Black Feminist Working Group - 2019-2020
Fall
Beloved
Morrison, Toni. Beloved. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987.
9/25 - Week One - Welcome! - Greetings and Introductions
10/2 - Week Two - Reading Beloved, Reintroductions, and Discussion of Research
10/23 - Week Three - Finishing Beloved
1. Body (Body Politics)/Being
Spillers, Hortense. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar” Diacritics (1987).
Wynter, Sylvia, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation – An Argument.”: 257-337.
2. Temporality
Jennifer C. Nash, “Archives of Pain: Reading the Black Feminist Theoretical Archive,” in The Black Body in Ecstasy: Reading Race, Reading Pornography.__:2-58.
Hartman, Saidiya. “Venus in Two Acts.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 12, no. 2 (June 1, 2008): 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1215/-12-2-1.
Abdur-Rahman, Aliyyah I. "The Black Ecstatic." GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 24, no. 2-3 (2018): 343-365.
Kaplan, Sara Clarke. "Love and Violence/Maternity and Death: Black Feminism and the Politics of Reading (Un)representability." Black Women Gender Families Vol. 1, No. 1 (2007): 94-124. JSTOR. Web.
Dunye, Cheryl. The Watermelon Woman. 1996. [Film]
3. Kinship/Communal Knowledge
Morrison, Toni. “The Site of Memory,” “Strangers”
Davis, Angela Y, and James, Joy. “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” in Angela Y. Davis Reader. 2008.
Bambara, Toni Cade. The Black Woman: An Anthology. “Introduction.” 1970.
Sanchez, Sonia. Does Your House Have Lions?
Jones, Gayl. Corregidora. [Scan/Select Excerpts]
Parmar, Pratibha. A Place of Rage. 1991. [Film]
4. Language & Poetics
Phillip, Nourbese M. “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy” 1997.
Shockley, Evie. Introduction: Renegade Poetics (Or, Would Black Aesthetics by An[y] Other Name Be More Innovative?)
Ed. Hunt, Erica and Dawn Lundy Martin. (Excerpts from) Letters to the Future: Black women/Radical writing. 2018.
Alexander, Elizabeth. The Black Interior. “Preface”/“Introduction”
5. Spirituality/Sacred
Alexander, M. Jacqui. “Chapter 7: Pedagogies of the Sacred: Making the Invisible Tangible” or [“Chapter 5: Transnationalism, Sexuality, and the State: Modernity’s Traditions at the Height of Empire”] in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC: Duke Univ. Press, 2005.
LaShawn Harris, “Black Women Supernatural Consultants, Numbers Gambling, and Public Outcries Against Supernaturalism,” Sex Workers, Psychics and Numbers Runners. Pp. 94-122.
Townes, Emilie, Womanist Ethics and the Cultural Production of Evil.
Cannon, Katie, “The Emergence of Black Feminist Consciousness”
Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens. (def. Of Womanist)
Coleman, Monica. “Must I be a Womanist,” Making a Way out of No Way
Notes: Next time essay from Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society (Religion, Race, and Ethnicity),
6. Space
Morrison, Toni. “Home” The House that Race Built. 1997.
Gilmore, Ruth Wilson. Golden Gulag.
Hawthorne, Camilla and Brittany Meché, “Making Room for Black Feminist Praxis in Geography,” Society and Space online, September 30, 2016, at:
http://societyandspace.org/2016/09/30/making-room-for-black-feminist-praxis-in-geography/
Camp, Stephanie. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South.
Wright, Michelle. Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology. “Introduction.” 2015.
7. Queerness
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection:Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. “Introduction.” 2009.
Tinsley, Omise'eke Natasha. “Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic.” GLQ (2008) 14 (2-3): 191-215.
Ferguson, Roderick. Aberrations in Black: Towards a Queer of Color Critique. “Something Else to Be: Sula, The Moynihan Report, and the Negations of Black Lesbian Feminism.” 110-138.
Snorton, C. Riley, “Preface,” “Introduction,”Mary Anderson chapter! Black on Both Sides: A Radical History of Trans Identity (Minnesota, 2017).
E. Patrick Johnson. Put a Little Honey in my Sweet Tea: Oral History and Quare Performance
Cohen, Cathy. “Punks, Bulldaggers, Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics,” GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies vol. 3, no. 4 (1997): 437-465.
8. Affect
Musser, Amber “Introduction,” Sensual Excess: Queer Femininity and Black Jouissance (NYU Press, forthcoming November 2018).
Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic.” Sister Outsider. 1984. & “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism,” National Women’s Studies Association Conference (June 1981).
Stallings, L.H. “Introduction,” Funk the Erotic: Transaesthetics and Black Sexual Cultures. 2015.
9. Ecology
Frazier, Chelsea M. “Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism.” Critical Ethnic Studies 2, no. 1 (2016): 40-72.
Sharpe, Christina Elizabeth. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. “Chapter 4.”
Franklin, Aretha. “Bridge Over Troubled Water” (1971)
Kincaid, Jamaica. A Small Place. 1988.
10. Care
Clifton, Lucille. “won’t you celebrate with me.” 1993.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity. 2016.
---.M Archive : after the end of the world
Bambara, Toni Cade. Excerpts of Salt Eaters.
Jordan, June. “Bringing Back the Person to Black studies.”
Morrison, Toni. “James Baldwin: His Voice Remembered; Life in His Language”
Contributors:
Jocelyn Proietti
Teona Williams
Amara Lawson Chavanu
Alexandra Thomas
Candace Borders
Andie Berry
Bianca Dang
Olivia Polk
Jaz Riley
Ambre Dromgoole