I have been thinking about these lines in ra malika imhotep’s poem A LOT.

The last couple of weeks of this dying empire have been devastating. If you are anywhere in proximity to the humanities—as in you do art, culture, history, or literature in any way, shape or form—you have probably been touched by the seizure and decimation of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Institute of Museum and Library Services.

Last week, I watched as folks doing humanities work and folks charged with maintaining the work that humanists do received termination letters. Projects shuttered. People fired. Many of us live paycheck to paycheck. The thing about seeing life through screens, data, and abstraction is we can forget scale. Thousands of people fired really scales down to individuals fired really scales down to a single person who can no longer financially support the people they care for, who can no longer pay for their own or someone else’s hospital bills, who has felt the shock and confusion of having to reconfigure their own health, dreams, goals, who may have been holding the sky up for a world they are part of—because we are all world-builders, especially if the women of color—and that world is now coming apart.

Ways to help? Mutual aid, of course. Creating smaller, more local subsistence networks, yes. Creating smaller, more local projects, research goals, public humanities endeavors, of course.

But from the side of the humanities, where digging down into deeper knowledge and pushing up into the next levels of the profession both require massive and organized long-term planning, this is a bitter time. People and institutions set their two, three, five year plans on promises of support and resources. This is a bitter time.

Meanwhile, even as my peers mourn the loss of their jobs, and, with them, professional prospects and pathways, the university has become an even more fraught place—an impossible place, really—to express that anger, grief, rage, and bitterness. Universities are facing a clear and present threat to their survival that is actually a clear and present threat to freedom of speech and ideas. And also, as Shana Redmond pointed out in her piece, the universities have been making such wretched decisions and failing, with few exceptions, to protect their own community members, it is hard to know where to stand. The disappearances and students with canceled visas, which are running about one thousand now, put us squarely in a science fiction Netflix series.

(It actually isn’t hard to know where to stand. We stand with the people, the planet, and the oppressed.)

What is hard is explaining this to graduate students who have set their hopes on a life they imagined and are seeing it disappear what comes next.

What is hard is seeing undergraduates heartbroken by the inability of their universities to stand up for them, seeing students persecuted by their university for exercising their first Amendment rights.

What is hard is seeing faculty struggle with what to do and how to support and also manage the deluge of need, whether that is emotional, psychological, financial, professional or otherwise being placed at our doorstep—again, especially if you are a faculty member of color, a woman of color, a Black woman, a woman.

Which is to say—I haven’t been able to find the words for these newsletters because I have barely been able to keep up with myself. I set up Black Creative Worlds to find a pace that would allow us all to sit, to breathe, to receive, and we have managed to do that beautifully. And, also, the last few weeks, the deluge overwhelmed me and all I could do was sit, breathe, receive, and be in community in the seminar room. I could not find a pace that allowed me to do that online too.

So I chose. I chose in person over this newsletter. Because I am finite and so is time and if I had to choose to be somewhere, it would have to be in my flesh and not my screen.

But I missed y’all. And it made me think of the other ways that people are choosing and having to choose where to be, when to be, how to be. And how important grace is.

Building worlds is not easy. Building new worlds is beyond hard. It is devastating work. The choices we make every day, every hour, to be in place, to breathe, to smile instead of crying, to plant a seed instead of cutting a tree down, to find ways to be in person, in personal, in actual lived and physical reality with each other are important.

Scale and the algorithm may make us think we can always choose everyone, all the time, everywhere.

But I am a mother who knows that there are limits.

I don’t believe in binaries and I do believe in nuance. I study messy, complicated, lustful women who survived a time when being messy, complicated or lustful could get you drawn and quartered, hung until dead, set on fire, tortured and mutilated a thousand ways—and those are just the executioner options. Sometimes it could get you a bayonet in the throat or a club to the head until dead. Black women, we know death. We know the dead. And we know the living dead, the ones walking around with blood caked thighs, missing limbs, shaved heads. We know what happens when they know they can do what they want to you. We remember. The water in our bodies, in our blood, in our bones remembers (M. Jacqui Alexander; Toni Morrison; Olaf in Frozen).

Black women feel this time and it is a hurting time. Be gentle with us and with you.

We have two weeks of Black Creative Worlds left.

Tomorrow, we read about two Black women who have survived something unspoken and unspeakable, and then have to survive the almost mundane and obvious violence of broken kinship. That is the way I think of “The Office of Historical Corrections” by Danielle Evans. Evans will join us in seminar.

We also will be reading Afrofuturism, the book issued by the Smithsonian’s National Museum of African American History and Culture. Last week, along with the death of the NEH and the IMLS, an executive order was issued that specifically targeted and named NMAAHC and the Women’s History Museum for action. The order called for “RESTORING TRUTH AND SANITY TO AMERICAN HISTORY.”

As a historian of slavery and the African diaspora, I cannot tell you how unhinged that title is.

I will try to tell you. I need time though. This is also what my silence has been. Trying to figure out how to explain, to a reader who may have been conditioned to reject all things African, African diasporic, Black, Caribbean, and even broadly subaltern that the stories we tell about ourselves are the roadmap that we use to chart our desires, our kinships, our futures? Is it enough to say it like that?

I don’t know. But we will be reading about Afrofuturism, returning to the recipes that have worked, that still work to create the worlds we need to survive this world.

For those interested, in the coming days, the LifexCode substack will also be showcasing material from our projects that have received federal funding, from our partners who have received IMLS funding, and from across our ecosystem more broadly. Feel free to subscribe there (we don’t post much on our notes, but we do have a completely free newsletter) and follow along on our social media (IG is life_x_code). And on April 22nd, we will have our research celebration.

LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure

It's here! The Spring 2025 LifexCode Research Celebration on April 22!!!

We have much to celebrate and much to gather in this moment in the world. Let’s create some joy and learning…

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a year ago · LifexCode Admin

We keep rocking on. Ancestors said “we nursed you” so “don’t you dare give up.” My comrades sent me pictures of their children and grandchildren this weekend. My godson had his birthday this weekend. I made chocolate chip cookies for my babies this weekend. The flowers on my boveda are blooming. The okra seeds I planted are sprouting. Ancestors, the unborn, our children—none of them said we get to give up. My mothers bequeathed me care, discernment, love, and a sense of justice that is ratchet and raucous and has room for all. I did not inherit compliance. I inherited disobedience.

So we don’t dare give up. We do this.

Even when I am not on here, right on this newsletter, showing my work, I am doing it, somewhere.

And when I don’t see you, I’ll trust you are doing it too.

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My obsession with Octavia Butler predates all other obsessions except my obsession with history. I am writing about her in the book I am working on, including my first encounter with her—which was Parable of the Sower at age thirteen. I write to her whenever I journal, even when I am not writing directly to her. And my relationship with her work is usually different from most people. Parable of the Sower is the Bible, of course. But Wild Seed is still my favorite, the one I think offers me the clearest map of where we have been and where we might go. Might, of course, since the Patternmaster series does not end up in the softest place. But the potential energy of “might” is the same potential energy of a parable and anyone familiar with the winding cautionary tales of African diasporic religions and folklore will recognize in Wild Seed a story of the humbling of two gods and the making of a world.

Wild Seed like both Parables is a warning, a possibility, not a prophecy. Wild Seed is just a longer yarn.

But what a warning it is. Parable of the Sower gives us Acorn. Parable of the Talents takes it away. And in the journey, we are meant to be warned of something, to be careful about something, to learn something. Given we are in the end game now, in the actual saga that Parables laid out, with people being disappeared, we have a lot to be warned of, a lot to be careful of, and a lot to learn.

More from me below the paywall jump, but if you’ve been following, you got a prelude of Butler two weeks ago, that you can review here.

What We Are Reading

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Sower &

Octavia Butler, Parable of the Talents

“Abolition is Nonlinear and Iterative,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

Suggested Readings:

• Octavia’s Parables Podcast, chapter 1, https://www.readingoctavia.com/episodes/sower-e1

• Gerry Canavan, “‘There’s Nothing New / Under The Sun, / But There Are New Suns’: Recovering Octavia E. Butler’s Lost Parables,” Los Angeles Review of Books, June 9, 2014, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/theres-nothing-new-sun-new-suns-recovering-octavia-e-butlers-lost-parables/.

• Ruha Benjamin, “But … There Are New Suns!”,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 6, no. 1 (2017): 103–5.

Discussion Questions (expect spoilers, of course)

• What role does faith play in the work you do? Not necessarily in a Judeo-Christian sense, but is there some intangible that you have faith in that orients you? Even if you don’t know it?

• What role does religion play in the work you do? Even if a contrarian role?

• The Parables are Judeo-Christian parables. Olamina’s father is a minister. Butler’s mother was very religious as well. How does Black Christianity in particular, and its history, appear in this future-not-future world?

• How do you write about violence? Butler doesn’t shy away from any violent experiences and, in fact, imagines terror that we don’t have in our world yet. Thoughts on writing violence and how. And why.

• By Parable of the Talents, Lauren Olamina and Harry and Zahra aren’t the only survivors of their community. Marcus returns and his re-entry is rough. What can we learn from Marcus’s arrival about re-entry, re-learning, unlearning as we build community and solidarity in this world?

• Children in this world, in both books, have particular experiences. What do we learn about childhood in Parables?

• Radical empathy is a common science fiction (fantasy, speculative fiction, etc.) device. From Charmed to Professor X, it isn’t uncommon to come across characters who can feel deeply what others feel. But usually they can control it (or their journey is to learn to control it). Olamina will never be able to control her hyperempathy. It is a a disability. In the hands of their oppressors, it even becomes a tool of oppression and unspeakable (though Butler speaks it) violation. Are there abilities and disabilities that operate in similar ways in your world?

• Related — Are social media companies creating hyperempathy in us and then using it as a tool against us?

• Christian fundamentalism is introduced in Sower but Christian AmericaTM is unfurled in Talents. What do we learn about how Christian America runs, its structure, members, businesses, leaders? What parallels do we see as we look around today?

• Do they make it to the stars? What is the lesson of going (or not going) to the stars?

• Lauren is a mother, by the end, but her motherhood is fraught, maybe even broken. What is Black motherhood in Parables?

• What is Black love in this world?

Suggested Readings

Going to try to keep this short, but there is so much!

• Gerry Canavan, Octavia E. Butler, Illustrated edition (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2016).

• Jayna Brown, Black Utopias: Speculative Life and the Music of Other Worlds (Duke University Press, 2021)

• Susana M. Morris, “Black Girls Are from the Future: Afrofuturist Feminism in Octavia E. Butler’s Fledgling,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 40, no. 3 (2012): 146–66.

• Lynell George, A Handful of Earth, A Handful of Sky: The World of Octavia Butler (Santa Monica, California: Angel City Press, 2020).

• Sami Schalk, Bodyminds Reimagined: (Dis)Ability, Race, and Gender in Black Women’s Speculative Fiction (Duke University Press, 2018).

• Abby Aguirre, “Octavia Butler’s Prescient Vision of a Zealot Elected to ‘Make America Great Again,’” The New Yorker, July 26, 2017, https://www.newyorker.com/books/second-read/octavia-butlers-prescient-vision-of-a-zealot-elected-to-make-america-great-again

• Sasha Ann Panaram, “Bloom’s Butler’s Taxonomy,” The Black Scholar 52, no. 2 (April 3, 2022): 38–49, https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2042762

• Octavia E. Butler, A Few Rules for Predicting the Future: An Essay (Chronicle Books, 2024)

• Moya Bailey, “‘ Shaping God’: The Power of Octavia Butler’s Black Feminist and Womanist SciFi Visions in the Shaping of a New World–An Interview With Adrienne Maree Brown,” 2013, https://scholarsbank.uoregon.edu/xmlui/bitstream/handle/1794/26298/ada03-shapi-bai-2013.pdf?sequence=1

• Betsy Mitchell, “The Evolution of Octavia Butler’s Cover Art,” The Portalist (blog), June 5, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20190605051627/https://theportalist.com/octavia-butler-cover-art

• Ayana Jamieson, “‘Harvest of Survivors’: 30 Years After Octavia E. Butler’s ‘Parable of the Sower’ | Sierra Club,” Sierra: The Magazine of the Sierra Club, February 22, 2023, https://www.sierraclub.org/sierra/harvest-survivors-30-years-after-octavia-e-butler-s-parable-sower.

• Frances Smith Foster, “Octavia Butler’s Black Female Future Fiction,” Extrapolation 23, no. 1 (Spring 1982): 37–49.

• Marisa Parham, “Saying ‘Yes’: Textual Traumas in Octavia Butler’s ‘Kindred,’” Callaloo 32, no. 4 (2009): 1315–31

• Moya Bailey and Ayana A. H. Jamieson, “Guest Editors’ Introduction: Palimpsests in the Life and Work of Octavia E. Butler,” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender, and the Black International 6, no. 1 (2017): v–xiii, https://doi.org/10.1353/pal.2017.0014.

• Octavia Butler, “Locus Online: Octavia E. Butler Interview (Excerpts),” June 2000, http://www.locusmag.com/2000/Issues/06/Butler.html.

• “Black Blessings: Toni Cade Bambara and Octavia E. Butler,” The Feminist Wire (blog), accessed November 23, 2014, http://thefeministwire.com/2014/11/black-women-writers/

• TAPPhD, “Digging in the Crates: Day 4 in the Octavia Butler Archives at The Huntington | Therí A Pickens, PhD,” accessed November 5, 2014, http://www.tpickens.org/2014/11/04/digging-in-the-crates-day-4-in-the-octavia-butler-archives-at-the-huntington/.

• Radio Imagination https://clockshop.org/project/radio-imagination/

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For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.

I am not sure time travel isn’t possible. In everything Alexis Pauline Gumbs writes, I find stardust, volcanic ash, and salt water, the stuff of cosmos. The stuff we come from and stuff we are going back to. Some scholars know how to tell a beautiful story. Some know how to research deeply and inhabit the lives of their subjects. And some know how to take a topic apart, distill it to its molecules and atoms so we can understand its constituent parts—so we have no excuse not to rise to the call of the work demanded of us to change the world. Most scholars can do one or the other of these well. Gumbs can do all three.

I first met Audre Lorde wandering used bookstores in Chicago. The book The Black Unicorn, seemed to jump into my hand. I felt that way about Octavia Butler too, and Elizabeth Alexander. As an adolescent, the books I needed leapt off the shelves and into my waiting arms. Later, I read This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings By Radical Women of Color, as it circulated among radical womyn of color bloggers in the early aughts. Never before exposed to textual Black and Third World feminism, that volume knit together things I knew, things I feared, and things I needed to know to proceed in the world and not die. Lorde’s essay in that book (which was a talk given at a conference), “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” forever changed how I understood what it meant to be in right relationship to institutions.

I offer this genealogy, but I am not sure why. Only that there is something about encountering Audre Lorde, whether on the page or in person, as I learned in Gumb’s biography, that asks you to seek out your origin story. I thought it was just her on the page, her words like a laser gutting me from the inside out. Apparently, Audre was just that kind of person in the world. A burst of light.

Questions, readings below; activities and a bit more under the wall.

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What We Are Reading

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde

“Abolition is Adaptive and Intentional,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

Discussion Questions

• Who is Audre Lorde?

• What does the structure of the book tell us about what Gumbs wants us to know about Audre Lorde? The length of the chapters, their order. The book itself is a physical representation of the life of Audre Lorde; what is the physical book doing?

• Many of the chapters begin with a reference to something in nature. Sea. Ocean. Stars. Coal. What is Gumbs doing with nature, with the planet and the cosmos in relationship to Lorde?

• Gumbs includes herself in the text as biographer and as shaper of the story. When does she do that? Why?

• Some of the people in Lorde’s life (and ours) get their own attention, like Pat Parker and Gloria Joseph and Barbara Smith. Why do this in a book about Lorde?

• Lorde’s immortal life is told mostly chronologically, but not entirely and not always. How is encountering her life in different phases and at different moments different in this text from more linear biographies? What do we get from the time travel?

• What role does physical travel play in Lorde’s life? Sometimes she moves voluntarily, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes a combination of both. Is the immortal life of Lorde also a wandering life? What do we learn about what it means to be intentional and global from Lorde?

• What was Lorde’s writing life? What were her writing practices? How did they change over the course of her life?

• Both Lorde and Gumbs think deeply about the metaphysics of Black feminism. What do we learn about that in this book?

• Lorde thinks a lot about her origin story, especially her family, her relationship with her father, her, mother. And Gumbs untangles, without destroyng Lorde’s mythography, a lot of the complicated dynamics. Who is the Audre embedded in a family structure?

• Who is Lorde the mother? Not just biological, but also the mother of artists, poets, scholars?

• Lorde seems to move from painful loneliness as a child (including a tragic first love) into a community forged from fire. The stakes for Black lesbians and Third World lesbians and feminists were deadly and high. What does intentional and adaptive (Ritchie) community look like for Lorde and for those around her?

• Can we live Lorde’s eternal life? Is survival promised us?

• Where are the “uses of the erotic” in Lorde’s life, at least as told by Gumbs. The sensual, erotic, delicious and tactile? Where can we spot those examples in our own lives?

Suggested Reading

• Audre Lorde, “The Uses of the Erotic as Power,” Sister outsider: Essays and speeches (1984)

• Audre Lorde, The Black Unicorn: Poems, (NY: W. W. Norton & Company, 1995).

• Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, This Bridge Called My Back, Fourth Edition: Writings By Radical Women of Color (Watertown, MA: Persephone Press, 1981).

• Moya Z. Bailey, “All the Digital Humanists Are White, All the Nerds Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave,” Journal of Digital Humanities (2012):

• Barbara Smith, Patricia Bell-Scott, and Akasha (Gloria) T. Hull, eds., But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies., First Edition (New York, NY: Feminist Press at the City University of New York, 1982).

• Rosalyn Terborg-Penn and Andrea Benton Rushing, Women in Africa and the African Diaspora: A Reader (Washington, DC: Howard University Press, 1987).

• Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

• Robin Boylorn, “How to Not Die: Some Survival Tips for Black Women Who Are Asked to Do Too Much,” The Crunk Feminist Collective (2013), http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2013/06/07/how-to-not-die-some-survival-tips-for-black-women-who-are-asked-to-do-too-much

• Brittney Cooper, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2018).

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Coal: Black Matter Oracle,” The Black Scholar 47, no. 3 (2017): 3–7.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves:” a Dialogically Produced Audience an Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the “present”,” Gender Forum: An Internet Journal for Gender Studies 22(2008):

• Moya Bailey and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Are the Ones We’Ve Been Waiting for,” Ms. Magazine Winter(2010): 41–42.

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For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.

I count myself fortunate to live in a time of genius. Moya Bailey might not describe herself that way, and she is clear, in Misogynoir Transformed, that the term misogynoir may have originated with her, but it was also incubated in work generated and further theorized by Trudy of Gradient Lair. Together, they published a history of the term. But who said two people can’t be geniuses? Who said twenty?

The lesson of Misogynoir Transformed is it takes community to create remedies against oppression and that community is the remedy against representations that threaten to destroy us. Genius is plural and communal. Black feminists have been teaching us this lesson since Harriet Jacobs sat in the loophole of retreat provided by her grandmother’s garret to watch her children play. Kinship is a practice and it is the medicine.

Even when the disease is epidemic. I followed Trudy for years and years, knowing that I was learning from a singular mind. I still support their work, although I won’t do more than say their name here, because the other lesson of Misogynoir Transformed is that creating generative digital worlds that center Black queer and trans folks as complex human beings worthy of care, grace, and cherishing may alchemize racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and transphobia, but it does not dismantle empire.

Trudy has described elsewhere the damage researchers, academics, and journalists have done just by linking to her work and putting her ideas in their own creations. And if there’s anything the last 28 days have taught us, it is that these platforms never loved us, we just loved the shit out of each other with them as tools, as front stoops, and as windows we could shout down to each other form.

The point, as Mark Anthony Neal reminds me constantly, was never the platform.

Trudy’s digital project (more than a blog!), Gradient Lair, has sunset. Most of the web series Bailey describes have also sunset. Tumblr is somewhere in the Land of Lost Toys. AMC has sunset and remixed its focus to Detroit. And on and on.

The permanence of the work was never the point (although some of the artists, writers, and creatives Bailey references may have preferred to stick around longer than they did). Ephemerality has never stopped Black queer and trans folks, feminist-identified and otherwise, from creating new worlds. We create because we have to. Because without cultivating an erotic, resistive, transgressive, audacious and juicy imagination, how else will we survive?

As web pages get deleted and data sets disappear, as a new administration attempts to literally write and legislate trans folks out of existence, harnessing the power of memory, fighting for what can be said and what needs to be said, and creating worlds where we, Black queer folk, don't disappear, where our trans sisters and trans and non-binary sibs don't disappear—this is the work. This is what digital alchemy teaches us to do.

Discussion questions and suggested readings below (updated with more texts specific to Black trans studies); activity and more of my thoughts below the paywall.

What We Are Reading

Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (New York: NYU Press, 2021).

“Abolition is Fractal,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

Discussion Questions

• What is misogynoir and how does Bailey define it?

• What is a zine and how does it work?

• What is a hashtag and how does it work?

• Were you outside for the era of Black web series? Did you watch the ones Bailey describes?

• Timeless question: What do we do with representations that aren’t so “favorable” or put Black folks in the best light?

• Does the fractal require permanence? What do we do with the missing websites, the sunset projects, the disappeared platforms and the work created on them?

• How does autobiography and controlling, creating, and repairing the narrative of who you are intersect with finding community online for Black queer and trans folks?

• Who is making the Black queer and trans content that you love now? Is there a lesson in Bailey about how to support, celebrate, even critique the work that brings more community, connection and creation into the world, not less?

• Once again, Allied Media Conference takes center stage. How have the books so far crossed paths with each other—not just in topics and scholars, but in other ways?

Suggested Readings

• C. Riley Snorton, Black on Both Sides: A Racial History of Trans Identity (Minneapolis: University off Minnesota Press, 2017).

• Treva Ellison, Kai M. Green, Matt Richardson, and C. Riley Snorton, “We Got Issues Toward a Black Trans*/studies,” TSQ: Transgender Studies Quarterly 4(2017): 162–69.

• Kaila Adia Story, “Fear of a Black Femme: The Existential Conundrum of Embodying a Black Femme Identity While Being a Professor of Black, Queer, and Feminist Studies,” Journal of Lesbian Studies 0(2016): 1–13.

• Uri McMillan, Embodied Avatars: Genealogies of Black Feminist Art and Performance (New York: NYU Press, 2015).

• Jessica Marie Johnson, “4dh + 1 Black Code / Black Femme Forms of Knowledge and Practice,” American Quarterly 70, no. 3 (2018): 665–70.

• Savannah Shange, “A King Named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee,” Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory 24, no. 1 (2014): 29–45.

• Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, Ezili’s Mirrors: Imagining Black Queer Genders (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2018).

• Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, The Color Pynk: Black Femme Art for Survival (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2022).

• Margaret Washington, Sojourner Truth’s America (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009).

• Washington, Margaret. “Going ‘Where They Dare Not Follow:’ Race, Religion, and Sojourner Truth’s Early Interracial Reform.” The Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (January 1, 2013): 48–71.

• Kidada Williams, “Interview: Deborah Willis | Seizing Freedom,” August 27, 2021, https://seizingfreedom.vpm.org/interview-deborah-willis/.

• Kim Gallon, “The Media Force That Made ‘Black Twitter’ Possible,” The Washington Post, February 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/the-media-force-that-made-black-twitter-possible/2016/02/11/092ed5c6-af1d-11e5-b820-eea4d64be2a1_story.html.

• Tina Campt, “The Loophole of Retreat--An Invitation,” E-Flux 105 (2019), https://www.e-flux.com/journal/105/302556/the-loophole-of-retreat-an-invitation/.

• Kim Gallon, “Looking Backward and Forward: Pleasure, Joy, and the Future of Black DH,” Digital Humanities Quarterly 016, no. 3 (July 22, 2022).

• Legacy Russell, Black Meme: A History of The Images That Make Us (Verso, 2024)

• Tina M. Campt, A Black Gaze: Artists Changing How We See (The MIT Press, 2021)

• Tina M. Campt, Listening to Images (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2017).

• “Tourmaline. Salacia. 2019 | MoMA,” The Museum of Modern Art, accessed February 17, 2025, https://www.moma.org/audio/playlist/298/4089.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World, Illustrated edition (Durham ; London: Duke University Press Books, 2018).

• The Black Studies Podcast, “Romaine McNeil, Tatiana Esh, Sha-Shonna Rogers, Jessica Newby, and Julia Mallory - Slavery in Motion Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art,” Substack newsletter, The Black Studies Podcast (blog), February 6, 2025

• Sarah J. Jackson et al., #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).

• “The Digital Apothecary with Moya Bailey,” The Emergent Strategy Podcast, n.d.,

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  Romaine McNeil, Tatiana Esh, Sha-Shonna Rogers, Jessica Newby, and Julia Mallory - Slavery in Motion Collection, Baltimore Museum of Art

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Purchase Jessica Marie Johnson, David Mimno, and Lauren Tilton, eds., Computational Humanities (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2024) here and everywhere now.

I don’t know what I planned to write about computational humanities before the murderous halftime show that aired last night. The week was another hard one, mostly because I did not set up the right care infrastructure. I am taking the advice, of course, of everyoneTM online, in movement, and in person to slow the onslaught, don’t get consumed, pick an issue and stick it, control the pace, log off when necessary. I designed Black Creative Worlds for this—analog readings, one hour with no devices, reflective writing, etc.

Except that last week involved planning for three trips, one that ended up rescheduled due to weather, which put me on the computer prepping at a more frantic pace than usual. Except that Witch Baby decided to tear the club up and by club I mean school, after care and day care. Between embarrassing teacher phone calls and dishing out “consequences,” playing emotional care parent wore my boundaries down. Except that the issues I’ve committed to staying present with (resegregation watch, research funding, and education) got slammed last week over and over, ending with a hit on universities via the NIH indirect funding cap, which Greg Pak accurately called “a vote for cancer” (and he has scripts to call your reps and tell them all so).

Being a cancer survivor is like being a rape survivor if you’re a Black woman—even if you aren’t one yourself, pretty much everyone around you is and you know it is a matter of time before it is your turn. Because that is the water we are swimming in—plastic-infested, bloody, and full of predators fed on fantasies of flayed Black flesh.

And before I knew it, the empire’s algo got me. Scroll, scroll, doom, doom, and then this, and this, and this, meeting, triage, phone call, meeting, link share, scary emoji face.

And then…

Suddenly I felt like the T’Challa at the edge of a waterfall, being yelled at by the Queen of Wakanda while hanging upside down from fine ass M’baku’s hips.

If you haven’t seen the Kendrick concert/halftime show, it should be up to view. And this newsletter isn’t a post-mortem on that performance. The Black pop culture gworls do it better and I’d rather read/view their takes on the socials.

Instead, this is me confirming READ RECEIPT on the love note Kendrick sent Black folks and the world. A note that reached me despite disappearing from Twitter, despite doom scrolling, despite algorithms and corporate ownership and the drama that is the NFL. It reached me through group chats, screenshots, and even some in person kking with my partner, cutting right through the 2025 grey haze.

What is it about Black culture, our culture, that saves our lives? After all, I’m not the biggest Kendrick fan. I wasn’t on the “Not Like Us” wave (I actually prefer “euphoria” and still keep it on repeat). I am not from the West Coast, I don’t like Los Angeles, and as much as I love hip hop, there aren’t enough blue pills that will make me forget the Dee Barnes story so I never got into N. W. A. or any West Coast rap. But in an IG live on the election, Nelini Stamp said something I think about a lot: “It’s time to get serious about culture…culture is art, but also culture is shared experiences.”

The shared experience of internationally hating on Drake, but really also hating on 47, but really also hating on these United States of America with all her footballs and slavery, doctrine of Discovery and petrochemicals, moonlight and magnolias, and rotting bodies around the world…yes. That hate is delicious. That hate is power. We can put that hate in an IV and let it drip.

That American flag made up of Black masc figures in red, white, and blue did a lot of work last night. As did kdot sitting in the middle of it all. That flag was a Black data moodboard and I hadn’t seen one blaze so bright since Kara Walker built herself a Sugar Sphinx/A Subtlety.

And I didn’t miss the he doth protest too much (like Kendrick didn’t let him up on that stage, be serious) protestor waving the Sudan and Palestine flags. YES.

Computational humanities is a very dry term to some. Listen, all it means is we want to talk about what gets counted and how we know what all that counting means. And we (Tilton, Mimno and I) want to do it with an eye towards care and support and revising the known world.

These days, there is a lot of talk about flows and floods and shock and awe. In the way we live now, on screens, on devices, and in person, the shock and awe is computational. It is Big Data. And everything happening right now is also generating data that could get Big. This post. That halftime show. The images circulating. The alt-text. From music notes to pixels to page views, data is being collected, catalogued, and compiled, somewhere. And if it is compiled in machine readable form, most likely it is quantifiable and, because this is all happening at lightning speed these days, most likely it is already being quantified.

And, yes, the quantification is increasingly opaque and dangerously proprietary (i.e. AI).

But none of that is actually us, ya know? AI isn’t culture. A dataset isn’t culture. Alt-text isnt culture. Neither are filenames or timestamps or visualizations. You still need people, in the end. And you still need the social. And you still need to reckon with power. Culture doesn’t exist without people, without the shared experience, the social relations we forge over and under and with culture. The human, in all her tempestuous, denied, greedy, confounded and confounding limitations.

Which also means the culture will never really sit still long enough for the machines to catch her.

The Muskies are attempting to bomb the culture in a "keep this nigger-boy running," kind of way. Big Data. What they are doing is clumsy, flimsy, and illegal, but not ineffective if we act as individuals.

But I am we, and we remain unquantifiable, legion. We continue to falling in love with ourselves and with each other. We continue to remind ourselves to SHOW THEM WHO WE ARE. We continue to move in a the people could fly kind of way. In a, just when you think you’ve caught her, out of nowhere, the culture will sprout wings and take to the sky kind of way. In a, we will tell the story of this moment, and that story will cripwalk all over your fucking face how do you like them apples black Uncle Sam jazz hands kind of way.

On Tuesday (tomorrow), come hear from some of the contributors and learn more about how we are thinking about literature, history, culture, data, infrastructure, labor, funding, and power.

LifexCode: DH Against Enclosure

Join Us for a Book Celebration! Computational Humanities (2024)

Join Black World Seminar on February 11th, 12 - 2:00 pm, to celebrate the publication of Computational Humanities (2024), the first volume to intervene in debates on computation in the digital humanities. We will be joined by editors Lauren Tilton, David Mimno, Jessica Marie Johnson, and select contributors: Roopika Risam, Vanessa Holden, Crystal Nicole…

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a year ago · 3 likes · Dr. Nadejda Webb

Whether you can join us or not, do something to resist this week. Oh, the week’s questions and readings are below.

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Week 4 - February 11 - Computational Humanities Book Celebration with Roopika Risam, Vanessa Holden, Joshua Rothman and Crystal Eddins

Lauren Tilton, David Mimno, and Jessica Marie Johnson, eds., Computational Humanities (Minneapolis: Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2024)

“Emergent Strategies and Abolition,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

Discussion Questions

• Four weeks in, return to Ruha Benjamin’s provocation two weeks ago: How do you know if you are dreaming your own or someone else’s dreams?

• Read the terms of service of your favorite social media platform. Do you understand where your data is going?

• What is data? How do you define it? Miriam Posner has a great definition, but is it the same as yours?

• Black folks have created worlds using data, challenging data, and disappearing from data collectors. Think of some examples of each.

• What does infrastructure mean to you?

Suggested Readings

• adrienne maree brown and Autumn Brown, “Post-Election Time with Nelini Stamp,” How to Survive the End of the World, accessed February 9, 2025, https://endoftheworldshow.org/episodes/post-election-time-with-nelini-stamp.

• Kim Gallon, “Synthetic Data and Health Equity,” accessed January 27, 2025, https://just-tech.ssrc.org/field-reviews/synthetic-data-and-health-equity/.

• Catherine D’Ignazio and Lauren F. Klein, Data Feminism (Cambridge, Massachusetts: The MIT Press, 2020).

• Peace Ossom-Williamson and Kenton Rambsy, The Data Notebook (Mavs Open Press, 2021), https://uta.pressbooks.pub/datanotebook/.

• Shaka McGlotten, “Black Data,” in No Tea, No Shade: New Writings in Black Queer Studies, ed. E. Patrick Johnson (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016), https://read.dukeupress.edu/books/book/23/chapter/97539/Black-Data.

• Dong Nguyen et al., “How We Do Things With Words: Analyzing Text as Social and Cultural Data,” Frontiers in Artificial Intelligence 3 (2020): 62, https://doi.org/10.3389/frai.2020.00062.

• “Finding Runaway Slaves: Freedom on the Move and the Databasing of Fugitive Slave Advertisements from North American Newspapers,” Process: A Blog for American History (blog), June 9, 2016, http://www.processhistory.org/freedom-on-the-move/.

• Whitney Battle-Baptiste and Britt Rusert, eds., W. E. B. Du Bois’s Data Portraits: Visualizing Black America (Amherst, Mass. : Hudson, NY: Princeton Architectural Press, 2018).

• Autumn Womack, The Matter of Black Living: The Aesthetic Experiment of Racial Data, 1880–1930 (The University of Chicago Press, 2022).

• Joan Mukogosi, “Establishing Vigiliant Care: Data Infrastructures and the Black Birthing Experience” (Data & Society Research Institute, July 10, 2024), https://datasociety.net/library/establishing-vigilant-care/.

• CDCS Annual Lecture 2024: Alex Gil “The Point Is Still To Change It: On Doing Better Than Best Practices in Data Work for Culture and Society,” 2025, https://media.ed.ac.uk/media/CDCS+Annual+Lecture+2024%3A+Alex+Gil+%22The+Point+is+Still+To+Change+It%3A+On+Doing+Better+Than+Best+Practices+in+Data+Work+for+Culture+and+Society%22/1_ew9wipxz.

• Treva B. Lindsey and Jessica Marie Johnson, “Searching for Climax: Black Erotic Lives in Slavery and Freedom,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 169–95.

• Miriam Posner, “Humanities Data: A Necessary Contradiction – Miriam Posner’s Blog,” June 25, 2015, https://miriamposner.com/blog/humanities-data-a-necessary-contradiction/.

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For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.

This newsletter is a bit late; my apologies. I spent the weekend with my comai, Dr. Yomaira Figueroa-Vazquez in New York City. None of which would have normally stopped me from getting this out…except that I left my well worn, underlined, marked up copy of Stephanie Y. Evans Black Feminist Writing in the back pocket of a train seat.

The thing about switching back to analog reading and practicing divestment from Amazon? You fall back in love with paper books.

Now, I always loved books. I always loved writing, which is why this week’s book and visit from Dr. Evans has me fangirling hard. But the physical book? The pages, their feel under your fingers, the way paperbacks bend in your hand, the scratch of a really good pen when you underline or leave a note in the margin….whew, that’s seduction. That’s delicious. That’s my heartbreak losing this copy, knowing I’ll go buy a new one but she won’t be the same.

If you’re somewhere along the Northeast corridor and you find a deeply loved copy of Black Feminist Writing, please enjoy it.

So this newsletter might be late, but drafting it without the book right on hand gave me a chance to wander a bit in the readings and questions below. Let me know what you think and, as always, an activity and a longer reflection below the paywall.

This Week We Are Reading:

Stephanie Y. Evans, Black Feminist Writing: A Practical Guide to Publishing Academic Books (State University of New York Press, 2024).

“What Are Emergent Strategies,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

Foundations of Black Womens’ Studies: https://foundationsofbwst.net/

Discussion Questions

• How do you create the conditions to write? Whatis your optimal writing environment?

• How does Evans describe what writing does for her, above and beyond what she uses writing to do (i.e. research, publish)?

• Evans described writing as something she has grown to enjoy and love. But she didn’t always feel that way. What is your relationship to writing?

• If you are university-affiliated or adjacent, why do you think academic writing has such a reputation for being hard, brutal, even traumatizing?

• Describe your writing community? If you don’t have one, how might you cultivate one?

• Black women’s studies scholarship is throughout this text. In fact, it would seem that Evans made a deliberate decision to cite almost all Black women scholars. How is your citation practice reflecting your political practice or the politics of the research you do? Where can it be strengthened?

• Evans citation practice evidences the “interconnected networks and communities of practice” described as a “system of influence” cited in Ritchie. Is a “system of influence” a discipline?

• It would seem that to get to abolition, we need to create and expand our “system of influence.” Where else in your work do you see systems of influence? What are its rules, rituals, and cultures ?

• Choose a metaphoric emblem generated by Complex Movements and write about the way you see that strategy showing up (or not) in your life?

Suggested Readings

• Noelle Toumey Reetz, “Self Care as an Act of Resistance - Black Women and Wellness,” Georgia State News Hub (blog), June 7, 2021, https://news.gsu.edu/research-magazine/self-care-black-women-yoga.

• Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": A Dialogically Produced Audience and Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the" Present,” in Gender Forum (Prof. Dr. Beate Neumeier, 2008), N_A, http://search.proquest.com/openview/d67dace6a0d33569ab43e9024b36c948/1?pq-origsite=gscholar&cbl=29335.

• Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology Rutgers University Press, 1983).

• Courtney Thorsson, The Sisterhood: How a Network of Black Women Writers Changed American Culture (New York: Columbia University Press, 2023).

• Nell Irvin Painter, I Just Keep Talking: A Life in Essays (Doubleday, 2024).

• Patricia Bell-Scott and Juanita Johnson-Bailey, Flat-Footed Truths: Telling Black Women’s Lives, 1st edition (New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1998)

• Mari Evans, Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation, 1st edition (Garden City, N.Y: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 1984).

• Mayra Santos-Febres, Sobre Piel Y Papel/over Skin And Paper, 2nd edition (San Juan, Puerto Rico: Ediciones Callejon Inc, 2011).

• Odile Ferly, A Poetics of Relation: Caribbean Women Writing at the Millennium (Springer, 2012).

• Hanétha Vété-Congolo, The Caribbean Oral Tradition: Literature, Performance, and Practice (Springer, 2016).

• Carole Boyce-Davies, Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (London: Routledge, 2002), https://doi.org/10.4324/9780203201404.

• Toni Cade Bambara, The Black Woman: An Anthology Simon and Schuster, 2010).

• Claudia Tate, ed., Black Women Writers at Work (La Vergne: Haymarket Books, 2023).

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For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.

….but for Black Creative Worlds, I am not sure where I would be this Monday.

This one week felt like ten years and had the destructive force of fifty. We knew it would be brutal.

But smarter people than me have said the future is not yet written. And spending those two hours last week sitting in peace and community with others committed to practicing new worlds steadied me. Working on this newsletter series for you, dear reader, gives me a soft place to turn my attention and an oyster knife to sharpen for the work that has been, that is, and that will be.

One of the things to do on the “things you can do that aren’t organizing” list being circulated by folks like Mariame Kaba is organize study groups, book clubs, and other space where folks can think, digest, and struggle with the information together. The attention industry thrives on the shock and awe. But we have a superpower of our own.

We create imagination spaces.

This Week We Are Reading:

• Ruha Benjamin, Imagination: A Manifesto (New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2024).

• “What is Abolition?,” Andrea Ritchie, Practicing New Worlds: Abolition and Emergent Strategies (La Vergne: AK Press, 2023).

• Ida B. Wells Just Data Lab: https://www.thejustdatalab.com/

Discussion Questions

• Benjamin, riffing a bit on Thomas Berry, writes “the historical mission of our time” requires "an honest reckoning with the existing stratification of humanity as a starting point for any reinvention.” (43) Is this an alignment with Ritchie’s descriptions of abolition?

• Thomas Berry is describing a necessary move from "Homo economicus" to "Homo cooperativus." Benjamin cites Sylvia Wynter’s formations of Man1 and Man 2, as well as posthumanism. Who or what is the human we should be imagining if s/t/he/y are none of these?

• What does Benjamin mean by the eugenic imagination? How does it differ from what she proposes as “the solidaristic imagination”? What does a solidaristic imagination look like in practice?

• Ritchie writes: "Far from ignoring violence, abolition requires us to come face to face with violence, to stop delegating responsibility for it to cops acting as violence workers, and to devote our attention and resources to preventing, interrupting, and transforming the conditions that produce violence and the people who enact it." (53) What are strategies you, your community, your institutions/organizations are doing to come “face to face” with violence in an abolitionist way?

• "Harrell cautions that when computer scientists rely on their own limited intuitions to design systems, rather than engage theories that show how identities are "enacted, contextual, imaginative, and infrastructural," they are likely to perpetuate patterns of discrimination and disenfranchisement." (67) How do we fight those who have limited imaginations, eugenic imaginations? Convince them different? Laws? Ignore them? No wrong answers.

• Limited imaginations are building rockets to space, video games, and robot dogs that erase, police, subjugate the many for the few. There’s a Black Studies genealogy from slaves to minstrels to robots (see Chude-Sokei reading below). The Just Data Lab and Being (see below) might be examples of the opposite. Is it possible to reverse engineer an Afrofuturist tale of people and machines that gets us towards the next world? Can the robot’s tools dismantle the robot’s house—or free it?

• Longtermism connects the dots from neoliberalism to colonialism to slavery and Discovery. At the same time, it is clear we won’t all make it through the other side of this world ending. It feels impossible to square the circle and stay human. And yet we must. Are there lessons abolition might hold for how to reckon with these hard facts?

• Did Benjamin add something new, change or resolve your mind about AI?

• Which life are you willing to live: "life as property or life as poetry"? (110)

• Try out one of the promots Benjamin offers in the final chapter!

Suggested Readings

• Alondra Nelson, The Social Life of DNA: Race, Reparations, and Reconciliation After the Genome Beacon Press, 2016).

• Alexis De Veaux, JesusDevil: The Parables (AK Press, 2023).

• Ruha Benjamin, “Perhaps a Lot of Our Future Is Behind Us,” Urban Omnibus, January 16, 2025, https://urbanomnibus.net/2025/01/perhaps-a-lot-of-our-future-is-behind-us/.

• Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein, “The Trauma Doctrine: A Conversation Between Yarimar Bonilla and Naomi Klein,” in Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm, ed. Yarimar Bonilla and Marisol LeBrón, 2019, 21–37.

• Water the Roots Zine: https://ourtranstruth.org/wp-content/uploads/2024/09/Water-the-Roots-Zine-1.pdf

• Marisa Parham, “Breaking, Dancing, Making in the Machine: Notes on .Break .Dance,” Sx Archipelagos, no. 2 (July 10, 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-xn3y-vj19.

• Sylvia Wynter. “1492: A New World View,” in Race, discourse, and the origin of the Americas: A new world view, edited by Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford, 5–57. 1995).

• Eleni Agapis, “Toolkit for Cooperative, Collective, & Collaborative Cultural Work,” accessed January 26, 2025, https://toolkit.press/introduction.html.

• adrienne maree brown, “Working Families Mass Call Jan 23, Notes – Adrienne Maree Brown,” accessed January 26, 2025, https://adriennemareebrown.net/2025/01/24/working-families-mass-call-jan-23-notes/.

• Fiona Barnett et al., “QueerOS: A User’s Manual,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Lauren Klein and Matthew Gold, vol. 19 (University of Minnesota Press, 2016), https://scholar.google.com/scholar?cluster=11961495101989078851&hl=en&oi=scholarr.

• Bill Chappell, “The Vatican Repudiates ‘Doctrine of Discovery,’ Which Was Used to Justify Colonialism,” NPR, March 30, 2023, sec. Religion, https://www.npr.org/2023/03/30/1167056438/vatican-doctrine-of-discovery-colonialism-indigenous.

• Kelly Hayes, “A Brutal Beginning: Orienting Ourselves Amid the Shock and Awe,” Organizing My Thoughts, January 21, 2025, https://organizingmythoughts.org/a-brutal-beginning-orienting-ourselves-amid-the-shock-and-awe/.

• “Black Haunts in the Anthropocene,” Notebook (blog), January 27, 2014, http://mp285.com/nb/black-anthropocene/.

• LaKendrick Richardson, “A Black Belt-Ocene: Anti-Black Racism and Reimagining the Anthropocene,” Radical History Review 2023, no. 145 (January 1, 2023): 104–23, https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063795.

• Daelena Tinnin-Gadson, “‘I Saw Things I Imagined’ Poetic and Geographic Audacity in Solange Knowles’s When I Get Home,” Southern Cultures, December 11, 2024, https://www.southerncultures.org/article/i-saw-things-i-imagined/.

• Kim Gallon, “Synthetic Data and Health Equity,” accessed January 27, 2025, https://just-tech.ssrc.org/field-reviews/synthetic-data-and-health-equity/.

• Being, the Digital Griot: https://beingthedigitalgriot.com/

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For more on the Black World, including past seminar schedules and an essay about the Black World Seminar by Dr. Nathan Connolly visit: bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld.

How are you? How are your people? Grab a cafecito and come sit down.

So.

There’s a lot going on today. Today is THE day for some of us.1 The next days will be hard, strange, frustrating days for a lot of Black women, for a lot of different reasons. Over here, I’m adding an extra spoonful of sugar in my coffee. Days like this, I like my coffee extra sweet.

And when I picked these readings (broadly defined, of course, since one is a podcast and one is a video) to kick off Black Creative Worlds, I thought I was starting us off sweet. And slow.

I’d forgotten how raw, intense, intimate, and introspective studying the principles of emergent strategy, transformative justice, and organizing/surviving institutions could be, especially at a time like this when the stakes are planetary. How challenging these frameworks are to my own sense of order, health, and justice. And how important it is to study a topic like this in relationship with people who want to engage in principled struggle, not casual discussion, on them. These aren’t principles or strategies for play play. Folks doing this work are for real.

(Example: In the response to the election I co-wrote with others for LifexCode, we cited Women With a Vision, the New Orleans reproductive justice organization founded by Black women and led by Black women. Andrea Ritchie was part of the legal team that allowed them clear sex offender from the records of hundreds of queer and trans folks. Fire Dreams is below as one of the suggested texts.)

Then again, casual discussion is never really casual at our kitchen tables, right? And the project of Black Study is always serious: "To love this way requires relentless struggle, deep study, and critique. Limiting our ambit to suffering, resistance, and achievement is not enough. We must go to the root—the historical, political, social, cultural, ideological, material, economic root—of oppression in order to understand its negation, the prospect of our liberation." (Robin D. G. Kelley)

Below are discussion questions and suggested readings; activities and a deeper dive into my own inner monologue on the readings below the fold. I barely scratched the surface, but because this was only meant to be a start, I stayed close to the fundamentals: texts and questions that add context to the points this week's readings raised. All of the books have been added to the Black Creative Worlds wishlist (supporting the Community Book Center of New Orleans) for you to purchase for yourselves.

I hope this offering helps you as you engage in your own Black Study of this moment. Feel free to add suggestions and feedback in a comment below!

love,

jmj

Discussion Questions

Slow and Easy….

1. What are emergent strategies?

2. What is the difference between pace, rest, care and self-care?

3. What does “moving at the speed of trust” mean?

4. How is resilience being defined in these texts (this will be a theme in the coming weeks)?

5. Bailey mentioned the important role students have played in social movements. Name a few and describe the role students played in moving the lever towards a just world. (some examples: Black on Campus, Black Studies movement, Palestine encampments. Rhodes Must Fall….)

6. Did you know about “the technology of the sabbatical” (Bailey)? How did it sound to you? How might you implement something like that in your own life?

7. How are conflict, disagreement, hurt, harm and abuse defined?

Crunchier, harder….

1. Today, of all days, Black women will be reminded that they are often asked to do and be and act in ways that are for a good that may not be their own. Is that practicing new worlds? Is that resilience? Is that a failure of imagination? Discuss with your own kitchen table crew.

2. Students have played a role in moving us towards a more just and humane world. Students have also paid the price. In the same movement you chose above, identify where students have paid the price (suspensions, expulsions, arrests, deportations, disappearances). See it clearly. Light some sage, a candle, play some music if you need to move through it. Now make a plan for what to do if one of those things were to happen to you or someone you know. If you don’t know where to start, make a list of people you might ask for help, resources you can look up, or even things you want to happen for them.

3. What pace can we set in this moment that moves with our need but also pushes against reaction to crisis?

4. How do we balance a sustainable pace with accountability to an issue, group or even person? Who does a demand for rest require to step up into the space of work? (i.e. Françoise Vergès question: "who cleans the world")

5. If you are in graduate school: What did you think of the "posture of the graduate student" (26:39, Bailey)? How and where do you see that posture materializing in your life (academic, professional, personal)? How do you challenge that posture (real strategies that keep in mind power dynamics you are vulnerable to)? Follow ups: What inspires confidence in you about your scholar self?

6. If you are a researcher (uni or non-uni affiliated): Are you researching on or about the bodies of a people (i.e. black women) and if so, what material benefits are you lining up for those people to receive as a result of your work—in this life or beyond?

7. Tik Tok blinking on and off is a example of why we need a critical analysis of the platforms and their relationship to the work that those of us on the left need to do—communicate, create radical media, create propaganda, disseminate accurate information from the grassroots to the institutional, and understand history and power in a consolidating oligarchy. Have you explored digital media curriculum or digital literacy workshops? In this time of misinformation and fascism-informed media, what tools are you using to “challenge, resist and defend against the negative representations that are circulating"?

8. See the question above, but applying it to civics—who makes the rules about access to broadband, digital media, messaging, and public relations in your institutions, city, county, state, and federally? Do you know what the FCC does? When does legal counsel get triggered in communications at your institution (i.e. are there key words or topics that will bring the institution or organizations lawyers to your door)? What can be said by your institution out loud and what cannot? What is the relationship between what you can say and what you can do at your institution? (example: can your university or organization still create programming based on race or did they squash that language, effectively dismantling those initiatives, in the wake of the 2023 Supreme Court decision?) Can you be FOIA’d? What happens if you are? Do the people who are supposed to have your back should you be FOIA’d or hit with a communications related legal action (i.e. defamation lawsuit) know what to do? Do they have your back and do they have your back on the topic at hand?

9. The organized abandonment of Detroit created the conditions for organizers, cultural workers, and residents of the city to imagine different, claim emergent strategies as their own, and build new worlds. We do not treasure disaster over thriving. Instead, viewing with clear eyes whichever disaster (slow or fast) is happening to [insert your institution, organization, region, city, or home], take a deep breathe and consider: What are we already practicing in "just getting by" or in surviving that might be bookmarked after the current crisis as a rehearsal for a new future? (An example a friend gave me is the susu and the cooperative economics mutual aid present across the African diaspora). I say again—we do not glorify or wish for disaster, not even as a catalyst for consciousness raising or change. Period.

10. Halima Cassells, an artist in Detroit, told Ritchie "A lot of these practices are rooted in Black people's survival of the South, and their ancestral expertise in thriving community traditions." (page 21). Have you considered what we owe the Black South? How might you spend some time this week putting some RESPECT ON THE BLACK SOUTH AND HER NAME? What does solidarity with the Black South look like from where you are positioned?

Suggested Readings (available here)

• adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds / by Adrienne Maree Brown (Chico, California: AK Press, 2017).

• Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021).

• “Parable of the Sower: Chapter 1,” Octavia’s Parables, accessed December 30, 2024, https://www.readingoctavia.com/episodes/sower-e1.

• The Black Studies podcast

• Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Study and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013). (PDF)

• Sarah J. Jackson et al., #HashtagActivism: Networks of Race and Gender Justice (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2020).

• Meredith D. Clark, We Tried to Tell Y’All: Black Twitter and the Rise of Digital Counternarratives (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2025). (Jenna Wortham’s review is here)

• Laura McTighe, Women With A. Vision, and Deon Haywood, Fire Dreams: Making Black Feminist Liberation in the South (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2024).

• Mariame Kaba et al., Let This Radicalize You: Organizing and the Revolution of Reciprocal Care (Haymarket Books, 2023).

• Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism (London: Pluto Press, 2021).

• John Herrman, “Social Media Is for Consuming Disasters, Not Surviving Them,” Intelligencer, January 16, 2025, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/the-los-angeles-fires-exposed-social-media-for-what-it-is.html

• Maurice Mitchell, “Building Resilient Organizations,” The Forge, November 18, 2022, https://forgeorganizing.org/article/building-resilient-organizations

• Gabriela Flores, “‘What I Believe,’ A Keynote Address By Hess Scholar Barbara Smith – The Brooklyn College Vanguard,” accessed January 18, 2025, https://vanguard.blog.brooklyn.edu/2023/03/22/what-i-believe-a-keynote-address-by-hess-scholar-barbara-smith/.

• Edward Buckles, “Stop Telling New Orleans To Be Resilient,” TIME, January 7, 2025, https://time.com/7205139/stop-telling-new-orleans-to-be-resilient/.

• Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance: A Manifesto, 1st edition (New York: Little, Brown Spark, 2022).

• Davarian L. Baldwin, In the Shadow of the Ivory Tower: How Universities Are Plundering Our Cities (PublicAffairs, 2021).

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