research post 2025-11-14
Sometimes you need to "read until you understand"
Some repeats in this post. Organizing my desktop for a weekend of writing alongside syllabus planning and closing down classes, projects and labs for the holiday break. I revisited a few things, including in Office Hours this week. The repetition was soothing so I leaned into it. Farrah Jasmine Griffin said “read until you understand” and I am, I am, I am.
Yes, I’m starting course prep verrrrry early. Yes, I will likely give up sometime before Thanksgiving and then pick it up again a week before class starts in January. But starting now helps me head off a little bit of the panic that the fall semester has ended, what is not done is not done, what is done could have been done better, and on and on recycle spin rinse repeat. The anxiety cycle of a teaching prof.
This week was also a nice reminder that even as things change, grow chaotic, and change again, the basic ingredients of the work do not. Read, search for Black lives, mentor, discuss, critique (critique in Barbara Christian, critique as in engagement is a love language not as in tear down and be a critic), write and write and write and write, repeat. Knowing that if I keep the beat, con clave, I will keep the practice. Knowing if I keep the practice, the practice will nourish me, the practice will create what is needed, the practice will contribute to the struggle, the resistance. I trust this. I must trust this.
“So be it, see to it,” Octavia Butler said.
Reads
Juan Vicente Iborra-Mallent et al., “The Origins of the Idea of ‘Internal Colonialism’ in African-American Communist Harry Haywood’s Critical Thinking: A Chronicle of a Conversation with Gwendolyn Midlo Hall,” Tabula Rasa 35 (September 2020), https://www.revistatabularasa.org/en/issue-35/the-origins-of-the-idea-of-internal-colonialism-in-african-american-communist-harry-haywoods-critical-thinking-a-chronicle-of-a-conversation-with-gwendolyn-midlo-hall/.
Michael A. Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 1998).
Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores, The Afro-Latin@ Reader: History and Culture in the United States (Duke University Press, 2010).
Lissette Acosta Corniel, Transatlantic Bondage: Slavery and Freedom in Spain, Santo Domingo, and Puerto Rico (State University of New York Press, 2024).
Alex Borucki et al., eds., From the Galleons to the Highlands: Slave Trade Routes in the Spanish Americas (University of New Mexico Press, 2020).
Abdul Alkhalimat, “The Sankofa Principle: From the Drum to the Digital,” in The Digital Black Atlantic, ed. Roopika Risam and Kelly Baker Josephs (Univ Of Minnesota Press, 2021).
Kelly Baker Josephs, “Caribbean Studies in Digital Space and Time,” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 25, no. 3 (66) (2021): 105–15, https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9583446.
Farah Jasmine Griffin, Read Until You Understand: The Profound Wisdom of Black Life and Literature (W. W. Norton & Company, 2021).
Sounds
Lagniappe
Benito, hijo de Benito, le decían “Tito”
El mayor de seis, trabajando desde chamaquito
Guiando camione’ como el pai y el abuelo
Aunque su sueño siempre fue ser ingeniero
Un día Tonito lo invitó pa’ hacer una mudanza
Pa’ buscarse alguito, par de peso’ pa’ algo alcanza
Gracia’ a Dios que ese día no estaba busy
Porque en la mudanza fue donde conoció a Lysi
La menor de tre’ que se criaron con Doña Juanita
Porque su papá y mamá partieron estando chiquita’
Prometió graduarsе ante’ de casarse y lo cumplió
Diciеmbre del 92 con Tito se casó
Ante’ de irse pa’ Almirante donde se conocieron
Vivieron en Morovis en donde hicieron al nene
Que en Bayamón por primera vez vieron
Un aplauso pa’ mami y papi porque en verda’ rompieron….
Spring 2026 Community Offerings
I really enjoyed doing a Kitchen Table History offering of Black Creative Worlds, so I will definitely be creating community offerings that follow these two courses. Structure and frequency to be determined, but they will launch in January. Stay tuned….
Coming soon….
Enjoy your weekend
