In this episode, Brendane and Alyssa tackle a fraught subject in the Black community: colorism. We discuss the paper bag test, dating “loophole” women for ascendance vs. unambiguously Black women to legitimize one’s blackness. In our What We’re Reading segment, we bring things full circle with Alice Walker’s essay where she coins the term colorism,…
It seems we REALLY missed y’all because it’s a long episode! Today we talked neoliberalism and waiting for Biden to make it rain with stimmy checks, Black political strategies and women’s participation in political movements through the work of anthropologist Leith Mullings, Alyssa explains for 6 whole ass minutes why Canada the “cultural mosaic” isn’t…
It’s all about God’s greatest hits today! Alyssa and Brendane kick off the episode with ‘Defund Reform Abolish,’ before getting into the colonial and religious history and use of the word diaspora. They debate whether the Jamaican immigrant community is a diaspora and get into some African diaspora religions before moving on to the text…
In today’s episode, Alyssa and Brendane explain why we chose ‘Daughters’, play a new game called “Defund Reform Abolish,” and unpack Achille Mbembe’s concept of necropolitics in conversation with Angela Davis’ brilliant essay “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” who helps us contextualizes the history of birth control movements and eugenics. In our What in…
In today’s episode, Brendane and Alyssa are doing the Lorde’s work! We talk ideal care packages, the history of the fetish (wassup Freud, Marx, and problematic anthropologists!) and contemporary racial/sexual fetishization, the invisibility and hypervisibility of Black women, honor Audre Lorde’s Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, PLUS a ZD first: a guest! In…
The world is a dumpster fire! Today we’re talking about what’s been helping us get through quarantine, the Anthropocene and the hypocrisy of its hyper-ethics, Black feminist futurity and imagination and environmental racism and the slow violence of redlining, Superfund sites, and the water in Flint, MI. We also discuss the value of taking up…
Today we’re answering the question What makes this anthropology?, discussing the politics of respectability and its iterations for African-Americans vs. Jamaican immigrants, we celebrate Black women’s bodies and Jamaican dancehall with Carolyn Cooper’s essay “Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall”, and we bring it to popular culture with Cardi B and…
In this episode, we’re talking about archetypes of Black women – the Mammy, the Jezebel, the Sapphire – and the ways they continue to be used against Black women, we fangirl over Hortense Spillers, and Alyssa struggles with pronunciation (#DecolonizeLanguage!). We dig into the repercussions of the Moynihan report, ungendering, and Tory Lanez’s alleged assault…
It’s OUR FIRST FULL EPISODE! We’re talking about misogynoir: our experiences, transmisogynoir, the erasure of Zora Neale Hurston and her rediscovery thanks to Alice Walker, Essence Magazine drama, how gatekeeping benefits Black men, Brendane’s viral Twitter thread, and we ask WHY, Academia? WHY?! Zora’s Daughters Podcast: Episode One Co-Hosts: Brendane Tynes and Alyssa A.L. JamesTitle:…
An introduction to Zora’s Daughters: a biweekly podcast where Alyssa and Brendane take a close look at some of the things we encounter in our everyday lives with the goal of spreading love and affirmation, and demonstrating how thinking like a Black feminist anthropologist can contribute to understanding and changing the world around us. Zora’s…
