About Archetypal Studies of Global Antiblackness & Black Invention

Should we choose to pay attention to the conditions of our global present, we would notice an ongoing interdiction of Black peoples’ mobilizations and comportments of bodily sovereignty, self-determination, and love. Our modern relationship templates to be human are the result of practices over millenia of  core relationship principles which subtly, and explicitly, harvest life. These principles establish freedom and the terms of life for some at the cost of others being perpetually foreclosed from experiencing wellbeing in the established world. As a result of colonialisms, the invention of Blackness, chattel slave trades in Earth, apartheid, imperialism, and other systems of bestialized domination, these foundational principles have established daily life such that Black people share common experiences of this oppression. This is not only a routine intergenerational experience, but an expected and foundational part of modern polities and how we understand what it is to be in this world. As this structure fabricates its own necessity, revolutionary consciousness, conditions of resistance and its own ends are simultaneously borne by those it hunts. How do we explain how these experiences are related and structured? What are the beliefs and conditions that make this possible? What can we do about it?

Emerging from decades of research and ongoing collective study with Black communities across the United States, Caribbean, South America, East and Southern Africa this Apothecary studies the relationships among forms of these principles through what we call antiblackness. As a general approach, the study within the Apothecary demonstrates a continuity of antiblack principles across time, space, and dimensions of consciousness. Archetypes here temporarily gather the form a principle takes to then deconstruct and dissolve how this continues to show up in our respective daily lives.

In the dissolution of antiblack archetypes of relation, we aim to establish new relationships and life-affirming ecologies by bringing together all ranges of study and creation. Our intention is to explore as many forms of the problem, and create as many ecologies of solutions as needed and deeply, and precisely, as possible.

Our Archetypal Study of Global Antiblackness begins with a few, and will be added to over time: 

The (Info) Mammy (Za Suekama)  

The Beast 

The Freak 

The Siphon & the Well (of Endless Energy) 

The Cop Coon

The Damned 

The Captive Maternal (Joy James) 

The Machine / The Plantation

Individual Property 

Vocal Cage 

The Patriarch

The Scarce Glut (Scarcity &  Gluttony) 

The Uninvited/Unaccepted

The External Savior 

 

Our Archetypal Study as Black Invention provides a multidimensional and embodied reframing of the solution to problems expressed in the archetypes above. For example, consider food sovereignty. Many approaches to this problem stitch mutual aid, seed libraries, and defending a community garden. While we do not discredit the importance of any of these practices we consider the communal and embodied needs of food sovereignty. Thus our food sovereignty archetypal course brings together: 

- Seed libraries, soil cultivation. and community gardens 

- Metabolism, gut & heart brain, and tailoring nutritional development

- Food psychology, emotional eating and feeding emotional needs

- Recipes to eat and repair earth ecologies for growing food

- Psychological and spiritual relationship building with harvesting

Through our anti-imperial City Living Gardening program, and guidance from an array of researchers, artists, community educators, activists, parents, farmers and more.