Welcome to Zora’s Daughters 102, the Second Semester of the first year 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: Afro-Latinidad (?)
Required:
Becoming American, becoming black? Urban competency, racialized spaces, and the politics of citizenship among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark (Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, 2007)
Optional:
The Lived Experience of the Black Man (Frantz Fanon, 2008 [1952])
Colorist Clown Culture-Vultures (MayowasWorld, 2021)
2: Black Feminist Anthropology: Foundations
Required:
Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics (Irma McLaurin, 2001)
Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age (Faye V. Harrison, 2008)
Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (Patricia Hill Collins, 1990)
Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood, and Community (Riché J. Daniel Barnes, 2015)
3: Anti-Blackness
Required:
In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Christina Sharpe, 2016)
“Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness” (kihana miraya ross, 2020)
Optional:
Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument (Sylvia Wynter, 2003)
4. Afropessimism: An Introduction
Required:
Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying (Patrice D. Douglass, 2018) (download)
Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word (Jared Sexton, 2016)
Prerequisites:
Episode 2: Ain’t I a Woman?
Episode 6: Deathcraft Country
Episode 11: Not My Latinidad
5. Reparations
Required:
Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Deborah A. Thomas, 2011)
The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2014)
Prerequisites:
Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Deborah A. Thomas, 2019)
U.S. Museums Hold the Remains of Thousands of Black People (Delande Justinvil and Chip Colwell, 2021)
Payback’s a B**** (Code Switch, NPR, 2021)
6. Accountability
Required:
Zora’s Daughters’ Reaction to How Not To Travel Like a Basic B*tch (Brendane Tynes and Alyssa A.L. James, 2021)
Mountains That Take Wing: Angela Davis & Yuri Kochiyama (C.A. Griffith & H.L.T. Quan, 2009) [Talk back featuring Angela Davis]
Optional:
Exploring Black and Asian American Lesbian Archives: Aché and Phoenix Rising (Jaimee A. Swift, 2021)
Flimsy Bridges Burn Easily: How Social Media Exposed the Trepidatious Nature of Black/Asian Relations in the Wake of the Atlanta Spa Shootings (Ashley-Devon W., 2021)
7. The Graduate School Self
Required:
Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology (Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, Attiya Ahmad, 2013)
Optional:
Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care (Koritha Mitchell, 2018)
How to Not Die: Some Survival Tips for Black Women Who Are Asked to Do Too Much (Crunk Feminist Collective, 2013)
Resources
Black Girl Does Grad School
Hooded: A Black Girl’s Guide to the PhD (Malika Grayson, 2020)
Back-to-School Beatitudes: 10 Academic Survival Tips (Crunk Feminist Collective, 2011)
The Professor Is in: The Essential Guide to Turning Your Ph.D. Into a Job (website) (Karen Kelsky 2015)
57 Ways to Screw Up in Grad School: Perverse Professional Lessons for Graduate Students (Kevin D. Haggerty and Aaron Doyle, 2015)
Institute for Recruitment of Teachers
8. Prison Industrial Complex Abolition
Required:
We Do This ’til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Mariame Kaba, 2021)
Optional:
Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (Michel Foucault, 1995)
Resources
Abolition
Women, Race & Class (Angela Davis, 1983)
Are Prisons Obsolete? (Angela Davis, 2003)
Abolition Democracy: Beyond Empire, Prisons, and Torture (Angela Davis, 2005)
The Meaning of Freedom (Angela Davis and Robin D. G. Kelley, 2012)
Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Joy James, 1996)
Seeking the Beloved Community : A Feminist Race Reader (Joy James andBeverly Guy-Sheftall, 2013)
Policing Black Women and Girls
Dark Matters : On the Surveillance of Blackness (Simone Brown, 2015)
Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and Opposition in Globalizing California (Ruth Wilson Gilmore, 2007)
Pushout : The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (Monique W. Morris, 2016)
Arrested Justice : Black Women, Violence, and America’s Prison Nation (Beth E. Richie, 2012)
Invisible No More : Police Violence against Black Women and Women of Color (Andrea J. Ritchie, 2017)
Killing the Black Body : Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Dorothy E. Roberts, 1999)
“Complicating the Triangle of Race, Class and State: The Insights of Black Feminists (Dorothy E. Roberts, 2014)
Black-Palestinian Liberation and its Connections to Abolition
Freedom Is a Constant Struggle : Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement (Angela Davis, 2016)
9. Against the Commodification of Self-Care
Required:
Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care (Koritha Mitchell, 2018)
Optional:
The Audacity of Nope (Ayesha K. Faines, 2021)
10. Cultural Appropriation
Required:
Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance (bell hooks, 1992)
Optional:
The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation (James O. Young and Conrad G. Brunk, 2012)
White Negroes: When Cornrows Were in Vogue … and Other Thoughts on Cultural Appropriation (Lauren Michele Jackson, 2019)
Further Reading:
Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (Mimi Sheller, 2003)
Eating their Words: The Consumption of French Caribbean Literature (Celia Britton, 2014)
Slavery and the Culture of Taste (Simon Gikandi, 2014)
Black Matters (Toni Morrison, 1992)