Imagine a BLOCK PARTY

What sounds do you hear?
What foods do you smell?
Which neighbors do you see?
Whose hands do you high-five? And/or is it a fist-bump? Describe the greeting
What snacks are available?

If you have not been to a BLOCK PARTY before, no worries.Each one is completely different. One painting that we are reminded of the Block Party painting by artist Ka-Son Reeves.

In this BLOCK PARTY, which crosses multiple times and dimensions, Toni Morrison, James Baldwin, Octavia Butler, Rene Anderson, Langston Hughes, Janise Powell, Huey P. Newton, Christin Washington, Eghosa Obaizamomwan-Hamilton, Andre Carter, Sylvia Wynter, Coach Fred – are there talking it up! Double Dutch become epistemic preparation on playing and jumping between the lines as Hopscotch stomps on the order numbers of a drive thru menu. Here, we learn, we gather, we commune, we celebrate, we nourish, we aspire, we live.

This website is an experiment, experience on some of the ideas from Undissertation Notes: A Collective Unraveling. In this BLOCK PARTY, the quotes come from the various stories, articles, books, movies, anime, manga, notes, videogames, monologues, screenshots, and songs witnessed at the BLOCK PARTY in the wake. There are 216 quotes with this “theme.” In addition, this is not the only BLOCK PARTY in the wake. There are others in various spaces. BLOCK PARTY refuses colonial knowledge making in regard to consuming literature to animate the stories and enter the spaces of the BLOCK PARTY – to bear witness to the stories untold in the archives and to engage in the undissertation experience.

Walkie Talkie Blue: [chirp chirp] Yo, where you at?

Walkie Talkie Red: At the BLOCK PARTY, bro. It’s Lit

Walkie Talkie Blue: Where it at?

Walkie Talkie Red: You sounding like a Boost Mobile commercial

Walkie Talkie Blue: Nah man, I use America’s Best 5G Network

Walkie Talkie Red: They ALL say that. It’s like every university they have the best food, books, professors, campus, student-life

Walkie Talkie Blue: You a tour guide? Plus, my phone plan is free. Got a free phone too

Walkie Talkie Red: Let me guess, free with 24-month payments of $49.99? That’s not free

Walkie Talkie Blue: I mean…

Walkie Talkie Red: So if your grandma is on speed dial, you gonna say you have Instagram too?

Walkie Talkie Blue: Cool it, but if I am walking cross the street in my Jordans, Imma call that J-Walking

Walkie Talkie Red: So you the type that will see a spider on a camera and call it webcam

Walkie Talkie Blue: Chillllll, why you gotta bring in the spiders, man

Walkie Talkie Red: Just saying – that movie was lit

[hears song playing on the speaker]

Walkie Talkie Red: this song is lit too!

Walkie Talkie Blue: Sooo, where this BLOCK PARTY at?

Walkie Talkie Red: In the wake

Walkie Talkie Blue: Aight, let me join you

Walkie Talkie Red: Bro, I see you here already. Come down the block

Walkie Talkie Blue: Lit


Where is the BLOCK PARTY?

An excerpt from Undissertation Notes:

….we are in the wake – in afterlife of slavery: "Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery – skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, impoverishment" (Harman 2008,6). With an undissertation, the communities and authors are moving around, talking as the speakers playing the music are speaking from decentralized places.

We steal the "lit" from "literature review" to emphasize how the multiple "somewhere" are places at a lit BLOCK PARTY that continue to animate the genealogies of resistance. This gathering in the wake is a BLOCK PARTY.

This BLOCK PARTY resonates with Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s discussion in The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study. The BLOCK PARTY is a site that resonates with the undercommons, where as Filipina critical theorist Leah Kabigting Sicat mentions "…hip hop music plays from the stoop where neighborhood historians discuss the lineages of the artists and their music." Moten and Harney describe the social world of the text, which reminds us of the healing spaces at the BLOCK PARTY that are neither confined to space nor time:

It's a deeper way of looking at it. To say that it's a social space is to say that stuff is going on: people, things, are meeting there and interacting, rubbing off one another, brushing again one another and you enter into that social space, to try to be part of it

— Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (2013, p. 108)

We are attuned to the music and rhythm within these social worlds of the text. Engaging in the chorus, within the genealogy of liberation and resistance, we recognize the un-empirical nature of study to bear witness to the unraveling in collective un-dissertation experiences.


Credits

This website style is inspired and partially based on the web2k16 project, which aims to show 216 accounts of life with the internet using the 216 color profile that computers used to have. Though the style of the four block rows are similar, the BLOCK PARTY diverges from the web2k16 project to conceptualize the “individual” squares as blocks in the BLOCK PARTY.

In addition, each block is not solely the 216 color profile that were displayed on older computers; rather, each row of block styled in four-color pallettes to resonates with the BLOCK PARTY. As a result, many multi-colored blocks within BLOCK PARTY --- all resonating with one another. We continued to modified the style to include adjustments (random and next buttons) to assist with navigating aka “walking around” the BLOCK PARTY.


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00 00 00 --- Post Number count up by 10
00 00 00 --- Color Number
00 00 00 --- Date Number (MM/DD/YY)


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