Elizabeth Povinelli

[[Between Gaia and Ground_ Four Axioms of Existence and the — Elizabeth A_ Povinelli — 2021 — Duke University Press — 9781478013648 — be37eb1c1ed10621067be4d744ecf67a — Anna’s Archive.pdf]]

‘political proper’ p.21

In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman situates her interest in a “politics in a lower frequency” in the conditions of African enslavement. Hartman notes that because the forms of resistance among enslaved Africans were “excluded from the locus of the ‘political proper,’ ” the agencies of the enslaved Africans must be reconceptualized from the perspective of “the nonautonomy of the field of action==; provisional ways of operating within the dominant spaces; ==local, multiple, and dispersed sites of resilience that have not been strategically codified or integrated; and the nonautonomy and pained constitution of the slave as person.”14 makes me think a bit about narrative therapy, agency within oppressive conditions […] These politics at a lower frequency would seem to fit nicely into the politics of axioms one through three, making devastatingly clear why it is so nec- essary to understand the social conditions of entangled existence. How are we to forge a new mode of political historiography unless we understand that the way social worlds are entangled directly alters the modes in which political resistance and resilience are expressed?

p.26:

“all concepts are precipitates from and for locations in the differential spaces of the entanglement of existence wrought by colonialism.”