Journal of Black Studies and Research
Going Imperial inaugurates the fiftieth volume of The Black Scholar. The issue serves as both a testament to the journal’s longevity and a meditation on the Black intellectual tradition that serves as its raison d’être. At the center of this volume is Jeffrey C. Stewart’s The New Negro: The Life of Alain Locke, winner of the 2018 National Book Award and the 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Both Stewart and Locke’s work mark monumental contributions to the Black Studies project(s), serving as embodiments of where the field has been—even before its institutionalization in the late 1960s—and where it stands to go.
After Editor-in-Chief Louis Chude-Sokei starts the conversation with a provocative question of whether or not Black Studies has “gone imperial,” Stephanie Leigh Batiste opens up the forum on The New Negro by chatting with the book’s author. Over the course of the conversation Batiste and Stewart touch on wide-range of topics, including the book itself, long-form modes of study and research, and questions of Black masculinity, Black Studies, and Black sexualities.
Contributors Cheryl Wall, Gilbert NMO Morris, and Terrance Wooten each put Stewart’s The New Negro under critical scrutiny. Wall—a first rate scholar of the Harlem Renaissance in her own right—raises questions about Locke’s troubling relationship with several notable women of the movement, while also taking stock of the “extraordinary achievement” of Stewart’s biography.
Morris pushes us to map the terrain of Locke’s foreign policy influence, reminding us that Locke was both the product of and advocate for a broader Black World. According to Morris, such advocacy “rooted his [Locke’s] foreign policy concepts in the experience of displacement, subjugation and marginalization of the negro.” In this respect, Locke fits in a longer genealogy of Blacks in American foreign policy who attempted to center “human value as a recognition and commitment to the acclaimed values of the West.”
Wooten draws on Black queer Studies and “queer of color” critique to interrogate Locke’s complicated queer life. He encourages us to reckon with the troubling relationship between value and geography, while also coming to terms with “the limitations of any Black sexual politics that relies on class ascension/mobility as its primary way of conceptualizing freedom or belonging.”
Finally, Mathew Omelsky steps away from Stewart’s book and instead draws our attention to Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Buluwayo’s novel, We Need New Names. Omelsky’s work is motivated by a desire to both think through and expand the limitations of Black Studies’ recent discourse on “fugitivity.” He asks, what do notions of fugitivity—raised by scholars like Fred Moten, Jared Sexton, and Saidiya Hartman—have to say about Black folk beyond the boundaries of the United States. And, more importantly, how can African literary studies expand and trouble prevailing theorizations of fugitivity in Black Studies.
Not to be overlooked, South African artist, Pola Maneli’s Slumflower serves as the cover art for the issue. Like Locke, Stewart, Omelsky, and the rest of the contributors to this volume, Maneli’s work is animated by the ever-vexing questions of Black racial identity—how it’s constructed, (mis)understood, disseminated, and essentialized. Maneli’s work reminds us that even the best, and most well-meaning, attempts at defining and representing “the race” seem to fall short, revealing instead the limitations of our own observations.
For a limited time, access the introduction and “Intellect, Art, Culture: Legacies of The New Negro; A Forum on Jeffrey C. Stewart’s Biography of Alain Locke.”
Subscribe to our 50th anniversary volume here. Personal subscriptions are $41 USD. Volume 51 includes the above issue, plus At the Limits of Desire: Black Radical Pleasure, part one of What Was Black Studies?, and Beyond Borders: Black Girls and Girlhood.
In our 2021 volume, keep an eye out for Black Privacy, Caribbean Global Movements, part two of What Was Black Studies?, and more . . .
For our 2022 volume, look for Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades, Other Black Independent Cinema, and more . . .
In a February 1977 Letter to the Editor of the New York Times, a group of Black civil rights leaders including Dorothy Height, Bayard Rustin, and A. Phillip Randolph denounced Idi Amin’s “reign of terror” in Uganda. They were among the first Black Americans to dismiss Amin’s ersatz Pan-African appeals and publicly condemn his human rights record. Their letter emphasized the basic immorality of Amin’s atrocities, while taking care to avoid generalizations about African governance.
In the run-up to the next US ambassador to Uganda’s confirmation, US foreign policy toward Africa and Ugandans fighting for civil liberties would benefit from a similar ethical commitment on the part of Black civil society.
The question isn’t if Uganda’s president and US security ally, Yoweri Museveni, is an authoritarian. He’s no Amin, but his regime is widely known for suppressing civil liberties, undermining Uganda’s judiciary, persecuting gay Ugandans, and torturing political dissidents. The question is why Black civil rights groups, professional associations, and criminal justice reform organizations should take an interest in shaping US policy toward Uganda.
Today, the sense of shared identity and struggle that animated much of the Black American engagement with Africa during the 20th century is often pilloried as escapist and romantic. The haste to lampoon this Pan-Africanism, however, has overlooked consequences. It has also discouraged a commitment—not based simply on ethnicity but also on ethics and an expansive notion of American citizenship—to demanding that the US act justly in Africa. This is what’s at stake when Black Americans remain silent about US support for the Museveni regime.
No surprise, like strongmen the world over, Museveni loves Trump. He’s said as much, lauding the American president for his frankness after it was revealed that Trump dubbed Africa a continent of “shithole countries.” Over the course of the last three years, despite the occasional spat, the Trump administration has largely toned-down US criticism of Museveni’s brutal and illiberal policies. Museveni, in turn, continues to prioritize Ugandan support for US counterterrorism in Africa, his primary source of leverage in Washington for nearly two decades.
In Somalia, Ugandan troops comprise the largest contingent of African Union peacekeepers and work closely with US special operations forces, sharing intelligence, training the Somali army, and launching raids against the Al Qaeda affiliate, Al Shabab. Ugandan units have even, reportedly, served as guinea pigs in the development of US military technology, collaborating with US military contractors to test IED detection systems in Somalia prior to their potential use by American soldiers in other conflicts.
Despite a sharp increase in US drone strikes in Somalia, a recent spate of Al Shabab operations, including coordinated strikes against US and EU military advisors and this month’s attack on US reconnaissance forces at Kenya’s Manda Bay airstrip, suggest that the militia is far from a spent force. Meanwhile, Museveni’s opportunistic support for US counterterrorism has made Uganda one of the leading recipients of US security assistance in Africa. This security cooperation has strengthened Museveni’s grip on power at home, where the Ugandan military routinely takes to the streets to quash protests demanding an end to his 34-year rule.
Yet in the US, Black opposition to the underbelly of the US-Uganda security partnership has been muted at best. Black Americans consistently decried US military aid to white-minority-ruled regimes in Africa when parallels between racism in the US and South Africa, for example, were easy to identify. These parallels were not, however, necessary to evoke the outrage of Black Americans witnessing the exploitation of African people by their rulers.
In 1990 Coretta Scott King, Dorothy Height, Joseph Lowery, and leaders representing a cross-section of Black civil society called for sanctions against the regime of Daniel arap Moi in Kenya, one of America’s key African security allies during the Cold War. A moral impulse and a commitment to democratic freedoms imperiled by the “black oppressors” of the Moi regime, with support from the Bush administration, motivated their outcry. Their denunciation of arap Moi and similar criticisms of Sani Abacha in Nigeria, Mengistu Haile Mariam in Ethiopia, and more recently the late Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe were coordinated by Black foreign policy lobbies such as the TransAfrica Forum.
But groups such as TransAfrica have been in decline since the turn of the 21st century, and little has emerged within Black civil society to replace them. Black Americans have largely left the details of Africa advocacy to liberal NGOs, Black elected officials, and newly arrived African immigrant communities. Today’s inattention to US-Africa policy is a departure from the legacy of organizations such as the NAACP, the Urban League, the National Council of Negro Women, the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, and the Brotherhood of Sleeping Car Porters—all of which, during critical moments, spoke out in defense of African people. It’s also bad for the formulation of US foreign policy toward Africa.
Why? Because Black Americans have been consistently more skeptical than other ethnic groups of US military interventions and the capacity of the US to solve other countries’ problems. It is this aversion to paternalism, coupled with the moral aspirations that fuel many of their domestic social movements, that Black civil society can bring to debates about the future of US policy in Africa. Such a perspective would serve as a much-needed check on the worst impulses of liberal humanitarian interventionists and conservative hawks preoccupied with counterterrorism and “near peer competition” in Africa.
What would this look like in the case of Uganda?
First, it would mean avoiding a short-sighted fixation on calls for Museveni to relinquish power under the assumption that the Ugandan opposition is necessarily more committed to just policies. Instead, Black Americans could insist that the next US ambassador intensify pressure on the Museveni regime to roll back Uganda’s social media tax, computer misuse act, and other strictures on free expression it has used to silence social movements and government critics, women and youth activists in particular.
Second, Black Americans can support the calls of Ugandan dissidents for a full suspension of US security assistance to Uganda if the human rights abuses of the Museveni regime continue. And insist that the Trump administration move beyond ineffectual sanctions on Ugandan security officials once they have already fallen from Museveni’s good graces.
These are demands that Trump’s nominee for US ambassador to Uganda, Natalie E. Brown, may be willing to take into account. Brown, a career member of the US foreign service who is now the US chargé d’affaires in Eritrea, has openly acknowledged the benefits she’s derived from the struggles of women and Black Americans to combat discrimination within the US State Department itself.
Yet Black American scrutiny of the US-Uganda alliance wouldn’t just be good for activists in Kampala. It would also be a good means for Black people to reject a stunted conception of American citizenship, a conception that suggests that Black American morality ends at America’s shores or perhaps its border detention centers. This idea of citizenship is at odds with the history of Black civil society groups across the political spectrum that fought for enfranchisement primarily in pursuit of domestic reforms but also to secure a meaningful voice in shaping US policy abroad.
The Black American voice in foreign affairs has never been limited to Africa or rigidly bound by ethnic sentimentality, but until recently it rarely failed to critique US support for repressive African regimes. Nor was this voice silenced by the idea that Black American’s domestic challenges were so pressing that they should abandon an effort to have their values represented in US policy toward Africa.
In 1962, for example, at a conference intended to increase Black American interest in Africa, Dr. King called upon one of his favorite refrains to describe the parochialism this effort aimed to overcome. “There was a time” King noted, “when the intensity of our own problems excluded our awareness that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.” For King, the American Negro Leadership Conference on Africa offered the potential of “meaningful leverage to shape an American foreign policy on Africa that will be consistent with our democratic principles.”
This effort was not without its detractors. Declassified memos from Lyndon B. Johnson’s National Security Council suggest that the president was strongly opposed to “a separate Negro view of foreign policy” on Africa and wanted to “discourage emergence of any special Negro pressure group (a la the Zionists) which might limit his freedom of maneuver.”
It appears that after more than two centuries of Black American civil society widening its moral ken to include the African continent, Trump need not share Johnson’s concerns. US policy toward Uganda and people of African descent on both sides of the Atlantic are all poorer for it.
Sobukwe Odinga is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies at UCLA. His areas of expertise are International Relations theory, African regionalism and security cooperation, and race and US foreign policy.
Please read the attached letter to Harvard’s president in opposition to the recent denial of tenure to Dr. Lorgia García Peña. This letter specifically outlines the relevance of Dr García Peña’s work to the study of global Black literatures and cultures. Many of you will recall her brilliant article in the TBS special issue on “Dominican Black Studies” (2015), which the editorial board recognized as one of its top five articles from that year.
If you would like to add your signature, please email Raj Chetty at rchetty@sdsu.edu and include your full name, job title(s), and institutional affiliation. Please also feel free to pass this letter along to others you think would be amenable to adding their names.
In solidarity,
Raj Chetty, PhD
Assistant Professor, Black Literature & Culture
English & Comparative Literature
San Diego State University
Co-editor (with Amaury Rodriguez), “Dominican Black Studies,” The Black Scholar (2015)
December 10, 2019
President Lawrence S. Bacow
Office of the President
Harvard University
Massachusetts Hall
Cambridge, MA 02138
Tel: (617) 495-1502
Email: president@harvard.edu
Dear President Bacow,
We submit this letter in response to the decision to deny tenure to Dr. Lorgia García Peña. As scholars in Black Studies, we research and teach about the long histories of activist-intellectual work that undergirds all social change, including but not limited to changes in higher education. We understand the importance of linking national and international movements for social change to the development of social theories, histories, and art that respond to and build from these movements. We recognize that this work is part of Harvard’s own history, as the coming year marks the 50th anniversary of the founding of the Department of African and African American Studies (AAAS) , emerging from Civil Rights struggle, Black struggle, and the momentous events of 1968, particularly on campuses across the United States, and globally.
It is clear to us that Dr. García Peña’s work is part of the long struggle against anti-blackness and for a more just world. While her scholarship has a clear relevance for Ethnic Studies, Latinx Studies, and Caribbean Studies, we see her work’s deep relevance for Black Studies, especially at this conjuncture in which Blackness and Latinidad rises to prominence at the intersecting interdisciplinary fields of Latinx Studies and Black Studies. As the work of Arturo Schomburg, Nicolás Guillén, and Ana Livia Cordero makes clear, international alliances between Blacks in the U.S. and in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean have a long and storied history. However, we see the current intellectual moment as one in which a global Black Studies is re-emergent, with particular attention to relations between and among Afro-Latinxs and Blacks in the U.S., Blacks in Latin America and the Caribbean, and Blacks in Europe. Dr. García Peña is at the forefront of scholarship attending to studies of the inter-cultural relations between Blacks in these different sites of the diaspora, and her work is of international renown. In denying her tenure, Harvard has failed to see the import of her rigorously comparative and globally attuned study of Black creative cultures.
Dr. García Peña’s work is generative not merely for attention to Black cultural relations, but also for the way it brings together landmark theories that often remain in the silos that narrow the scope of interdisciplinary Ethnic Studies scholarship. For instance, in her book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradiction, she bridges Gloria Anzaldúa’s theories of the border/lands with the particular configuration of the border as it developed over the 19th and 20th centuries in the island that is today Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the symbolic border established across imperial lines between the U.S. and the Dominican Republic. The Dominican Republic and Haiti, both of which were at the center of Black-led revolutionary and anti-colonial liberation movements in the Age of Revolutions, deserve more attention in Black Studies. Again, Dr. García Peña is at the cutting edge of this much-needed reorientation, intervening simultaneously in two fields: (1) reconceptualizing the concept of the border by extending from Chicano/a and Latinx Studies to the Caribbean and the cradle of enslavement, marronage, and Black revolution in Hispaniola, Santo Domingo, and Saint Domingue, and (2) re-orientating Black Studies toward the Dominican Republic and Haiti, in relation, and with attention to the way borders map onto Black lives.
In her forthcoming monograph, she brilliantly conceptualizes the vaivén (“coming and going”) of blackness that structures Black migrants’ lives today—from the Dominican Republic to the U.S., to Italy, and to Spain. This is a crucial and laudatory addition to global Black Studies and promises to transform the field. Her initial work for this book was published in The Black Scholar, one of the leading Black Studies journals, established in the late 1960s context of radical Black struggle. The Black Scholar’s editorial board named her 2015 essay one of its top five essays from among the four issues published that year, a remarkable achievement considering the caliber of the journal in the field of Black Studies.
In this way, Dr. García Peña is a national leader in addressing the intersections between blackness, migration, and immigration status in the United States and globally. In addition to a stellar and internationally resounding publication record, her work has included institution building for communities historically marginalized by white supremacy in and out of the university, the kind of work that promises to transform students’ experiences. We need not say too much about her efforts at Harvard, because you know this record. We want to stress, however, her work in co-founding Freedom University in Georgia in 2011, in the immediate wake of legislation there that restricted undocumented students’ access to university study. This work foregrounds her ability to create sustainable collaborations to address contemporary systems that create and maintain oppressive conditions for marginalized people, and at Harvard she has continued to combine research, pedagogy, and service work in liberatory institution building. Her work is part and parcel of what Harvard will celebrate next year in the 50th anniversary of AAAS. It is no small irony that Harvard has denied tenure to someone who has been actively involved in the kind of institution building that descends directly from Black struggle within higher education and against the white supremacy that plagues it.
We express solidarity with the disappointment about Dr. García Peña’s tenure denial expressed through letters and statements, direct action, and on news and social media. We add our voices to the thousands of undergraduate and graduate students, faculty, Harvard alumni, activists, and others opposed to the denial of tenure to Dr. García Peña because her research and publication record, institutional and professional service, and teaching are exemplary. What is more, we are concerned about what this denial says about Harvard’s stated commitment to pursuing diversity, inclusivity, and social justice, through hiring in Ethnic Studies and corresponding curricular change. Finally, we see this decision as detrimental to the critical intellectual and social justice work that Ethnic Studies does and can do, at Harvard and more broadly.
Sincerely,
Leslie Alexander
Associate Professor, Department of History
University of Oregon
Immediate Past President, Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora
Executive Board, National Council for Black Studies
Beverly Araujo Johnson
Professor and Director of Online MSW program, Social Work
Adelphi University
Jossianna Arroyo-Martínez
Professor, Department of African and African American Studies
Chair, Department of Latin American and Caribbean Languages and Cultures
Professor of Spanish and Portuguese
University of Texas at Austin
Sophia Azeb
Provost Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language & Literature
University of Chicago
Davarian Baldwin
Paul E. Raether Distinguished Professor of American Studies
Trinity College
Keisha Blain
Associate Professor of History
University of Pittsburgh
2019-2020 W.E.B. Du Bois Fellow, Harvard University
President, African American Intellectual History Society
Melissa M. Blanco Borelli
Associate Professor, School of Theatre, Dance and Performance Studies
Associated Director, International Program for Creative Collaboration and Research
University of Maryland
President, Dance Studies Association (2019-2021)
Kimberly Blockett
Associate Professor of English
Penn State University, Brandywine
Adrienne Brown
Associate Professor of English
University of Chicago
Charisse Burden-Stelly
Assistant Professor, Africana Studies and Political Science
Carleton College
Christopher Cameron
Associate Professor of History
University of North Carolina at Charlotte
Ginetta Candelario
Professor of Sociology and Latin American & Latina/o Studies
Smith College
Editor, Meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism
Ben Carrington
Associate Professor of Sociology and Journalism
University of Southern California
Claudia Castañeda
Senior Scholar-in-Residence, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College
Manu Samriti Chander
Associate Professor of English
Rutgers University-Newark
Raj Chetty
Assistant Professor of Black Literature and Culture, Department of English & Comparative Literature
San Diego State University
Laura Chrisman
Professor, Nancy K. Ketcham Endowed Chair of English
University of Washington
Publisher of The Black Scholar Journal
Kwami Coleman
Assistant Professor, Gallatin School of Individualized Study
New York University
Deirdre Cooper Owens
The Charles and Linda Wilson Professor in the History of Medicine & Director of the Humanities in Medicine Program
Department of History
University of Nebraska-Lincoln
Director, Program in African American History at The Library Company of Philadelphia
Kaysha Corinealdi
Assistant Professor of History, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College
Aimee Meredith Cox
Associate Professor of Anthropology and African American Studies
Yale University
Collin Craig
Associate Professor, English Department
Hunter College
Michaeline Crichlow
Professor of Caribbean and Global Studies, African and African American Studies, and Sociology
Senior Research Fellow, Kenan Institute for Ethics
Duke University
Christina Davidson
Postdoctoral Fellow, Charles Warren Center
Harvard University
Zaire Z. Dinzey-Flores
Associate Professor, Departments of Sociology and Latino & Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Jessie D. Dixon-Montgomery
Associate Professor of Spanish, Department of World Languages, Literatures, and Cultures
Illinois Wesleyan University
Erica R. Edwards
Associate Professor of English
Presidential Term Chair in African American Literature
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Ashley D. Farmer
Assistant Professor, History and African & African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Denise Ferreira da Silva
Professor & Director, Social Justice Institute-GRSJ
University of British Columbia
Yomaira Figueroa
Assistant Professor, Departments of English and African American & African Studies
Michigan State University
P. Gabrielle Foreman
Founding Director, the Colored Conventions Program
Paterno Chair of Liberal Arts, Professor of English, African American Studies, and History
Penn State University
Marisa J. Fuentes
Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History
Presidential Term Chair in African American History
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Colette Gaiter
Professor, Department of Art & Design and Africana Studies (Joint Faculty)
University of Delaware
Mneesha Gellman
Associate Professor of Political Science
Director, Emerson Prison Initiative
Emerson College
Nigel Gibson
Associate Professor, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College
Kaiama Glover
Ann Whitney Olin Professor of French and Africana Studies
Director, Digital Humanities Center
Barnard College, Columbia University
Editor, sx archipelagos
Katerina González-Seligmann
Assistant Professor of Literature
Emerson College
Camilla A. Hawthorne
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology
University of California, Santa Cruz
Laura E. Helton
Assistant Professor of English and History
University of Delaware
Scholar-in-Residence, Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture (2019/20)
Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham
Chair, Department of History
Victor S. Thomas Professor of History and of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Roger House
Associate Professor in American Studies
Emerson College
Yasmiyn Irizarry, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Régine Michelle Jean-Charles
Associate Professor of French, Department of Romance Languages & Literatures
African & African Diaspora Studies Program
Boston College
Mónica Jiménez
Assistant Professor, Department of African and African Diaspora Studies
University of Texas at Austin
Miriam Jiménez-Román
Executive Director, Afrolatin@ Forum
Black Latinas Know Collective
Jessica Marie Johnson
Assistant Professor, Department of History
Johns Hopkins University
Sarah Jessica Johnson
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English
University of Chicago
Gaye Theresa Johnson
Associate Professor, Departments of Chicana and Chicano Studies and African American Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Tiffany Joseph
Associate Professor of Sociology and International Affairs
Northeastern University
Ford Foundation Senior Fellow
Helen Heran Jun
Associate Professor, Departments of English and African American Studies
University of Illinois, Chicago
Aaron Kamugisha
Senior Lecturer in Cultural Studies
University of the West Indies, Cave Hill Campus
Robin D. G. Kelley
Distinguished Professor and Gary B. Nash Endowed Chair in U.S. History
University of California, Los Angeles
Natalie Marie Léger
Assistant Professor of English
Chair of the English Honors Program
Queens College, CUNY
George Lipsitz
Professor of Black Studies and Sociology
University of California, Santa Barbara
Hilda Lloréns
Associate Professor of Anthropology
University of Rhode Island
Nancy López
Professor of Sociology
Director & Co-founder, Institute for the Study of “Race” & Social Justice
University of New Mexico
Coordinator, NM Statement Race, Gender, Class Data Policy Consortium
Kelly Lytle Hernandez
Professor of History, African American Studies, and Urban Planning
The Thomas E. Lifka Endowed Chair of History
Director, Ralph J. Bunche Center for African American Studies at UCLA
University of California, Los Angeles
Director, Million Dollar Hoods
Rosario M. de Swanson
Professor of Spanish, Latin American Literature & Gender Studies
Marlboro College
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Professor, Latino and Caribbean Studies and Comparative Literature
Director, Rutgers Advanced Institute for Critical Caribbean Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Yolanda Martínez San-Miguel
Professor and Chair, Department of Modern Languages and Literatures
Marta S. Weeks Chair in Latin American Studies
University of Miami
Brian Meeks
Professor and Chair, Africana Studies / Rites and Reason Theatre
Brown University
Shirley Moody-Turner
Associate Professor of English and African American Studies
Co-Director, Center for Black Digital Research
Founding Director, Cooper-Du Bois Mentoring Program
Penn State University
Khalil Gibran Muhammad
Professor of History, Race and Public Policy, Kennedy School of Government
Harvard University
Yasser Munif
Assistant Professor, Institute of Liberal Arts and Interdisciplinary Studies
Emerson College
Pedro Noguera
Distinguished Professor of Education
Faculty Director, Center for the Transformation of Schools
UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies
University of California, Los Angeles
Tavia Nyong’o
Professor, African American Studies; American Studies; Theater and Performance Studies
Yale University
Imani Owens
Assistant Professor of English
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Kaneesha Cherelle Parsard
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
Tina Post
Provost’s Postdoctoral Fellow, Department of English Language and Literature
University of Chicago
Rachel Afi Quinn
Assistant Professor, Comparative Cultural Studies and Women’s, Gender & Sexuality Studies
University of Houston
R. Radhakrishnan
Distinguished Professor of English, Comparative Literature and African American Studies
University of California, Irvine
Ana Ramos-Zayas
Professor, Departments of American Studies and Anthropology, and Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration
Yale University
Barbara Ransby
Distinguished Professor of Liberal Arts and Sciences, Departments of African American Studies, Gender and Women’s Studies and History
University of Illinois at Chicago
Petra Rivera-Rideau
Assistant Professor, American Studies Program
Wellesley College
Cindy Rodriguez
Senior Journalist-in-Residence
Emerson College
Ileana M. Rodríguez-Silva
Giovanni and Amne Costigan Endowed Professor in History
Associate Professor of Latin American and Caribbean History, Department of History
University of Washington
Alaí Santos-Reyes
Associate Professor, Department of Indigenous, Race, and Ethnic Studies
University of Oregon
Evie Shockley
Professor, Department of English
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Kimberly Eison Simmons
Associate Professor, Anthropology and African American Studies
Interim Director, Institute for African American Research
University of South Carolina, Columbia
Christen A. Smith
Director, Center for Women’s & Gender Studies
Associate Professor of African and African Diaspora Studies and of Anthropology
University of Texas at Austin
Maya Angela Smith
Associate Professor of French
University of Washington
Faith Smith
Associate Professor, African and African American Studies; English; Latin American and Latino Studies; Women’s Gender and Sexuality Studies
Brandeis University
Chris Taylor
Associate Professor, Department of English
University of Chicago
Silvio Torres-Saillant
Professor of English & Dean’s Professor of the Humanities
Syracuse University
Anwar Uhuru
Assistant Professor of English, African American Literature
Monmouth University
Gina Athena Ulysse
Professor of Anthropology
Wesleyan University
2020 Biennale of Sydney Artist
Melissa M. Valle
Assistant Professor, Department of Sociology and Anthropology, Department of African American and African Studies
Rutgers University, Newark
Wendy W. Walters
Professor, African American Literature & Culture, Writing, Literature, & Publishing Department
Emerson College
Calvin Warren
Assistant Professor, African American Studies
Emory University
Cornel West
Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy
Department of Philosophy
Harvard Divinity School
Department of African and African American Studies
Harvard University
Omaris Z. Zamora
Assistant Professor of AfroLatinx Studies, Department of Latino & Caribbean Studies and Department of Africana Studies
Rutgers University, New Brunswick
Cc:
Provost Alan M. Garber, Harvard University, alan_garber@harvard.edu
Dean Claudine Gay, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Harvard University, fasdean@fas.harvard.edu
Dean Robin Kelsey, Arts & Humanities Division, Harvard University, kelsey@fas.harvard.edu
Professor Mariano Siskind, Chair, Romance Languages and Literatures, siskind@fas.harvard.edu
Black Performance I: Subject and Method collects research that shows how performance can act as an optic and object of study. The authors’ diverse subjects reveal resonances of the past in performance in music and movement, poetry, media, art, museums, memory, and thought. The research in Black Performance II: Knowing and Being further demonstrates the ways performances in various genres contemplate and structure ways of knowing and ways of being as systems entangled in embodiments and critical interactivity. In this, women scholars identify performers’ diverse strategies for making meaning and remaking inherited knowledge. These scholars discover performance structures of Black feminist love in the work of various artists.
The performances reflect on new ways of being as much as the scholars who analyze them. Each performance also forges new ways of being that address how we understand, and perhaps feel, blackness, gender, transnational womanhood, community, sexuality, and history. The communities invoked develop common language and sensibility through aesthetics, speech, and writing. Several articles foreground the ways in which people work through ideas together in an enactment of community recognition. This occurs through relationships to form, through conversation, choreography, and writing. Melissa Blanco Borelli reveals Black transnational artists structure as radical presence through musical performance practices. Jasmine Elizabeth Johnson reveals dancers’ choreographic collaborative work founded on sharing spoken memories and stories as a process of “tenderness.” Shana L. Redmond experiments with collaborative and contrapuntal writing practices between Hansberry and Baldwin as negotiating a terrain of sound. Redmond explores the quotidian elements of sound as form—sound from the neighborhood as much as from music.
At times, the performers shape ideas with their audiences as interlocutor. In Aleksandra Szaniawska’s essay, Janelle Monae narrates queer possibilities via performances that find greater resonance before live and constructed audiences. In Rashida Braggs’s piece, our author as performer, addresses the nature of audiences’ hearing of history. Braggs brings performative ontology to the page to play with text as a conduit between thought, knowledge-making, performance, blackness, the body, music, and history. She recounts a performance she created as an investigation of Sidney Bechet’s performance of Gershwin’s “Summertime,” itself a layered enactment of historical consciousness. Braggs’s endeavor reflects the investigative and pedagogical directions of research as embodied practice.
Artist Delita Martin’s cover to this issue, “If Spirits Danced” poses a possibility echoed by our authors. With a quotidian boldness, the direct gaze of a Black girl in blue calmly engages and challenges. She ventures a hypothesis of lively possibility in her provocative titular “if” alongside an embedded invitation to do so, to dance in spirit and gesture.
For a limited time, read the introduction by guest editor Stephanie Batiste, and “Of Treads and Thunder: The Insurgent Listening of Lorraine Hansberry and James Baldwin” by Shana L. Redmond, for free.
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Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…
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This first of a two-part Special Issue on Black Performance samples diverse subjects and methodologies, ranging from theater and dance to art installation, music, literature, film, digital images, and social interaction. Edited by Stephanie Leigh Batiste, this issue positions Black performance as a site for solidifying the prescience and critical sharpness of Black creativity in shaping knowledge and sensibilities. In the ways that the contributors featured study performance, we see the past brought to bear to redefine what we know about history and Black histories in particular. In each essay, the author’s mode of analysis asks us to imagine how our present moment is or might be remade by the performances studied and by their performers’ exhortations towards proliferating ways of understanding blackness.
Ananya Jahanara Kabir and Francesca Negro introduce a lost archival folder that details a radical play written in Portuguese. This essay substantiates a hemispheric history of choreographic narrative in the lives of iconic dancers — Brazilian Solano Trinidade and American Alvin Ailey.
Sasha Ann Panaram analyzes poetry and post-modern performance in M. NourbeSe Philip’s textual and performative re-memory of the middle passage’s Zong massacre. The absented bodies of enslaved, murdered Africans become memorialized in writing, breath, and embodied art installation.
Christina Knight evaluates Black performances’ visual resonances in Arthur Jafa’s jazz-inflected film strategies in Love is the Message The Message is Death. She considers viewership, visual representation, and Black social performance in historically and digitally viral images.
Isaiah Matthew Wooden riffs on the historical sampling of memory in the performance practices of artist Derrick Adams’ ostensibly fine arts repertoire. Looping the terms repertoire, representing, representation, repetition (and, perhaps, reputation) in the hip hop idea of “reppin’,” Wooden’s deejay format spins beats of memory through Adams remixing of history.
DJ Lynée Denise presents a listener’s archeology of the song “Rock Steady” to sound our way through a musical legacy of soul. Denise moves in unruly genealogies against the grief of our loss of Aretha Franklin, a sonic shaper of Black feeling.
Redeployments of Black performances resound visually and sonically in these performers’ and scholars’ recombination of memory, feeling, and time. Artist Delita Martin’s cover “New Beginnings” places a mask, perhaps of ritual or theatrical mediation, in the company of a non-linear exchange of intergenerational looking and encounter. Our scholars follow suit. Their approaches mix a critical engagement with the past with systems of knowing and feeling blackness in creative critical conversations with the artists.
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For a limited time, the introduction and DJ Lynée Denise’s “The Afterlife of Aretha Franklin’s “Rock Steady:” A Case Study in DJ Scholarship” are free to download and read. Keep an eye out for our upcoming final issue for 2019, Black Performance 2.
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Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…
The following is the projected content for our 2021 volume…
This special issue contributes to studies of Black masculinities by centering the matter of vulnerability. It expands concerns about vulnerability in black masculinities studies from more spectacular forms of violence to consider the interior lives of Black masculine subjects and more quotidian and privatized forms of violence and violation. The essays explore a range of performances and expressions—(non)masculinity, feminine-aligned masculinity, mama’s boys, interspecies imaginings, and bereavement—to ask how Black masculinities are fashioned in an anti-Black, anti-queer, and gender-normative world. Through historical and contemporary examples that engage the fields of visual culture, animal, literary, performance, Black feminist, and Black queer studies, these contributions consider how masculinity is made or unmade by blackness and through the ubiquitous threat of gendered forms of anti-Black violence.
The essays explore a range of topics: proslavery and abolitionist discourse as a way to understand Black masculine vulnerability without likening it to feminization; poetic and filmic representations of black male life that radically refigure the animalization of Black people as a site of liberatory possibility; the association between Black masculinity and the Black maternal; vulnerability and intimacy in times and spaces of bereavement; and queer contingency—simultaneous freedom and risk that emerge from Black male gender subversion. Together, these contributions expose histories of anti-Black, misogynist, and homophobic violence, while imagining alternative modes of masculinity, blackness, and (post)human agency and subjectivity.
The essays in this volume are appropriate for specialists and graduate students, as well as the general public. The special issue will be of interest those engaged in the study of Black masculinities in the wake of Black feminist, queer studies, and trans studies and politics. It will be useful to individuals and groups interested in thinking critically about Black masculinities in the era of #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo movements. We also hope the essays in this collection will reinvigorate the field of Black masculinities studies, and push both public and scholarly discourse about Black masculinities beyond simple dichotomies of toxic masculinity or Black male victimization.
– Darius Bost, La Marr Jurelle Bruce, and Brandon J. Manning
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For a limited time, the introduction and “Uncertain Freedom: RuPaul, Sylvester, and Black Queer Contingency” by GerShun Avilez are free to download and read.
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Upcoming 2019 issues include…
Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…
The culinary history of America has erased the true contribution of African Americans to American cuisine in every phase of its development, and continues to pigeonhole African American cuisine in the category of soul food, used as a type of cultural and culinary shackle. Moreover, there are numerous African American women and men who have served in the capacity of chefs and cooks in America’s kitchens and against all odds made indelible marks on the cuisine of this country.
One such narrative surrounds the resort town of Saratoga Springs, New York, home to African American residents who were largely hotel service people in the early to mid 1800s, working in the capacity of chefs, cooks, waiters, and maids. Black musicians were employed at the hotels as well. While serenaded by Francis (Frank) Johnson’s very own music compositions at Congress Hall Hotel and United States Hotel in Saratoga Springs, you could experience wonderful dining treasures supplied by Mrs. Anne Northup. She and her husband Solomon Northup, who became a familiar name in African American history, were year round residents and both worked at the United States Hotel, which opened in 1824.
Having garnered a reputation as an outstanding cook, Anne Northup had been hired to take charge of the “culinary department” at Sherrill’s Coffee House in Sandy Hill, twenty miles away. In the latter part of March, 1841, on one of her days there, her husband Solomon was approached on the street by two slave dealers pretending to be interested in hiring him as a violinist to play for a circus. Solomon Northup, a free African, was drugged, kidnapped, and sold into slavery – a common occurrence in America. His riveting narrative, Twelve Years A Slave, published in 1853, chronicles his life and some of the lives of Africans with whom he suffered, on plantations in Louisiana. After Mr. Northup’s rescue, he returned to his family at Glen Falls, in Warren County, where his wife was in charge of the kitchen at the Carpenter’s Hotel.
For many diners–including a number of senators, governors, wealthy financiers, and presidents–Saratoga had its legendary waiters and chefs. George Crum, the African/Native American chef at Cary Moon’s lake house, was particularly celebrated for his fish dinners. His most famous creation came into being when he responded to a customer complaint that the fried potatoes served were cut too thick. Crum prepared some new ones by shaving some potatoes paper thin and dropping them in hot oil. Salting them first, he sent them out to the customer never expecting to receive approval. The customer loved them. Crum’s “Saratoga chips,” i.e., potato chips, received rave reviews and were soon on menus throughout the country. The man who invented the potato chip and launched a multi-billion dollar snack business died on July 22, 1914, and was said to have left behind a small fortune.
If you could afford to have your meals professionally prepared, New York City was the place to eat. Black caterers were numerous in New York, and their services have a long history. According to Booker T. Washington, catering in New York City began with Black women. Between 1780 and 1820 Cornelia Gomez, great-grandmother of Dr. P. W. Ray of New York, was among the most recognized of Black women caterers. She catered for the most prominent families in the city and was succeeded by “Aunt” Katie Ferguson, who stayed in business until about 1820. Washington states that catering had been almost totally in Black hands, and that Black men “[took] it up where the women left it.”
Some early to mid-nineteenth century Blacks in Brooklyn responded to their exclusion from the labor force, or their status as “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” by selling oysters and crabs about town on Sundays. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century Brooklyn’s small group of Black businessmen, whose businesses centered on food service included William Pope, owner of the Square Café, and John Connor, who operated the elite Royal Café, which only a few white cafés could surpass in beauty or in up-to-date service. In addition, Professor B. H. Hawkins owned the New National Hotel and Restaurant.
Cato’s Tavern (or Roadhouse), in New York City, was an early version of a sports bar. Cato’s clientele included numerous horse race fans. Situated midway along the Harlem speedway, on Post Road at what is now 59th Street and 2nd Avenue, this African American barkeeper served “unadulterated brandy,” Cuban cigars (shipped direct), and a woodcock and toast for breakfast.
Whether in the occupation of bartender, cook, caterer, or chef, Blacks in New York dominated most of these positions for generations and were uncontested in their quality of service. Nor was there dispute that the best food that could be procured in New York City was that furnished by “coloured” caterers. During the decades preceding the Civil War, Thomas Jackson, who serviced the most exclusive parties and fashionable weddings, and Henry Scott, who launched one of the most successful pickling establishments in New York, helped to prove the point. Thomas Jackson was considered the arbiter of all things gustatory in New York in his day. Scott and Company, by 1839, was open for business and warehoused a large stock of, among other items, pickles, preserves, and jellies that were in constant demand.
While Cato established himself as the famous purveyor of cocktails and woodcock for breakfast, and the sale of oysters and crabs became the livelihood of Brooklyn’s “outcasts and indigent sons of Africa,” over six million dollars worth of oysters were sold in New York each year by 1850. The 1866 Guide to New York City reports, “The consumption of oysters in New York is immense; it having been computed that the daily consumption is valued at $15,000, and that some 1,500 boats are constantly engaged to obtain the supply for this city alone.”
A settlement of free Black folks living in the area of Staten Island known as Sandy Ground, also referred to as “Little Africa,” and called this country’s oldest existing community of free blacks in the nineteenth century, was a supplier of oysters for New Yorkers. Most of the residents of Sandy Ground were in the oyster business and first occupied the area in the 1830s and 1840s and were known for their high quality of oysters.
Oystering as a trade was all but finished in Sandy Ground by 1916 due to industrial pollution from New Jersey, the town’s inability to compete with corporate-run agriculture and aquaculture, and ultimately, competition with whites. Black residents sought other occupations, such as wrought iron mastery, midwifery, well-digging, and some grew crops for self-consumption and sale, such as strawberries, sweet potatoes, melons, and tomatoes.
The nineteenth century demand for oysters had been a tremendous one and made a fortune for some in the business. In the early 1800s Boston Crummell, father of future African American intellectual leader, Alexander Crummell, was one of many who met the demand, as he was a New York caterer and oysterman who harvested and sold the bivalves.
In the 1830s and 1840s, for the tradesmen and businessmen of the district, oyster cellars provided breakfast, lunch, and dinner. A “Canal Street Plan” was offered, which was an all-you-can-eat for six cents setup. It was said that if the establishment thought that you were getting too much for the money, a bad oyster would turn up to curb a glutton’s appetite. For the proprietor, the bigger the oyster the more servings it would provide. Some oysters could be cut into three or four pieces, depending on size. A plain array of condiments accompanied raw oysters: lemon juice, vinegar, oil, salt, pepper, and mustard. Another fifteen cents added to your bill would purchase a bowl of stew, normally served for dinner, containing at least three dozen oysters, together with a generous slab of bread and butter, salad, and a relish or two.
Now, the menus at most cellars were limited to raw, fried, or stewed oysters. Well, there were cellars, and then there were cellars. Thomas Downing’s oyster cellar on Broad Street was said to be the very model of comfort and prosperity with its mirrored arcades, damask curtains, fine carpet, and chandelier. Oysters were considered an epicurean delight and Downing made them his specialty. His menu established and sealed his reputation by offering unusually elaborate dishes, such as scalloped oysters, oyster pie, fish with oyster sauce, and an especially delectable poached turkey stuffed with oysters. His award winning pickled oysters, together with his boned and jellied turkeys, were particularly popular during the holidays.
Thomas Downing’s restaurant, which occupied the basements of two small buildings, was in the financial and shipping section of the city. There were also three other Black owned eating houses in this same district: Henry Johnson’s, Lawrence Chloe’s, and Stephen Simmons’s. But it was Thomas Downing, George T. Downing’s father, who became and remained the most famous African American caterer and restaurateur in New York between 1830 and 1860.
Thomas Downing’s Oyster Bar, located at 3, 5, and 7 Broad Street at the corner of Wall Street, became famous as one of the best eating establishments in New York. Not only was Downing’s the only house to attract the aristocracy as well as ladies in the company of their husbands or chaperones, it was also the favorite haunt of a regular crowd of distinguished businessmen from the Merchants’ Exchange, nearby banks and custom houses, as well as leading politicians of the day and others who believed in the marked superiority of “colored” cooks.
Downing shipped raw, fried, and pickled oysters to the West Indies and to Europe. In 1847 Downing prepared and shipped a barrel of very lovely pickled oysters to Queen Victoria. The Queen responded to his gift by asking Joseph Comstock to deliver to Mr. Downing a letter accompanied by a gold chronometer watch engraved with her initials.
The American culinary narrative continues to assert that this country’s cooking and cuisine were founded by Americans of European ancestry and are rooted in so-called Western civilization. In doing so it fails to acknowledge the African American contribution, and thereby adheres to the theory of white supremacy. The roles of Downing, Crum, and many other “sons and daughters of Africa” are mere microcosms of the Black cook’s rightful place in the nation’s history.
Diane M. Spivey, author of The Peppers, Cracklings, and Knots of Wool Cookbook: The Global Migration of African Cuisine, has also written articles for the Encyclopedia of African-American Culture and History and Scribner’s Encyclopedia of World Food and Culture, among others. Born and reared in Chicago, she resides with her family in Palmetto Bay, Florida.
Cover art by Xavier Roache
This issue on Black Queer and Trans* Aesthetics is aimed at collecting avant-garde writing from Black queer trans scholars on the aesthetics of Black everyday life, Black art, and Black critical thought. The essays in this special collection are all focused on 20th and 21st century US Black art, frameworks, and aesthetics. The essay topics include archives of Black femme gender, unfinished music demos as sites of Black queerness, the relationship between bafflement and Blackqueer futurity in the work of Ayana Jackson, ethnographic work on Black queer kinship in San Francisco, and a review essay focused on the living archive of Lyle Ashton Harris.
The essays range in their theoretical and linguistic denseness, but all strive for accessibility to a general public in order to build an approachable body of work for, by, and about Black queer trans people across the Black diaspora. These stories of Black queer trans lives and aesthetic work are much-needed additions to the growing body and long history of Black queer trans artists, activists, lovers, scholars, thinkers, and organizers: our bodies, flesh, thoughts, and contributions matter in a world spinning on the axes of anti-blackness, transmisogyny, trans-antagonism, misogynynoir, and queerphobia.
These essays are appropriate for high school, college, and graduate students, as well as the general public interested in the intersection between blackness, queerness, transness, and aesthetic forms. We invite you to hold in-person salons, conversations, social media debates, and invite any of the writers or guest editors to speak with you and your community about the content of this issue.
– Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls
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For a limited time, the introduction by Elliott H. Powell and Shanté Paradigm Smalls and “Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship” by Savannah Shange are free to download and read.
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Upcoming 2019 issues include…
Our 2020 volume, which is also our 50th anniversary volume, is slated to include…
We, the undersigned, express our solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Assistant Professor of Classics at Princeton University, who was recently the target of a racist verbal attack during the conference of the Society for Classical Studies in San Diego. Born in the Dominican Republic, Professor Padilla Peralta is the author of Undocumented: A Dominican Boy’s Odyssey from a Homeless Shelter to the Ivy League.
During one of the “Future of the Classics” panel, Mary Frances William, a white scholar, stated that professor Padilla Peralta got his job because he is “black,” according to a report by Inside Higher Ed. In addition to those vitriolic remarks, the conference “was quite the showcase for the enforcement actions of white supremacy,”according to a post by Padilla Peralta in Medium, which recounts another racist incident endured by two students of color at the annual event this year held at the Marriot hotel:
The day before the panel, Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn, co-founders of The Sportula and recipients of a WCC award at the annual meeting, were racially profiled by hotel security — possibly at the request of other conference-goers who were unsettled by the presence of brown bodies.
As students, scholars and activists, we condemn white supremacy and racism and extend our solidarity to both Djesika Bel Watson and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn.
These instances of racist and discriminatory practices in academic spaces are not new. Historically, white supremacists have dominated the Classics field in academia, constructing over time the myth of a so-called civilized and homogeneous ancient Europe by erasing the contributions of Africans, African-descended people, and non-white Europeans.
We call on writers, artists, scholars, scholarly organizations, students, and progressive organizations to express solidarity with Dan-el Padilla Peralta, Djesika Bel Watson, and Stefani Echeverría-Fenn and mobilize against racism in all its forms. Let us turn our discontent into collective action. Our message: Black and Brown academic work matters.
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Alexander Gil Fuentes, Digital
Scholarship Librarian, Columbia University, USA
Amarilys Estrella, PhD Candidate, Anthropology New York University, USA
Amaury Rodriguez, Independent Scholar, USA
Amy M. King, Associate Professor of English, Director of Graduate Studies, St. John’s University, USA
Ana Liberato, Associate Professor of Sociology, University of Kentucky, USA
Anthony Stevens-Acevedo, Historian, Higher Education Assistant (ret.), CUNY, USA
Anwar Uhuru, Assistant Professor of English, Harris Stowe State University, USA
April Yoder, Assistant Professor, History & Global Studies, University of New Haven, USA
Arelis M. Figueroa, Master of Divinity, USA
Cornel West, Professor of the Practice of Public Philosophy, Harvard Divinity School, USA
Daniel Huttinot, Activist and Editor, USA
David Marriott, Professor, History of Consciousness, University of California, Santa Cruz, USA
DeLisa Brown-Guc, Graduate Student, The Open University, UK
Denise Paiewonsky, Associate Professor, Instituto Tecnológico de Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic
Dohra Ahmad, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA
Edwin Rosario Mazara, Host of La Sala and Activist, USA
Elena Machado Sáez, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA
Elizabeth Manley, Associate Professor of History, Xavier University, USA
Euclides C. Nuel, Activist and Journalist, Dominican Republic
Emmanuel Espinal, Esendom magazine, USA
Erik S. McDuffie, Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies and History, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA
Gabriel Brownstein, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA
Ginetta Candelario, Professor of Sociology, Smith College, USA
Ivette Romero, Professor, Marist College, USA
Jennifer M. Rodríguez, PhD Candidate in the Spanish and Portuguese Department. Princeton University, USA
John Keene, Professor and Chair of African American and African Studies, Professor of English, Rutgers University, USA
Jomaira Salas Pujols, Graduate Student, Rutgers University, USA
Jordan Rogers, PhD Student, University of Miami, USA
Jossiana Arroyo, Professor, Department of Spanish & Portuguese, Department of African & African Diaspora Studies, University of Texas, Austin, USA
Juan J. Ponce-Vázquez, Assistant Professor, University of Alabama, USA
Jubi Arriola-Headley, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA
Kathleen Lubey,Associate Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA
Laura Bass, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA
Laura Chrisman, Professor, University of Washington, USA
Laurie Lambert, Assistant Professor, Fordham University, USA
Lawrence La Fountain-Stokes, Associate Professor, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, USA
Lico Enrique Agustin, Poet and Educator, Dominican Republic
Louis Chude-Sokei, Professor of English, Chair and Director of African American Studies Program, Editor-in-Chief of The Black Scholar, Boston University, USA
Mark Anthony Neal, James B. Duke Professor and Chair of African & African American Studies, Professor of English, Duke University, USA
Melissa Mowry, Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA
Michael D. Yates, Editorial Director of Monthly Review Press, Professor Emeritus, University of Pittsburgh-Johnstown, USA
Michèle Voltaire Marcelin, Artist, USA
Miguel Vasquez, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA
Mildred D Mata, B.A. in Social Work, Dominican Republic
Natalie P. Byfield, Associate Professor, St. John’s University, USA
Nelson Ricart-Guerrero, Poet, France
Nelson Santana, Editor, Esendom Magazine, USA
Preston Stone, PhD Student, English, University of Miami, USA
Raj Chetty, Assistant Professor of English, St. John’s University, USA
Ramón A. Victoriano-Martínez (Arturo), Sessional Lecturer, University of Toronto, Mississauga, Canada
Raphael Dalleo, Professor of English, Bucknell University, USA
Raquel Virginia Cabrera, Writer, USA
Robert (Bobby) Rivera, Assistant Professor of Theology, St. John’s University, USA
Robert Forman, Professor of English and Classics, St. John’s University, USA
Robin Wellington, Associate Professor of Psychology, St. John’s University, USA
Sandy Placido, Assistant Professor of History, CUNY-Queens College, USA
Shannon Hanks-Mackey, Managing Editor, The Black Scholar, Occupied dxʷdəwʔabš (Duwamish) land
Sharon Marshall, Associate Professor, First Year Writing Coordinator, St. John’s University, USA
Sheridan Wigginton, Professor of Spanish and Latin American Studies, California Lutheran University, USA
Sophia Blea Nuñez, Postgraduate Research Associate, Department of Spanish and Portuguese, Princeton University, USA
Sophie Maríñez, Academic, USA
Steve Newman, Associate Professor of English, Temple University, USA
Sydney Hutchinson, Associate Professor of Ethnomusicology, Syracuse University, USA/Germany
Tarika Sankar, Graduate Student, University of Miami, USA
Tony Savino, Photographer, USA
Victor Arcturus Estrella, Artist, Dominican Republic
Wendy D. Roth, Associate Professor of Sociology , University of British Columbia, Canada
William García Medina, PhD Student, University of Kansas, USA
Yomaira C. Figueroa, Assistant Professor of English, Michigan State University, USAZaida Corniel, PhD, Lecturer, Stony Brook University, USA
