research post 2025-12-12
Seasonal Read Everything You See Disorder
Currently rewatching The Equalizer over and over because Queen is still fine as hell and watching an intergenerational family of Black women discuss fighting (physically) for others while also exchanging pancake recipes and relationship advice across a kitchen table is my obsession.
This week felt like ping pong between deep reading in Black history based in Turtle Island/North America and what becomes the United States, deep viewing the terrible sociopathic things (mostly) men have done to women, and deep resting on the personal side in this calm before the holiday storm. Lots of soaking up texts and non-texts and para-texts and “para-archives” (thank you Mary Hicks, whose amazing book, Captive Cosmpolitans, is below)—but still needing more time to digest it all. And not finding enough time.
Maybe this is what it feels like to be moving between projects, between semesters, between seasons. Maybe this is a study season and things are meant to be foggy, triggering, soulful and strange. Incomplete. Offline and analog. Secret.
Trying to embrace the opacité, the transitions, the openings and closings.
Enjoy the waterfall of work below. Affirmations and beatitudes for all this week, And Kevin Quashie is resplendent; if you read/watch nothing else, watch that.
Reads
“United States 1860 Census Slave Schedules,” International African American Museum, n.d., accessed December 12, 2025, https://iaamuseum.org/center-for-family-history/blog/united-states-1860-census-slave-schedules/.
Puerto Rico, 2020 Census breakdown: https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/puerto-rico.html
A’Lelia Bundles, Joy Goddess: A’Lelia Walker and the Harlem Renaissance (Simon and Schuster, 2025)
Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose (Mariner Books, 2004)
Zora Neale Hurston et al., Barracoon: The Story of the Last “Black Cargo” (Amistad, 2018).
Jean Fagan Yellin, ed., The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (University of North Carolina Press, 2008).
Nivea Serrao, “Author Octavia Butler Reaches New York Times Best Seller List, 14 Years after Her Death,” SYFY, September 3, 2020, https://www.syfy.com/syfy-wire/octavia-butler-new-york-times-bestseller-list-parable-of-sower.
Donna Haraway et al., “Anthropologists Are Talking – About the Anthropocene,” Ethnos 81, no. 3 (2016): 535–64, https://doi.org/10.1080/00141844.2015.1105838. (Plantationocene mentioned)
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934.
Jody Benjamin, The Texture of Change: Dress, Self-Fashioning and History in Western Africa, 1700–1850 (Ohio University Press, 2024), https://doi.org/10.2307/jj.19724077.
Jalil Sued Badillo and Angel Lopez Cantos, Puerto Rico Negro (Ediciones Cultural, 2001).
Héctor Andrés Negroni, Historia militar de Puerto Rico (Ediciones Siruela, S. A., 1992).
Jesse Walter Fewkes, The Aborigines of Puerto Rico and Neighboring Islands (University of Alabama Press, 2009).
Daniel H. Usner, “American Indians on the Cotton Frontier: Changing Economic Relations with Citizens and Slaves in the Mississippi Territory,” The Journal of American History 72, no. 2 (1985): 297–317, https://doi.org/10.2307/1903377.
Erin Austin Dwyer, Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021)
Sandra Gunning, Moving Home: Gender, Place, and Travel Writing in the Early Black Atlantic (Duke University Press, 2021)
Karen Cook Bell, Running from Bondage: Enslaved Women and Their Remarkable Fight for Freedom in Revolutionary America (Cambridge University Press, 2021)
Thulani Davis, The Emancipation Circuit: Black Activism Forging a Culture of Freedom (Duke University Press, 2022).
Mary E. Hicks, Captive Cosmopolitans: Black Mariners and the World of South Atlantic Slavery (Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2024).
John Minton, Folk Music and Song in the WPA Ex-Slave Narratives (Univ. Press of Mississippi, 2025).
Anelise Hanson Shrout, “Against Violent Quantification: Lessons from the Bellevue Almshouse Project,” in The Companion to Digital Humanities in Practice (Routledge, 2025).
Christopher Baldwin, “An Enslaved Community, Imperial Warfare, and the 1746 Invasion of Saint-Barthélemy,” The William and Mary Quarterly 82, no. 4 (2025): 603–44.
Black Lesbian Archives, “ULOAH/Black Lesbians United (BLU) & Newsletters In The Times,” Substack newsletter, Black Lesbian Archives, December 10, 2025,
Renita J. Weems, “The Bible Prepared Me for Epstein,” Substack newsletter, Renita J. Weems’ Substack, December 2, 2025,
Harper’s Bazaar, “She Wrote a Novel of Diddy’s Crimes. Then Her Work Was Cut Short.,” Substack newsletter, Harper’s Bazaar’s A Closer Read, December 9, 2025
Harmony Holiday, “Curtis Jackson vs. Sean Combs,” Substack newsletter, Black Music and Black Muses, December 7, 2025,
Projects
U.S. Census Mortality Schedule (1850-1880): https://www.familysearch.org/en/search/collection/1420441?collectionNameFilter=true
Watch
Kevin Quashie: In Praise of Mere Beauty, directed by The Racial Imaginary Institute, 2025, 01:28:34,
Privatized Resilience: Puerto Rican Voices, directed by Center for Puerto Rican Studies (CENTRO), 2022, 28:02,
Blink Twice dir. Zoe Kravitz (on Prime or your preferred streaming platform, https://letterboxd.com/film/blink-twice/)
Affirmations and Beatitudes
Donna Haraway, “Anthropocene, Capitalocene, Plantationocene, Chthulucene: Making Kin,” Environmental Humanities 6, no. 1 (2015): 159–65, https://doi.org/10.1215/22011919-3615934 ——-This right here is blowing my mind a little