Talk by Omar Ricks, Presented by Tanzeen Doha
September 1st, 2015 I UC DAVIS
How do we name the violence of a paradigm of antiblackness that is still going? Hortense Spillers essay “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” outlines a revolutionary theory of the violence that created and continues to create Blackness through the rape, murder, incarceration, and misnaming of Black people by a central figure in the psychic formation of western society: the Name of the (white) Father. Spillers reading helps us understand Fanon’s notion that African “metaphysics [were]…abolished [by] a new civilization that imposed its own” and calls for a radical renaming of Black people by ourselves.
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