The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness comes from Sylvia Wynter’s 900-page unpublished monograph, Black Metamorphosis. In Black Metamorphosis, Wynter tracks how black cultural production is a necessary, and life giving, psychic and physiological response to the brutalities of racism and other forms of oppression. She observes that black cultural producers radically reconfigure normative and biologically-determinist understandings of race by creating works that are tandem with, yet imagine futures outside, colonial logics. The revolutionary demand is, then, a creative demand for a different future.
Who We Are
The Revolutionary Demand for Happiness is a working group of graduate students, faculty, and creatives who are interested in exploring the connections between cultural production and liberation. We share ideas about creative works, poetics, black studies, and anti-colonial studies; we seek out ways to momentarily concretize, in place, these ideas through small-scale aesthetic projects such as cooperative reading and writing projects, studio visits, book and art exhibits, music installations, and invited collaborations.
We are: Aaliyah Strachan, Adesoji Babalola, Alanna Stuart, Alice Grandoit-Šutka, Anthony Reed, DJ Lynnée Denise, fields harrington, Jeden Tolentino, Katherine McKittrick, Krista Franklin, Mark Campbell, Paul Akpomuje, Safia Siad, Temi Odumosu, and Tina Munroe.
Work
Exordium: The Sixties by Katherine McKittrick and Milka Njoroge
In Sylvia Wynter’s writing, The Sixties provides a grammar for reconfiguring who and what we are while also noticing that this redefinition of humanity is tied to our collective (that is, black and nonblack, ecological and environmental) well-being. Wynter asks us to read and reread The Sixties not as an era of nostalgia and a path toward resolved freedom, but as an ongoing engagement with racial violence that sparks potential and already realized insurgencies. Seeking out images that capture Wynter’s insights about global black insurgencies, while also pointing to her own work as a black anti-colonial creative and intellectual, we sought out and exhibited high- resolution images of first edition book covers published between 1960 and 1969. Our findings are below.
Sonic: Vibes by Alanna Stuart, Adesoji Babalola, Aaliyah Strachan
A sound-based lecture disguised as a live musical performance, It’s A Vibes Ting is a sonic vision that brings diasporic-sonic collaborators, GroundSound— Isis Semaj-Hall and Gavin Blair/Gavsborg—into conversation with Caribbean-Canadian femmehall practitioner, PYNE, and Nigerian wordsmith, Soji. Conversations, beats, and grooves will illuminate how sonic kinship is a reparative act, one that pushes against the longstanding practices of violence that black and African communities experience globally. Our findings are below–please feel free to turn up the volume!
Approximation: Poetics of Migration by Paul Akpomuje and Aaliyah Strachan
Inspired by the writings of Simone Browne, on 25 January 2024 we organized a conversation that centred the poetic possibilities of migration, mobility, immobility, borders and boundaries. Paul Akpomuje and Aaliyah Strachan organized the event, and it was moderated by Katherine McKittrick. Akpomuje, a Nigerian poet and doctoral student at Queen’s Faculty of Education, read a set of his poems that attended to surveillance, visas, travel, and home. The poems were paired with community stories about displacement and belonging; we made connections between over-policing, governmentality and government papers, racial capitalism, family and kinship ties, and the difficult and onerous work of travelling as members of the black diasporas. We also homed in on the racialized underpinnings of the “international student” category at Queen’s University–a figure that is monetarily required-desired yet is also continually rendered institutionally unrooted. Our findings are here.
A Smile Split by the Stars
A Smile Split by the Stars was a collaborative narration and installation of nourbeSe philip’s poem, “Meditations on the Declension of Beauty by the Girl with the Flying Cheek-bones.” Working within, across and beyond colonial lexicons, the exhibit-experiment, read philip’s poem through and as audio-visual-textual moments of revolutionary intent, wherein black girlhood and black femininity are understood, a priori, as recoding the aesthetic promises of modernity. The collaborators for this project were: nourbeSe philip, Katherine McKittrick, Juliane Okot Bitek, Trish Salah, Cora Gilroy-Ware, Chloé Savoie-Bernard, Yaniya Lee, Sameen Mahboubi, Aaliyah Strachan, Alana Traficante, Muna Dahir, Cristian Ordóñez, The Gas Company, Roya DelSol.
The exhibit was accompanied by a book—comprised of an essay by Katherine McKittrick and an index by nourbeSe philip and Yaniya Lee and designed by Cristian Ordóñez—that was anchored the exhibit and complemented large scale textual renditions and audio mashups of “Meditations.” Our findings are below. Turn it up!