We’re back! Next week marks the start of ZD 102, the second “semester” of our first season of the podcast! From February to July, we’ll be dropping bi-weekly episodes that will continue to challenge and inform. It’ll be everything you loved about the first semester, but a little extra because Alyssa and Brendane are where…
We Back, We Black, and We On the Track
The Square Root of Impossible is Black Girls
It’s our last episode of the ZD Semester! In keeping with the season, Alyssa and Brendane discuss #BlackGirlMagic via the popular Netflix holiday movie Jingle Jangle (SPOILERS)! We discuss the origins of the phrase via CaShawn Thompson and her coinage of the hashtag Black Girls ARE Magic and how it is both celebration of Black…
Color Struck!
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,…
The Black Liberal Agenda
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…
Holy is the Black Woman
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…
Deathcraft Country
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…
Lorde Take the Wheel
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 Basura en Fuego
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…
There’s Some Anthros in this House
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…
Ain’t I a Woman?
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…