"Let me begin by saying that I came to theory because I was hurting-the pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend-to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing. I came to theory young, when I was still a child... Whenever I tried in childhood to compel folks around me to do things differently, to look at the world differently, using theory as intervention, as a way to challenge the status quo, I was punished." bell hooks [1]
In The Significance of Theory [2] Terry Eagleton says:
"Children make the best theorists, since they have not yet been educated into accepting our routine social practices as "natural", and so insist on posing to those practices the most embarrassingly general and fundamental questions, regarding them with a wondering estrangement which we adults have long forgotten. Since they do not yet grasp our social practices as inevitable, they do not see why we might not do things differently".
“I wanted to identify, as theory, the improvisation that black people do every day as we inhabit and imagine our lives. I wrote in ‘In the Wake’ that when I was growing up, my mother ‘tried to make a small path through the wake; She brought beauty into that house in every way that she could; she worked at joy, and she made livable moments in all that was unlivable there.” (Christina Sharpe) [3]
What has been your relationship to theory?
To relational theory? To critical theory?
When did you begin to theorise?
What comes to you when you consider theory as an improvisation?
[1] bell hooks, Theory as Liberatory Practice, 4 Yale J.L. & Feminism (1991).
[2] Terry Eagleton The Significance of Theory (1990).
[3] Christina Sharpe In The Wake On Blackness and Being. Dukes Press. (2016).