Black Art, which is to say Black Life, which is to say Black (Life Against) Death, which is to say Black Eros, is the ongoing production of a performance, the ongoing production of a performance: rupture and collision, augmented toward singularity, motherless child, childless mother, heartrending shriek, levee camp moan, grieving lean and head turn, fall, Stabat mater, turn a step, loose booty funk brush stroke down my cheek, yellow dog, blue train, black drive. The ways black moan ‘in improvises through the opposition of mourning and melancholia, disrupts the temporal framework that buttresses that opposition such that an extended, lingering look at—aesthetic response to—the photograph manifests itself as political action.

• Fred Moten In The Break

How does one rewrite the chronicle of a death foretold and anticipated, as a collective biography of dead subjects, as a counter-history of the human, as the practice of freedom? How can narrative embody life in words and at the same time respect what we cannot know? How does one listen for the groans and cries, the undecipherable songs, the crackle of fire in the cane fields, laments for the dead, and the shouts of victory, and then assign words to all of it? Is it possible to construct a story from “the locus of impossible speech” or resurrect lives from the ruins?8 Can beauty provide an antidote to dishonor, and love a way to “exhume buried cries” and reanimate the dead?

• Saidya Hartman “Venus in Two Acts”

Drawing on the statements by Moten and Hartman, one is forced to reconcile the limits and impossibility of Black speech and black narration. The early decades of the 21st century have proven to be a Black philosophical renaissance. With the growth of critical Black theory, namely the literary fields of Afro Pessimism and Black Studies, new and demanding challenges have been placed in the hands of this generation’s Black thinkers. Complementary to this, the growing popularity of High School and collegiate policy and lincoln-douglass debate, has placed these texts in the hands of young Black students from a diverse range of backgrounds, challenging and pushing the limits of black political thought. Both of these communities are centered around the task of exploring and developing methods of loving blackness and developing methods of critically examining how blackness situates itself in a world premised on its (non)being. 

 Our mission through this blog is to lift up the voices and perspectives of those in the Black debate community, specifically students, in order to expand and grow critical conversations out of the debate space and into our own communities. Through The Drinking Gourd, we hope to grow the Black debate community and to strengthen bonds between Black debaters, coaches and teachers to orient our debates in round, around praxis in our communities. Black debaters are frequently an afterthought in the debate community, victim to violent norm and expectations in a community that was not built for us. Through this project, we hope to give Black people the platform to express their desires and shape the future of the activity. First and foremost, we are a community built around loving and caring for black people, and we use that love to center and guide our praxis for surviving the end of the world.