The damage wrought by the fire “conjured the terror of the Ku Klux Klan burning crosses and the firebombing of Black homes, churches, and political organizations.” And yet, McTighe and WWAV write, the arsonists could only do so much. “The arsonists who set fire to the WWAV tried to take that space. What they could not take were the relationships that produced that space, which were always already rooted in this land.”
In 2020, LifexCode was founded in the midst of pandemic and protest with a commitment to antiracist and decolonial digital humanities. We have grown into an ecosystem of over 200 labs, projects, and members that span borders, that roots itself beyond the digital by learning from the earth, the archipelago, the ocean; that learns and is learning from our comrades fighting for freedom, sovereignty and recognition from the Dominican Republic to Palestine and beyond. In 2024, we turned to the mangrove to learn more about the labor it takes to transform the salt of enclosure into sweet water and nutrients, rooting deep at the edge of the sea to support and protect ecosystems teeming with resistant and resilient life.
We turn to the mangrove now.
We turn to fire now. We know empire will never go quietly, but “fire dreams are born in flames.”
We return to the wisdom of Clyde Woods, M. Jacqui Alexander, Leon Waters, Kathe Hambrick, Mayra Santos Febres, Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Édouard Glissant and other fighters past and present who have dared to imagine new worlds and new possibilities.
We commit to feeling and acknowledging the grief and terror of the moment. We remember those who have died, who were killed, and who did not survive the last month, the last year, the last four years, the last eight years, the last hundred, the last five hundred.
We know, as June Jordan writes, that “some of us did not die.” We know that while we are still here, we need each other and we will not back down from our commitment to antiracist and decolonial work, digital, analog, and otherwise.
We remain committed to life, to knowledge, to spirit, to gathering, to strategy, and to fighting with whatever tools are available for the safety and security of every single being on this planet.
We recommit to learning from those on the front lines, learning from the radical, grassroots organizing happening all around us, and being humble before that work.
We recommit to political education and learning everything we can about power and structure in the present as well as the past.
We recommit to political education and learning everything we can about power and structure in the present as well as the past.
We know we fight for ourselves, our ancestors, and the unborn. We look to our communities, elders and ancestors with care and regard as we recognize how they fought and still fight and we learn from them. We hold steadfast to the lessons and power our ancestors and forbears have laid before us as we engage with Black life and histories.
We remain committed to the everyday and the fractal, committed to building in relation and through relationships with small steps and small acts, one at a time.
We remain committed to grappling with the uncomfortable, difficult and, sometimes heartbreaking work of solidarity.
We remain committed to translation and translating, to multilinguality and multiple worlds. And, where necessary, mutation.
We continue to practice the future by refusing to replicate the old myths and structures of enclosure. These structures include the so-called sanctity of data and the reification of sociological categories that do not serve us. We practice a digital humanities that will continue to refuse the terms of pathology, binary thinking, and categorization in explaining who we are, what our lives are like, and how we should live.
We believe in a future where Black people still exist. Creating that future may require us to become unrecognizable to ourselves as well as ungovernable. Ruha Benjamin writes that the “Old Stories continue to infect our collective imagination, distorting how we see and value different groups, cultures, and worldviews.” However, “radical imagination can inspire us to push beyond the constraints of what we think, and are told, is politically possible.” Creating a future where we all LIVE will require new stories.
We believe in the power of imagination, play, and joy to guide us as we dream, imagine, create, and build new stories about the world and ourselves.
"Es hora de cambiar los discursos que nos rigen,” Mayra Santos Febres writes, “y eso empieza por descolonizar nuestras cabezas, recuperar saberes ancestrales e imaginarnos otro mundo posible, comenzar a contarlo." “Now is the time to change those discourses that govern us and that begins by decolonizing our minds, recovering ancestral knowledge and imagining another possible world, [and] starting to tell its story.”
Signed,
Dr. Jessica Marie Johnson, Director
Dr. Nadejda Webb, Assistant Director
Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vásquez, Diaspora Solidarities Lab
Dr. Kim Gallon, Black Beyond Data
Dr. Alexandre White, Black Beyond Data
Dr. Alex Gil, Black Beyond Data
Dr. Laura Rosanne Adderley, Keywords 4 Black Louisiana
Dr. Guadalupe Garcia, Keywords 4 Black Louisiana
Further reading:
Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).
Mayra del Pilar Santos Febres. “Descolonizando la academia.” Diálogos, 2023, 29–45
June Jordan, Some of Us Did Not Die: New and Selected Essays (New York: Basic Civitas Books, 2003).
Laura McTighe, Women With A. Vision, and Deon Haywood, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2024).
Clyde Woods, “Katrina’s World: Blues, Bourbon, and the Return to the Source,” American Quarterly 61, no. 3 (September 23, 2009): 427–53.
LifexCode Principles http://lifexcode.org/about
image Caption: The Frogmore Plantation is fully engulfed in flames in Frogmore, La., Friday, July 26, 2019. The Frogmore Plantation, an 1,800-acre property in Concordia Parish, includes a cotton gin that's on the National Register of Historic Places. (Sabrina Robertson/The Natchez Democrat via AP)
Dear LifexCode Members:
