The alternative is a prerequisite --- internal focus on Black studies is a project of liberation geared towards reorienting our position against racial capitalism.

I hear a sound. The sound I hear is made possible by what I’ve backgrounded, what I believe is not there. Silence is a quality but not a reality, at least not in space-time wherein humans must breathe. Silence only exists in vacuums, so when we speak of silence, we speak of a certain inattention to a certain ceaseless pulse and noise. To attend to silence and its being backgrounded, to attend to sound that foregrounds itself, Joshua Myers offers a meditation on the music, the sound, the collective practice of black thought in “The Order of Disciplinarity, the Terms of Silence.” Meyers’s essay excites because he stages an intervention against the conventional wisdom, the sort of anectodal narrativity, of Black studies. He offers that it is “reductionist and misleading to conceive of the whole of Black intellectual history as a corrective to the silences that make Western knowledges.” So if Black studies, if Black intellectual history itself, is not simply a corrective, is not simply attempting to fill silence that makes Western knowledge, what is such a history and tradition? In another register, then, Myers is asking the question, is wrestling with the concern, that each of the authors are in their own ways thinking with and through and against: how to take the occasion of failure, constraint, or here, silence, and make something otherwise? These authors do not assume the finality and totality of such “bad” things but think their occasion as absolute—though not pure—possibility. In mathematics, absolute values are considered to be the value’s distance from zero. It is about relation, about space-time possibility then, about the way value and distance codetermine each other. These essays in this issue of Critical Ethnic Studies are each about absolution and the absolute; they each are in the direction of finding a ceremony, a ritual and performance, a collective improvisational intellectual practice and mode of life that is produced by life in the flesh, by the resistance of the object, life otherwise, life produced in and as minoritized knowledges. Sharon Stein cuts to the heart of the chase in her essay, “Higher Education and the Im/possibility of Transformative Justice.” Can we do anything from within this space? What is the purpose of even this issue if it is only a filler for curricula vitae and not for thinking about how we might inhabit worlds otherwise? Are these just rhetorical exercises? Stein’s essay is concerned with these questions. She notes the “colonial elisions in accounts of the neoliberal present that rest on nostalgia for a prior commitment to higher education as a state-sponsored means of educating enlightened citizens and ensuring social mobility” and cautions that the modern university is constructed with a genre-specific student in mind: “they are different versions of the same base modern subject, who is educated to rationally pursue affluence, maximize utility, and enact seamless progress and development through the supposedly universal governing architectures of the nation-state and global capital.” The work we contend against, in other words, is varied, textured, difficult. If we are about the unsettling of the university, the becoming disoriented within the academy, it would have to be by way of a force that works on the university as it works on us, a force that works on the university as if it works on us. Who is this “us”? Who would nominate oneself for such a status and position and station? And in the service of what, exactly, would such a nomination occur? This brings me, finally, to the conversation between Robin D. G. Kelley and Fred Moten, moderated by Afua Cooper and Rinaldo Walcott. They begin their conversation by responding to a question about a meditation on Black studies and Black politics, what they are and what they might be. When we begin to think about what something might be, we are in the terrain of the as if, we are in the hopes for the failure of the what is, we are desiring and imagining and sensing otherwise possibility. Moten thinks of Black studies as “not so much as an academic discipline or confluence of disciplines but as the atmosphere in which I grew up. And I love that atmosphere. I love the way that it felt, and I love the way that it smelled, and I love the flavors, and I love the sounds, and I love the movements.” And Kelley comes on down the line, offering, “social movements have always been the catalyst for Black studies. When Fred was talking about Black studies as kind of a way of life, as an atmosphere in which he grew up and which I grew up and many of us grew up, that’s so true. I never thought of it that way, but that is so true. In fact, if anything, Black studies is not a multidiscipline but a project, a project for liberation, whatever that means, and liberation is an ongoing project.” Can you hear it as you read? Have you sensed the sound from which my thinking emerges? Can you tell that I think with Fred Moten and Robin D. G. Kelley? Can you get a sense for the fact that what is offered in the pages to come has already worked on me, has already helped me practice life and the way I live it otherwise? Moten and Kelley key in on the sensuality of Black studies, which is to say the sensual experience the university seeks to harness only insofar as it transforms it into a knowledge object for its own existence, not a way to sense worlds, not a way to practice justice and equity and love. What these authors in their complexity, each of them, offer is the fact that we have to have a sense for this thing, a sense for otherwise possibility, have to make ourselves open and vulnerable to otherwise possibility while also protecting from harm the violence that attends being open and vulnerable. Can we fail to live up to the university while showing up for each other? How can we go about an intentioned failure to produce the politics of the neoliberal academy while concurrently practicing a poetics of relationality, sociality, fundamental connection, and disorientation and unsettlement? It’s felt in the music, in the poetics, in the forms minor life takes. To ask, in other words, what can be done with the academy is to question if we might currently be, what we might have been, what we might otherwise be. We displace linear time and space for a different relation to temporality. This difference would reconceptualize relation and sociality such that the genre of human’s thoughts are allowed to flourish and, then, the knowledge production of otherwise genre-specific humanism would be taken as a way to practice, to perform, the joy and pleasure and liberation of thought otherwise