Welcome to Zora’s Daughters 101, the First Semester of the podcast! This syllabus is a companion to the first season of the podcast. We have tried to link to open source texts and videos where possible.
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1: Misogynoir
Episode: “What in the Misogynoir?!“
Required:
On misogynoir: citation, erasure, and plagiarism (Moya Bailey and Trudy, 2018)
Looking for Zora (Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 1975)
A Society of One: Zora Neale Hurston, American Contrarian (The New Yorker, Claudia Roth Pierpoint, 1997)
Optional:
Thick: And Other Essays (Tressie McMillan Cottom, 2019)
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (Saidiya Hartman, 2019)
Watch: The Grapevine TV
2: Ain’t I a Woman? + #ProtectALLBlackWomen
Episode: “Ain’t I A Woman?“
Required:
Ain’t I a Woman? (Sojourner Truth, 1851)
Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (Hortense Spillers, 1987)
Adultification & #FreeGrace: A Thread (Zora’s Daughters, 2020)
Optional:
Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Aimee Cox, 2015)
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco (Savannah Shange, 2019)
Sapphire as Praxis: Toward a Methodology of Anger (Bettina Judd, 2019)
3: The Politics of Respectability
Episode: “There’s Some Anthros In This House“
Required:
“Lady Saw Cuts Loose: Female Fertility Rituals in the Dancehall” (Carolyn Cooper, 2004)
“Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1978)
Optional:
“The Emergence of Modern Blackness in Jamaica” (Deborah Thomas, 2007)
“Reputation and Respectability: A Suggestion for Caribbean Ethnology” (Peter J. Wilson, 1969)
Black Sexual Economies: Race and Sex in a Culture of Capital (Adrienne D. Davis and the BSE Collective, 2019)
Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women (Brittney C. Cooper, 2017)
“The Booty Don’t Lie: Pleasure, Agency, and Resistance in Black Popular Dance” in Are You Entertained?: Black Popular Culture in the 21st Century (Takiyah Nur Amin, 2020)
“Twerk sumn!: theorizing Black girl epistemology in the body” (Aria S. Halliday, 2020)
4: Environmental Racism & The Anthropocene
Episode: “The World is Basura en Fuego“
Required:
Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics (Axelle Karera, 2019)
How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering (The New York Times, Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, 2020)
Optional:
Troubling Ecology: Wangechi Mutu, Octavia Butler, and Black Feminist Interventions in Environmentalism (Chelsea M. Frazier, 2016)
Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler, 1993)
On the Importance of a Date, or, Decolonizing the Anthropocene (Zoe Todd, 2017)
5: Visibility, Silencing, and Whisper Networks
Episode: “Lorde Take the Wheel“
Required:
The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 1978)
How Do We Listen to the Living? (Brendane Tynes, 2020)
Optional:
Summertime Selves (On Professionalization) (Nick Mitchell, 2019)
The Patron (Nell Gluckman, 2020)
You Belong to Me: Sex, Race and Murder in the South (John Cork, 2014)
6: Immigration, Reproductive Justice, and Necropolitics
Episode: “Deathcraft Country“
Required:
Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights (Angela Davis, Women, Race, Class, 1983)
Necropolitics (Achille Mbembe, 2003)
Optional:
Afro-Paradise: Blackness, Violence, and Performance in Brazil (Christen A. Smith, 2017)
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Dorothy E. Roberts, 1997)
Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science (Kim TallBear, 2013
An Act of Genocide: Colonialism and the Sterilization of Aboriginal Women (Karen Stote, 2015)
The Birth of Biopolitics (Michel Foucault, 1979)
7: African Diaspora Religions, Syncretism, and Church Hurt
Episode: “Holy Is the Black Woman“
Required:
Transcendent Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi, 2020)
Between Sundays: Black Women and Everyday Struggles of Faith (Marla F. Frederick, 2003)
Optional:
The Secret Lives of Church Ladies (Deesha Philyaw, 2020)
The Myth of the Negro Past (Melville J. Herskovits, 1941)
Commandment Keeper Church in Beaufort, South Carolina (Zora Neale Hurston, 1940)
Creole religions of the Caribbean: An Introduction from Vodou and Santeria to Obeah and Espiritismo (Lizabeth Paravisini-Gebert and Margarite Fernandez Olmos, 2011)
8: The Pitfalls of Black Liberalism
Episode: “The Black Liberal Agenda“
Required:
Mapping Gender in African-American Political Strategies (Leith Mullings, 2019)
Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler, 1993)
Optional:
Neoliberalism: A Very Short Introduction (Manfred B. Steger & Ravi K. Roy, 2010)
The Book of Negroes/Someone Knows My Name (Lawrence Hill, 2007) (miniseries)
Life and Debt (Stephanie Black, 2001)
9: Colorism
Episode: “Color Struck!“
Required:
If the Present Looks Like the Past, What Does the Future Look Like? (Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens, 1983)
Optional:
Here Comes the Sun (Nicole Dennis-Benn, 2016)
10: Black Girl Magic
Episode: “The Square Root of Impossible is Black Girls“
Required:
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography (Savannah Shange, 2019)
CaShawn (Black History Untold, n.d.)
For CaShawn Thompson, Black Girl Magic Was Always the Truth (Feminista Jones, 2019)
Optional:
Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Saidiya Hartman, 1997)
Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book (Hortense Spillers, 1987)
Shapeshifters: Black Girls and the Choreography of Citizenship (Aimee Cox, 2015)
Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (Monique W. Morris, 2016) [Feature length documentary]