Black Feminist Research Articles

Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters

Reviewed by: Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought by Kristin Waters Janaka Lewis (bio) Maria W. Stewart and the Roots of Black Political Thought. By Kristin Waters. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2021. Pp. 338. Cloth, $99.00; paper, $30.00.) In twenty-five chapters, Kristin Waters chronicles the life of Maria W. Stewart (née Miller). From Stewart’s childhood in Hartford, Connecticut, to the moment when, as “a nearly destitute twenty-nine-year-old widow,” she placed the manuscript of what became her famous collection of meditations into William Lloyd Garrison’s hands, Waters’s biography paints an imaginative portrait of “America’s first black woman political writer” (3). Waters seeks to understand why and how Stewart’s work stands today as “one of the most significant and least well-known foundational voices in African American and Black feminist thought” (4). While tracing Stewart’s early years, Waters includes little-known details of Stewart’s Connecticut-based parents, along with narratives of their possible enslavement during the 1790s. The young Maria Miller herself was indentured to a clergyman when municipalities were still governed by Congregational churches. While painstakingly reconstructing Miller’s decade of servitude in Hartford, Waters contextualizes these experiences within the relationship of the city to regional and national events, such as the War of 1812 and the Hartford Convention. She examines Miller’s Sabbath School education in Hartford, which put her in proximity to other Black individuals, while she planned her escape to Boston. Waters also [End Page 241] uses naval vessel records to document James W. Stewart, Miller’s later husband and a major intellectual influence, as a merchant mariner and then a seaman under David Porter in the U.S. Navy during the War of 1812 and the Second Barbary War. By starting with Stewart’s beginnings, Waters reclaims “the lives and thought of Black women as they co-created community as well as social and political theory, contributing original analysis of the gendered dimensions of life, action, and thought” (6). Waters reconstructs the names, families, and occupations of women of the North Slope, who made up fifteen of the twenty-four founders of the First African Church, the “first autonomous Black church in the Northeast,” constituted on August 8, 1805. In so doing, Waters “piece[s] together their lives and contributions as friends, neighbors, co-congregants, co-theorists and sometimes critics of Stewart, whose writing is replete with gender analyses” (6). The author also recreates local African American community life, in which Stewart likely participated, including community festivals and public feast days, such as Boston Bunker Hill Day—an opportunity to honor African American Revolutionary War veterans—and African Day, which celebrated the legal demise of the slave trade and revolution in Haiti. Waters then contextualizes Stewart’s feminist activism, speaking, and writing in ongoing developments in Boston, such as the establishment of the Prince Hall Masons, the inauguration in 1827 of Freedom’s Journal as the first Black newspaper in New York City, the publication of David Walker’s Appeal in 1829, and the publication of the white-owned Liberator in 1831. Waters also details the courtship and brief marriage of the Stewarts, as well as the death of James W. Stewart to heart failure and Maria Stewart’s long battle for her husband’s estate. Based in the field of philosophy, but also using history, fictional narrative, biography, and archival research, Waters puts into conversation Black feminist theorists, such as Patricia Hill Collins and Brittney C. Cooper; historians, such as Christopher Cameron and James and Lois Horton; and political philosophers, such as Charles Mills and Leonard Harris. In so doing, she explores how Stewart had to hold and practice principles of morality, knowledge and power, and multiple consciousnesses (citing W. E. B. DuBois). Waters’s methods are informed by African American and women’s studies movements, as she seeks to rewrite and recenter the roots of Black political theory. She ends her account of the woman she calls “a hero and a warrior” with Stewart securing for herself a pension for widows of War of 1812 veterans and then publishing Meditations from the Pen of Mrs. Maria...

Playing That Crystal Flute: Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives

Playing That Crystal Flute:Black Interventions in the Sonic Archives Kristin Moriah (bio) Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. By Daphne Brooks. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2021. 608 pages. $39.95 (hardcover). Black Diamond Queens: African American Women and Rock and Roll. By Maureen Mahon. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2020. 408 pages. $29.95 (paperback). Black Ephemera: The Crisis and Challenge of the Musical Archive. By Mark Anthony Neal. New York: New York University Press, 2022. 232 pages. $27.00 (paperback). Black women and Black musicians have a contentious relationship with archival practices and popular memory. Take Lizzo, for example, and the moment she played James Madison's previously untouched two-hundred-year-old flute at a concert in Washington, DC, in fall 2022. In that instance, she was, as the kids say, her ancestors' wildest dreams. She certainly seemed to be creating a full circle, reaching toward the eighteenth century and grasping hold of a powerful symbol of the Enlightenment cherished by a founding father whose most notorious achievements would be used to disenfranchise women like Lizzo for generations. Common wisdom tells us that she was not meant to touch it. The crystal flute's very status within the Library of Congress calls attention to its symbolic power and its distance from Black women's marginalized position in society. Can you be Lizzo, a Black musician, and play the flute? More specifically, can you be Lizzo and play that flute? In their recent books, Daphne Brooks, Maureen Mahon, and Mark Anthony Neal reckon with such questions raised by Black musicians and musical archives at a time when Black music and its influence on popular culture is both ubiquitous and contentious. They write from a cultural context in which the roots, nuances, and implications of Black musical life have often been obscured and whose continued existence, in the [End Page 395] case of Black musical archives, is often tenuous. Their scholarship represents a deep engagement with a diverse set of sonic archives and innovators. The need to theorize work so foundational to American popular culture, to mine sounds always seemingly present and in motion, arises from a sense of urgency spurred by the fascination with and furor over Black popular musicians. In Liner Notes for the Revolution, Daphne Brooks argues that "Black women of sound" have "a history unfolding on other frequencies while the world adores them and simultaneously devalues them" (1). Brooks takes "seriously the centrality of sound in Black women's lives as a foundation for developing and sustaining pivotal, profoundly meaningful world-making sociocultural networks and forms of intimacy with one another" (12). In doing so, she recalls the work of scholars like Jayna Brown when she argues that "what these Black women musicians offer, in short, is another way of hearing, reading, theorizing, making the modern. Black women of sound sign and sing themselves through their listening such that they reframe archaic philosophies of the 'Self' born out of high Enlightenment—thought that never had them in mind" (17). In Brooks's work, readers will also find echoes of Paul Gilroy, Sylvia Wynter, and Alexander Weheliye and their interrogations of Western Humanism and modernity. What is more, while rigorously engaging with critical theory from a range of fields, Liner Notes is structured like a vinyl record. Thus the text speaks to the influence of material culture on Black sound studies. Black media form part of the message. Side A of Liner Notes is "a meditation on the importance of intellectual labour and Black women's sonic cultures" (45). Side B is "an exploration of elusive Black women musicians and the critics and artists who have focused their attention on their legacies in a variety of ways" (45). Side B takes inspiration from the experimental nature of B sides and moves more fully into "the speculative terrain of revolutionary possibility" (45). Taken together, each side is a reminder that listening is a central critical practice. Liner Notes is a manifesto that offers a blueprint for the work that Black feminism can accomplish in the field of sound studies. While Brooks is interested in how theory and cultural criticism can...

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

Unpeeling the banana dance: The quare fugitivity of Joséphine Baker

“If a Black Woman Had Done It”: The Beliefs and Attitudes of Black Women K–12 Art Educators’ Curricular Experiences

Abstract Although the curriculum drives an educational program and is essential to students’ learning, minimal research documents the impact of whiteness in the curriculum development process for Black women K–12 art educators. This narrative inquiry aimed to explore how Black women who teach art in elementary and secondary school feel about their curriculum. For many educators, the school district provides their curriculum without input or knowledge of the students’ cultural backgrounds. The promotion of whiteness deters a diverse and inclusive learning environment. Through a Black feminist perspective, I critically expose, analyze, and identify Black women K–12 art educator's curricular experiences. In their narratives, I reveal the reality of how race influences who writes the curriculum and who is the target audience of learners. I interviewed 21 Black women who expressed their lived experience as K–12 art educators. Based on the findings of this study, the participants identify their challenges to create a diversified curriculum that mirrors the students in their classroom. The study encourages administrators, curriculum developers, and the field of art education to address the influence of race and gender on Black women's experiences.

Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden

Research Article| June 01 2023 Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD School of Media Studies, The New School Brittnay L. Proctor is a Mellon post-doctoral fellow/assistant professor of race and media in the School of Media Studies at The New School. Her research interests include black studies; black popular music, black feminist theory, sound studies, visual culture, and performance. Her work has been published in the Journal of Popular Music Studies, The Journal of Popular Culture, American Literature, Sounding Out!, Feminist Formations, Hyped on Melancholy, African American Review, Reviews in Digital Humanities, and ASAP/Journal. She is the author of Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden (Bloomsbury Press: 33 1/3 Series). She is also working on a second book manuscript, which draws on LP records and Compact Discs to trace the sonic and visual discourses of gender and sexuality in funk music. Search for other works by this author on: This Site PubMed Google Scholar Journal of Popular Music Studies (2023) 35 (2): 6–9. https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon Tools Get Permissions Cite Icon Cite Search Site Citation Brittnay L. Proctor; Minnie Riperton’s Come to My Garden. Journal of Popular Music Studies 1 June 2023; 35 (2): 6–9. doi: https://doi.org/10.1525/jpms.2023.35.2.6 Download citation file: Ris (Zotero) Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All ContentJournal of Popular Music Studies Search If the garden can be used as a metaphor for Black women’s creativity and self-preservation, Minnie Riperton’s sonic garden reminds us that black womanhood is not merely self-evident but produced through praxis engendered by creating, cultivating, and tending, in this instance, to one’s garden. We might consider how Riperton’s vocal performance of the place of the garden and its figurative use throughout the album pose an antagonism to genre: both as a technique for taxonomizing black music and the codification of gender as the collapse between sex as biology and gender (the production of gender dimorphism as the discrete categories of “man” and “woman”). Against “genre” and toward the place of the garden, the black avant-garde tenets of Come to My Garden are rooted in Riperton’s blurring of Charles Stepney’s “written” composition and her own improvisational ad libs. The “phonic substance” of her vocal performance becomes a “visual manifestation” of... You do not currently have access to this content.

Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979)

The Journal of American CultureEarly View ORIGINAL ARTICLE Dancing grounds, bloody grounds: Pearl Primus and Michael Row the Boat Ashore (1979) Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar, Corresponding Author Ninoska M’bewe Escobar [email protected] Department of Theatre and Dance, The University of New Mexico Correspondence Ninoska M’bewe Escobar Email: [email protected]Search for more papers by this author First published: 11 June 2023 https://doi.org/10.1111/jacc.13459Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Works Cited Amin, Takiyah Nur. “A Terminology of Difference: Making the Case for Black Dance in the 21st Century and Beyond.” Journal of Pan African Studies, vol. 4, no. 6, 2011, pp. 7– 15. Anderson, Jack. “Dance: Pearl Primus Presents 'Earth Theater'.” New York Times, 21 Aug. 1979, https://www.nytimes.com/1979/08/21/archives/dance-pearl-primus-presents-earth-theater.html. Cleage, Pearl. “A Hollering Place.” Dramatists Guild Quarterly, vol. 31, no. 2, 1994. Collins, Patricia Hill. “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought.” Social Problems, vol. 33, no. 6, 1986, pp. S14– 32. DeFrantz, Thomas F. Dancing Many Drums: Excavations in African American Dance. University of Wisconsin Press, 2002. Dennis, Paul. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 18 May 2021. Dennis, Paul. “Pearl Primus, 'Omowale,' Child Returned Home.” The Massachusetts Review, 14 Feb. 2021. Dixon-Gottschild, Brenda. "The Power of Dance as Political Protest." Dance Magazine, 29 Oct. 2020. Elam, Harry and David Krasner. " The Device of Race." African American Performance and Theater History: A Critical Reader, Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 3– 16. Escobar, Ninoska M'bewe. Wrought with Light and Dreams: Auto/body/graphy and the Persistence of Pearl Primus. 2019. The University of Texas at Austin, PhD dissertation. Estrada, Ric and Sigrid. “3 Leading Negro Artists, and How They Feel About Dance in the Community: 1. Eleo Pomare 2. Arthur Mitchell 3. Pearl Primus.” Dance Magazine. vol. 42, no.11, 1968. Gere, David. “Dances of Sorrow, Dances of Hope.” Los Angeles Times (pre-1997 Fulltext), 1994. Griffin, Farah Jasmine. “ Pearl Primus: Dancing Freedom.” Harlem Nocturne: Women Artists & Progressive Politics during World War II, Basic Civitas, A Member of the Perseus Books Group, 2013. hooks, bell. “ Performance Practice as a Site of Opposition.” Let's Get It On: The Politics of Black Performance. Institute of Contemporary Arts, 1995. Hughes, Langton. " On Leaping and Shouting." The Chicago Defender, 3 Jul. 1943. King, Martin Luther, et al. A Call to Conscience: The Landmark Speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. IPM (Intellectual Properties Management), in Association with Warner Books, 2001. Kisselgoff, Anna. "Pearl Primus Offering Program Of Dance Called 'Earth Theater'." New York Times, 24 Mar. 1979. ---. “DANCE VIEW,” New York Times (New York), 17 Dec. 1978, p. 2. Kourlas, Gia. "Could Dance Be a Weapon All Over Again?" The New York Times, 28 Oct. 2020. Krasner, David. "Walter Benjamin and the Lynching Play: Allegory and Mourning in Angelina Weld Grimké's Rachel." Text & Presentation, 1997, pp. 64– 80. Lorde, Audre. Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. Crossing Press, 1984. Patterson, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study. Harvard University Press, 1982. Pearl Primus #1363. Secure Media Network. Dance Heritage Coalition, Accessed May 2016. http://archive.danceheritage.org/. Pearl Primus, " Omowale," Child Returned Home. Directed by Stan Sherer. 2020. Robertson, Michael. “Pearl Primus, Ph.D., Returns,” New York Times, 18 Mar. 1979, 2. Proquest. Web. Accessed 18 Mar. 2018. Schwartz, Peggy and Murray. The Dance Claimed Me: A Biography of Pearl Primus. Yale University Press, 2011. Sitton, Claude. "Birmingham Bomb Kills 4 Negro Girls." New York Times, 16 Sep. 1963, https://www.nytimes.com/1963/09/16/archives/birmingham-bomb-kills-4-negro-girls-in-church-riots-flare-2-boys.html. Schechner, Richard, and Willa Appel. By Means of Performance: Intercultural Studies of Theatre and Ritual. Cambridge University Press, 1990. Waithe, Mary. Interview. Conducted by Paul Dennis, 2020. Watson, Elbert. Interview. Conducted by Ninoska M'bewe Escobar, 8 Apr. 2022. Wolfe, George C. " Performance Method." Black Theatre: Ritual Performance in the African Diaspora. edited by Carter Harrison Paul, Leo Walker Victor, and Edwards Gus. Temple University Press, 2002, pp. 4400– 405. Early ViewOnline Version of Record before inclusion in an issue ReferencesRelatedInformation

Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in The Twentieth And Twentyfirst Century United States by Katelyn Hale Wood (review)

Cracking Up: Black Feminist Comedy in The Twentieth And Twentyfirst Century United States by Katelyn Hale Wood (review)

The Black Anterior

The Black Anterior Erica R. Edwards (bio) Near the beginning of Ntozake Shange's 1974 classic Black feminist choreopoem for colored girls who have considered suicide/when the rainbow is enuf, the lady in yellow remembers coming of age in a Buick on the night of her high school graduation. Colored "deep black," the Buick becomes a scene of too much pleasure: more people than seem possible crowd into the car—a young girl plus five pretty boys, all cousins—the young graduate sweats her hair out at the dance and, back in the car afterward, makes love for the first time. The Buick, conjured in memory, aids the feet and hips of the performers onstage in setting the choreopoem in constant motion against Black stasis. The soundtrack for this scene, powered by the lady in yellow and her slightly mocking compatriots in orange and blue, who sing backup, is the Dells' "Stay in My Corner." And more miracle than the layin' on of hands that ends the choreopoem is this: the Buick reaches its destination without event, and its Black inhabitants are even afforded the luxury of aging: "WE WAZ GROWN WE WAZ FINALLY GROWN," says the lady in yellow, and even if that bold assertion belies a youthful bravado, the past tense waz reminds us that the lady in yellow has indeed achieved the maturity of a grown-ass woman reflecting on the night she "gave it up in a buick." Sometime between Martha and the Vandellas' "Dancing in the Street" and the Dells' "Stay in My Corner," some womanish stuff happens. And by the time the sun comes up, the girl-woman rolling her hips in the back seat "cdnt stop grinnin."1 Shana Redmond's 2022 presidential address, "The Dark Prelude," teaches us to hear in detail scenes like this—scenes of motoring, listening, enjoying, coming, and coming through in deep black—where to hear in detail is to grieve in detail the lives these scenes index and, in so doing, to place ourselves in the way of Black culture's metronome of aliveness. But it teaches through its multimedia form: it must be heard, and it must be heard in concert. The address insists that if we listen for the interiors of Black vehicularity—which is to say, the Black anteriors that surface through the comingling of black automotive and audio technologies—we might hear well enough to be overcome by Black study's ethical excess. Our work might be overtaken, that is, not by the [End Page 219] thick description of telling the world as it is but by what Redmond refers to as the "thick emotion" of Black study's grief and what she refers to elsewhere as the "thick camaraderie" that counters the "thin bonds of sympathy" tying well-meaning liberals to dark subjects whose deaths serve as the precondition of white life.2 Redmond begins with this overstanding and overtaking: "I cry a lot," she confesses. The setting for "The Dark Prelude" is, indeed, the thick Black anterior, where what comes and lies before the black death that preconditions white life—what is in advance of and surrounds this black deathliness—is held and holding, and beheld and beholding. The Black anterior is what Stefano Harney and Fred Moten refer to as "the black before and before," "the already and the forthcoming": Consider the Black Panther Party for Self-Defense, first theorists of the revolution of the surround, the black before and before, the already and the forthcoming. Their twinned commitment to revolution and self-defense emerged from the recognition that the preservation of black social life is articulated in and with the violence of innovation. This is not a contradiction if the new thing, always calling for itself, already lives around and below the forts, the police stations, the patrolled highways and the prison towers.3 If Blackness is the constantly improvised mode of commoning and communing that is anterior to the carceral apparatuses mounted to harness and control it, Blackness is the antagonism to enclosure, to, even, racial Blackness. And if what we, students of the Black anterior, bring to American studies is a refusal of "America" and its...

REPERTOIRES OF CARE AND ACTIVIST SUSTAINABILITY IN U.S. SOCIAL JUSTICE ORGANIZING

Sociologists have a longstanding interest in how movements survive and how individuals persist in their activism over time (e.g., McAdam 1986; Downton and Wehr 1998; Corrigall-Brown 2011; Bunnage 2014). The role of care in activist sustainability stands out as a neglected domain for a better understanding of how movements maintain the human labor they need to survive. Some social theorists and on-the-ground activists have warned about the potentially individualizing and depoliticizing effects of “self-care” on movement culture. However, social justice movements, particularly racial justice movements, increasingly emphasize the role of healing, care, and the body in movement survival. Drawing on all 128 episodes of the Irresistible podcast (formerly the Healing Justice Podcast), its problematic founder, and its ultimate demise, I use a Black feminist framework that holds the tensions within political care to understand the conditional relationship between the functions and hazards of care within activism. Following and complementing Charles Tilly’s (1977) repertoires of contention, I develop this “repertoire of care” analytitoto better situate proliferating discourses of movement care within broader theoretical conversations around persistent activism and movement survival.

Black women faculty navigating a pandemic amid an epidemic

AbstractUsing Black feminist thought as a theoretical lens, authors explore their experiences as Black women faculty navigating the COVID‐19 pandemic amid the resurgent epidemic of racialized violence in the U.S. We conclude with implications for Black women's enactment of radical self‐care and institutional responsibility in humanizing higher education for Black women faculty.

Recognizing Greatness in Our Own Time

Recognizing Greatness in Our Own Time

Elevating Poetry Writing with Southeast Asian Refugee Children's Picture Books

AbstractIn this column, we demonstrate ways to connect four commonly taught poetic genres to better explore the intersectionalities (The University of Chicago Legal Forum;140:139–167, 1989; Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, 1990) in the texts and students’ own lives through two cultural insider‐created (A map into the world, 2019; Wishes, 2021) Southeast Asian (SEA) children's picturebooks about the refugee experience. In doing so, we show how students can write poetry as maps and wishes with picturebooks about the maps and wishes in the lives of SEA refugees.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

Introduction: Citational Politics in Medical Anthropology.

“Their Time, Their Moment, Their City”: A Critique and Black Feminist Reading of Harlem

This article analyses Tracy Oliver’s comedy series Harlem (2021) through the lens of Black Feminism. Invoking combined traces of Living Single (1993-1998) and Sex and the City (1998-2004), I contend Harlem aims to fill in the representation void that has erased Black women from mainstream comedies that are reduced to the white experience as it also aims to transgress the stigmatizing image of Black women in mainstream popular culture. In this manner, Oliver’s Harlem addresses several aspects of the Black female experience and shows the gendered racism Black women endure, such as racial stereotypes, medical mistreatment, or white women’s tears, among many others, prioritizing social accuracy and racial sensibilities through comedy as it follows the lives of four Black women in the neighborhood of Harlem in the twenty-first century.

Inclusive Listening

Our essay presents a critique of the limitations of Western Classical Music (WCM) in Aural Studies curricula, and the problems this poses for students from diverse musicking backgrounds. We propose a new teaching and learning framework, inspired by Black Feminist Pedagogy and aimed towards inclusivity, that devotes prolonged attention to multiple kinds of listening and analysis practices outside the WCM tradition. Our framework will be a live, open-access resource for teachers and self-directed students to understand various methods of listening and analysis. We prioritize the ability of this framework to communicate to students from a variety of disciplines and musicking backgrounds, including those who wish to develop listening skills relevant to electronic music practices, sound art, scored music, improvised music, and traditional musics. We believe that Aural Studies should be a teaching and learning space where a radical, prolonged breaking-down of institutional hierarchies can be enacted and propose that Aural Studies practices hold the potential to escape the notation-centeredness of WCM and the power dynamics implicit in that orientation.

Curating #blackgirlquarantine.

This autoethnographic visual essay narrates a Black feminist praxis of ancestral collage-making within my curation of #blackgirlquarantine: an exhibition of blackwomxnhealing in the wake of 20201 (BGQ). I detail my spiritual, affective, and embodied journey of stretching collage art to make room for memorializing the lives of Black womxn and girls who are no longer here to tell their stories. I write at the intersection of healing, memory, and mourning, and merge a Methodology for the Black Feminist Sacred2 with visual anthropology and digital humanities to read creative rituals of digital altar work as text.

Supplemental Material for A Black Feminist Study of Freedom, Community Care, and Self-Definition Among Black College Women Attending Predominantly White Institutions

Supplemental Material for A Black Feminist Study of Freedom, Community Care, and Self-Definition Among Black College Women Attending Predominantly White Institutions

We Are Here: Jesmyn Ward’s Black Feminist Poethics of Place in Men We Reaped

This essay explores how, in her memoir Men We Reaped, Jesmyn Ward confronts Mississippi’s pervasively anti-Black landscape and maps an oppositional geography that documents Black life in the landscape while also accounting for the constant movement brought on by slavery’s afterlives. Throughout the work, Ward engages in what the author terms Black feminist reaping, which operates as a cartographic practice that makes visible Black subjects situated at the margins of places that are designed to suppress and confine them. Through Black feminist reaping, Ward enacts a Black gathering—a countermobilization against the ways the plantation and its politics continue to reemerge in Mississippi’s geography and US geographies more broadly. In the process, Ward produces new geographic knowledges that highlight a Black viability, which undergirds sustainable communities and complex Black subjectivities.

Black Women Making Place in Nineteenth- Century Newspapers

This essay argues that letters to the editor are modes of “life storying” that document individual and collective makings of place as a collective Black feminist activism and politics. Using data visualization as a method of research and protocol of reading enables one to see that recalibrating how letters to the editor are understood, from a focus on the individual to one on the collective, reveals their political work across space and scale in the early to late nineteenth century. But digital humanities tools, such as data visualization, need to be used with attention to the foundational assumptions that underlie them and will not, alone, necessarily produce readings that put the individual and collective in generative dialogue. Rather, interscale readings that combine both foundational and new reading methodologies in the humanities may reveal more about Black women’s lives through this press form they used.

Queertopia’s New World Order: Simon Nkoli’s Legacy in Queer Black Nightlife Spaces in Johannesburg

This article explores the concept of queer utopia, drawing from Muñoz’s writings on queer futurity, from Simon Nkoli’s embodiment of the struggle for queer utopia through organising with GLOW and in spaces of militant joy like Pride marches, and from modern queer Black feminist interpretations of nightlife spaces in Johannesburg. Through a close reading of a queer Black nightlife event in 2021 called Queertopia, this article argues that queer Black feminists are embodying queer utopia through nightlife, even in the midst of the manifold crises of COVID-19 and late-stage racial capitalism and cisheterophobia. By linking practices of healing and nightlife in these events to resistance to racial capitalism and cisheterophobia, and particularly lifting up queer Black people involved in activism and social movement and cultural organising work, these parties continue the lineage of Simon Nkoli’s work towards dignity and joy. They exist as experiments in queer Black feminist practice, particularly through growing bonds and emphasising relationality between organisers and attendees of these parties, and focusing on healing, dancing, and dreaming in collective space. This article ultimately argues that these nightlife spaces are practices, in the legacy of Nkoli’s activism and analysis, of embodying resistance and queer Black visibility, and ultimately of imagining utopias where queer Black people can fully thrive.