Read the Room

Keller Easterling opened and closed her lecture at e-flux’s new event space with a pair of colorful US maps. The meaning of this gesture was only slightly elucidated by her concluding assertion that “there’s not one registration of value but rather multiple economies and communities. To create an overabundance of value in registers beyond the financial—in this way an incalculable value begins to address an incalculable debt.”

But one incalculable debt was clear—that amassed by the Jim Crow South, whose oppressive regime terrorized communities and purloined wages for generations. Easterling shared her gatherings on how territories of resistance formed in response to this sustained threat, hopscotching between towns and farms in southern Georgia, for example. It was here that Slater King, Charles Sherrod, Martin Luther King, Jr., and other organizers built robust institutions like the Albany Movement for desegregation, Koinonia Farm, and Habitat for Humanity. Easterling explicated concurrent systems of resistance while flipping through matrices of book covers, in which…