Update: Reuploaded with new audio to fix the levels
Objectivity, the Black digital, and enslaved testimony all in one office hour. Special thanks to Mimi Borders for popping in and hanging out.
To hear a clip, catch me reading public/private divide during slavery via Thavolia Glymph above. Below, you can find me reading Blassingame and sharing my thoughts on black testimony and who is really telling the truth about slavery (under the money fold).
Topics Discussed:
This song
Catherine Knight Steele, Digital Black Feminism (NYU Press, 2021).
Moya Bailey, Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women’s Digital Resistance (NYU Press, 2021).
Technically, I didn’t discuss this post, but in the Black Creative Worlds community offering, there is a day on this text:
Digital Alchemy Against Misogynoir (Black Creative Worlds: Week Five)
Black Creative Worlds is a community offering of notes, readings, and curriculum from my convening of Black World Seminar in Spring 2025. Newsletters come out on Mondays from now through April with material for free and paid subscribers under the paywall jump.
In Misogynoir Transformed, the experiences of Danielle “Struggling to be Heard” Cole and Antoinette Luna Myers (formerly ancestryinprogress on Tumblr).
Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, As We Have Always Done: Indigenous Freedom through Radical Resistance (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2017). (I cannot stop talking about this book)
Yomaira Figueroa, Decolonizing Diasporas: Radical Mappings of Afro-Atlantic Literatures (Northwestern University Press, 2020).
Jim Milliot |, “Authors’ Class Action Lawsuit Against OpenAI Moves Ahead,” PublishersWeekly.Com, October 28, 2025, https://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/copyright/article/98961-authors-class-action-lawsuit-against-openai-moves-forward.html.
Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1988).
Saidiya Hartman et al., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, Updated edition, ed. Cameron Rowland (W. W. Norton & Company, 2022).
Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016).
Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020).
Darlene Clark Hine and Jacqueline McLeod, eds., Crossing Boundaries: Comparative History of Black People in Diaspora (Indiana University Press, 2001).
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household Cambridge University Press, 2008).
John W. Blassingame, Slave Testimony: Two Centuries of Letters, Speeches, Interviews, and Autobiographies Louisiana State University Press, 1977).
John W. Blassingame, “The Mathematics of Slavery,” The Atlantic Monthly (1971-1981); Boston 234, no. 000002 (1974): 78. [Not “Mathematics of Black Life” - that was McKittrick]
Katherine McKittrick, “Mathematics Black Life,” The Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 16–28.
Jessica Marie Johnson, “Black New Orleans Is the Center of the World,” The Journal of African American History 103, no. 4 (2018): 641–51, https://doi.org/10.1086/699959.
See you next week!
