Welcome to Zora’s Daughters 201, the First Semester of the sophomore year of the podcast! This syllabus is a companion to the second season of the podcast. We have tried to link to open source texts and videos where possible.
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1. Politics and Aesthetics
Episode: “Liberation Don’t Cost a Thang“
Required:
Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia (Angela Davis, 1994)
“Corporate America’s $50 billion Promise” (Washington Post, 2021)
Optional:
The Politics of Aesthetics (Jacques Rancière, 2013)
2. Fatphobia
Episode: “Big Girl, Small World“
Required:
Fat, Black, and Ugly: The Semiotic Production of Prodigious Femininities (Krystal A. Smalls, 2021)
Optional:
Belly of the Beast: The Politics of Anti-Fatness as Anti-Blackness (Da’Shaun L. Harrison, 2021)
The Body Is Not an Apology, Second Edition: The Power of Radical Self-Love (Sonya Renee Taylor, 2021)
Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia (Sabrina Strings, 2019)
Hunger: A Memoir Of (My) Body (Roxane Gay, 2017)
Big Girls Need Love, Too: Dating While Fat (and Feminist) (Brittney Cooper, 2015)
3. Plantation Futures
Episode: “600 Years A Slave“
Required:
Plantation Futures (Katherine McKittrick, 2013)
Borders, Blackness, and Empire (Jemima Pierre, 2021)
Optional:
The Time of Slavery (Saidiya Hartman, 2002)
In The Wake: On Blackness and Being (Christina Sharpe, 2015)
Anthropocene, Capitalocene, …Plantationocene?: A Manifesto for Ecological Justice in an Age of Global Crises (Janae Davis, Alex A. Moulton, Levi Van Sant, Brian Williams, 2019)
Black Feminist Plots before the Plantationocene and Anthropology’s “Regional Closets (Mythri Jegathesan, 2021)
The Plantation, the Postplantation, and the Afterlives of Slavery (American Literature, 2019)
4. Fugitivity
Episode: “Fleeing the Plantation“
Required:
“Black Feminist Theory and its Wayward Futures” (Naomi Simmons-Thorne, forthcoming)
Fugitive Pedagogy: Carter G. Woodson and the Art of Black Teaching (Jarvis R. Givens, 2021)
5. Black Feminist Futurity
Episode: “The Emancipation of ZD: Black Feminist Futurity“
Required:
Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler, 1993)
Black Feminist Futurity: From Survival Rhetoric to Radical Speculation (Caitlin Gunn, 2019)
Optional:
Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations (Tēvita O. Ka’ili, 2017)
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (adrienne maree brown, 2017)
Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Sharon P. Holland, 2000)
Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values (Joy James, 2015)
6. AAA Annual Meeting
No reading!
7. Gentrification & The City
Episode: “Harlem Ever After“
Required:
“D.C. is mambo sauce”: Black cultural production in a gentrifying city (Ashanté M. Reese, 2020)
Race, Class, and the Packaging of Harlem (Sabiyha Prince, 2005)
Optional:
Health Effects of Gentrification (CDC, 2015)
Tallawah Abroad: Remembering Little Jamaica (Sharine Taylor, 2019)
I’m a black gentrifier in Harlem – and it’s not a good feeling (Morgan Jerkins, 2015)
Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (Marcus Anthony Hunter & Zandria Robinson, 2018)
Harlemworld: Doing Race and Class in Contemporary Black America (John L. Jackson Jr, 2003)
8. Black & Indigenous Solidarity?
Episode: “40 Acres Ain’t Praxis“
Required:
Every Day We Must Get Up and Relearn the World (Robyn Maynard, Leanne Betasamosake Simpson, Hannah Voegele, Chris Griffin, 2021)
Optional:
An Afro-Indigenous History of the United States (Kyle T. Mays, 2021)
The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Tiffany Lethabo King, 2019)
Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness (Tiffany Lethabo King, Jenell Navarro, Andrea Smith, 2021)
Hawai′i Is My Haven: Race and Indigeneity in the Black Pacific (Nitasha Tamar Sharma, 2021)