Narrating Home and Loss in Black Feminist Writing

Session Submission Type: Roundtable Discussion

Abstract

Women of color feminists have long argued for the generative possibilities of intellectual labor that is informed by the subject position of the theorist. Drawing from this critical lineage, this roundtable considers how Black women scholars from varying disciplinary fields and backgrounds take up nonfiction narrative forms and research methodologies that cohere under terms like autoethnography, autotheory, creative nonfiction, and memoir.

In the spirit of improvisation, before opening up the conversation each speaker will riff on a recent or in-progress piece of their own writing that engages the themes of the roundtable. Among the questions we are concerned with addressing: What are the stakes of taking up the personal in our research and writing? In what ways do we grapple with the ethics of personal, familial, and communal disclosure? How do we respond to the provocations around personal narrative, aesthetic valuation, and affect that Jennifer Nash, our chair, posits in her recent book How We Write Now? And, what practices, tools, and strategies enable us to write through pain, loss, and grief in the wake of various forms of interpersonal, state, and structural violence?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Chair

• Jennifer Nash, Duke University

Panelists

• Regina N. Bradley, Kennesaw State University

• Ashton Pemapanik Dunkley, Georgetown University

• Nicole Fleetwood, NYU

• Su’ad Abdul Khabeer, University of Michigan-Ann Arbor

• Marisa Solomon, Barnard College

• Terrion Williamson, University of Illinois Chicago

• Shoniqua Roach, Brandeis University

Biographical Information

Regina N. Bradley is a Professor of English and African Diaspora Studies at Kennesaw State University, a faculty editor for Southern Cultures journal, co-director of the Hip Hop Studies Consortium at Georgia State University, and author of Chronicling Stankonia: The Rise of the Hip Hop South.

Ashton Pemapanik Dunkley (Jamaican and Nanticoke Lenni-Lenape) is an Assistant Professor of Black Studies and American Studies at Georgetown University. Dunkley’s research centers the histories of Black and Nanticoke-Lenape women throughout the Delaware Bay region. With particular interest in the mechanizations of erasure through which her ancestors’ histories are forgotten or misunderstood, she interrogates how settler colonialism, racialization, and anti-Blackness have intertwined and shaped public memory and recognition of the Nanticoke-Lenape peoples.

Nicole R. Fleetwood is the Paulette Goddard Professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication (NYU Steinhardt) and the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis (NYU College of Arts and Science). A MacArthur Fellow, she is a writer, curator, and art critic interested in Black art and cultural history, aesthetics, photography and documentary studies, and art and activism.

Su'ad Abdul Khabeer is a scholar-artist-activist originally from Brooklyn, NY. She is curator of Umi's Archive, a multimedia project documenting Black and Muslim histories. Su’ad’s first book, Muslim Cool: Race, Religion and Hip Hop in the United States, is a field-defining study on Islam and hip hop that examines how intersecting ideas of Muslimness and Blackness challenge and reproduce the meanings of race in the United States. Su’ad is currently an associate professor of American Culture at the University of Michigan.

Jennifer C. Nash is Jean Fox O’Barr Professor of Gender, Sexuality, and Feminist Studies at Duke University. She is the author of four books, most recently How We Write Now: Living with Black Feminist Theory (Duke University Press), and articles that have appeared in Signs, Feminist Studies, Social Text, differences, Theory & Event, and GLQ.

Shoniqua Roach is Assistant Professor of Black Feminist Theory and Queer Studies at Brandeis University. Her work appears in American Quarterly, boundary 2, differences, and The Black Scholar, among other venues. Roach’s forthcoming book, Black Dwelling: Home-Making and Erotic Freedom, theorizes black domestic spaces as tragic sites of state invasion and black feminist enactments of erotic freedom. Roach has received many awards and fellowships, including those from the American Council of Learned Societies and the Ford Foundation.

Marisa Solomon is an Assistant Professor of Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. Her book, The Elsewhere is Black: Ecological Violence and Improvised Life, received Duke University Press’s Scholar of Color First Book Award. She has published in GLQ, the Journal of International Labor and Working-Class History, Catalyst and a number of edited volumes. She is also an editorial board member of Women’s Studies Quarterly (WSQ) and The Scholar and Feminist Online.

Terrion L. Williamson is an associate professor of Black Studies and Gender and Women’s Studies at the University of Illinois Chicago, where she is also the director of the Black Midwest Initiative. She is the author of Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life and is currently working on a project that centers the story of nine black women who were killed in her hometown between 2002 and 2003.