… speaking of great people with exciting mind: two notes.

1. Professor Guno Jones
Last Friday professor Guno Jones spoke of hope, protests, refusal and what he often refers to as citizenship violence. He did so for a most historic moment: his inaugural lecture as professor holding the Anton de Kom Chair of Amsterdam’s Vrije Universiteit (VU). The first professor to do so. Equally important: As someone who continuously gives proper credits to the activists and other radical thinkers whose work is fundamental for the critical knowledge production within Dutch academia. And, as someone who smashes these structural practices of erasing or under-crediting the work of Afro-Surinamese scholars of his generation and over.

As we speak, I’m trying to find the right words to properly describe the absolute amazingness of last week’s event. While searching, I’d like to share some of his articles and essays that can be read online. For free:
– Citizenship Violence and the Afterlives of Dutch Colonialism: Re-reading Anton de Kom, published in Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism.
– Plantation Logics, Citizenship Violence and the Necessity of Slowing Down.
And, if you were also at the VU last week… be sure to speak on it. Share some of your notes. Really, we are our own best thing.


2. Upcoming event: lynnée denise’s Sound System Ecologies with Anesu Chigariro (Zimbabwe), Torkwase Dyson (US) at Bijlmer Parktheater.
On Wednesday July 10, DJ lynnée denise is bringing Sound System Ecologies to the Bijlmer, a place where many of Amsterdam’s sharpest listeners have tuned their ears. In collaboration with Bijlmer Parktheater’s GembertheeSessies, denise is curating a program focused on intimate conversations and reflections on creative processes and practices.Sound System Ecologies is concerned with questions pertaining the intersections of music, enslavement, and Black spatiality.

The evening will feature frameworks and perspectives from visual artist Torkwase Dyson, with Anesu Chigariro as the moderator. Torkwase Dyson (Beacon, US) describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure, and architecture. Anesu Chigariro (Harare, Zimbabwe) is an editor in sexual and reproductive health education and a community and health psychology practitioner. She is an aspirant narrative medicine scholar with a focus on social and behaviour change communication, contemporary critical theory and visual culture.

Check the program page on Bijlmer Parktheater’s website for the full bio’s and the ticket link. The theatre’s productional team would very much appreciate it if people who’ll attend the program buy their tickets in advance.

The title of this note is from Toni Morrison’s novel Jazz: “I’m crazy about this City. Daylight slants like a razor cutting the buildings in half. In the top half I see looking faces and it’s not easy to tell which are people, which the work of stonemasons. Below is a shadow where any blasé thing takes place: clarinets and lovemaking, fists and the voices of sorrowful women. A city like this one makes me dream tall and feel in on things.”