Writing Black Feminist Lives

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Roundtable Format

Abstract

This roundtable interrogates and reimagines the biographical narratives of Black women amid a shifting American landscape. In an era marked by institutional retrenchment, environmental crisis, and the waning promise of American exceptionalism, our panel examines how Black feminist biography recovers overlooked histories and destabilizes dominant Western narratives.

One panelist explores how pioneering Black women literary scholars of the late 1970s and early 1980s—exemplified by Nellie Y. McKay’s work—expanded global visibility for Black women’s writing, even as biography remained underutilized as a critical mode. McKay’s groundbreaking efforts in recovering and teaching Black women’s literature laid the foundation for broader scholarly engagement with Black women’s lives.
Another panelist reconsiders Harriet Tubman’s life through disability studies, centering her brain injury and lifelong disability as integral to her abolitionist praxis. This approach examines slavery’s disabling effects and Tubman’s resilience, foregrounding the intersection of disability, race, and gender in historical narratives. A third panelist interrogates the artist Augusta Savage’s rise, institutional legacy, and the distortions in her narrative through archival research that challenges gaps and omissions in historical records, critical analysis of how race, gender, and class shaped Savage’s artistic trajectory, and engagement with oral histories and community memory to recover overlooked aspects of her life. Savage’s contributions as a sculptor and arts institution builder are situated within a broader historical context that highlights the systemic barriers she faced and the enduring impact of her work on contemporary Black artists. Finally, a fourth panelist outlines a group biography that uses the Village Gate nightclub to examine how creative communities during the Civil Rights Movement—embodied by figures like Lorraine Hansberry, Nina Simone, Abbey Lincoln, Miriam Makeba, and Maya Angelou—cultivated artistic genius and expanded visions of collective liberation. The Village Gate served as a cultural and political hub where artists engaged in radical discourse and produced work that challenged the status quo, fostering a space where art and activism intertwined.

This roundtable embraces Black feminist theoretical frameworks that unsettle dominant narratives and reconfigures the boundaries of biography. By centering the lived experiences and epistemologies of Black women, we interrogate historical silences and challenge the archival practices and institutional structures that have long marginalized Black voices. Black feminist biography emerges as both a site of resistance and a tool for dismantling the legacies of colonialism, patriarchy, and systemic racism. Through our discussion, we reveal how biography can disrupt canonical histories and illuminate transformative pathways for collective liberation. In an era marked by the resurgence of fascism and authoritarianism, these discussions reaffirm the power of interdisciplinary inquiry to reshape American Studies, forging a historiography that is politically potent and theoretically rigorous. The dialogue format of this roundtable encourages panelists to engage with each other’s perspectives, fostering a rich, multifaceted conversation that invites audience participation. We aim to inspire critical engagement with biographical narratives that not only resist oppressive regimes but also envision new possibilities for justice and liberation.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Susana M Morris, Georgia Institute of Technology

Panelists

• Shanna G. Benjamin, Wake Forest U

• Soyica Colbert, Georgetown University

• Tanisha C Ford, The Graduate Center, CUNY

• Deirdre Cooper Owens, UCONN

Biographical Information

Shanna Greene Benjamin is Professor of African American Studies at Wake Forest University. A former Associate Dean and Professor of English at Grinnell College, Dr. Benjamin is a biographer and scholar who studies the literature, lives, and archives of Black women. She is the author of Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay, which received the 2022 Hurston/Wright Legacy Award in Nonfiction (in the Memoir/Biography category) and was an Honorable Mention for the Modern Language Association’s 2022 William Sanders Scarborough Prize.

Soyica Diggs Colbert is the Idol Family Professor of Black Studies at Georgetown University. She is a winner of the Guggenheim Fellowship and the author of several books including award-winning, Radical Vision: A Biography of Lorraine Hansberry. She has also held fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, Woodrow Wilson Foundation, Stanford University, Mellon Foundation, and the Robert W. Woodruff Library at Emory University. Colbert’s essays have appeared in African American Review, Theatre Survey, Modern Drama, Boundary 2, South Atlantic Quarterly, Scholar and Feminist Online, and Theatre Topics as well as the The New York Times, Washington Post, Public Books, and American Theatre. She is an Associate Director at the Shakespeare Theatre Company in Washington, D.C., has served as a Creative Content Producer for The Public Theatre’s audio play, shadow/land, and a curator for the exhibition “Art is Energy”: Lorraine Hansberry, World Builder at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM). Her research interests span the 19th-21st centuries, from Harriet Tubman to Beyoncé, and from poetics to performance.

Tanisha C. Ford is Professor of history and Biography and Memoir at The Graduate Center-CUNY. She’s an award-winning historian and cultural theorist whose work centers on social movement history, Black feminist theory, material culture, Black visual culture, cultural economics, migration, and the craft of life writing. Ford is the author of Our Secret Society: Mollie Moon and the Glamour, Money, and Power Behind the Civil Rights Movement (Amistad/HarperCollins, 2023), which won the 2024 NAACP Image Award for Outstanding Literary Work of Biography/Autobiography. It received Honorable Mention for the Organization of American Historians’ coveted Darlene Clark Hine Award for Best Book on African American Women’s and Gender History. Our Secret Society was also named one of Vanity Fair’s and Ms. Magazine’s Best Books of 2023. Ford has also written three other books: Liberated Threads: Black Women, Style, and the Global Politics of Soul (UNC Press, 2015), winner of the OAH Liberty Legacy Foundation Award for Best Book on Civil Rights History; Dressed in Dreams: A Black Girl’s Love Letter to the Power of Fashion (St. Martin’s, 2019); and Kwame Brathwaite: Black is Beautiful (Aperture, 2019). Her scholarship has been published in the Journal of Southern History, NKA: Journal of Contemporary African Art, the Black Scholar, and QED: A Journal in GLBTQ Worldmaking. She writes regularly for public audiences, with stories in the Atlantic, New York Times, Time, Elle, and Harper's Bazaar, among others. Ford was named to The Root’s 100 Most Influential African Americans list for her innovative, public-facing scholarship. She is an OAH Distinguished Lecturer. Her research has been supported by institutions including New America/Emerson Collective, the Institute for Advanced Study, the Smithsonian Museum of American History, Harvard Radcliffe Institute, Ford Foundation, Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Ford is currently writing an experimental biography of sculptor and institution builder Augusta Savage, which will be published by Penguin Press—as part of Henry Louis Gates Jr’s “Significations” series.

Deirdre Cooper Owens is an Associate Professor of History and Africana Studies at the University of Connecticut. Before her most recent appointment, she simultaneously directed the Program in African American History at the Library Company of Philadelphia and a medical humanities program at the University of Nebraska. During that time, she was the only Black woman in the country who served as director of an academic medical humanities program. Dr. Cooper Owens is a popular public speaker, has appeared in several documentaries, podcasts and television newscasts as a historical expert, and is a nationally recognized reproductive justice advocate. She is an Organization of American Historians’ (OAH) Distinguished Lecturer, a past American College of Obstetricians and Gynecologists Fellow, and a newly elected member of the American Antiquarian Society. Time Magazine named her as one of the country’s “best historians.” Dr. Cooper Owens has won several prestigious honors and awards for her scholarly and advocacy work in history and reproductive and birthing justice. Her first book, Medical Bondage: Race, Gender and the Origins of American Gynecology won a Darlene Clark Hine Book Award from the Organization of American Historians as the best book written in African American women’s and gender history. It has been translated into Korean. She is currently working on a popular biography about Harriet Tubman that will examine her life through the lens of disability and is also writing a historical monograph about race, medical discovery, and the C-section.

Susana M. Morris is Associate Professor of Literature, Media, and Communication at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She has been an Anschutz Distinguished Fellow at Princeton University and was most recently the Norman Freeling Visiting Professor at the University of Michigan. She is the author of Close Kin and Distant Relatives: The Paradox of Respectability in Black Women’s Literature (UVA 2014), co-editor, with Brittney C. Cooper and Robin M. Boylorn, of The Crunk Feminist Collection (Feminist Press 2017), and co-author, with Brittney C. Cooper and Chanel Craft Tanner, of the young adult handbook, Feminist AF: The Guide to Crushing Girlhood (Norton 2021). She is the co-founder of The Crunk Feminist Collective and has written for venues such as Gawker, Long Reads, Cosmopolitan.com and Ebony.com, and has also been featured on NPR, the BBC, and Essence magazine. Her cultural biography of pioneering science fiction writer Octavia Butler, Positive Obsession: The Life and Times of Octavia E. Butler, will be published in August of 2025.