My “Gender, Race and Urban Space” course moves this week to postwar Greenwich Village and the experiences of writer Hettie Jones, former wife of poet-activist Amiri Baraka. Her movements away from her suburban Queens home to one of the centers for creative output and radical politics after World War II pose tensions with those of… Continue reading how she became hettie jones
How long have I studied this map and other things including postcards to better see Zora Neale Hurston’s days in Honduras? Her visit to Honduras in 1947 through 1948 and the time she spent in Miami in 1950 were part of the beginning of her darkest years. How do I find meaning in how she… Continue reading won the newberry fellowship
Another visit to Bryce Hospital, a historic building on the University of Alabama’s campus, went well. That is until the end. I had a feeling we might get locked in now that the construction crews are back to work. Sure enough, after we went up to the rotunda to stand where former UA President Landon… Continue reading another bryce visit went well
“If there is a book that you want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, you must be the one to write it.” Happy Birthday, Toni Morrison If I didn’t define myself for myself, I would be crunched into other people’s fantasies for me and eaten alive. – Happy Birthday, Audre Lorde
This week, Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust novel, which receives inspiration from her ancestral connections to the Gullah Sea Islands (and offers the back story for characters in her pivotal 1991 film Daughters of the Dust), are front in center in my “Gender, Race and Urban Space” class. I have so much to think… Continue reading dash, gendered storytelling and the gullah sea islands
…because I almost never wear heels. Hope you had a lovely week. Happy Valentines Day!
On a day this rainy, this made sense…recasting some of my earlier work digitally. Three pieces are up at Dinah Washington Cultural Arts Center this month. There are tensions here with my research on Miami. Postscript: as I prepare for today’s “Gender, Race and Urban Space” class, I have read an excerpt from Edwidge Danticat’s… Continue reading rainy day moments
My husband always said “Limbs are made for climbing out on.” So, it was with pleasure I told students enrolled in my “Antebellum America Swagger,” a capstone research and writing class at the University of Alabama, these same words. I was not sure if they would understand how the word “swagger,” which has been in… Continue reading from the mouths of brilliant young people….swag
This week, I have an opportunity to think about how empire encounters race via the lived experience and music. What set this in motionL reading Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands for my “Gender, Race and Urban Space” class, and my prep work for “Music and Race and the UK,” my… Continue reading imperial intimacies in two classes
So happy to have been interviewed by The Washington Post. We need to better understand these familiar horrors and the complexities circling around them. For more, see this story about an enslaved woman who inherited the property of a man who almost certainly had coercive moments with her.
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