On Beauty and Terror Part 1: The Black Outdoors

Matri-Archi(tecture)

‘Anybody who thinks that they can understand how terrible the terror has been, without understanding how beautiful the beauty has been against the grain of the terror, is wrong.’ -Fred Moten (2014), The Black Outdoors. This MA episode is part 2 of a two piece article which features a talk between two scholars. As an extension of Part 1, Fred Moten, ‘in his work he has consistently argued that any theory of politics, ethics, or aesthetics must begin by reckoning with the creative expressions of the oppressed’ (McCarthy, 2018). Saidiya Hartman, has written about feeling the continual legacy of slavery and ‘[making] productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women’. In this talk they lead us through various questions, musings, and lingering breakthroughs. How do we get out from under the regime of everyday violences? Being outdoors is premised on an inness, does the outdoors always exist or is it also because there is an in that has been made? And what happens when we finally get out? Can we get out? This episode is narrated by Khensani de Klerk and was written by Ndjha Ka; originally published as an article on February 21st 2018.