About
Note: I am not a historian. I accept all responsibility for factual errors. Even when this research appears reliable, treat it as nonauthoritative; always verify and corroborate independently.
Free Penelope the Platypus is a media aggregator about Penelope the Platypus’s life, 1947 - 1957.
Free Penelope the Platypus is a featured [Infodump] project on KJR Studios/Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s Gather & Disperse platform.
Gather & Disperse (G & D) is an ecosystem for Kameelah Janan Rasheed’s research and archival work. G & D includes special collections of “found” Black vernacular photographs and Black printed matter; research platforms on radical Black educational institutions and Black spiritual movements; infodumps on niche histories such as Eldridge Cleaver’s fashion line and the escape of Penelope the Platypus; and viewfinders that closely read shapes, textures, and typography that we may typically overlook.
The [Infodump] cluster is driven by a visceral obsession (read more about (surrendering to) obsession here), hyperfixation, and the exhaustive encyclopedic pleasure of finding as much as I can about a niche history. Projects in the [Infodump] cluster are organized around three commitments.
- Aggregation as Substrate: An aggregator gathers information from multiple sources and consolidates them into a single, publicly accessible, centralized platform. While the project prioritizes breadth over teleological narration, aggregation is an interpretive, thus subjective process. I seek meaning through accumulation. This accumulation serves as a substrate for future inquiry. I have included all available and accessible media and research materials to the greatest extent possible.
- Invitation to Distributed Authorship: Distributed authorship emphasizes the importance of decentralized, multidirectional creation. Readers are encouraged to contribute more resources to expand the aggregator in expected and unforeseen directions. We pursue the elastic limits of the niche, sometimes birthing adjacent and derivative aggregators that build “primitive hypertext” (Octavia Estelle Butler).
- Obsessive Driver: The obsessive driver refers to the affective and somatic ambiance that sustains intensive attention. While this force relates to Derrida’s notion of archive fever, I am more interested in the literal dimensions of fever as sensory intensification. Early etymological roots suggest fever to mean “burn”, “to be restless”, and “intense nervous excitement”. Somatically registered, the obsessive driver - the fever - arouses as it compels enmeshment. These intense moments are markers of the understated, but very present relationships between deep feeling and deep research. Research, maybe activates a wider range of sensation.
I am interested in fugitivity: what compels someone (and in this case, something) to escape, abscond, and disappear? This project makes no claims to answer that question. Rather, this project concerns itself with a question Alexis Pauline Gumbs calls me to in her book Undrowned Black Feminist Lessons from Marine Mammals (2021) as well as our interview in the Believer: how do we listen more closely across species to consider strategies of liberation, collaboration, and pleasure?
In pursuing this niche history, I challenge myself to not further anthropomorphize Penelope. I also challenge myself to not romanticize her escape as an anomalous event, but instead, I seek to situate her in a larger ecosystem of animals that have escaped zoos, aquariums, and safari parks. As a result, an adjacent aggregator of escape zoo and safari animals is emerging alongside this aggregator. You can explore that emergent index here.
In learning about Penelope’s escape, we might be etter equipped to consider questions of interspecies learning, the logics of animal captivity and display, the agency of non-human beings, and our conceptions of ferality.