2021 Meeting: Online
November 4-6, 2021
Image Credit: Wangechi Mutu, 'You are my sunshine,' collage painting on paper, 24 x 36", 2015.
Schedule of Events (all listed times are in EST)
Day One: Thursday, Nov. 4
Introductory Remarks: 9:00am-9:30am
K. Bailey Thomas, University of Louisville
Session I: 10:00am-12:00pm: Moderated by Asaf Angermann, University of Louisville
Anwar Uhuru, Monmouth University
"Pray Tell and Lil Nas X Up in Pumps: Internalized Femmephobia and the Black Queer Experience"
My paper focuses on two cultural phenomena Montero and Pray-Tell. Pray-Tell the vogue-emcee of the balls that take place on the television show Pose and the characterization of Montero although it is the legal name of recording artist Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X, uses his legal name as though it were a character that he is able to play out in real time as a social critique of masculinity, femme-identity, sexual bottoming, and Blackness. Scholars have argued that the devaluation of femininity increases the likelihood of discrimination and violence among sexual and gender minorities. Due to the social awareness of sexism, femmephobia, and internalized femmephobia there has been a surge in theorization within those domains as well as critiques against xenophobia and Anti-Blackness. However, femmephobia and internalized femmephobia at the intersection of xenophobia and Anti-Blackness are under theorized. This chapter argues that femmephobia is not merely the enforcement of cisgender social norms and hierarchical structures, but also regulated through internalized femmephobia among LGBTQIAPOC sexual and gender minorities.
Cathy Thomas, University of California, Santa Barbara
"'Identity Which Does Not Come When Called': Comic Book Cosplay and Caribbean Carnival as Embodied Cognates"
Black female figures disrupt the normative constructions of genre/gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play thereby turning body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black women at play, I assert that cosplaying (comic book and pop culture costume play) and to play mas (Caribbean carnival) are rhetorical and performative cognates. I argue that Black women at play highlight the paradoxical dilemma of their visibility/invisibility so that, in public (virtual and physical), their presence becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. Because the category of “Black women” in this research include people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, I theorize a Black femme praxis that considers how this queer identity conditions a generative configuration that addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate this affective overlap between cosplay and playing mas, this essay includes excerpts from conducted interviews with science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, cultural theorist Emily Zobel Marshall, and content from various Black female cosplayers on social media.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Kaila Story, University of Louisville
Session II: 4:30-6:30pm: Moderated by Damion Scott, CUNY and Stony Brook University
crystal nelson, The Pennsylvania State University
"Committed to Survival: The Womanist Visions of Varnette Honeywood and Annie Lee"
A critical part of womanist praxis is the mandate to create safe space. Black romanticism serves as one of the safe spaces for Black subjects. This paper examines the work of two Black romantic artists: Varnette P. Honeywood and Annie F. Lee. I begin with a detailed analysis of their respective paintings, Dixie Peach (1978) and Ash (1983), both of which depict intimate moments between Black mothers and daughters. Using the Black maternal as a launch point, I argue that these two representations of mothering situate the images in the womanist tradition of creating safe time and safe space. In the rest of the paper, I follow the thematic threads of each artist’s body of work to trace their exploration of womanist subject matter and themes inspired by the Black women’s blues tradition. Furthermore, I am interested in how an ethics of care is translated through their respective techniques. I conclude that both women craft identities for Black women that can sustain self-esteem. Tina Campt’s theory of the quotidian supports my assertion that Honeywood’s and Lee’s depictions of the everyday in Black women’s lives are modes of refusal of racial and sexist interpellation.
Monica Evans, Clark Atlanta University
"Intertextual Dialogue: Lovecraft Country as Womanist Aesthetic Adaptation"
This paper explores the way HBO's series Lovecraft Country uses womanist aesthetics as a method of adapting the literary works of white men.
Day Two: Friday, Nov. 5
Session III: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by Shelby Pumphrey, University of Louisville
Amanda Anderson, Emory University
"Hyper-Empathic Blackness: On Shared Feelings and Porous Subjectivities"
This paper turns to 20-21st century literary and cultural production to interrogate the contemporary appeal to the power of shared feelings. I examine the public response the opening of white American artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2017) and critique attachments to empathy and mutual identification. I posit instead, a new mode of communal reckoning, through what I term ‘porousness’ (the intermingling between self and other in an account of the subject). I advocate for an understanding of how legacies of slavery subtend this relationality and produce for black people, a distinct and intensified vulnerability to violation. My analysis is a literary one. I treat Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and in so doing offer an alternative, black feminist archive within which to theorize black subjectivity. In Parable of the Sower protagonist Lauren Olamina must survive what seems to be the end of the world all the while suffering from hyperempathy, an excessive and threatening sensitivity to others’ emotions. In this paper, I treat Lauren Olamina as a character in which Butler embeds a key critique of blackness and black girlhood. I introduce a theory of “hyper-empathic blackness” to observe how black feeling emerges as an effect of excess forms of embodiment.
Marlas Yvonne Whitley, North Carolina State University
"To Bear Witness (Among the Shoreline and Other Earthly Sites)"
Throughout history, Black women have often begun and contributed significantly to movements for collective liberation. A critical aspect to this history is the witnessing of and responding to state sanctioned violence and murder in Black communities. Though a common-place practice in various forms of art and media, the tragedies of the last decade have not only revealed an established tradition of Black women organizing and making the most vehement demands for justice, but also has invigorated a powerful wave of response in forms old, new and emerging. From fiction writers such as Angie Thomas, to film directors such as Ava DuVernay, Black women are producing critical, artistic work that bluntly interrogate institutions of power and their constituents in the wake of murder. Exploring contemporary diasporic production in this respect, and considering current discourse on Black women’s mental and emotional labor, this paper asks the question: what does it mean for Black women to bear witness? To work towards an answer or answers, this presentation considers a theory of response, illustrated through contemporary film and print media.
Session IV (Invited Talk): 12:00-2:00pm: Moderated by Haylee Harrell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Taryn Jordan, Colgate University
"Soul: Food and Thought"
"Soul: Food and Thought" conceptualizes my reframing of Du Boisian peculiar sense as a constitutive excess of black living to explore sentiments: sense, sensation, affect, and emotion in fried chicken. Fried chicken does not make up the totality of soul food; it is one part of a larger universe of dishes. Hence, I argue black history is sensed in the taste of soul food. Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s (2000) concept of the “black radical tradition,” which he defines as a form of black collective intelligence gathered through the accretion of struggle, I assert that Robinson’s exclusion of black women, specifically black women’s domestic work, from the “black radical tradition” elides social practices vital to black living that have an element of training built in. I contend that the exclusion of the black domestic work from the black radical tradition is the condition of possibility for soul food such as fried chicken to express history through taste.
Session V: 2:00-4:00pm: Moderated by Caleb Ward, University of Hamburg
Helen Gibson, University of Erfurt
"Midwifery as Black Radical Tradition"
This paper analyzes the practice of midwifery during enslavement as part of a Black radical tradition that complicates masculinist understandings of Black Marxism. As Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, Hortense Spillers, and myriad doulas attest, the history of Black subjectivity in the colonial Americas is a history of women’s reproductive lives and labors. The subject of midwifery speaks not only to cultural practices of historical, gendered subject positions for Black women and non-men, but also to the continued relationships of Black women and non-men in the United States to medical communities at large. I argue that enslaved midwives helped birth significant gendered realities for enslaved pregnant people. Tanya Hart writes that Black women delivered most babies in the antebellum South. How and under what circumstances did these midwives work? What means of affirming Black life and confronting pain did midwives offer? A methodological focus on care work in this paper brings together current theorizing in the fields of Black feminist studies and disability studies, placing historiographically elusive female protagonists at the center of the narrative.
SaraEllen Strongman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Black Feminists Building Community: On the Black Feminist Retreats (1977-1981)
This paper argues that a major preoccupation of black feminist organizing during the late 1970s and early 1980s was constructing a community of black feminists by connecting women across the United States who otherwise felt isolated and alone in their personal and political commitments as black feminists. Specifically, this paper examines the series of seven black feminist retreats organized by members of the Combahee River Collection between 1977 and 1981 as one such instance of black feminist community building. The retreats were imagined as both an occasion for serious political work and a space for Black women to build deep personal connections with each other. Due to the conviviality of group gatherings, where there were both serious political conversations and good food, and the continuation of those connections outside of group meetings, Black feminists were able to build networks of support even though they were geographically separated. The emotional connections between individual women satisfied their longing for community and helped them survive. By attending to the overlap of personal and political work done by the participants in the black feminist retreats, this paper helps us appreciate how black feminists’ community-building was linked to their political organizing during the 1970s.
Session VI: 4:30-6:30pm: Moderated by Leah Kaplan, Emory University
Michelle Lanier, Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"Speaking Fire Out of Burn: Womanist Cartographies an the Healing Sojourns"
In “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” I write about the “transformative balm” potential of reclamation, re-membering, rooting, witnessing, calling out, and contending with the southern landscapes that hold and held the feet of Black women and femmes.
The piece ends with a litany of questions meant to serve as wayfinders for future research and inquiries. The word “explorations” almost finds its way into this framing, until I recall the conquering past of the word. Journeying and sojourning, seeking and groundtruthing, are the choreographies of this proposed endeavor. The journey is to the multitudinous self and her source lands, her source waterways. This is a terraqueous work, slick and muddy, shifting and thick. Quite literally, with the tools of Womanist Cartography (mapping the lives, dreams, and feet of Black South women) and ethnopoetics (conjuring the rhythm/quietude/power of spoken text) I seek to revisit ancestral spaces and remap them with words.
For instance: I will revisit the birthplaces of Eartha Kitt, Moms Mabley, Anna Julia Cooper, Nina Simone, and my great great grandmother (all in AfroCarolina) and seek to redefine these unceded territories with the boundlessness of the souls the soils held. Ntozake Shangé’s choreopoem and Natasha Trethewey’s witnessing/commemorative poetic forms will guide the syntactic structures of this piece, as will Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s sometimes epistolary approach to communing with aquatic, mammalian kin.
Chérie Ndaliko’s mixed media expression (photography in conversation with text) stitched with a “decomposed colonial gaze,” will also guide this proposed work. The ultimate aim is an illumination of the nuanced ecosystems of witness surrounding Black women’s Southern homelands. The ultimate calling is furthering the praxis work of commemorative and futuritive healing and wholeness in the face of the American Souths. The title of this piece comes from a tradition of healing associated with indigenous people, Black people, and those who claim both as kindred. Speaking fire out of the burn is a healing modality passed across generations and often across genders. Speaking fire out of a burn has particular appreciation in the vernacular South. The pervasiveness of fire in the wood stove, the cooking fires, the heat that allowed the pressing comb to work, the tobacco curing barns, the barbeques, the kilns, the brush fires and lightning strikes, all had the potential to burn. All burns cry out for healing. Communal fire talkers were/are famously able to speak incantations, call out a particular scripture, and/or breathe healing over a burn victim, often resulting in the miraculous erasure of pain and scarring. This tradition, this healing work, can be used as a powerful metaphor for the work that can be done when we revisit spaces of ancestral memory, with the cooling ointment of autonomy and self declared beauty. This is the way of Womanist Cartography, to adorn the land with our living memories, to call out our mothers’ names in poem and dance.
Licho Lopez Lopez and Gioconda Coello
"Where Was the Master's House Anyway? Of Place and Possibility in Unmastering Editorship"
The focus of this paper is editorship and the challenge to the conservation of coloniality. Following the ancestral guidance of Audre Lorde (1984) we inquire into what it might mean to turn Lorde’s analytic—the masters’ tools will never dismantle the master’s house—to examine itself. In doing so, we return to place, to Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place and Growing up antiblack in Latin America and the Caribbean, two collections we edited and our evolving meditations on what it may mean to unmaster editorship work. The papers in these collections are authored by Black, Indigenous, and Ch’ixi writers of Abiayala (Wagua, 2007) and the Caribbean. This paper is braided with three cases that help us examine possibilities beyond being subjected to settler logics and assimilatory regimes in editorial work. We propose breaching the masterful possessive logic by shifting the geography of reason (Fanon, 1952), or rather by restoring reason to Abiayala and the Caribbean where it has always been. This implies to disrupt the inhospitable environments that we as editors and reviewers often create in reducing the expansive works of our colleagues to frames of reference only intelligible through the sovereignty of our own stories/theories (McKittrick, 2021).
Day Three: Saturday, Nov. 6
Session VII: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by Corbin Covington, Northwestern University
Melissa Brown, Santa Clara University
"Black Women's Resistance to Lynching and Police Brutality"
This article reviews literature across several disciplines to examine the political strategies Black women in the United States use to resist lynching and police brutality. I use existing research on these interrelated forms of state-sanctioned violence to examine how the social construction of race, gender, class, and sexuality via controlling images restricts the agency and group autonomy of Black women. To begin, I draw on the matrix of domination as a conceptual framework to understand the dialectical relationship between the oppression and resistance of Black women in regard to police brutality and lynching. I then lay out a historical and empirical background on Black women, lynching, and police brutality from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Additionally, I analyze the political strategies Black women have used in the movements against police brutality and lynching that transpired during each of these eras. I argue that through an intersectional consciousness, these Black women activists innovated counter-narratives and counter-frames about Black womanhood to challenge controlling images. Further, these activists engaged in intersectional mobilization to redress their subordination within broader feminist and antiracist movements. To conclude, I suggest avenues for future inquiry on social movements against lynching or police brutality.
Brendane Tynes
"'All the Ways We Can Die But We Don't': Making Home in Haunting"
The word “haunt” stems from the Germanic and old French word, haunter, and has roots in the old English home, which meant to frequent a place. Today, “haunt” holds several meanings: 1) to visit habitually or appear to frequently as a spirit or ghost; 2) to recur persistently to the consciousness of; remain with; 3) to visit frequently; go to often; 4) to frequent the company of; be often with; 5) to disturb or distress; cause to have anxiety; trouble; worry. It is no mystery that blackness, Black life, and Black death haunt the U.S. national imaginary (Holland 2000) and the lore of Baltimore, but this paper does not list all the ways that blackness haunts. Instead, this paper opens the sociological concept of “haunting” (Gordon 1998) to the transgenerational, embodied experiences of Black women. “All the Ways We Can Die, But We Don’t” approaches haunting through a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of haunting, reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife to illuminate the haunted-haunt-haunting bind in which Black interpersonal violence survivors find themselves. I ask: How does one make life at the intersection of being the haunt (the role reserved for Black feminine people in white supremacist and Black patriarchal scripts) while being haunted by legacies of structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence?
Session VIII: 11:30am-1:30pm: Moderated by Anwar Uhuru, Monmouth University
Loron Benton, Case Western Reserve University
"A Black Feminist Exploration of Kara Walker's A Subtlety"
Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouette cutouts. This chapter explores Kara Walker’s intentions to both understand and undermine the nostalgic meanings of mammy in her public art installation A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Utilizing Black feminist and performance scholarship, I argue that Walker’s A Subtlety—and her art more broadly—offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as the Black public imagination. And when read through a Black feminist lens, specifically the works of Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Sharon Patricia Holland, Walker’s work is acutely affective and effective in troubling the ruptures between racism and sexuality by asking where might pleasure be found in systems of abject imperialism and how we might understand complex cultural signs in which Black women’s bodies are always implicated.
Tara Green, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
"'To Be (Un) Equally Unfree': Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Memphis Minnie's Practice of Pleasure"
In his essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” (1926) W.E.B. Du Bois states, “the young and slowly growing black public still wants its prophets almost equally unfree….We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it.” The truth is, for Black women, sexual expression was not that simple as Sadiya Hartman notes of the late nineteenth century, “All colored women were vulnerable to being seized at random by the police” (221). Navigation in a sexually repressive society forced Black women to engage in life-saving negotiations. I focus on two Black women—one of the growing educated class and the other of the working class— who defied respectability. In my presentation, I will share my research on how Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Memphis Minnie’s resistance exists in their pleasure practices. I offer a definition that acknowledges there are multiple complex contours of pleasure. More specifically, I will discuss Dunbar-Nelson’s relationship with a fellow female activist and one of her short stories. Further, I will discuss several of Memphis Minnie’s sexually-suggestive blues songs and her reputation as a woman who struck fear in men. Ultimately, we may learn how they loved their Black womanly selves.
Saidiya Hartman Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Axelle Karera, Emory University
Closing Remarks: 3:35-3:45pm
K. Bailey Thomas, University of Louisville
Introductory Remarks: 9:00am-9:30am
K. Bailey Thomas, University of Louisville
Session I: 10:00am-12:00pm: Moderated by Asaf Angermann, University of Louisville
Anwar Uhuru, Monmouth University
"Pray Tell and Lil Nas X Up in Pumps: Internalized Femmephobia and the Black Queer Experience"
My paper focuses on two cultural phenomena Montero and Pray-Tell. Pray-Tell the vogue-emcee of the balls that take place on the television show Pose and the characterization of Montero although it is the legal name of recording artist Lil Nas X. Lil Nas X, uses his legal name as though it were a character that he is able to play out in real time as a social critique of masculinity, femme-identity, sexual bottoming, and Blackness. Scholars have argued that the devaluation of femininity increases the likelihood of discrimination and violence among sexual and gender minorities. Due to the social awareness of sexism, femmephobia, and internalized femmephobia there has been a surge in theorization within those domains as well as critiques against xenophobia and Anti-Blackness. However, femmephobia and internalized femmephobia at the intersection of xenophobia and Anti-Blackness are under theorized. This chapter argues that femmephobia is not merely the enforcement of cisgender social norms and hierarchical structures, but also regulated through internalized femmephobia among LGBTQIAPOC sexual and gender minorities.
Cathy Thomas, University of California, Santa Barbara
"'Identity Which Does Not Come When Called': Comic Book Cosplay and Caribbean Carnival as Embodied Cognates"
Black female figures disrupt the normative constructions of genre/gender in narrative-based costumed pretend play thereby turning body spectatorship into new narratives of speculation. For Black women at play, I assert that cosplaying (comic book and pop culture costume play) and to play mas (Caribbean carnival) are rhetorical and performative cognates. I argue that Black women at play highlight the paradoxical dilemma of their visibility/invisibility so that, in public (virtual and physical), their presence becomes a phenomenological experience and political expression of their capacity as world builders. Because the category of “Black women” in this research include people who use an array of binary, nonbinary, and contested gender categories, I theorize a Black femme praxis that considers how this queer identity conditions a generative configuration that addresses the complex relations of the real and fictive worlds their play inhabits. To demonstrate this affective overlap between cosplay and playing mas, this essay includes excerpts from conducted interviews with science fiction writer Nalo Hopkinson, cultural theorist Emily Zobel Marshall, and content from various Black female cosplayers on social media.
Beverly Guy-Sheftall Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Kaila Story, University of Louisville
Session II: 4:30-6:30pm: Moderated by Damion Scott, CUNY and Stony Brook University
crystal nelson, The Pennsylvania State University
"Committed to Survival: The Womanist Visions of Varnette Honeywood and Annie Lee"
A critical part of womanist praxis is the mandate to create safe space. Black romanticism serves as one of the safe spaces for Black subjects. This paper examines the work of two Black romantic artists: Varnette P. Honeywood and Annie F. Lee. I begin with a detailed analysis of their respective paintings, Dixie Peach (1978) and Ash (1983), both of which depict intimate moments between Black mothers and daughters. Using the Black maternal as a launch point, I argue that these two representations of mothering situate the images in the womanist tradition of creating safe time and safe space. In the rest of the paper, I follow the thematic threads of each artist’s body of work to trace their exploration of womanist subject matter and themes inspired by the Black women’s blues tradition. Furthermore, I am interested in how an ethics of care is translated through their respective techniques. I conclude that both women craft identities for Black women that can sustain self-esteem. Tina Campt’s theory of the quotidian supports my assertion that Honeywood’s and Lee’s depictions of the everyday in Black women’s lives are modes of refusal of racial and sexist interpellation.
Monica Evans, Clark Atlanta University
"Intertextual Dialogue: Lovecraft Country as Womanist Aesthetic Adaptation"
This paper explores the way HBO's series Lovecraft Country uses womanist aesthetics as a method of adapting the literary works of white men.
Day Two: Friday, Nov. 5
Session III: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by Shelby Pumphrey, University of Louisville
Amanda Anderson, Emory University
"Hyper-Empathic Blackness: On Shared Feelings and Porous Subjectivities"
This paper turns to 20-21st century literary and cultural production to interrogate the contemporary appeal to the power of shared feelings. I examine the public response the opening of white American artist Dana Schutz’s Open Casket (2017) and critique attachments to empathy and mutual identification. I posit instead, a new mode of communal reckoning, through what I term ‘porousness’ (the intermingling between self and other in an account of the subject). I advocate for an understanding of how legacies of slavery subtend this relationality and produce for black people, a distinct and intensified vulnerability to violation. My analysis is a literary one. I treat Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower and in so doing offer an alternative, black feminist archive within which to theorize black subjectivity. In Parable of the Sower protagonist Lauren Olamina must survive what seems to be the end of the world all the while suffering from hyperempathy, an excessive and threatening sensitivity to others’ emotions. In this paper, I treat Lauren Olamina as a character in which Butler embeds a key critique of blackness and black girlhood. I introduce a theory of “hyper-empathic blackness” to observe how black feeling emerges as an effect of excess forms of embodiment.
Marlas Yvonne Whitley, North Carolina State University
"To Bear Witness (Among the Shoreline and Other Earthly Sites)"
Throughout history, Black women have often begun and contributed significantly to movements for collective liberation. A critical aspect to this history is the witnessing of and responding to state sanctioned violence and murder in Black communities. Though a common-place practice in various forms of art and media, the tragedies of the last decade have not only revealed an established tradition of Black women organizing and making the most vehement demands for justice, but also has invigorated a powerful wave of response in forms old, new and emerging. From fiction writers such as Angie Thomas, to film directors such as Ava DuVernay, Black women are producing critical, artistic work that bluntly interrogate institutions of power and their constituents in the wake of murder. Exploring contemporary diasporic production in this respect, and considering current discourse on Black women’s mental and emotional labor, this paper asks the question: what does it mean for Black women to bear witness? To work towards an answer or answers, this presentation considers a theory of response, illustrated through contemporary film and print media.
Session IV (Invited Talk): 12:00-2:00pm: Moderated by Haylee Harrell, Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Taryn Jordan, Colgate University
"Soul: Food and Thought"
"Soul: Food and Thought" conceptualizes my reframing of Du Boisian peculiar sense as a constitutive excess of black living to explore sentiments: sense, sensation, affect, and emotion in fried chicken. Fried chicken does not make up the totality of soul food; it is one part of a larger universe of dishes. Hence, I argue black history is sensed in the taste of soul food. Drawing on Cedric Robinson’s (2000) concept of the “black radical tradition,” which he defines as a form of black collective intelligence gathered through the accretion of struggle, I assert that Robinson’s exclusion of black women, specifically black women’s domestic work, from the “black radical tradition” elides social practices vital to black living that have an element of training built in. I contend that the exclusion of the black domestic work from the black radical tradition is the condition of possibility for soul food such as fried chicken to express history through taste.
Session V: 2:00-4:00pm: Moderated by Caleb Ward, University of Hamburg
Helen Gibson, University of Erfurt
"Midwifery as Black Radical Tradition"
This paper analyzes the practice of midwifery during enslavement as part of a Black radical tradition that complicates masculinist understandings of Black Marxism. As Saidiya Hartman, Jennifer Morgan, Hortense Spillers, and myriad doulas attest, the history of Black subjectivity in the colonial Americas is a history of women’s reproductive lives and labors. The subject of midwifery speaks not only to cultural practices of historical, gendered subject positions for Black women and non-men, but also to the continued relationships of Black women and non-men in the United States to medical communities at large. I argue that enslaved midwives helped birth significant gendered realities for enslaved pregnant people. Tanya Hart writes that Black women delivered most babies in the antebellum South. How and under what circumstances did these midwives work? What means of affirming Black life and confronting pain did midwives offer? A methodological focus on care work in this paper brings together current theorizing in the fields of Black feminist studies and disability studies, placing historiographically elusive female protagonists at the center of the narrative.
SaraEllen Strongman, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor
"Black Feminists Building Community: On the Black Feminist Retreats (1977-1981)
This paper argues that a major preoccupation of black feminist organizing during the late 1970s and early 1980s was constructing a community of black feminists by connecting women across the United States who otherwise felt isolated and alone in their personal and political commitments as black feminists. Specifically, this paper examines the series of seven black feminist retreats organized by members of the Combahee River Collection between 1977 and 1981 as one such instance of black feminist community building. The retreats were imagined as both an occasion for serious political work and a space for Black women to build deep personal connections with each other. Due to the conviviality of group gatherings, where there were both serious political conversations and good food, and the continuation of those connections outside of group meetings, Black feminists were able to build networks of support even though they were geographically separated. The emotional connections between individual women satisfied their longing for community and helped them survive. By attending to the overlap of personal and political work done by the participants in the black feminist retreats, this paper helps us appreciate how black feminists’ community-building was linked to their political organizing during the 1970s.
Session VI: 4:30-6:30pm: Moderated by Leah Kaplan, Emory University
Michelle Lanier, Duke University and University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill
"Speaking Fire Out of Burn: Womanist Cartographies an the Healing Sojourns"
In “Rooted: Black Women, Southern Memory, and Womanist Cartographies,” I write about the “transformative balm” potential of reclamation, re-membering, rooting, witnessing, calling out, and contending with the southern landscapes that hold and held the feet of Black women and femmes.
The piece ends with a litany of questions meant to serve as wayfinders for future research and inquiries. The word “explorations” almost finds its way into this framing, until I recall the conquering past of the word. Journeying and sojourning, seeking and groundtruthing, are the choreographies of this proposed endeavor. The journey is to the multitudinous self and her source lands, her source waterways. This is a terraqueous work, slick and muddy, shifting and thick. Quite literally, with the tools of Womanist Cartography (mapping the lives, dreams, and feet of Black South women) and ethnopoetics (conjuring the rhythm/quietude/power of spoken text) I seek to revisit ancestral spaces and remap them with words.
For instance: I will revisit the birthplaces of Eartha Kitt, Moms Mabley, Anna Julia Cooper, Nina Simone, and my great great grandmother (all in AfroCarolina) and seek to redefine these unceded territories with the boundlessness of the souls the soils held. Ntozake Shangé’s choreopoem and Natasha Trethewey’s witnessing/commemorative poetic forms will guide the syntactic structures of this piece, as will Alexis Pauline Gumbs’s sometimes epistolary approach to communing with aquatic, mammalian kin.
Chérie Ndaliko’s mixed media expression (photography in conversation with text) stitched with a “decomposed colonial gaze,” will also guide this proposed work. The ultimate aim is an illumination of the nuanced ecosystems of witness surrounding Black women’s Southern homelands. The ultimate calling is furthering the praxis work of commemorative and futuritive healing and wholeness in the face of the American Souths. The title of this piece comes from a tradition of healing associated with indigenous people, Black people, and those who claim both as kindred. Speaking fire out of the burn is a healing modality passed across generations and often across genders. Speaking fire out of a burn has particular appreciation in the vernacular South. The pervasiveness of fire in the wood stove, the cooking fires, the heat that allowed the pressing comb to work, the tobacco curing barns, the barbeques, the kilns, the brush fires and lightning strikes, all had the potential to burn. All burns cry out for healing. Communal fire talkers were/are famously able to speak incantations, call out a particular scripture, and/or breathe healing over a burn victim, often resulting in the miraculous erasure of pain and scarring. This tradition, this healing work, can be used as a powerful metaphor for the work that can be done when we revisit spaces of ancestral memory, with the cooling ointment of autonomy and self declared beauty. This is the way of Womanist Cartography, to adorn the land with our living memories, to call out our mothers’ names in poem and dance.
Licho Lopez Lopez and Gioconda Coello
"Where Was the Master's House Anyway? Of Place and Possibility in Unmastering Editorship"
The focus of this paper is editorship and the challenge to the conservation of coloniality. Following the ancestral guidance of Audre Lorde (1984) we inquire into what it might mean to turn Lorde’s analytic—the masters’ tools will never dismantle the master’s house—to examine itself. In doing so, we return to place, to Indigenous Futures and Learnings Taking Place and Growing up antiblack in Latin America and the Caribbean, two collections we edited and our evolving meditations on what it may mean to unmaster editorship work. The papers in these collections are authored by Black, Indigenous, and Ch’ixi writers of Abiayala (Wagua, 2007) and the Caribbean. This paper is braided with three cases that help us examine possibilities beyond being subjected to settler logics and assimilatory regimes in editorial work. We propose breaching the masterful possessive logic by shifting the geography of reason (Fanon, 1952), or rather by restoring reason to Abiayala and the Caribbean where it has always been. This implies to disrupt the inhospitable environments that we as editors and reviewers often create in reducing the expansive works of our colleagues to frames of reference only intelligible through the sovereignty of our own stories/theories (McKittrick, 2021).
Day Three: Saturday, Nov. 6
Session VII: 9:00-11:00am: Moderated by Corbin Covington, Northwestern University
Melissa Brown, Santa Clara University
"Black Women's Resistance to Lynching and Police Brutality"
This article reviews literature across several disciplines to examine the political strategies Black women in the United States use to resist lynching and police brutality. I use existing research on these interrelated forms of state-sanctioned violence to examine how the social construction of race, gender, class, and sexuality via controlling images restricts the agency and group autonomy of Black women. To begin, I draw on the matrix of domination as a conceptual framework to understand the dialectical relationship between the oppression and resistance of Black women in regard to police brutality and lynching. I then lay out a historical and empirical background on Black women, lynching, and police brutality from the mid-nineteenth to the twenty-first century. Additionally, I analyze the political strategies Black women have used in the movements against police brutality and lynching that transpired during each of these eras. I argue that through an intersectional consciousness, these Black women activists innovated counter-narratives and counter-frames about Black womanhood to challenge controlling images. Further, these activists engaged in intersectional mobilization to redress their subordination within broader feminist and antiracist movements. To conclude, I suggest avenues for future inquiry on social movements against lynching or police brutality.
Brendane Tynes
"'All the Ways We Can Die But We Don't': Making Home in Haunting"
The word “haunt” stems from the Germanic and old French word, haunter, and has roots in the old English home, which meant to frequent a place. Today, “haunt” holds several meanings: 1) to visit habitually or appear to frequently as a spirit or ghost; 2) to recur persistently to the consciousness of; remain with; 3) to visit frequently; go to often; 4) to frequent the company of; be often with; 5) to disturb or distress; cause to have anxiety; trouble; worry. It is no mystery that blackness, Black life, and Black death haunt the U.S. national imaginary (Holland 2000) and the lore of Baltimore, but this paper does not list all the ways that blackness haunts. Instead, this paper opens the sociological concept of “haunting” (Gordon 1998) to the transgenerational, embodied experiences of Black women. “All the Ways We Can Die, But We Don’t” approaches haunting through a Black feminist reading of ethnographic interview data, Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), and Gayl Jones’s Corregidora (1975), examining themes of haunting, reproduction, violence, and slavery’s afterlife to illuminate the haunted-haunt-haunting bind in which Black interpersonal violence survivors find themselves. I ask: How does one make life at the intersection of being the haunt (the role reserved for Black feminine people in white supremacist and Black patriarchal scripts) while being haunted by legacies of structural, institutional, and interpersonal violence?
Session VIII: 11:30am-1:30pm: Moderated by Anwar Uhuru, Monmouth University
Loron Benton, Case Western Reserve University
"A Black Feminist Exploration of Kara Walker's A Subtlety"
Kara Walker is best known for her depictions of sexualized violence and gendered racism during slavery in the form of black paper silhouette cutouts. This chapter explores Kara Walker’s intentions to both understand and undermine the nostalgic meanings of mammy in her public art installation A Subtlety, Or the Marvelous Sugar Baby, an Homage to the unpaid and overworked Artisans who have refined our Sweet tastes from the cane fields to the Kitchens of the New World on the Occasion of the demolition of the Domino Sugar Refining Plant. Utilizing Black feminist and performance scholarship, I argue that Walker’s A Subtlety—and her art more broadly—offers theoretical and geographic space to ponder where Black pleasure and collective memory can exist in systems of misogynoir, as well as the Black public imagination. And when read through a Black feminist lens, specifically the works of Saidiya Hartman, Hortense Spillers, and Sharon Patricia Holland, Walker’s work is acutely affective and effective in troubling the ruptures between racism and sexuality by asking where might pleasure be found in systems of abject imperialism and how we might understand complex cultural signs in which Black women’s bodies are always implicated.
Tara Green, University of North Carolina, Greensboro
"'To Be (Un) Equally Unfree': Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Memphis Minnie's Practice of Pleasure"
In his essay, “Criteria of Negro Art,” (1926) W.E.B. Du Bois states, “the young and slowly growing black public still wants its prophets almost equally unfree….We are ashamed of sex and we lower our eyes when people will talk of it.” The truth is, for Black women, sexual expression was not that simple as Sadiya Hartman notes of the late nineteenth century, “All colored women were vulnerable to being seized at random by the police” (221). Navigation in a sexually repressive society forced Black women to engage in life-saving negotiations. I focus on two Black women—one of the growing educated class and the other of the working class— who defied respectability. In my presentation, I will share my research on how Alice Dunbar-Nelson and Memphis Minnie’s resistance exists in their pleasure practices. I offer a definition that acknowledges there are multiple complex contours of pleasure. More specifically, I will discuss Dunbar-Nelson’s relationship with a fellow female activist and one of her short stories. Further, I will discuss several of Memphis Minnie’s sexually-suggestive blues songs and her reputation as a woman who struck fear in men. Ultimately, we may learn how they loved their Black womanly selves.
Saidiya Hartman Keynote: 2:00pm-3:30pm: Moderated by Axelle Karera, Emory University
Closing Remarks: 3:35-3:45pm
K. Bailey Thomas, University of Louisville
Event Generously Funded by Emory University's:
Department of Philosophy's Loemkehr Fund
Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Department of African American Studies
Department of Philosophy's Loemkehr Fund
Department of Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies
Department of African American Studies