Welcome to Zora’s Daughters 301, the First Semester of the junior year of the podcast! This syllabus is a reading list to the third season of the podcast that will continue to grow throughout the season. We have tried to link to open source texts and videos where possible.
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1. Race and Postfeminism
Episode: “Dangerously In Love With Celebrity“
Required:
“Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture” (Kimberly Springer, 2007)
2. Sovereignty and Non-Sovereignty
Episode: “The Death of Sovereignty“
Required:
Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Yarimar Bonilla, 2015)
Optional:
“The Sovereignty of Critique” (Audra Simpson, 2020)
“Unsettling Sovereignty” (Yarimar Bonilla, 2017)
“The Dissolution of the Myth of Sovereignty in the Caribbean” (Linden Lewis, 2012)
3. Reproductive Justice, Part II
Episode: “Looting the Womb: Black Birthing People and Reproductive Unfreedom“
Review:
S1, E6: Deathcraft Country
S1, E 14: Afropessimism: Anything But Black!
Required:
Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Dorothy Roberts, 1997)
Optional:
How Your Period-Tracking App Could End Up Tracking You (Mali Collins, 2021)
The Accumulation of Capital (Rosa Luxemburg, 1913)
4. Diaspora Wars
Episode: “All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk“
Required:
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade (Saidiya Hartman, 2008)
Optional:
Families We Choose: Lesbians, Gays, Kinship (Kath Weston, 1991)
Optional Review:
S1, E7 Holy Is the Black Woman
S1, E15 B**** Better Have My Money!
S2, E9 Separate but Equal Month
5. Professional Development – Academic Conferences
No reading!
6. Black Disability Politics
Episode: “Diary of Mad Black Women“
Required:
Neuroexpansive* Thoughts (Ngwagwa, 2022)
Black Disability Politics (Sami Schalk, 2022)
Optional:
Black Madness :: Mad Blackness (Therí Alyce Pickens, 2019)
Review:
S2, E8 40 Acres Ain’t Praxis
S2, E13 No Body Is Normal
7. All About Zora Neale Hurston
Episode: “We Call Her Zora“
Optional:
You Don’t Know Us Negroes and Other Essays (Zora Neale Hurston, 2022)
The Case for Letting Anthropology Burn: Sociocultural Anthropology in 2019 (Ryan Cecil Jobson, 2019)
8. The Politics of Black Hair
Episode: “The Crown Chronicles“
Required:
‘Don’t Touch My Hair’: Problematizing Representations of Black Women in Canada (Shaunasea Brown, 2018)
Optional:
The constraints of racialization: How classification and valuation hinder scientific research on human variation (Tina Lasisi, 2021)
Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia (Angela Davis, 1994)