Thank you everyone who came out to Office Hours live today!!! Last one of the year! Whew! What a year.
We talked about it, I have cried about it, but I think we are also ready for a new year, a next world. Please and praise to all the powers that be—make it so. “I can hear her breathing” (Arundhati Roy).
Topics Covered:
This song:
My shirt which is part of this celebration (shout out to Black Women Radicals, I stay in their merch!):
45 Years of Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press, Black Women Radicals, 2025,
These texts and trying to write when the world is on fire:
Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (The New Press, 1995).
Fire!! : A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, Volume 1, Number 1 (2023), https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/71448.
This exhibit:
This puzzle and the puzzle of emotions and hopes and dreams and heartbreaks it unleashed in me:
Our star this week was Harriet Jacobs, but not just Jacobs. Her grandmother Molly Horniblow. Her brother John (host of our audio note). Her kinship network (shout out to Shanae who joined live and is tracing her own family history of slavery and freedom in Edenton, NC) and Jacobs post-emancipation activism.
Jacobs spent seven years hiding in her grandmother’s garret, what she called her “loophole retreat.” This loophole of retreat is where many of us, as Black feminists, enter into her oeuvre and impact, but there is so much more to learn!
A brief Jacobs bibliography below:
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 479–86
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, ed. Lydia Marie Childs (for the author, 1860), https://docsouth.unc.edu/fpn/jacobs/jacobs.html
Rafia Zafar, “Introduction: Over-Exposed, Under-Exposed: Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” in Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, ed. Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture (Cambridge University Press, 1996), https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511570414.001
Deborah M. Garfield and Rafia Zafar, eds., Harriet Jacobs and Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl: New Critical Essays, Annotated edition (Cambridge University Press, 1996)
Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
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/.
Koritha Mitchell, “I Was Determined to Remember: Harriet Jacobs and the Corporeality of Slavery’s Legacies,” Los Angeles Review of Books, May 30, 2023, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/i-was-determined-to-remember-harriet-jacobs-and-the-corporeality-of-slaverys-legacies.
Jacobs, Harriet. Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. Edited by Koritha Mitchell. Ontario, Canada: Broadview Press, 2023.
Our conversation took a brief tributary to discuss Marcus’s tale of slavery and redemption as told to Lauren Olamina in:
Octavia E. Butler, Parable of the Talents (Grand Central Publishing, 2000).
….and then we wove through a reading from the National Anti-Slavery Standard reporting a John S. Jacobs speech demanding enslaved and free people of African descent engage in armed self-defense against the Fugitive Slave Act.
Black Abolitionist Archive https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/index.php?collectionCode=bulletins_bul
The image below is the original text of the newspaper article, downloaded from the Black Abolitionist Archive https://libraries.udmercy.edu/archives/special-collections/index.php?collectionCode=bulletins_bul
I cannot wait to teach Black Freedom Struggles to 1896 next spring—both in seminar and here as a community offering. We have so much to learn from the fight and fury of those who preceded us.
Their fight and fury is the fire I am taking into 2026.
About the Groceries (Paid Subscriptions)
As the year closes, I’m thinking about how to express my appreciation for paid subscribers in a way that feels authentic. The subscriptions help and the support is valued, but I won’t pretend I am not lucky to have a J-O-B that pays the bills.
As 2026 rolls in, I’ll probably start making the lives and after work audio open to all but try to offer something else special for those who buy the groceries. Maybe post-live video? Maybe previews of the next book project and other writing? I have some projects on the horizon for 2026 that I want to commit to. Having you all as accountability will mean I actually meet a deadline.
Whatever emerges, please know I have appreciated the support this year (it does actually buy the groceries!) and I hope to offer more enticing nuggets of appreciation in the new year. Thank you for hanging out at my kitchen table.
And a video for you is below. *prayer hands*
