research post 2026-03-27
Last one of Women's History Month
Here in Camazotz, spring break was seasoned with five hour TSA lines and some choppy attention spans. I spoke to a room of women’s studies students about the ways Black feminists love each other by citing each other, by finding each other in the archive, by speaking each other’s names.
Toni Cade Bambara knew this. My good sis Sharayna Christmas has organized a slate of events in honor of the recent documentary, TCB: The Toni Cade Bambara School of Organizing by Louis Massiah. Sharayna sends me text message love notes with Mama Toni’s words that land with authority and shine:
“Can the planet be rescued from the psychopaths? The persistent concern of engaged artists, of cultural workers, in this country and certainly within my community, is, What role, can, should, or must the film practitioner, for example, play in producing a desirable vision of the future? And the challenge that the cultural worker faces, myself for example, as a writer and as a media activist, is that the tools of my trade are colonized. The creative imagination has been colonized. The global screen has been colonized. And the audience–readers and viewers–is in bondage to an industry. It has the money, the will, the muscle, and the propaganda machine oiled up to keep us all locked up in a delusional system–as to even what America is. Toni Cade Bambara, “Language and the Writer,” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).
Black sisterhood is a group chat of Toni Cade Bambara screenshots.
Check out my IG for information about the events (jessicamariejohnson_) and I hope you’ll come join us if you’re in the area.
Research bits and bites below.
Listen
Reads
“Technologies for Liberation: Toward Abolitionist Futures,” Neighborhood Funders Group, December 4, 2020, https://nfg.org/technologies-for-liberation-toward-abolitionist-futures/.
Kristina Kay Robinson, “Down River Road,” Burnaway, February 18, 2020, https://burnaway.org/magazine/letter-from-new-orleans-down-river-road/.
S. J. Zhang, “What Cecilia KnewReading Reproduction and Marronage in Records of Recapture,” History of the Present 14, no. 1 (2024): 156–73, https://doi.org/10.1215/21599785-10898396.
Joseph R. Hartman, “Temporal Visions: Hurricanes as Chronotopes in Caribbean Art History,” Miradas-Zeitschrift Für Kunst-Und Kulturgeschichte Der Amérikas Und Der Iberischen Halbinsel 7 (2023): 122–47.
Manuel Barcia, “Exorcising the Storm: Revisiting the Origins of the Repression of La Escalera Conspiracy in Cuba, 1843-1844,” Colonial Latin American Historical Review 15, no. 3 (2006): 311.
La Cumbre Afro de Puerto Rico celebra la humanidad negra en su quinta edición internacional – Recinto de Río Piedras, n.d., accessed March 26, 2026, https://www.uprrp.edu/la-cumbre-afro-de-puerto-rico-celebra-la-humanidad-negra-en-su-quinta-edicion-internacional/.
Por Víctor Ramos RosadoPeriodista de Entretenimiento, “Analizarán el racismo en Puerto Rico en la Cumbre Afro,” El Nuevo Día, March 17, 2026, https://www.elnuevodia.com/entretenimiento/cultura/notas/analizaran-el-racismo-en-puerto-rico-en-la-cumbre-afro/.
Linda M. Rodriguez and Ada Ferrer, “Collaborating with Aponte: Digital Humanities, Art, and the Archive,” Archipelagos, no. 3 (July 2019), https://doi.org/10.7916/archipelagos-mq9x-dd28.
Jada Similton, “Carlota and Fermina: Enslaved: Peoples of the Historical Slave Trade,” accessed March 26, 2026, https://enslaved.org/fullStory/16-23-126906/”.
Mailing Address: 67 Kirk Street Lowell and MA 01852 Phone: 978 970-5000 Contact Us, “The Mill Girls of Lowell - Lowell National Historical Park (U.S. National Park Service),” accessed March 26, 2026, https://www.nps.gov/lowe/learn/historyculture/the-mill-girls-of-lowell.htm.
Diane Jones Allen, “Living Freedom Through the Maroon Landscape,” Places Journal, ahead of print, September 22, 2022, https://doi.org/10.22269/220922.
Aisha K. Finch, “Cécile Fatiman and Petra Carabalí, Late Eighteenth-Century Haiti and Mid Nineteenth-Century Cuba,” As If She Were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, 2020, 293–311.
Alejandro De la Fuente, “Slave Law and Claims-Making in Cuba: The Tannenbaum Debate Revisited,” Law and History Review 22, no. 2 (2004): 339–69.
Sylviane Diouf, Slavery’s Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York University Press, 2016)
D. Ryan Gray, “Memories of Black Indian Materialities in Colonial New Orleans,” Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage 8, nos. 1–2 (2019): 78–109, https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2019.1647662.
Toni Cade Bambara. “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye,” in Deep Sightings & Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, 240. Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, 2009).
Toni Cade Bambara. “On the Issue of Rules*,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, edited by Toni Cade Bambara, Simon and Schuster, 2010).
FAIR Guiding Principles for scientific data management and stewardship
Mark O. Hatfield, Building a Collaborative Governance Framework: A Five Step Process (National Policy Consensus Center, 2020).
Jean Fagan Yellin, “Written by Herself: Harriet Jacobs’ Slave Narrative,” American Literature 53, no. 3 (1981): 479–86.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Prophecy in the Present Tense: Harriet Tubman, the Combahee Pilgrimage, and Dreams Coming True,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 142–52, https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.142.
Kim Gallon et al., Voices for Health Equity (Community Health Informatics Data Lab, 2025).
Karsonya Wise Whitehead, “Beyond Myths and Legends: Teaching Harriet Tubman and Her Legacy of Activism,” Meridians 12, no. 2 (2014): 196–218, https://doi.org/10.2979/meridians.12.2.196.
Sarah Bradford, Scenes in the Life of Harriet Tubman (W. J. Moses, 1869).
Nikki Giovanni, Poems: 1968-2020 (Penguin Books Limited, 2024).
Sara E. Johnson, Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry’s Intellectual World (UNC Press Books, 2023).
Henry Marks, “A Slave Emancipation Act in Early North Alabama,” Huntsville Historical Review 4, no. 3 (1974), https://louis.uah.edu/huntsville-historical-review/vol4/iss3/5.
Jerome Handler, The Old Plantation Painting at Colonial Williamsburg: New Findings and Some Observations | Jerome S. Handler, n.d., accessed February 20, 2026, https://jeromehandler.com/2010/12/the-old-plantation-painting-at-colonial-williamsburg-new-findings-and-some-observations/.
Sophia Monegro, “Origins of Black Feminist Thought in the Americas: La Negra Del Hospital in Colonial Santo Domingo,” Global Black Thought 1, no. 2 (2025): 289–321.
James D. Dewell, Down in Porto Rico with a Kodak (The Record publishing co, 1898), https://www.loc.gov/resource/gdcmassbookdig.downonportoricow00dewe/.
Kendra T. Field, “The Privilege of Family History,” The American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (2022): 600–633, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac151.
Joseph C. Dorsey, “Women Without History: Slavery and the International Politics of ‘Partus Sequitur Ventrem’ in the Spanish Caribbean,” The Journal of Caribbean History (Kingston, Jamaica, Jamaica) 28, no. 2 (1994): 165–207.
George Rawick, From Sundown to Sunup: The Making of the Black Community (Praeger, 1977).
Chandra McCormick and Keith Calhoun, “Right of Return,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 118–19.
Andy Horowitz, “Another Kind of City: Kalamu Ya Salaam in Conversation with Joshua B. Guild,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 66–75.
Kristina Kay Robinson, “A Mass For Worlds Pre and Post: Preface to a 918 Volume (304 Children) Suicide Note or Letter to June Jordan on Jonestown Reply Written in New Orleans, 1,392, . . . Official Count,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 120–23.
Cécile Fromont, Images on a Mission in Early Modern Kongo and Angola (Penn State Press, 2022).
Carter Godwin Woodson, The Education of the Negro Prior to 1861 : A History of the Education of the Colored People of the United States from the Beginning of Slavery to the Civil War (New York : Putnam, 1915), http://archive.org/details/educationofnegro00wooduoft.
Jessica Dauterive and Mary Niall Mitchell, “Save What You Can: Tending Katrina’s Community Archive,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 31–49.
Andy Horowitz, “Another Kind of City: Kalamu Ya Salaam in Conversation with Joshua B. Guild,” Southern Cultures 31, no. 3 (2025): 66–75.
David M. Stark, “A New Look at the African Slave Trade in Puerto Rico Through the Use of Parish Registers: 1660–1815,” Slavery & Abolition 30, no. 4 (2009): 491–520, https://doi.org/10.1080/01440390903245083.
Courtney Desiree Morris, “Becoming Creole, Becoming Black: Migration, Diasporic Self-Making, and the Many Lives of Madame Maymie Leona Turpeau de Mena,” Women, Gender, and Families of Color 4, no. 2 (2016): 171–95.
Joan Dayan, “Erzulie: A Women’s History of Haiti,” Research in African Literatures (1994): 5–31.
Watch
The Clifton House Baltimore, Scrap Theory: Mali D. Collins in Conversation with Nadejda Webb | The Clifton House, 2026, 01:11:18,
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Projects
Digest of the Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo https://nolacityarchives.org/cabildo-digest/#gsc.tab=0
The original Cabildo digest was compiled from the English translations (done by the WPA) of the original Spanish manuscript of the Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo. It was designed, according to its preface, “to classify this information in order that each subject may be found readily in its entirety, in each specific classification.” References are included to the relevant book/volume and page number in the translation (volumes 3 and 4 of the translations were subdivided into several books; the first two volumes were translated without subdivision). The digest, and accompanying Acts and Deliberations of the Cabildo, are available on microfilm in the City Archives.
Affirmations and Beatitudes
