Tag Archives: Black feminism

Conferences, lectures, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 4, Ravynn: Act 4, Scene 2, Research, The Journey, Uncategorized

Catherine Knight Steele and the New Vanguard of Black Digital Feminists | Chesapeake DH Conference 2020

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On February 21, 2020, William & Mary hosted the first annual Chesapeake Digital Humanities Conference. This conference drew together digital humanists from all over the region, and from places further away, like Cornell University. Unfortunately, inclement weather delayed the conference’s start, but nevertheless, the panels and conversations were extremely valuable.

The highlight of the experience for me was the opportunity to listen to, and share space with our keynote speaker, Dr. Catherine Knight Steele. Dr. Steele’s work has included conversations about Black people in the digital, but more specifically, Black women in the blogosphere. As such, it’s not hard to imagine how important her scholarship has been to me, a young Black feminist and digital humanist whose blog–this blog–is part of her scholarly intervention.

I got to introduce Dr. Steele’s keynote, a moment for which I was truly grateful. From the moment she began speaking, I was mesmerized. It became abundantly clear as she spoke who her intended audience was, and she wouldn’t budge on that an inch. She spoke for Black feminists, and those who understood there was something to learn from the combination of Black feminism and digital humanities. She spoke for people like me. Her keynote, a deep dive into Black Digital Feminism prepared and influenced by her upbringing as a preacher’s kid (a sermon with (1) alliteration and (2) three key points), drew from her experiences as a baby digital humanist learning to type from “Mavis Beacon;” and her love of Black feminisms and feminists.

In what seemed to be the same breath, Dr. Steele rapped the beginning of Lauryn Hill’s Lost Ones, and invoked both Zora Neale Hurston and Luvvie Ajayi. Despite their differences, as soon as she brought each one’s thoughts and contributions to the conversation, in conversation with one another, I thought, Of course they go together. How could they not? I watched Steele weave, as Black feminists do, very different theories and praxis to create a new product– what she calls Black Digital Feminism. She defines it as the moment of Black feminist thought shaped by the relationship of Black feminist thinkers to digital technology. Different from Black cyberfeminism, Steele argues that Black feminists relationship to technology predates any conversation about cyberfeminism, therefore Black feminism is the point of origin.

I thought long and hard about what she feels Black feminism can bring to conversations in the digital humanities: Steele cites a shift to praxis over practice, a focus on people and principles as methods we can invoke in digital humanities work. I cheered when she encouraged the audience to ask basic, humanizing questions of their graduate students so they would and could feel more connected to their work– and their lives outside of it. And I almost cried when she offered a moment of transparency: she doesn’t really code.

This was a moment of release for me. In most fields, you are not required to be able to create the work that you are critiquing: film scholars are not required to make film and literary scholars are not required to write novels. Yet, for some reason, there is this impulse that if you critique the digital, you must also be able to create it, and create it from scratch (i.e. coding). But what Steele points out here is an understanding that there are levels and different ways of engaging as a digital humanist. We do need makers, breakers and coders of all kinds, but we also need theorists and critics. It’s a balance, a delicate dance: theorists keep makers honest and ethical (one hopes), and makers inspire theorists to write.

Her keynote, and all that it offered: the theory, the praxis, and the parts of herself that she was willing to share with an audience of strangers, gave me hope. There is a place for me to discuss Eve L. Ewing in the same breath that I invoke Jessica Marie Johnson and Audre Lorde. There is a place for me to bring my blogger, scholar, and writer self into larger conversations about digital humanities. It encouraged me to continue making connections that make sense to me, theorizing in a way that is meaningful to my intended audience. (I honestly went crazy a couple of times at some of the incredible connections Steele was making, as easy as if it were breathing.)

It also made me consider lineage. The work of Black Digital Feminists like Steele, Moya Bailey, Jessica Marie Johnson, the Crunk Feminist Collective and Feminista Jones, just to name a few, were the early adopters of the internet. They felt out the space and then created for themselves. As Steele says, blogs were often specialized enclaves in which Black feminists could have difficult conversations, unlike the environment of the internet today.

That generation of Black feminists made it possible for a new vanguard of Black Digital Feminists to aid in the expansion of their work. The New Vanguard, which I see primarily manifesting in those graduate students and early career scholars who do digital content creation (mostly because of my positionality as a Black graduate student), take cues from our Digital Aunties. We build blogs, vlogs, podcasts and carefully curated instagram feeds to help each other, and the generation after us get to and through the academic spaces we currently inhabit. We create collectives and build community online. We find the digital to be a space of resistance, but also one, as Andre Brock insists, where we should be able to simply be.

This new moment of Black Digital Feminism in action would not exist if not for the work of the earlier adopters of the internet and the digital. It would not exist if not for our Black feminist foremothers who theorized about us, for us.

And we certainly wouldn’t be here without Catherine Knight Steele, who was critical in our ability to merge these two strands of thought.

Comps, Ravynn, Ravynn: Act 3, Ravynn: Act 3, Scene 2, Readings, The Journey, Uncategorized

“Enjoy the Process”: Notes from My First Week of Full-Time Comps Prep

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While my semester got off to an exciting start with the Computing for the Humanities Bootcamp and Branch Out 2019, once those workshops were over, I realized there was nothing standing between me and my comps preparations. So I took a couple days after Branch Out to rest up, then mentally steeled myself to dive completely into comps.

Since about last Thursday, I’ve read a lot. I read Sami Schalk’s Bodyminds Reimagined and LeRoi Jones’ Blues People; I read Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Sam Greenlee’s The Spook Who Sat By The Door; I even read The Narrative of Sojourner Truth and Ishmael Reed’s Mumbo Jumbo. I also read a number of poems by Paul Laurence Dunbar, Rita Dove and Langston Hughes, as well as chapters from Safiya Noble’s Algorithms of Oppression, Simone Brown’s Dark Matters: On Surveillance of Blackness and Anna Everett’s essay “Have We Become Postracial Yet? Race and Media Technology in the Age of President Obama.” I’ve been reading like I’m dying of thirst and books are my only cure.

Ultimately, with 117 texts left to read and 93 days to read them in, I know I have to stop reading every single word. But as much as grad school has tried to break me of my love for reading, and as much as comps is essentially academic hazing, this past week of doing nothing but reading texts and then writing about then for notes has actually renewed my love of the written word. I know not all of what I will read will be beautiful, I know not all of it will be life changing– there will inevitably be texts that I don’t like– but this week, I did manage to fall in love with a few texts.

A Voice From the South, Anna Julia Cooper

“When, looking a little more closely, I see two dingy little rooms with, “FOR LADIES” swinging over one and “FOR COLORED PEOPLE” over the other; while wondering under which head I come…” (p. 96)

I thought my love of books published by Black women in 1892 began and ended with Ida B. Wells’ Southern Horrors. Sometimes, I love being wrong. AJC was tackling the intersections and complexities of Black (Southern) womanhood long before there was the word “Intersectionality” to put in your twitter bios. (No shade, no shade). I’m definitely late to the AJC fan club and the importance of her writing, but I’m here now! Cooper had me laughing out loud at her quite frequently present shade and sarcasm. For example:

“Above all, for the love of humanity stop the mouth of those learned theorizers, the expedient

mongers, who come out annually with their new and improved method of getting the answer and clearing the slate: amalgamation, deportation, colonization and all the other actions that were ever devised or dreampt of.” (p. 171-172)

She said it, not me.

Her soapbox is the education of Black women– no, not even the education of Black women, but her insistence on the existence of Black women and thus catering towards our humanity. We aren’t doing any service to our race, she insists, by ignoring Black women. We are a critical part of the population.

If there was any doubt that Black women have always been doing the work of liberation, one need only look to Anna Julia Cooper.

“If she the G.O.A.T. now, would anybody doubt it?”

-Janelle Monae, “Django Jane”

Superwomen: Gender, Power and Representation, Carolyn Cocca

Carolyn Cocca is mainly concerned with the project of representation of women in (transmedia) comics. She covers it all– the good, the bad, and the ugly. Her chapters on figures such as Wonder Woman, Batgirl, and Buffy (among many others) are proof that women characters can have varying representations in comics and on screen, but a lot of that representation is unfortunately tied to sales and who on the artistic and editorial team is willing to, as Kelly Sue DeConnick quips, “pretend [women are] people.” (p. 220) Cocca is also deeply interested in the connections between representations of women in comics in particular with the second and third waves of feminism. And naturally, with discussions of power come questions of race and heternormativity, questions I believe Cocca handles with care.

And yet– and this is no fault of Cocca’s excellent text– I found myself wanting more of this type of analysis but about Black women in comics, Latinas in comics, Native Americans in comics, Asian Americans in comics. I think Deborah Whaley’s Black Women in Sequence is an excellent text to read in conjunction with Cocca’s book, because it fills in the narrative gaps I was feeling, at from the perspective of Black women.

What this book gave me was a desire to produce more content by and for Black women in the comics realm, so much so, that the first thing I did after close the book for the last time was open a document and start writing my first comic book script, a fantastical/superhero narrative starring two best friends, one African American and one Afro-Latina. I don’t know if anything will ever come of this story, but it made me feel emboldened to create the story I know I would have wanted to read as a sixteen year old.

And at the end of the day, in my mind, if a book doesn’t make me want to write, then it didn’t speak to my soul.

Thank you for speaking to my soul, Carolyn Cocca.

Iola Leroy, or Shadows Uplifted, Frances E. W. Harper

Again with my books published by Black women in 1892. That was just a good year for Black women writers, apparently.

So, I picked up that book…and didn’t put it down again until I was finished reading.

I was not expecting to be so engaged! But then again, I should have known I would have liked it. Ever since I took my Interracialism class my first semester of graduate school, I have been enamoured with the Black writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, particularly those stories which deal with mulatto characters. I honestly have no idea where the fascination comes from, but I believe it’s the interest in different variations on American Blackness that confounds and enthralls me. I also have an interest in Afro-Latinx literature of the late 20th and 21st century. I think these stories remind me that Blackness is not monolithic, it’s diasporic and infinite.

I also love a text that challenges me to think and question, that I sort of wrestle with, and Iola Leroy was definitely one of those texts. Everytime I read a text with mixed raced characters, I have to redefine what I mean by Blackness, and I think that sort of exercise is good for the mind and important for my scholarship.

“‘Slavery,’ said Iola, ‘was a fearful cancer eating into the nation’s heart, sapping its vitality, and undermining its life.’” (p. 216)

—

As much as I have dreaded this process, fearfully reading as much as I could last semester and in the summer to avoid having to read stacks of books a day, I have found this intellectual exercise particularly stimulating. It’s also possible that I feel this way because the ratio of novels and poems to peer reviewed monographs is overwhelming. I’m spending my days lounging around, devouring books with my dog at my side, sipping perfectly brewed coffee and thinking how one day, I will desperately miss these perfect moments.

Comps, Intermission 2, Readings, Uncategorized

#RavynnReads: “Eloquent Rage” by Brittney Cooper

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This week and I got off on the wrong foot. Weird things were happening with my mood, I couldn’t sit still and I was feeling generally out of sorts. So, I decided do what I always do when I’m feeling in a funk: I get books.

I drove up to the north part of my city to the public library that I prefer– brand new, new books, and a general sparkle that always inflates my mood. I didn’t have any books in mind– I thought I’d just go have a look around and see if anything caught my eye. When nothing did, I took to the computers to see if they had any of the books that I needed for comps. After spending about five minutes in the search engine, I began to notice a trend. Every time I would search a book that I wanted (The New Jim Crow, Audre Lorde’s Collected Poems, Nnedi Okorafor’s Binti, Eloquent Rage, etc.), my heart would leap with excitement upon noting that the library had the book, and do a mild decrescendo upon realizing the availability was at the library downtown.

As I left the library fuming about the inconvenience of having to drive all the way across town to the other library, it struck me that all the books that I wanted were Black books and they were all housed in the library smack in the middle of the Black neighborhood. Quelle surprise. As if Black books were not able to take up space in a predominantly white space. As if all a Black populace would be interested in is Black books. As if white populations would not be interested in Black books. (Granted there were thousands of books in both libraries, but I’m still frustrated that the majority of the Black books were in the “Black” library.)

Shocked at my own naiveté, I decided half way home that driving the 25 minutes across town was worth it if it meant getting Brittney Cooper’s Eloquent Rage. This library was dimly lit and generally of a poorer disposition than the library in the white part of town, but within minutes, my arms were full of my beloved Black books, including a Okorafor book, The Book of Phoenix, Ibram Kendi’s Stamped from the Beginning, Zadie Smith’s Feel Free and of course, as the title of this piece implies, Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower by Brittney Cooper.

After simmering down from the injustice of realizing my books had been segregated, I settled into the couch to read the opening chapter of Eloquent Rage. Within moments, I found myself chuckling at Cooper’s candor, snapping my fingers in agreement with many of her sentiments, and riveted by her analysis which seamlessly wove together theory and personal anecdotes which produced scholarship which would be palatable to a broad range of audiences.

Damn, I thought, drowning in my own admiration, I want to write like her when I grow up.

In Eloquent Rage, Audre Lorde shares the stage with Beyoncé, who shares with Patricia Hill Collins, who shares with Michelle Obama. Black women have been theorizing about anger forever, both in academic and non-academic spaces. Cooper breaks down and analyzes Beyoncé’s “Formation” video with the same care that she defines ‘feminism’ and ‘intersectionality.’ For that, I am eternally grateful because I have seen what the type of public facing scholarship I want to write looks like in Cooper’s work.

In addition to discussing Black women’s rage, which as Audre Lorde notes is both full of information and energy, and an appropriate response to racism (Sister Outsider), Cooper discusses understanding her own feminist identity in conjunction with other identities that don’t always inherently mesh well together. I am thinking specifically of when she discusses being a Christian feminist and also being a heterosexual Black feminist. Cooper’s right that feminism has yet to really take into that God plays a big part in a lot of Black feminists’ lives, but I think she’s also right to point to the fact that Black churches still tend to be sites of Black patriarchy run amok. How do we reconcile those two spaces? How do we become good God-fearing Christians while also wanting to smash the patriarchy?

Another topic which I think Cooper nails in “Love in a Hopeless Place,” is difficulty heterosexual Black feminists face while in pursuit of relationships, a place I only know too well. I am either too intimidating, too angry, too sassy, too opinionated, too bossy, or too independent– words that essentially equate to “You cannot be forced into submission by me. I find that threatening.” Cooper’s analysis is rife with statistics and a much more eloquent analysis than what you will find here. She turns a conversation about a difficulty find mates into a debriefing on the Moynihan Report, which essentially calls the Black family a “tangle of pathology” and that our maternal led households are a part of the problem. Much of the Moynihan Report is based on the assumption that “legitimate” families are constituted of (1) father, (1) mother and (2.5) children. (Maybe not the 2.5 kids part but the “nuclear family unit” piece is there.)

Using Beyoncé as a jumping off point for discussing feminism, Cooper states that feminism’s tagline should be, as her idol says, “I love being a woman and being a friend to other women.” (28) If that’s not your MO, then you’re not a feminist, Cooper decides. That goes for nonsense about not having Black female friends because “they’re too much drama” or you “get along better with men.” Cooper explicitly says:

Friendships with Black girls have always saved my life. I give the side eye to any Black woman who doesn’t have other Black women friends, to any woman who is prone to talk about how she relates better to men than to women, to anyone who goes on and on about how she “doesn’t trust females.” If you say fuck the patriarchy but you don’t ride for other women, then it might be more true that the patriarchy has fucked you, seducing you with the belief that men care more about your well-being than women do.

It isn’t true.

(p. 13-14)

I can say with absolute certainty that Black women friendships have given me the most out of life, from my intellectual soul sisterhood with Micah, to my coffeeshop buddy Kels, to my homie Alexis and my cousin Leah, I would not be the woman I am today without each one of them. They lift as they climb, they’re there for me, they understand me and most of all they listen with care when I come home from class after three hours of having to listen to racist, homophobic vitriol.

Brittney Cooper’s book, which touches on everything which matters to Black women, from dating to hair, as touched my life in important ways, namely by making me feel seen. Thanks to Cooper, I, as a big black girl nerd from the South, that had trouble making Black girl friends growing up and trouble dating, who grew up in a devout faith, but is, without a shadow of a doubt, a feminist, feel like part of my story has been told. A story that has only partially been exposed. From her complicated relationships with white women, to her mixed feeling about Hillary Clinton and Tevin Campbell obsession, Cooper and I might be of different generations, but her story is mine and I loved reading every second of it.

11/10 would recommend and am currently trying to figure out if I can add this to my Comps list.

But, seriously, don’t take my word for it, check it out for yourself.