Editor's ForumProtest and/as Care

This forum cluster—in dialogue with the Editors' Forum on "Art, Process, Protest"—consists of a series of short essays on Black poetics, Black language, protest photography, and artistic practice to reflect on protest and/as care in slavery's afterlife. Christina Sharpe's In the Wake: On Blackness and Being links each meditation; here, the authors engage with an extended set of inquiries that Sharpe catalogs at the outset of In the Wake regarding Black strivings toward living otherwise: "I want to think through what this imagining calls forth, to think through what it calls on 'us' to do, think, feel in the wake of slavery. … How can we think (and rethink and rethink) care laterally, in the register of the intramural, in a different relation than that of the violence of the state?"¹ The reflections that follow contemplate alongside Sharpe's stunning text, interrogating and gesturing toward additional ways of asserting and tending to Black being despite the immi/a/nence of death in the wake of slavery.²