This issue on Black Archival Practice is a collection of reflections, celebrations, and prefigurations of and for the past, present, and future of the Black lives in the Archive(s). The essays in this issue center Black(end) archival knowledges as a way to expand current understandings of how Black archival practices get imagined, contested and negotiated within traditional archival spaces and in spaces intentionally coded as Black.

Beginning with the remarkable cover by Alanna Fields, Black Archival Practice announces its subject as a fugitive departure from tamed, disciplinary modes of archivy. Fields’s work is a new kind of archive that conceals as much as it reveals; and, just as it reveals the persistence of Black life that is often veiled in the archive(s), so, too, do the essays in this special issue.

These essays speak to transformation through witnessing and testimony in the archives, Black women stewarding collections of their own experiences, Audre Lorde’s queer and deviant library science practices, the questioning of what we know and from where we know it in Octavia E. Butler’s archival practices, poet Arna Bontemps’s Black archival labor in the Fisk University W.E.B. DuBois collection, the use of narrative prose to probe the limits of care and affection in undoing archival harm, and an interview with Black Bottom Archives Director Paige “PG” Watkins that thoughtfully engages abolitionist organizing with Black memory work.

While the seven essays in this special issue range in their use of various theoretical and methodological lenses, each author offers an approach to Black archival practice that both integrates and exceeds the practices of traditional archival work and research. Together, these pieces trouble the principles of traditional archives practices and celebrate, dissect, and testify to the power of Black archives, archivists, and archival practices in ways that are both rigorous and generative.

We invite you to engage with the essays in this issue as a means of thinking about the possibilities for seeing and celebrating Black life in spaces that have traditionally been understood as anti-Black or as hostile to Blackness. In these pages, we hope you will find transformative inquiry, creativity, and hope; that you will be as moved and inspired as we have been by the authors, their words, and their muses.

 – Tonia Sutherland and Zakiya Collier

 

For a limited time, access the introduction “The Promise and Possibility of Black Archival Practice,” by Sutherland and Collier, and “Narratives of Interiority: Archival Practices of Care and Affection (and its Limits)” by Paula C. Austin for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, and the upcoming issues Black Archival Practice II and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies, Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Pioneering Black British independent filmmaker, Henry Goule Martin, died at 70 years old on May 13^th of this year after months of a struggle with cancer, which he, characteristically, kept private. Though his name might be unfamiliar in the United States, Martin started the important production company, Kuumba in 1982 along with two other Black pioneers—Menelik Shabazz and Imruh Bakari. This company would provide a base for the Ceddo Film and Video Workshop founded later that year. In an era of notable Black film/media collectives such as Isaac Julien’s Sankofa and Black Audio, Ceddo made a significant mark as the center of radical Black filmmaking in London for over a decade. For example, the workshop would produce seminal films, including Milton Bryan’s, The People’s Account (1985), Shabazz’s proto-Afrofuturist Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988) and D. Elmina Davies’ groundbreaking womanist documentary, Omega Rising: Women of Rastafari (1988).

Shabazz was the well-known director of Burning an Illusion (1981), only the second film directed by a Black director in British history and winner of the Grand Prix at the Amiens International Film Festival in France. He would direct others including, Step Forward Youth (1976), Time and Judgement: Diaries of a 400 Year Exile (1988), The Story of Lovers Rock (2011), and publish the magazine, Black Filmmaker in the 90s. Imruh Bakari directed films such as Riots and Rumors of Riots (1981), Street Warriors (1985), The Mark of the Hand (1987), and Blue Notes and Exiled Voices (1991). Devoting much of the years since Ceddo building the filmmaking infrastructure of the African continent, Bakari directed the Zanzibar International Film Festival (1999-2004) and has developed screenwriting and production projects in Tanzania while teaching and publishing critical works as well as collections of poetry.

Martin was never a member of Ceddo. But he worked closely with the collective, producing Bakari’s Blue Notes and Exiled Voices and The Mark of the Hand, and devised and ran Screenwrite (1993), an influential screenplay program for Black writers, in association with the British Film Institute and Channel 4 Television. While maintaining this commitment to Black independent film and filmmakers, he worked in the wider British film industry, even directing a season of early 80s children’s television program, Everybody Here.

Born to Trinidadian parents Claude and Vida Martin in Lewisham Hospital, London, in 1952, Henry Martin returned to the island at three months old to spend his formative years in the heady climate of Carnival culture in the capital city, Port of Spain. Across the street from his home in the Woodbrook neighborhood was the legendary Little Carib Theatre. This hub of cultural activity drew into its orbit everyone from Nobel Laureate Derek Walcott to dance pioneer Katherine Dunham, and the great African American singer/activist, Paul Robeson. Also nearby was the pan-yard of the equally legendary Invaders Steel Orchestra. It was in between those spaces of cultural activism that he would develop his political and artistic sensibility in advance of his return to England in the very early 1970s. He returned already a pan-Africanist, but one who had discovered that ideology as much in the anti-colonial street culture of Port of Spain as in the zones between theatre and pan-yard.

His experiences with film in the Caribbean had taught him the power of the moving image. This led him to study film at the West Surrey College of Art and Design. There he committed himself to bringing Afro-Caribbean street culture and politics into film, a mix he believed could be revolutionary. His first film expressed that Trinidadian influence, a short documentary for the Arts Council of London called Grove Carnival (1981). Without dialogue it told the story of a day in the life of the Black community as it prepared for the Notting Hill festival. But like his colleagues in Ceddo, his work was also made in response to the almost annual series of riots that had rocked England since 1976. That first film would inspire his next, the controversial documentary on the militant music and culture of Ladbroke Grove, Grove Music (1981). It was a community he’d become a part of, the late night shebeens, the squats, the hustlers, and revolutionaries. That was why the film featured local musical legends Aswad, and the Sons of Jah. It remained Martin’s favorite of his films. He felt it enabled Black people to finally speak honestly about their interactions with the police as well as express unfiltered views of their lives in England.

However, the honesty that the film portrayed would lay the foundation for why he would eventually abandon filmmaking. Despite the enthusiasm of viewers and the fact that the very influential Channel Four bought the film, its release and advertising was so limited as to effectively ban it. It seemed to Martin and his comrades in Kuumba that this was due to the allegation by theater owners and others in the film industry that Grove Music affirmed and encouraged the violent confrontations between racist police and the Black community. This charge was not unfamiliar, having been made against many of the early films of Shabazz and Bakari, and later, in relation to Ceddo’s, The People’s Account. As well as documenting lived realities, these films had in fact been made to document the police harassment and violence towards Black people that instigated the uprisings in the first place.

That charge would also feed a level of street-level support that other collectives could not boast. Yet despite this support, his authentic voice as a filmmaker, which blended the music and cultural activism of street culture with Pan-Africanism and anti-colonialism, had been stunted. The sabotage of Grove Music, though, wasn’t enough to diminish his commitment to independent filmmaking. Nor did it diminish his radicalism: his next two films focused on transformations in the Caribbean as the islands lurched from colony to neo-colony: Grenada, Is Freedom We Making, and Trinidad and Tobago—Money Is Not the Problem, both from 1983.

He returned to his interest in Black street life and culture with the drama Big George is Dead (Kuumba Productions, 1987) made for Channel Four. On it, Martin worked with one of the very few Black female producers at the time, Deanne Edwards. This film starred two of Britain’s finest and most highly praised Black actors, the late Norman Beaton, and Rudolph Walker CBE. Both relished the freedom to perform outside of the stereotypical roles available to them in mainstream British media. But beyond its notable performances and a script by Black writer Michael Abbensetts (1938-2016), the film is remarkable for its depiction of Caribbean migration and generational change. Told over the course of one long night carousing in Soho, Big George is Dead remains one of the most evocative stories about the racial transformations of British street culture ever filmed.

Where Shabazz and Bakari remained engaged with the ups and downs of independent filmmaking, particularly after the drying up of formal support from the British Film Institute, Channel Four, and the Greater London Council, Martin made a momentous decision. Feeling that too much of the support for his films required that he betray his independence, he retired. In his own words, he was a revolutionary, not a hustler, though he freely admitted that the latter could be just as vital to the task of liberation.

Henry G. Martin leaves behind a loving family, many friends, and a network of Black writers and filmmakers grateful for his work and mentorship.

Cover art by Cienna Smith

Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades convenes social commentary and scholarly critiques on the post-soul aesthetic’s ideological entanglement with Afro-Latino subjectivity, expressive culture, and political thought in the US and Latin America. Historical and cultural contiguity provide the rationale for this long overdue intervention. The post-soul condition and sustained interest in Afro-Latinidad by US scholars emerged simultaneously in the wake of the Civil Rights and Black Power/Black Arts movements. Recognizing this harmonic convergence, the co-guest editors of this special issue bring together writers and scholars who variously embrace, reject, and modify conventional understandings of Afro-Latinidad and the post-soul aesthetic.

Cienna Smith’s innovative rendition of the Orisha Oshun graces the cover, figuratively signaling the issue’s understanding of post-soul Afro-Latinidad as an inherently diasporic, elastic, eclectic, and transnational concept of ethno-racial belonging and identification. The issue opens with “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster.” Coster, a best-selling novelist of Dominican, Cuban, and Curaçaoan heritage, discusses her views of the post-soul aesthetic and shares with the co-guest editors how being an Afro-Latina writer shaped her MFA experience, her themes and characters, and the marketing of her novels. Examining the impact of US Soul music in Panama, Matti Steinitz traces how Black Power symbols, styles, and discourses provided many young Afro-Latin Americans across the hemisphere with a means to break with prescribed nationalist and folkloristic identity constructions of blackness. Moving the discussion southward to Brazil and forward to the present, Bryce Henson explores singer-songwriter Karol Conká’s music, videos, and role on Big Brother Brazil to examine the tension between mestiço-oriented brasilidade’s erasure of blackness and the Brazilian post-soul aesthetic’s use of Black Brazilian musical genres and social movements to disrupt that erasure.

The next three articles investigate post-soul Afro-Latinidad in video games, social media, and trap rap. Examining the Sony PlayStation video game Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), Regina Marie Mills argues that Miles Morales, as Spider-Man, is a post-soul superhero who invites readers and players to contend not only with what it means to be Black but also with the marketability of blackness and Afro-Latinidad in post-Civil Rights America. In her article, Omaris Zunilda Zamora examines how Cardi B’s trance-inducing social media presence challenges Black feminism, Chicana feminism, and the post-soul aesthetic to substantively engage, rather than elide, Afro-Latina epistemologies. Calling attention to Mexican-American rapper Kap G and the post-soul South, Rodolfo Aguilar contends that Kap G’s sonic fusions of cumbia and trap rap symbolically represent the Latinx transformation of Atlanta’s demographic landscape and hip hop scene.

The issue concludes with “Our Patrias Cannot Liberate Us from Anti-Blackness: Post-Racial Myths in the Latinx Diaspora,” a personal essay by Ayendy Bonifacio. Using the day that he became a US citizen as a point of departure, Bonifacio meditates on the anti-racist protests stemming from the murders of Rayshard Brooks, George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery, asking Latina/o/x communities to come to terms with their histories of anti-blackness.

– Trent Masiki and Regina Marie Mills

 

For a limited time, access the intro and “Naming Loss: An Interview with Naima Coster” for free.

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Volume 52 (2022) includes the above issue, plus Black Archival Practice I and II, and Black Religions in the Digital Age.

In volume 53 (2023), keep an eye out for The Shape of Things to Come: Africology and the Rise of Afrofuturist Studies (CFP), Unsafe Words: Black Radical Pleasure II (CFP), and more.

Cover art by Diedrick Brackens

 

From the introduction, “Going Electric” by Paul J. Edwards:

“Dylan is not alone in producing speculative knowledge of Black trauma within circuits of white American poetics. Ezra Pound provided the only first-person account of the death of Louis Till, Emmett Till’s father. Executed by the US Army at a detention center near Pisa, Louis’ only chronicler was his fellow prisoner, Pound, who recorded only fleeting mentions of the man in The Pisan Cantos, noting Till’s nickname by his fellow prisoners and a slightly longer passage that functions as a eulogistic note. Again, this moment is marked by its apparent ambiguity. It only becomes legible to scholars after Roy Bryant and J.W. Milam murdered Emmett Till a decade later. Maddeningly, Louis’ death was kept from his family until it was used to smear him and his dead son, suggesting that the Tills shared a genetic predisposition—like all Black men—to assault white women. Such a sardonic line retrospectively seems oddly Dylanesque with its inclusion of Louis’ death with a sense of a feast being prepared. In either case, in Pound and Dylan, the Black body can only be speculated on, never quite in focus but instead more citational than critically engaged with. Although Pound and Dylan do not feature in this issue, each of our contributors counter the obscurations of Dylan and Pound’s white poetics.”

Issue also includes the following:

• Violent Illumination: Street Lamps as Sites of Lynching and Black Resistance, by Leah S. Yared
• When Militancy Was in Vogue: Amiri Baraka, Langston Hughes, and the Precarious Desires of White Audiences, by Zachary Manditch-Prottas
• Sex and the Future of History: Black Politics at the Limit in Sutton E. Griggs’ Imperium in Imperio, by Melissa A. Wright
• Book Reviews: Ebony Magazine and Lerone Bennett Jr.: Popular Black History in Postwar America by E. James West / Sid Ahmed Ziane; Dear Science and Other Stories by Katherine McKittrick / Cera Smith; Childhood in Contemporary Diasporic African Literature: Memories and Futures Past by Christopher E.W. Ouma / Daniel Chukwuemeka; Infamous Bodies: Early Black Women’s Celebrity and the Afterlives of Rights by Samantha Pinto / Margarita Lila Rosa; Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital edited by Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective / Kirin Wachter-Grene

For a limited time, read the introduction and “Violent Illumination” for free.

 

Personal subscriptions are $44 USD and include 4 issues. Until the end of 2021, you can subscribe to our 51st volume here.

In our 2022 volume, keep an eye out for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archival Practice (two issues), and Black Religions in the Digital Age. Our 2023 volume will include issues on Afrofuturism, and more…

 

Aerial image in the University of Ibadan. Image from Wikimedia.

 

The city of Ibadan in south-western Nigeria is historic for many reasons. In this case, it was once the intellectual hub of the country and arguably, the Anglophone sector of West Africa. The seminal quartet of modern Nigerian letters comprising Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka and J.P. Clark Bekeredemo all studied at the University College Ibadan (now University of Ibadan) in the 1940s, 50s and 60s. The same is true of the first major generation of literary critics and theorists.

And so, it isn’t surprising that another significant figure-Harry Garuba- of the Nigerian literary scene emerged from the Ibadan school of poets and literary artists. Garuba, sadly passed in 2020 and Sanya Osha in this essay, explores what the culturally rich city might have meant to him and what he in turn personified for the sprawling metropolis.

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The historic city of Ibadan in South-western Nigeria is home to the University of Ibadan, the country’s first university. But it is also a city of startling contrasts, mystique, and secrecy. Capital of the Western region for a time, it has never completely shed its aura of deep mystery, even as an endless influx of cosmopolitan denizens flooded its world-renowned university and urban conurbations in search of refined company, rustic serenity, knowledge, and off-beat experiences.

Harry Garuba was a distinguished professor of literature and African studies at the University of Cape Town, South Africa before he passed in 2020 due to leukemia. He had been a brilliant student at the Ibadan university which was established by British colonial authorities in 1948. More importantly, Garuba was an influential poet whose groundbreaking first collection of verse, Shadow and Dream and Other Poems (1982) inspired an entire generation of poets, writers and academics most notably, Remi Raji based at the University of Ibadan, Onookome Okome at Alberta University, Canada, Nduka Otiono at Carleton University, Canada, Afam Akeh, a London- based poet, and many others who made their mark in the worlds of academia and creative writing. Indeed, for a significant length of time, he was a fulcrum around which all major literary figures, initiatives, and activities on campus converged. Arguably, this attraction was not due to an inordinate exercise of power or undue force of character. Rather, it stemmed from the lambency of an ineluctable Warholian disposition.

At Ibadan, Harry also commenced his career as a young academic when he was still in his early twenties. The main campus was virtually ‘everything’ with its own vast residential quarters, not excluding rows of rickety stalls and kiosks that served as eateries and tuck shops at what is called the Black Market. Other similar arrangements can be found at Abadina, the quarter meant for non-academic staff and low-end workers. At the Black Market, apart from eating and drinking, theatre students and lovers held drama rehearsals. There were stores everywhere. You didn’t have to leave the campus for much and there was a shop that was once well stocked with the written works of the brightest minds the world had to offer.

And so the campus became a city-within-a-city. As a result, this curious relationship led to a dichotomy between city and varsity.

Virtually all of Nigeria’s major literary icons and intellectuals—Chinua Achebe, Christopher Okigbo, Wole Soyinka, John Bekeredemo Clark, Abiola Irele, Michael Echeruo,  Ben Obumselu, Isidore Okpewho,  Ken Saro-Wiwa, Femi Osofisan and so many others—passed through the city and varsity at significant stages of their lives and careers.

Expatriates such as the late Ulli Beier, the irrepressible cultural catalyst, worked at Ibadan along with his then wife, Suzanne Wenger, who had facilitated the famous Oshogbo school of art that promoted the talents of Twins Seven Seven, Jimoh Braimoh, Rufus Ogundele and other notable artistic luminaries. They were also pivotal in establishing the Mbari artistic collective that offered a platform for the likes of Duro Ladipo, Kole Ogunmola, and a young Orlando Owoh, a great exponent of highlife music. Wenger would later become a well-respected high priestess of traditional spirituality, the river goddess Osun specifically, in Osogbo, calmly receiving and nurturing acolytes from all over the world until her final days.

The city of Ibadan and its illustrious varsity loomed under this formidable pedigree. As we walked as students through the hallowed corridors of the Faculty of Arts, we were never allowed to forget this lofty history nor the colorful personalities who inscribed their kaleidoscopic narratives drawing richly from their transformational personal experiences and inimitable perspectives on life and art. Bekeredemo Clark immortalized the city in a poem in which he remarked that it was a place browned with dust and rust glittering underneath the sun like fragments of broken china. Such a metaphor captured both the brokenness and inexplicable allure of the city. In a way, Clark (who passed in October 2020) was a poet who captured and represented the city’s vernacular cosmopolitanism.

Wole Soyinka, Nigeria’s Noble laureate, has a long and intimate relationship with both the city and varsity where he once studied and worked. There, he plotted his numerous artistic adventures and staged his first major act of political rebellion by holding up a regional radio station to protest an election widely believed to have been rigged in 1965.

One eerily bright and sunny afternoon in the early nineteen nineties, whilst walking along the narrow road that ran in front of the central administrative block, Soyinka spritely hopped out of a barely stationary vehicle, sighted Harry and greeted him warmly like a long lost friend. Having been entertained by a plethora of tales pertaining to Soyinka’s legendary self-regard, I was quite amazed at the depth and sincerity of the warmth he demonstrated towards Harry who was much younger than he.

Harry, being the consummate raconteur, always had delectable anecdotes to share about our numerous literary heroes. This was not out of place having been taught by the likes of Biodun Jeyifo, a Harvard emeritus professor, and the ever so proper Dan Izebavye, who managed to uphold an ethic of fair play, propriety, and humane considerateness even whilst scrupulously adhering to varsity rules. Undoubtedly, much of Harry’s social and cultural grooming also came from mavericks and perennial barroom fixtures such as the late Joe Emordi (fondly called Oga Joe), a formidable thespian in his own right and Sam Loco Efe, the also deceased great Nollywood actor who was already an established Ibadan legend long before he found renewed fame and controversy in the frenetic film industry cities of Lagos and Onitsha.

Life swirled drunkenly in cloudy beer mugs and sometimes became crossed-eyed with blind rage and bitter regret. Dreams flitted away in columns of cigarette smoke until the first glow of dawn wiped afresh the misty bar louvres. How could one ever forget the transitional impact of the irascible theatre director and professor, Dapo Adelugba, who held court in his cluttered and dusty office on the last floor of the faculty building?

The countless attractions and distractions of the varsity often kept us from exploring the hidden delights of the city, which were generally considered to be less cosmopolitan and therefore probably less valued. In my opinion, this was a huge mistake.  Harry, for instance, never learnt to speak Yoruba properly even though he had a Yoruba middle name, Oludare. The varsity was obviously viewed with awe and slight perplexity by the indigenous dwellers of the city’s inner precincts. The varsity had been constructed according to the vision and expectations of white colonial masters with considerable care and precision that is lacking in many areas around the city. It was believed that only favored initiates were cherry picked to experience the guarded delights of the varsity.

In his remarkable memoir, A Mouth Sweeter than Salt, the extraordinary Ibadan historian Toyin Falola irreverently captures the hidden mysteries of Ibadan in a manner that those of us locked within the innards of the varsity, unfortunately, did not really care to explore. When we ventured into the labyrinthine precincts of the city, we often did so as slightly snobbish and absent-minded tourists, carelessly going through the motions.

In varsity poetry circles, perhaps the most influential artistic figure with an Ibadan background was Christopher Okigbo, who is firmly etched within the pantheon of poets that mysteriously legislated over what was acceptable and possible from an artistic point of view. Although he was sadly killed during the Nigerian Civil War fighting for the Biafran side in 1967, his presence was felt in every poetry reading we held in both formal and informal settings, including our interminable after-hours drinking sessions.

Okigbo’s accomplishment confirmed the belief that we could be cosmopolitan artists even when our geographical circumstances were fairly circumscribed. Also, it was indeed possible to discover submerged postcolonial resources within the English language from which we could forge a new poetic vision and sensibility quite distinct from the Eurocentric paradigm. Perhaps this was the most powerful allure Okigbo held for us, including Harry, of course.

However, one thing we couldn’t have anticipated, flush as we were with youth, was that Okigbo’s talent and unique vision were singularly his own and not to be shared with those  who stumbled through the maze surrounding the path he had so ingeniously discovered. Okigbo, in short, was not to be followed. We could only marvel and gaze forlornly from afar at the magnificent horizon unearthed in those astonishing cadences of his remarkable and ethereal poetry.

In his art and academic writings, Harry did not do much to interrogate the connections between city and varsity, except perhaps with a cursory reference to Sango (the Yoruba deity of thunder and lightning) in his most famous essay, “Explorations in Animist Realism: Notes on Reading/Writing, African literature, Culture, and Society” published in Public Culture in 2003. Rather than drawing its primary inspiration from Yoruba culture and mythology, this essay is, instead, a compelling feat of postcolonial theorizing.

While the varsity was a site of ever-encroaching cosmopolitanism, the city held onto foundations of culture and language that have so much to reveal to us. Ibadan was a settlement, stabilized at the end of the nineteenth century after a century of warfare with other towns that tore apart most of Yoruba land. Innumerable slaves were snatched away to the New World, social fragmentation ensued and old political alliances crumbled.

The British colonial authorities established a semblance of social order in 1893. In essence, Ibadan eventually settled to civil life after a protracted reign of guns and swords. Today, it is difficult to sense a history that is drenched in blood, upheaval, and wanton destruction. Instead, the refinements of language, civility, and culture are so much more valued.

Indigenes of Ibadan are known as Mesiogo, a very peculiar concept applied only to the true born. “Mesi” means to reply, “ogo” means fool. And so Mesiogo means to reply promptly to a fool who is subsequently kept in the dark about one’s true intentions.  This characteristic is associated with the real children of Ibadan. In addition, Mesiogo incorporates a shifting sense of ambiguity, not as a counterproductive imperative, but rather as an unmistakable quality of existential resilience, that is, the ability to extricate oneself from a quandary with grace, skill, and finesse. Falola adds his important insights, claiming “mesiogo is a strategy of knowing when to fight, when not to fight. It is about understanding codes of behaviour in a highly stratified society.” Bola Ige, the former governor of Oyo State and a serving minister of the federation before he was assassinated under mysterious circumstances in 2001, published an edited volume that attempts to explain the concept as an existential practice.  We, the admirers of Okigbo, missed the full import this vital skill, taught in the indigenous Ibadan way whilst we lived in the city.

The Okebadan Festival is one of the most important in Ibadan’s cultural calendar. During this period, indigenes flock to the streets singing songs of excess and vulgarity to mask rites of social renewal, re-invention and consolidation. To the casual observer, the festival at first glance, may appear to be a carnival of decadence and transgression but is instead a crucial exercise in social cohesion, rejuvenation, and goodwill. It also serves as a collective prayer of seasonal plenitude and agricultural abundance. Indeed, the Okebadan Festival is intimately associated with harvests and the promise that comes with them. This tradition was not often emphasized amongst those of us whose worlds revolved largely around the university where we received most of our cultural and intellectual nourishment.

The tension between city and varsity can be ascribed to the fact that the former favored neo-traditionalism and the latter pursued a slightly triumphal cosmopolitanism. These two tendencies do not readily mix well and the disjuncture may have prevented both city and varsity from attaining their full potentials in postmodern times. The late Garuba was an unabashed representative of cosmopolitan strain of the city, but he would have been an even greater raconteur if he had embraced the neo-traditionalist element most cosmopolitans would rather not entertain. Indeed, Ibadan gave us more abundance than we knew what to do with and remains a city to which you always have to return.

 

Sanya Osha is the author of several books including Postethnophilosophy (2011) and Dust, Spittle and Wind (2011), An Underground Colony of Summer Bees (2012) and Ken Saro-Wiwa’s Shadow (Expanded Edition) (2021) among other publications. He works at the Institute for Humanities in Africa (HUMA), University of Cape Town, South Africa.

 

 

 

I write this appreciation as a teacher recognizing another. Mistress Velvet was a true educator in every sense of the word. They extended wisdom in so many realms of their life. Their influence and impact on others is hard to calculate in its radiant expansiveness. So many have come forward to celebrate them. They were deeply loved in Chicago—our adopted city—central to organizing circles and many other Black, queer communities. So many people have and will continue to speak to Velvet’s imprint and power from internal places and spaces far, far more intimate than I could ever hope to articulate. I met them only once and I was fortunate to receive their permission to record that evening in writing, to share with others. Our conversation was, in their own words, “important” to them. It was equally significant to me. I have shared it widely; I have taught it in my classes. Their knowledge requires deep listening.

It was 2019 over an opulent meal in a dark and handsome dining room. Nestled in our leather banquette I was instantaneously drawn to their energy and generosity as we discussed the shape and contours our conversation for The Black Scholar would and would not take before we began it. We spoke about all manner of things within that framework, some of which appear in the published interview; we took our time. At the end we hugged, “glowing” (in Velvet’s words) from the conversation and vowing to get together to celebrate the issue’s release. That was spring 2020; our reunion never happened. In the fall of 2020, I virtually introduced them to a collaborator—a photographer based in New York. Velvet’s participation in the still-developing project (one I hope will be made public in the near future) would be, both the photographer and I believed, integral. They embodied the project’s ethos through their coalescing practices of education, activism, caretaking, advocacy, sex work, and political organizing. Though they transitioned before they could take part, I trust their spirit and legacy will materialize emergent Black, queer, kinky futures that will bless and guide and shape us all. That is how they lived every moment on this plane. Let their words speak for themselves.

Forever Velvet.

Kirin Wachter-Grene
Assistant Professor of Literature
School of the Art Institute of Chicago

Wachter-Grene’s interview with Mistress Velvet, “Caretaking in So Many Ways: A Conversation with Mistress Velvet,” is free to access and read until the end of June.

Cover art by Diana Ayala

The Black Scholar continues to celebrate the journal’s 50th Anniversary with the release of its latest issue, Black Girlhood, which highlights the significance, challenges and beauty of Black girls. There is a growing body of scholarship on the experiences of Black girls, from their representation in the past and present to their lived experiences today. The intersectionality of Black girls’ lives – race, gender, class, and age – is a rich opportunity for interdisciplinary scholarship, including Black studies, feminist studies, and childhood studies.

This seminal issue is global in focus. It includes work from scholars analyzing representations of Black girls in the protest movement, new media technologies, musical theatre, and popular culture, like the Marvel Universe. It also centers Black girls’ voices about their own girlhood experiences.

Noted scholar Nazera Sadiq Wright opens the “Black Girlhood” issue with the essay, “Black Girl Interiority in Toni Cade Bambara’s Gorilla, My Love.” She argues that Black girls’ points of view and interior thoughts illustrate their involvement in the protest movement, often overlooked by Black Nationalism.

Kiana T. Murphy contributes an essay on the first Black girl superheroine and genius in the Marvel Universe with “Ironheart and the Crisis of Black Girl Representation,” and Jordan Ealey explores representation of Black girlhood in a musical in her essay, “Young, Bubbly, and Black: The Affective Performance of Black Girlhood in Kristen Childs’ ‘The Bubbly Black Girl Sheds Her Chameleon Skin.’”

This issue intentionally looks at Black girlhood through a transnational lens since, in the aftermath of the racist murder of George Floyd, we are once again seeing the interconnectedness of the global struggle for Black liberation. Maria Ximena Abello-Hurtado-Mandinga takes us to Colombia in her essay, “Black Girls’ Body: Notes on the Legacy of Colonialism in South America and the Urgency of a Black Liberation Project for Black Girls.” Régine Michelle Jean-Charles’ essay, “Nou pa gen vizibilite: Haitian Girlhood Beyond the Logics of Visibility,” speaks from the perspective of Haiti, the site of “the revolution from below,” the Haitian Revolution, spearheaded by Black enslaved peoples in the Americas.

The issue concludes with an examination of the depiction of Black girlhood in new media technologies. In their essay, “Digital Communities of Black Girlhood: New Media Technologies and Online Discourses of Empowerment,” Maryann Erigha and Ashley Crooks-Allen examine three online discourses: Well-Read Black Girl, Black Girls Rock! and SayHerName.

Lending authenticity to these scholarly essays, this issue includes the voices of Black girls about their own girlhood experiences, including stories about living under COVID-19 and the heightened racism in the U.S. They share their experiences with parental job loss and use of the “n” word in the classroom. These remarkable girls receive support from SisterMentors, a nonprofit program that centers the needs and dreams of women and girls of color in the education system, in the face of deep-seated institutional inequities. With this important addition, the issue connects scholarship and the actual subject of that scholarly work – the Black girl.

* * *

For a limited time, access the introduction and “Ironheart, Marvel Comics, and The Crisis of Black Girl Representation” by Kiana T. Murphy for free.

Until the end of 2020, you can subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $44 USD. Volume 50 includes the above issue, plus Going Imperial, At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, and What Was Black Studies?

In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, continued response to “What was Black studies?” and more. . .

For our 2022 volume, we’re working on Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Black Archives (CFP forthcoming), and more. . .

 

Mignonnes, a movie by Black French filmmaker, Maïmouna Doucouré, is one of the most-talked about films of this year. It initially premiered at the Sundance Film Festival in early 2020 and became controversial after its summer debut on Netflix under its English title, Cuties. The backlash against Cuties is partly related to anxieties around girls’ bodies—particularly in stories that engage with puberty and sexuality.  The spotlight is specifically on Black/African people: The main character is a young Senegalese girl, and the story relies on popular music and dance produced primarily by Black women. Thus, implicit in the film are the perception and representation of Africanness and Blackness through Black women’s bodies and Black popular culture.

Cuties falls within a genre of films about preteen and young teenage girls that have evoked controversy. For example, the U.S. film, Thirteen, which was released in 2003 and co-written by a then thirteen-year-old Nikki Reed, was very controversial.^[1] Unlike Cuties, which does not involve any sexual activity, Thirteen featured White girls having sex, taking drugs and self-cutting as a response to their unstable home environments. Major differences lie in the races of the protagonists, as well as Thirteen’s release long before the rise of social media. Perhaps the film that most closely resembles Cuties is another French film, Girlhood, directed in 2014 by White filmmaker Céline Sciamma.[2] Girlhood tells the story of a Black teenage girl in France who begins to come out of her shell after joining a lively group of other girls. Where Cuties is based on ethnography and draws on the experiences of Black French preteens, Girlhood evolved from the writer-director’s observations of Black teenagers in France. Though Sciamma received some criticism for being a White woman portraying a Black story, the film was widely praised.

Most reviewers have written positively about Cuties, which won a World Cinema Dramatic Directing award at the Sundance film festival, and many journalists have supported the film and been critical of the outrage that followed its Netflix release. This outrage became political and was mainly driven by White and other non-Black Americans. Republican Congressman Ted Cruz called for a federal investigation of the film as did the Concerned Women for America. Democratic Congresswoman Tulsi Gabbard similarly referred to the film on Twitter as child porn without viewing it. In addition, the writer-director, Maïmouna Doucouré received death threats, and many verbal assaults on social media. This led her to pen an op-ed in the Washington Post, explaining why she made the film, her reliance on ethnographic research with girls in the making of the film, and the importance of adults understanding modern girlhood.

We want to engage with how Cuties represents biculturality as well as puberty from the perspective of a young African/Black girl. The film is part of an ongoing project by artists and academics to increase the visibility of Black French people, and conversations about race and gender in France.[3] Notwithstanding its national specificities, there is much in Cuties that speaks to wider concerns in the African Diaspora, particularly with respect to invisibility and hypervisibility of Black women and girls, as well as migration and its effects on children. This context is critical for viewing the film and for understanding the protagonist’s journey.

Cuties: The Story

The main character is Aminata or Amy for short, played by Fathia Youssouf. Amy is an 11-year old girl from a poor Muslim Senegalese family that just migrated to France. The family abides by the principle that women are first and foremost modest caretakers. Thus, Amy has to help take care of her younger siblings, clean the house, do laundry, go to school and never question authority. The transformative moment in the story happens when the family learns that her father back in Senegal decided to marry another woman and move to France with her. Amy’s mother, Mariam (played by Maïmouna Gueye) becomes depressed and inadvertently neglects her. Eventually, she forms a friendship with another girl, Angelica, who lives in her building. Angelica’s life is also defined by poverty and a troublesome relationship with her immigrant parents, but Amy is attracted to her sense of freedom and her trendy outfits. She meets Angelica’s friends and finds out they have formed a dance group called Mignonnes (Cuties) and are preparing for a competition in which their major rival is a group of much-older girls.

Through her association with the members of Cuties, Amy stops being a bullied outsider. She learns the latest Afrobeat and hip-hop dances, including twerking, which she teaches the other girls. Amy joins the group after one of the members is kicked out, and her behavior quickly changes. She steals money from her mother to purchase new outfits, gets into a fight, steals her cousin’s phone, and becomes obsessed with social media. Eventually, Amy’s reliance on attention leads to her posting a revealing photo of herself on Instagram. Afterwards, the other girls reject her out of fear that they too will be seen as indecent. She becomes a pariah, the very thing that she had been trying to avoid, and the girl she replaced is invited back to the group. In the penultimate scene, on the day of her father’s wedding, Amy runs away to dance at the final competition. Most of the audience at the event rightly disapprove of the girls’ dancing and outfits. They boo them, and while a few people watch intently, others are visibly disturbed. Then, in the midst of the dance, Amy freezes onstage as the implications of everything she has done dawns on her (including throwing one of the group members into a pond so that she would not show up at the competition). She runs back home in tears, where Mariam, who had previously reacted violently to her daughter’s behavior, tells her she does not have to go to her father’s wedding and embraces her as she cries. The film ends with Amy skipping rope with other girls outside her building and the closing shot is of her smiling face against the blue sky.

One of Amy’s defining characteristics is that she barely speaks, though she is the protagonist. In almost every scene, she has the least dialogue— a trait that underscores how marginalized she is within her family, her peer group, and her environment. When adults speak to her she is more accurately spoken at, than with, including in one scene in which her great-aunt discovers that she started menstruating and declares to her jovially that she is now a woman. In some ways, Amy is a filmic successor to Diouana, the young Senegalese protagonist in Ousmane Sembene’s 1966 classic, Black Girl.[4] The two films are also connected through casting as Diouana was played by Mbissine Thérèse Diop who also stars in Cuties as La Tante, Amy’s great-aunt. In Black Girl, Diouana moves to France to work as a nanny to a White French couple who mistreat her. Diouana never speaks to the White people in the film, partly because she is not fluent in French, but also because she has been forced into a position of submission. Eventually, the alienation she experiences from her family in Senegal, her employers, and France is so intense that she commits suicide. Black Girl has been analyzed as an allegory on the postcolonial condition, particularly the continued exploitation of African nations by Europe after colonialism and the implicit violence of Western assimilation.[5] Cuties appears to continue the commentary on Western assimilation and biculturalism begun by Black Girl, including its effects on the psyche of African people through a young girl’s experience in a more modern and nuanced exploration of the socio-cultural effects of migration. These overlap with the psychological adjustments Amy has to undergo as she comes into puberty.

The Convergence of Biculturality and Coming into Puberty

Setting the film at the onset of Amy’s puberty provides a backdrop for understanding her uneasy journey from shy wallflower to dancing provocatively on the internet and in front of crowds. Research in developmental psychology points to the timing of the onset of puberty as a particularly vulnerable stage in a girl’s life. Rona Carter, a psychologist at the University of Michigan, has found that Black girls who begin their period before their friends (or even think they have before their friends) are more likely to show defiant behaviors.[6] This held true for girls who, like Amy, had immigration in their recent family history. We see some of these behaviors in the girls in Cuties: their argumentativeness with authority figures and their defiance of rules and laws, like their breaking into an arcade and buying clothes with stolen money.

During a time that is emotionally and physically tumultuous for any young girl, Amy is also battling with disruption in her family, specifically as it relates to female gender roles. She watches as her mother, Mariam, prepares for her father to bring his new wife into their household. To the outside world, Mariam puts on a happy face, seeming to welcome the new bride, but at home, Amy witnesses the toll the upcoming nuptials takes on her. As Amy is coming into her own womanhood, at least physically, she is surrounded by examples of emotional and physical suffering from Mariam and subservience and manual labor by her great aunt. The representations of womanhood in her home are in stark contrast to the models in the music videos who seem to own their bodies, and by extension, their futures. Even her young girlfriends embody an empowerment that Amy does not see represented at home. Her budding gender identity is influenced by competing models of femininity.

The intersection of gender and culture is particularly poignant for Amy at this juncture in her life. Like many immigrant children, she is “caught” between two cultural worlds: that of her hyper-conservative Muslim Senegalese family, and the relatively unrestrained French pop culture her friends open up for her. Through this mainstream culture, she is able to try on different forms of girlhood that are at odds with the expectations of her home life. At Mosque, her head is covered as she listens to messages of female subordination and damnation (“there are more women in hell than men”). With her friends, she shows more skin than would ever be allowed in her religious community. Instead of hellfire, she is met with what these girls consider to be liberation and fun. At home, as the oldest child and the only girl, she must care for her younger siblings and complete household chores. In her small dance troupe, she choreographs newer and more suggestive dance moves. At home, she is quiet, a background player to the drama unfolding in her parents’ marriage. Outside, she makes noise—through her choreography and her increasing delinquency.

For many young people who straddle two cultural worlds, the journey to reconciling them is often fraught with missteps and stress. The drama that unfolds in Amy’s life represents so many youth who attempt to navigate such disparate cultural frames of reference. As she runs away from the perceived limitations of one culture, she appears to lose herself in the extremes of the other. The end of the film quietly shows Amy’s resolution of the tension between these two cultural poles. On her bed lies her competition uniform (a pair of short shorts and a tank top). Next to it, we see the dress she was to wear to her father’s wedding: formal, sequined, almost overpowering next to the dance outfit. A gentle breeze lifts the fabric of both garments, as if to suggest that there is life in both options. The camera then follows Amy as she walks outside of her building, dressed as a typical (Western) pre-teen, in jeans and a t-shirt. As she skips rope with other girls, she smiles in such a youthful, genuine way that the viewer is led to conclude that she is embarking on a journey that will bring her to merge both worlds in a way that is truly agentic.

The film tracks with ongoing critiques of Islam in France and elsewhere. However, Doucouré seems to challenge a White, non-Muslim audience to think more profoundly about these critiques. For example, the healer, El Hadj, when summoned to “cure” Amy of her rebelliousness, tells Mariam that there is no “evil spirit” in her daughter. He also sympathetically acknowledges Mariam’s struggles with her husband’s new marriage and tells her she does not have to stay with him. In her Washington Post op-ed Doucouré states, “All my life, I have juggled two cultures: Senegalese and French. As a result, people often ask me about the oppression of women in more traditional societies. And I always ask: But isn’t the objectification of women’s bodies in Western Europe and the United States another kind of oppression?” This commonality of Amy’s experiences, and those of the other girls in the movie, is no doubt responsible for how much of the movie is translatable across cultures and nationalities. In particular, the film speaks transnationally to the experiences of Black girls and women throughout the African Diaspora^[7], particularly regarding body agency.

Hypervisibility and the Problem of Representation

In her desperation to be accepted, Amy becomes hypervisible through engaging in explicit modes of popular culture primarily practiced by adults; and ultimately, both invisibility and hypervisibility prove alienating. Amy’s hypervisibility in the story is mirrored in how Cuties was initially advertised by Netflix. The original poster showed an airbrushed image of the girls dancing on stage, very different from the film’s French poster. Netflix apologized and withdrew the poster but kept the trailer. Marketing the film as a feel-good, girls movie, the trailer focuses on the scenes in which the girls dance and Amy rebels to the sound of Afrobeat artist, Yemi Alade’s Bum Bum and other popular songs. Considering that the film is a drama, and at times very painful, this trailer seems to emerge from an association of Black popular culture and girls’ stories with comedy and sensationalism. The first poster and trailer may have garnered Cuties more attention than it would have gotten with a more subdued approach. However, this marketing format also repelled many potential viewers and influenced the controversy around it.

Certainly, the film itself is a work of art and deserving of critique like any other. Aspects of it are disjointed. For example, it needed more minutes to intuitively arrive at the ending, especially given how painful previous scenes were. Doucouré’s directorial choices are mostly very nuanced and empathetic, particularly in how she depicts Amy’s emotions through close up shots of her facial reactions to the suppressive circumstances beyond her control. There are other moments, though short, that focus considerably on the girls’ bodies (i.e., the close-ups of them dancing). Nathalie Etoke, whose research focuses on the African Diaspora in France, asserted that she thinks much of the film was lost in translation, because its story and aesthetic are “very French.” As examples, Etoke singled out scenes depicting the girls dancing in slow motion and close-up shots of their bodies—indicative of a more “laissez-faire” attitude towards bodily representation in France and a current tendency in mainstream French feminism to be explicit in female bodily representation.[8] These more explicit scenes have spurred both critique and undeserved outrage. Much of the outrage reveals a generally more critical attitude towards Black popular culture and bodies.^[9]

In a Washington Post review, Karen Attiah pointed out the racial hypocrisy in the outrage towards Cuties. She argues that in America there is a simultaneous castigation of Black women and girls who display erotic agency, or break the rules of decorum, while lauding images of Black women’s victimization, including in movies about slavery and racism. The Black people who were uncomfortable with the film struggled with these complex implications given histories and presents in which Black girls’ and women’s bodies have been exploited for other people’s financial gain.^[10] While some thought the controversy was overblown, others thought the dance sequences and sections in which Amy was in her underwear, veered too close to commercialized images of girls’ and women’s bodies in popular culture. There are also gender double-standards at play in how we think about bodily agency, illustrated by a tendency to be more carefree with boys but less concerned about their exploitation, and hypervigilant and suppressive towards girls.

In “Black Girlhood Interrupted,” from Thick, her collection of essays, Tressie McMillan Cottom describes the simultaneous victimhood and dispensability of young Black girls.[11] In her writing, she grapples with the paradox of being hypervisible when attempting to gain body autonomy but invisible when actually the victims of assault (as was the case with the girls abused by R. Kelly, who was convicted for his long-time predation of young Black girls). But what happens in the Black community, no matter how painful for the girls among us, must stay in the Black community. McMillan Cottom writes, “People of color are similarly hypervigilant when we navigate a white social world. We screen our jokes, our laughter, our emotions, and our baggage. We constantly manage complex social interactions so we are not fired, isolated, misunderstood, miscast, or murdered.”[12] Perhaps many Black people who were opposed to watching the film wished for a better management of Amy’s messy, and yes, uncomfortable life. Certainly, many of the White viewers who resisted the film misunderstood its aim. But by putting an all-too-familiar journey through biculturalism, autonomy, and self-acceptance in a social media age, Cuties might go far in eliminating much of that opposition. As Maïmouna Doucouré wrote, “Some people have found certain scenes in my film uncomfortable to watch. But if one really listens to 11-year-old girls, their lives are uncomfortable.” This is multiply so at the intersections of race, gender, age, and culture.

 

Notes

^[1] Catherine Hardwicke, Thirteen (Fox Searchlight Pictures, 2003). The screenplay for Thirteen was written by Reed and Catherine Hardwicke and directed by Hardwicke. The film garnered both criticism as well as praise, which included several awards and an Academy Award nomination.

[2] Céline Sciamma, Girlhood (Pyramide Distribution, 2014).

[3] See Nathalie Etoke, Afro Diasporic French Identities (Nathalie Etoke, 2013); Félix Germain, Silyane Larcher, and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, eds., Black French Women and the Struggle for Equality, 1848-2016 (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2018).

[4] Ousmane Sembene, Black Girl (Filmi Domirev and Les Actualités Françaises, 1966). Black Girl is one of the first films by an African creator to be widely distributed in Europe and North America.

[5] For a discussion on how Sembene and other authors and filmmakers have commented on the postcolonial African state through stories about women, see Susan Z. Andrade, The Nation Writ Small: African Fictions and Feminisms, 1958-1988 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011).

[6] Rona Carter et al., “Ethnicity, Perceived Pubertal Timing, Externalizing Behaviors, and Depressive Symptoms among Black Adolescent Girls,” Journal of Youth and Adolescence 40, no. 10 (October 2011): 1394–1406.

^[7] See Aria Halliday, “‘Twerk Sumn!:’ Theorizing Black Girl Epistemology in the Body,” Cultural Studies 34, no. 6 (2020): 874–91. In “Twerk Sumn!” Halliday writes about the ways Black girls across the Diaspora gain knowledge of and pleasure in their bodies through dance, including twerking. Further, Halliday highlights the communal nature of this corporeal journey–for Black girls, dancing in community is liberating. Although Amy’s story is situated in a specific context, her story reflects the lives of many Black girls and women.

[8] Etoke, personal communication with Nicosia Shakes.

^[9] Some have contrasted the continued airing of Toddlers & Tiaras on U.S. television with the rush to “cancel” Netflix and launch a criminal investigation into Cuties. Toddlers & Tiaras was canceled due to controversy, but TLC continues to air reruns and spinoffs. The reality show glamorizes the adultification of toddlers in beauty pageants, while Cuties critiques the effects of social media hypervisibility and beauty standards on preteen girls.

^[10] We had conversations with several Black people of different ages who we asked to provide their thoughts on the film. Some of their names are Niga Jacques, Ryan McLeish, Agostinho Pinnock and Maziki Thame. Their opinions varied. We also thank Kabria Baumgartner for her feedback on this essay.

[11] Tressie McMillan Cottom, Thick: And Other Essays (The New Press, 2018).

[12] Cottom, Thick, 193.

 

Nicosia Shakes is an Assistant Professor in the Department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her book, Gender, Race and Performance Space: Women’s Activism in Jamaican and South African Theatre, is under contract with University of Illinois Press.

 

 

Barbara Thelamour is an Assistant Professor of Psychology at Swarthmore College, Pennsylvania. She runs the Identity, Culture, and Immigration Lab where she primarily investigates the cultural adjustment and identity development of Black immigrants in the United States. She is on Twitter at @B_Thelove.

 

 

 

This is part three of a three part series. Read the introduction to the series and the first post here and the second post here. All articles linked to in this series are free to read through 2020. To access, click on the green PDF button above the article. Publisher platform may require registration (free).

 

The suppression of Black gathering and protest is a mode of social control that developed during enslavement and shapes modern policing systems. These structures protect white property at the expense of human life. From gang injunctions to the abduction and arrest of protesters, Black collectivity continues to be criminalized in the United States. As the authors in this mini-issue show, the shared survival, consciousness, and presence of Black Americans is a form of protest that does indeed threaten to dismantle the very structures of racial capitalism, white supremacy, and policing. The articles locate acts of gathering in response to deliberately delineated spatial patterns of racial domination in the U.S., recognizing a spectrum of protest forms that range from acts of subterfuge to marching in the streets. The visceral poetics of Hortense Spillers and Assata Shakur, socio-psychological renderings by Edward Palmer, and lyrical prose by Edna Edet, together, theorize how to collectively build a radicalized consciousness out of embodied experience—one that can create worlds outside of past and current spatial demarcations and affirm Black life.

With “A Day in the Life of Civil Rights” (1978), Hortense Spillers offers a creative piece on memory and reckoning in which multiple characters, literary forms, and experiences layer to capture Black voices and personalities, the harrowing impacts of the day, and a broader historical context. Narratives of protest, violence, and the destructive aftermath of resistance, provide a variegated image of gathering and embodiment under the threat of an increasingly militarized police force in 1968 Memphis, Tennessee. An April 4th letter, written by one “Vivian Henderson” on the day Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was assassinated, chronicles the events of the previous day, when she was part of a group of young Black protestors who faced martial police violence on the city’s streets. Dr. King’s final speech at Mason Temple, a space of spiritual and political assemblage, is woven into the piece as the foundational refrain, touching the lives of different generations of Black Americans. Spillers’ framing of the letter’s narrative signals the painful outcome of the protest. The speaker “Betty Trammel,” is an on-duty hospital nurse who finds Vivian’s letter. Betty channels Dr. King’s words, her own wartime and activist past, and that days’ on-going protests while tending to a young Black man injured in the previous evening’s events. This article, like Shakur’s essay introduced below, centers the experiences of Black women, not only as they care for their community, but also as they explore and reflect on how to respond to the oppression surrounding them. With various depictions of embodied resistance in the face of hawkish white claims for power and property, as well as the resounding impact of Dr. King’s speech at Mason Temple, Spillers’ work emphasizes the perils and weariness of staying “strong” amid a seemingly endless struggle for racial justice. The protagonist imagines with hope and doubt “That it was always possible tomorrow, or was it right now, to be released from the awful onus of nightmare and locate one’s own stage of action, even beyond sorrow and self-pity, even beyond the edicts of the willful and the thrusts of assassins.”[1] In a final note of ambiguity, the narrative concludes with the nurse considering the fortifying process of building “a private myth from the tattered fragments of loss and disappointment” in order to bring a new world into view.

In relation to the threats against Black gathering, Assata Shakur’s visionary essay “Women in Prison: How We Are” (1978) explicates how different spatial and social oppressions restrict Black gathering and imaginaries. The architecture of the city, with its tenements and “transient neighborhoods” fostering “no sense of community,”[2] is reminiscent of her experience of incarceration at Rikers Island where “women prisoners rarely refer to each other as sisters.”[3] Shakur states that Rikers Island reflects the city where “poverty is the same. The alienation is the same.”[4] Shakur writes the city as a site of intense coming together—in forced poverty and in common experience—as well as intense fracturing, a feature necessarily and brutally repeated at Rikers Island. Shakur states that the city “removed us from our strengths, from our roots, from our traditions.”[5] She desires a consciousness that returns Black women to embodied cultural memory, memories of women who “carry on the tradition of fierce determination to move on closer to freedom.”[6] Shakur describes the lives of the mostly Black and Puerto-Rican women in prison that reflect the violent institutions, social pressures, and distorting cultural values that led to their incarceration. The article explores the tension between the racist and sexist structures that the women at Rikers come up against, and the type of community and consciousness Shakur wants to cultivate. Shakur’s narrative brings us back not only to the question of crafting consciousness, but also to an awareness of how space can dictate what sorts of worlds people feel that they can imagine. When physical and psychic gatherings are threatened by enclosure and containment, Shakur hopes that we can conjure empowering connections to the past and future to form community in the present.  “Women in Prison: How we are” is a presentist insurgency, a detailed description of racist, sexist, heterosexist, and classist structural abuse, and the despair and hopelessness generated by these structures, boiled down into a cell. Released from prison, women feel like they have nowhere to go, nothing towards which to move. As such, it is also a declaration of desire for a collective method of activist-being for Black women, for a futurist plan that begins with a recollection of a rich past and a conscious analysis of political aggressions.

An activist for Black freedom, Shakur was a member of the Black Liberation Army and Black Panther Party. She participated in the Black liberation movement through broader freedom struggles including the student rights movement and the movement to end the war in Vietnam. She was incarcerated for the outcome of a 1973 shoot-out with New Jersey State police officers who pulled her over allegedly driving with a faulty taillight. Shot twice herself, the exchange of fire killed one of the officers. Two people were killed, Black Liberation Army activist Zayd Malik Shakur who was in the vehicle with Shakur, and Trooper Werner Foerster, who arrived in a second police car.[7] Calling herself a “20^th century escaped slave,” Shakur escaped the Clinton Correctional Facility for Women in New Jersey in 1979 to haunt the FBI most wanted list into the 21^st Century.[8] Several aspects of Shakur’s biography figure the structural war on Black life, thought, and freedom that manifest in continued fatal police aggression, hypercriminalization of Black citizens convinced of their own freedom, judicial bias, and miscarriage of justice.

Edward Palmer’s vision for an alternate world addresses the character of Black policing. His essay changes in tone from pessimism to pragmatic hope in a revolutionary consciousness among Black police officers essential for Black liberation. Palmer’s “Black Police in America” (1973) saliently conveys white threats to Black gathering, not only in so-called white spaces but also in Blacks’ own neighborhoods. Palmer was a Black policeman for the city of Chicago and was exposed to the oppressive power structures in place that target Black sites—both spatial and psychological. He follows the metonymic figure of the Black police candidate from his childhood in the “lower-middle class ghetto”[9] to his metamorphosis into “super-citizenry.”[10] In the midst of this transformation, Palmer notes, the candidate is armed with a uniform and a gun that separates him from his community and, subsequently, his identity. This follows a similar thread from articles by Robert L. Allen and Terry Jones,[11] published earlier in the Social Justice Handbook, that take internal neo-colonialism and epidemic police violence as theoretical lenses from which to view anti-Blackness. What distinguishes Palmer is his thought-provoking, if controversial, statement on the potential for Black police officers to radically transform the police structure from within by “protect[ing] Black people from white oppressors and from themselves.”[12]

Arguing that the act of protest is fundamentally human, Edet’s historical survey “One Hundred Years of Black Protest Music” (1976) attests to how Black musical forms emerge from and respond to their social, spatial, and material conditions. During enslavement, Black people consciously found ways to express their grievances surreptitiously through spirituals that “referred to the conditions of slavery obliquely” and, thus, went unnoticed and unrestricted.[13] Work songs and convict songs—developed from the experiences of individuals brought together under conditions of captivity—illustrate how protest music houses and manifests the embodied cultural memory that Shakur conjures as possibility on Riker’s Island. The song leader, who Edet calls “a psychologist, able to select the exact song for a particular situation,” would attune the melody and accompaniment to the physical movement the labor demanded.[14] Protest music vocalizes resistance within and against disciplinary spaces. Through these songs, which erupt forth from Edet’s pages, Black people express collective visions of Black liberation and “Say ‘em loud, say ‘em clear, for the whole round world to hear.”[15]

Police brutality, incarceration, deprivational segregations, and work gangs bind and quarter. Violent incursions on Black struggles for freedom take endless state-sanctioned forms as Black insistence on freedom persists. These authors provide a specific vision of persistent structures and deployments of racism that transmit structures of slavery into new generations through white civilian aggression, racist policing, the court system, and incarceration. Systems of quartering are upheld by violence. There is no romance to such forms of abuse or their calling out. In these articles, authors identify avenues for activism as thought practice and labor that remain pertinent in 2020, a watershed year in its undeniable display of the immediate deadly consequences of identifiable racist structural violence. They animate the necessity of fundamental shift in structures of thought around Blackness towards anti-racist conceptions of Black life and Black citizenship that support freedom and also legal protection for all. The systems that condition and precede the body, that condition white supremacist racialized citizenship require dismantling in order to begin to disrupt the vile loop of the state’s structural disposition against Black liberty.

The instrumentalization of diverse comings together and recognitions of chosen and forced collectivities distinguish this mini-issue. Alongside the violence they call out, these pieces identify the power of insistent collectivity, creativity, self-definition, and mutual recognition as mundane conditions and tools of Black life. By illustrating Black critical and creative practices within, on the margins of, and boldly beyond racist geographic and structural boundaries, these articles speak to how violent policing of Black spaces and people both impedes and catalyzes the body’s ability to shift, develop, and regenerate itself. It is in these transformative processes, sometimes as tenuous as they are hopeful, that Black Americans have led, and continue to lead, coalitions of people from around the world in the collective fight against global injustice.

Stephanie Leigh Batiste

Associate Professor, University of California, Santa Barbara, Departments of Black Studies and English

Nadia Ahmed, Anita Raychawdhuri, Erick John Rodriguez, and Maite Urcaregui

Graduate students, University of California, Santa Barbara, Hemispheric South/s Research Initiative

 

*The Social Justice Handbook Series authors would like to thank Louis Chude-Sokei for his co-curation and support of this archival project.

 

[1] Hortense Spillers, “A Day in the Live of Civil Rights,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no.8/9 (1978): 20-27,.

[2] Ibid., 13.

[3] Ibid., 12.

[4] Assata Shakur, “Women in Prison: How We Are,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 7 (1978): 8-15, 13.

[5] Ibid., 13.

[6] Ibid., 15.

[7] Bim Adewunmi, “Assata Shakur: from civil rights activist to FBI’s most wanted,” The Guardian, Sun 13 Jul 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2014/jul/13/assata-shakur-civil-rights-activist-fbi-most-wanted. Accessed by authors Nov 2, 2020

[8] http://www.assatashakur.org/ Accessed by the authors, Aug 15, 2020.

[9] Edward Palmer, “Black Police in America,” The Black Scholar, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 19-27, 19.

[10] Ibid., 23.

[11] Robert L. Allen, “Reassessing the Internal (Neo) Colonialism Theory,” The Black Scholar, vol. 35, no. 1 (2005): 2-11; Terry Jones, “The Police in America: A Black Viewpoint,” The Black Scholar, vol. 9, no. 2 (1977): 22-31, 36-39.

[12] Edward Palmer, “Black Police in America,” The Black Scholar, vol. 5, no. 2 (1973): 19-27, 27.

[13] Edna Edet, “One Hundred Years of Black Protest Music,” The Black Scholar, vol. 7, no. 10 (1976): 38-48, 38.

[14] Ibid., 39.

[15] Ibid., 48.

 

Black lives matter. Black thought matters. Black writing matters. Black writing about Black lives matters. Black scholarship, criticism, and research matter. Black memory matters, Black history perhaps most of all.

These words have been the credo of The Black Scholar from the apocalyptic year of 1969 to the, well, apocalyptic year of 2020. And so, situated once again “after the end of the world,” as Sun Ra would have it, it is incumbent on us to make sense of origins, presence, and futures.

What Was Black Studies?—an intentionally provocative title—commemorates 50 years in print, which also means 50 years of our entanglement with the ongoing project, commitment, inter-discipline, and reason for the argument called Black Studies. And in the spirit of political apocalypse and the dramas of memory, we’ve assembled a remarkable set of reflections and arguments, frustrated longings and critical conversations, visionary statements and declarations of failure by a range of significant figures in and around (and under?) Black Studies. The goal here is less to argue about origins, but instead to make sense of what it—we, us—have become in its wake, while continuing to engage the multiple, intersecting crises of the present.

Calling these scholars remarkable is no hyperbole: our contributors include Robin D.G. Kelley, Molefi K. Asante, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, Siobhan Brooks, Frank Wilderson, Michelle M. Wright, Lewis Gordon, and Kehinde Andrews. Indeed, the response and support for this issue particularly due to the framing question “What Was Black Studies?” generated so much material that we’ll be featuring longer pieces in imminent issues. All of these scholars were asked to honestly respond to the provocation in any way they felt appropriate. What does Black Studies look like now vs. when they began their engagement with it? What did they think it was vs. what it turned out to be? What can it be? Must it continue being? Is it an ongoing concern or an institutional habit?

We’d like to thank these scholars for their time and patience and their acknowledgement of the historical and current impact of the journal.

 

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For a limited time, access the introduction and Afropessimism and Futures of … : A Conversation with Frank Wilderson
by Linette Park for free.

Subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $41 USD. Volume 50 includes the above issue, plus Going Imperial, At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, and the forthcoming Black Girlhood.

In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, and more content responding to “What was Black studies?”

For our 2022 volume, we’re working on Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Other Black Independent Cinema, and more. . .