Ceremony

Abstract

This chapter turns to site of the university to consider what it means to think about pedagogy—or study—as endarkenment tending within what Christina Sharpe calls “the wake” of slavery. Three scenes in April 2019 organize the chapter: (1) reading Toril Moi's work on postcritique with a seminar in a building named after an enslaver, on a day when a sign was posted right outside our classroom door detailing that fact, which was largely ignored or disavowed on campus up until that point; (2) reading Sharpe's In the Wake in that seminar in that building; and (3) Alexis Pauline Gumbs bringing her M. Archive and Black Feminist Breathing Chorus to campus. Tying the engagements with those pedagogical events together is a focus on Sylvia Wynter's concept of “ceremony,” which I elaborate in relation to a longer discussion of “evental ontology.”