The last thing negroes need now are black imitators of neurotic white writers... we possess within ourselves a great reservoir of physical and spiritual strength to which poetry fiction and stage should give voice— Langston Hughes, April 1965 The Task of The Negro Writer as Artist
I ran from it and was still in it; it was so big I ran from it and was still in it– Fred Moten
If you are a diasporic subject, the archive acquires a special
poignancy for you, because it is the space of the memorial, there are
very few tangible memorials which say 'you have been here,' and so the
archive is important because it's one of the spaces in which the
memorial attests to your existence, but in the archival one also finds a
struggle between the official and the unofficial, because the archival
both brings out what is accepted as what has happened and
illustrates, sometimes, what has to be repressed in order for what's
happened to happen – John Akomfrah
This is a living archive of rare and underrecognized poetry recordings and antiquefuturisms– often works that explore the role of words as music in very literal, unflinching ways, as well as pieces that understand oration as a primary element of the literary arts. Also cataloged here are elective affinities of such work, and some of the spectral ideologies that make these endeavors possible, impossible (mythic/mythless), and imperative.
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