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As a part of the Diaspora Solidarities Lab, TEA (directed by Bruno and Johnson) is concerned with Black Puerto Rican data and those impacted by it. The projects, as discussed later in this paper, deal with and mitigate the limitations of diasporic archives while also riding the tension of the methodology of curating digital data sets and archives. Together, as two Black Puerto Rican women, we engage the practices Black Puerto Ricans, particularly Black femmes and other queer-identified Black Puerto Ricans on the island and in the diaspora, have used to forge a self-conscious, Black and African-descended (Afrodescendiente) community. Black Puerto Ricans have fought against the systematic erasure of Blackness from Puerto Rico's archive, as well as against the erasure of histories of Puerto Rican slavery from mainstream Puerto Rican, US, and even Caribbean popular memory. This paper explores the troubling and troubled water that spills forth when computational humanities meets the edges of empire and when Black diasporic life is centered in data analysis. What does it mean to confront people in data as we continue to lean into it? And where can that confrontation lead us and leave us? This paper is an exercise and calls to reexamine the digital with a Black digital-humanist lens to grapple with individuals and communities who might appear as binary code or, in the archive, as equations, parts, or marks. How can we look beyond the restraints we sometimes put on our data and ourselves and allow ourselves to be called into deeper intimacy with our materials? Black feminists have given us a choreography to build from if we are brave enough to fall into step with them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While small, midwestern towns across the United States have become the center of the battle against Critical Race Theory and identity politics in education over the past several years, one small town in Michigan became the launching pad for a grassroots gender-consciousness program grounded firmly in the experiences of young Black women. The Gender Consciousness Project (GCP) has flourished into a program co-facilitated by previous participants across several schools in the metro Detroit area, all while national- and state-level discourse became increasingly hostile towards any material or theoretical support of Black women's lives. In this paper, we—the three pilot participants of GCP and one co-facilitator—return to the recordings of the first iteration of GCP to examine how exactly a small-town consciousness-raising project took root amidst these circumstances. We explore how the project cultivated, and how its primary facilitator and founder conceptualized, a Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology which centered the agency and capacity for consciousness of young Black women, or Black girls, specifically. Through this analysis, we offer that one such Black feminist consciousness-raising methodology is to spark small revolutions through the everyday possibilities for resistance and refusal of cooptation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the United States, feminists within mainstream rape crisis advocacy have been working to address rape by advocating to end the DNA backlog and therefore, the expansion of DNA databases, locally and nationally. Despite criticisms from radical abolition feminists for practicing carceral feminism that incarcerates more Black and Brown people, rape crisis advocates have been continuing their entanglements with criminal justice, fully recognizing the contradictory ends of such investments. In this paper, I explore their continued carceral investments, through underlying logics and justifications based in science and law and the impacts of doing so, as it relates to the problem of racialized policing. Relying on Black feminist epistemologies and interdisciplinary methodologies, my analysis draws upon archived documents, reports, legislations, and ethnographically driven interviews and observations with and amongst state and non-state actors, who are stakeholders in DNA biosurveillance. I argue that carceral feminists continue their carceral investments through two justifications—materiality and recidivism—that results in intensification of policing in communities of color by expanding genome based racialized biosurveillance. The implications of their justifications further harm survivors of violence, and produce a multifaceted recidivism, that is unbounded spacio-temporally, deepening and furthering state reach within communities of color in perpetuity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawn from the life experiences of Adrienne Kennedy and her son Adam P. Kennedy, the Alexander plays represent the central character, Suzanne Alexander, as a prolific writer often struggling to breathe in the suffocating, epistemic air of narrative. A similar trope finds notable resonance in Afropessimist theories. As such, this analysis attends to the Alexander plays and three overlapping premises: first, that Afropessimism and its conjoined critique from Black feminists reveal significant understandings as narrative theory; second, that the epistemological questions raised by Afropessimism in regard to narrativity reverberate across the Alexander pieces; and last, that the Alexander stories challenge the racializing force of narrative, but with questions as to the fundamental efficacy of such efforts. These premises then span a three-part study. The first part concentrates on She Talks to Beethoven, The Film Club , and The Dramatic Circle , all of which deal with Kennedy's travels to/from Ghana and the role of narrative in the conscription of Black subjecthood to social death. Attention then goes to The Ohio State Murders , where the violent drama of emplotment that would seem to enact a constant state of narrative/loss for Black subjects is undercut by a nondramatic, academic reading. Finally, focus turns to Sleep Deprivation Chamber along with two other Alexander pieces, Letter to My Students on My Sixty-first Birthday by Suzanne Alexander and Motherhood 2000 —all emanating from Adam Kennedy's experience of being racially profiled. Here, narrative's condition of non-altering negation receives scrutiny. The question of "what can be done" then circles back to how Black writers working through and against narrative employ various discursive strategies to envision possibilities of social justice that should be, but may never be, realized. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As US universities and colleges increasingly identify with neoliberal discourses of students as human capital and higher education as a direct investment in earning potential, the liberal arts and humanistic fields of study are valued only for their capacity to train students in "multicultural communication." The minimization of their intellectual project marks these fields as susceptible to terminal budget cuts, a long-standing trend intensified by the COVID-19 pandemic. Some humanists have responded to this devaluation by defending the humanities as sites that produce knowledge for knowledge's sake. Such reflections defend the older venerable humanistic traditions often at the expense of newer and lesser humanities, namely, Black studies and feminist studies. In a recent Forbes article, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni argues that core language and humanities courses (e.g. writing, US history) should be protected, but "expensive fluff" courses should be eliminated as a cost-cutting measure. This "fluff" in fact represents the only significant epistemic challenge to the unreflective valuation of the Enlightenment project that birthed both scientific and humanistic traditions of study. This article analyzes recent COVID-related medical research to demonstrate how Black and feminist studies reject the assumptions of the Western canon in both humanities and STEM courses. Investing in these fields does not merely invest in students' communication skills, but in their ability to critically engage their home disciplines, fields of work, and political systems. Rather than defunding the interdisciplines, we urge institutions to model undergraduate studies more broadly in line with these fields. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses journalistic and literary aspects of black internationalism and African American feminism. The column "The Looking Glass" in the periodical "The Crisis: A Journal of the Darker Races" by editor Jessie Fauset is addressed, as is the column "Our Women and What They Think" by writer Amy Jacques Garvey in the periodical "The Negro World." The publication of "Negro World" by the organization United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) is noted, along with the attention of black internationalists to labor migrations.

Tarana Burke, a Black cis woman who grew up in the Bronx, New York, developed the politics of saying "me too" while working to address the sexual violence that Black girls and women experience in their families and larger Black community. A crucial question to ask, then, is how the #MeToo global social media manifestation of Burke's campaign remains faithful to the specific Black feminist politics of intersectionality and collectivist self-understandings that affirm anti-institutional community-based strategies for ending sexual violence. As a result, the face and politics of the now viral #MeToo social media campaign has tended toward bourgeois, Western and white cisgender women and, correspondingly, struggled to sustain the Black feminist politics of Burke's local "me too" activism ([31], 200). [Extracted from the article]

This article analyzes the discourses of the care crisis and its implications for how we understand the practices of care. Contemporary efforts to revalue "care" in some activist and scholarly circles mark a shift away from Fordist demands of workers' rights simply because one works to a neoliberal model of justifying rights because of a worker's emotional investment in their labor. The care discourse premises the collective social good on ensuring that the more privileged are well cared for while making the needs of the less privileged contingent on the well-being of the better off. This article argues that a Black feminist analysis and the language of social reproduction are better frameworks for understanding the labor of care in the context of neoliberal social and economic relations. I draw on my research on domestic worker activists in the 1970s who resisted characterizations of their work as care or love, terms they associated with the framework of "one of the family," which was a basis for underpayment and exploitation. Instead, they demanded equal labor rights and insisted that their work be treated the same as all other forms of labor. I conclude by pointing to models of collective care, justice healing, and radical care as one possible way forward. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Broken windows policing is traditionally understood as a tactic of governing public space, but in this essay, we show how this mode of policing also constitutes a war on domestic space. We take up Joy James's call to investigate how the domestic of domestic warfare necessitates an understanding of the home and household, and we ask how the state leverages broken windows–style policing to govern the home. Drawing from three different cases in Los Angeles County—gang injunctions, post-release supervision, and housing vouchers—we use ethnographic data, interviews, and court filings to show how the state treats the homes of people of color as broken sites of disorder. We contend that it is the state that engages in homebreaking, not the residents. Contextualized within Black feminist scholarship, we identify home-breaking as the state's attempt to break the home as a site of social reproduction and refuge from oppression, one of many state practices that fracture families of color and their homes, and we identify and examine two such stages of homebreaking: spying —surveillance of the home in ways that mark everyday behaviors and conditions as disordered and punishable; and raiding —punitive state intrusion that forces changes on the home or leads to punishment for perceived disorder. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Based on a roundtable discussion convened at the 2017 National Women's Studies Association (NWSA) annual conference, "Forty Years After Combahee," this discussion addresses the fraught relationship between Black feminist thought and doctoral training in gender, women's, and feminist studies (GWFS). While intersectionality is nearly ubiquitously claimed as central to training in GWFS PhD programs, its institutionalization can serve to defang and dehistoricize the centrality of Black feminisms and womanisms, as well as marginalize, exclude, and/or fetishize Black feminists training and teaching in such programs. Participants critically examine the ongoing realities of a white-centric canon, the disingenuous and racialized division of academia and community activism, struggles for Black-affirming spaces, anti-Black peer microaggressions, white fragility, and lack of mentorship, isolation, and "pushout." The authors reflect on their experiences transitioning from historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) and non-HBCU undergraduate programs to GWFS PhD programs and post-PhD faculty life; the importance of mentorship and community-building; Black intellectual and embodied navigations of institutional structures under white supremacy; racialized affective labor; and the place of GWFS PhD training in the futures of Black feminist thought and field (re)formation. The resulting written collaboration serves as part wake-up call, part warning, and part "truth telling" about the realities of being a Black woman intellectual navigating GWFS PhD training and post-PhD faculty life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars working with Black feminism in interdisciplinary contexts. We reflect on our own interactions with two Black feminist "classics" Conditions V: The Black Women's Issue (1979), co-edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by Barbara Smith, and consider the challenges of teaching Black feminism in the classroom. We discuss both our experiences as education professionals working within and against hostile institutions, and our experiences in the classroom. We explore the dynamics of teaching Black feminist theorizing in an increasingly financialized and securitized environment, where our students' desires for economic security index a worsening precarity they share with us. In the face of these desires for security, we explore what of the Black feminist tradition resists any reduction to the brutalizing logics of racial capitalism. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay explores the affects that circulate in and around libraries from a perspective informed by feminist cultural studies and Black feminist theory. I situate the library as an institution devoted to the cultivation of sentiment and the creation of virtual publics. Though flush with the promises of freedom and equality, this legacy remains fraught with contradiction: for those promises are implicated in the oppressive structures of capitalism and patriarchal white supremacy. And new rationalizations of old forms of state-sanctioned violence and neglect, though targeted specifically at the most vulnerable, constitute an existential threat to us all. Yet the proper subject of such promises—the liberal subject of racialized and gendered privilege—has failed, again and again, to imagine how the world might turn out otherwise than this. In the hopes of practicing forms of accountability to the wisdom of others, I situate myself, as a beneficiary of structural oppression, vis-a-vis the melancholy that troubles the profession of liberal (or library) sentiments with what haunts the present and threatens the future. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This essay draws methods from black feminist geography and black girlhood studies to examine the scrapbook archive of Philippa Schuyler, the black pianist and composer known in the 1930s as the "Harlem Prodigy." Philippa's parents, George Schuyler and Josephine Schuyler, collected exhaustive data on Philippa's development, creating an archive that has supported depictions of he Schuylers as proponents of the eugenic theory of "hybrid vigor," and of Philippa as their experiment. Arguing that the scrapbook archive reflects their contradictory rather than straightforward engagement with eugenics, this essay reads against the biographical vector and eugenic explanation the scrapbooks readily supply. Placing the scrapbooks beside George Schuyler's novel Black No More (1931), this essay highlights the Schuylers' shared speculative projects, but argues that Philippa intervened in the future her parents plotted for her. Interpreting Philippa's sonic, poetic, and haptic contributions as anarrangements of the scrapbooks' form and purpose, this essay proposes that Philippa's practices of narrative subversion and self-invention unsettle the scrapbooks and open her life for renewed interpretation and alternative conclusions. Bringing theories of black feminist geography, black radical aesthetics, and black girlhood studies to her archive, this essay centers Philippa Schuyler as the scrapbooks' alternative cartographer. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Baby Suggs's sermon in the clearing to formerly enslaved Black folx offers readers an important anecdote about living in the afterlife of white supremacy (Hartman, 2007; Sharpe, 2016). Baby Suggs seemed to understand that the priority for survival and emancipation was loving one's flesh in a world where "yonder they do not love your flesh." Morrison's (1987) careful and deliberate use of "flesh" denotes what Spillers (1987) wrote about as a self before captivity. Morrison's reminder suggests that even if the body is free, those formerly enslaved must wrestle with the unconscious, internalized seeds of captivity supplanted as psychic trauma (Oliver, 2004). Higher education contexts, as extensions of white supremacy, are rooted in colonization (Wilder, 2013). On this premise, daily, Black students are contending with the afterlife of coloniality (Maldonado-Torres, 2007) externally and internally. Building on Baby Suggs's plea, I was particularly interested in how Black students "love [their] flesh." I explored the potentialities of Black literary works to provoke onto-epistemological development and intervene on colonizing scripts in the student development theoretical canon and in the lives of Black folx. I took up this work by conducting a Black feminist analysis (Christian, 1988; Smith, 1979) of one student's exposure to Black literary works (Christian, 1988; Gordon, 1997) and the meaning made from that experience toward a praxis of self-love (Baszile, 2018). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Through a study exploring the role of spirituality in the lives of Black women pursuing engineering doctorates, this article provides a reimagining of researcher/participant relationships in qualitative research and highlights new possibilities in cultivating research relationships that are both humanizing and healing. This reimagining is guided by two frameworks. The first is Black feminist thought enunciated by Collins (1990/2000) to affirm Black women's knowledge claims through lived experience, the centrality of dialogue, and the ethics of personal accountability and care. The second is endarkened feminist epistemology's methodology of surrender (Dillard, 2006), which embraces love, compassion, reciprocity, and ritual. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]