New Worlds (Black Creative Worlds: Week One)
"Emergent strategies, their lineage, and the practices they point to, invite us to exercise rigor, curiosity, and commitment to shared values in everyday actions and relationships." - Andrea Ritchie
Black Creative Worlds is a community offering of notes, readings, and curriculum from my convening of Black Creative Worlds (a bit.ly/JHUBlackWorld seminar) in Spring 2025. Newsletters come out on Mondays from now through April with material for free and just for paid subscribers under the paywall jump. The full schedule is here.
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….
What are emergent strategies?
What is the difference between pace, rest, care and self-care?
What does “moving at the speed of trust” mean?
How is resilience being defined in these texts (this will be a theme in the coming weeks)?
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….)
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?
How are conflict, disagreement, hurt, harm and abuse defined?
Crunchier, harder….
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.
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.
What pace can we set in this moment that moves with our need but also pushes against reaction to crisis?
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")
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?
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?
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"?
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?
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.
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.
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).