To me a manifesto is a poetics of a community, it is beautifully heartfelt, compassion-based, and inclusive (in the best of cases), and can be used to set us apart from others, our intersections are unique to us and our language of community is likewise, distinct and beautiful. Manifestos allow us to announce our existence, our politics, our ethics, and our community structure.
For the next few posts I’ll be utilizing several manifestos to think with, for this post I’ve chosen: A Poltergiest Manifesto; Combahee River Collective Statement; the Pueblo/a/x Feminist Caucus Manifesto; from many others! Big ups to y’all for making your declarations, for adding to the chorus of voices. I’m interested in how manifestos have been used in the past by people like me. Other interests lie in how organizations like Wingbeat 88 talk about their work, themselves (who they are not), who they support, and how they do that support work, how do they build community. Words and our community and how we talk about ourselves are intricately related and specific to a given community identity. The Combahee River Collective (CRC) reminds us to be inclusive and that BIPOC feminisms diverge from White feminist theory as a necessary step to make sure future worlds are made safe for us. While we share a genealogy with Second Wave feminism’s theoretical framework, we have to make a decision on when and how we diverge from systems that don’t support us and we do this by manifesting, making a manifesto. This kind of survey of statements was done by L.H. Stallings in A Dirty South Manifesto: Sexual Resistance and Imagination in the New South (2020, University of California Press), shoutout for offering a framework for me, in this sense (analyzing manifesto-language) to build from and augment, this blog now becomes a laboratory of sorts, a blogatory? Hmmm…
What language do we use to talk about ourselves and the world we want to build? I believe it’s also in the defining what we are NOT is where we begin the process of building the language we use to talk about who we ARE, how do we differ, set ourselves against the status quo that does not bear all of us. When we have been named and categorized by external entities that did not understand us we demand to name ourselves, as an act of resistance against disappearance into categories and defined by others.
How do they use words to build the world(s) they want to see? Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Poltergeist Manifesto turns to the ethereal for building worlds that can support everyone in our community. This is one of the more creative uses of the manifesto but I think it also gives space for the most innovative ideas on how we make a world safe for us. A lot of what I see in manifestos is survival in the face of everyday occurrences of racism, sexism, classism, and so on. We see the need to build something outside of what the current the systems (capitalism, patriarchy) that cause regular/daily pain to us.
I’m intrigued by the methods we use to dream, imagine, and build. James Brown (hear me out) instructed his band to use the rule of “The One”, where the one note was a point of reference for the band, the space between The One notes is where Funk happened. That’s where I want to build from, this idea of the reference notes, if you will. We have reference words like Two-Spirit and Indigequeer, that’s our “One”, then we have this space between the notes (like Bootsy Collins explains here), that’s where we get to be freewheeling, I’m interested in what happens there. The place(s) where we might get tongue-tied, but something comes from being tied up, maybe in the unraveling is our poeisis lies. I want to live there, in that in-between space that’s rife with illusion, magic, and liberatory creation.
I hope you’ll look forward to more analysis of manifesto(s), statements, announcements, declarations over the next handful of posts. In my analysis I’m eager to investigate linguistics as a space for imagining/creation and how that intersects with art/music/literature. I’ll be asking these questions as I read your manifestos: how do you/they/we use the space between the notes? I want to learn from master manifestas on how to make for us a world that “bears all of us2.”
1 s/o to L.H. Stallings!
2 This is a quote from the introduction to Billy-Ray Belcourt’s A Poltergeist Manifesto, (2017).
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