Black Feminist Ecologies/Ethnographies of Experimentation and Revolt in The Black Shoals (2019) and Progressive Dystopia (2019)

Session Submission Type: Non-Paper Session: Workshop Format

Abstract

This authors meet critics roundtable focuses on the Black feminist methodologies and experiments offered by King and Shange in their works The Black Shoals (2019) and Progressive Dystopia (2019). With and after works like Pedagogies of Crossing (2005) "Venus in Two Acts" (2008), Wayward Lives: Beautiful Experiments (2019), Politics of Passion (2008), "What the Sands Remember" (2012), Shape Shifters (2015), "Revisiting Sycorax" (2015) and In the Wake (2016) this roundtable tarries with and explores practices of Black feminist creativity, speculation, refusal, advocacy, vulnerability, collaboration, witness, ritual, poetics, experimentation and play. The scholars and artists on this panel use King's ecological sites and Shange's abolitionist ethnographic sites as points of departure for discussing their own practices of crafting/conjuring Black feminist/fugitive epistemologies. The roundtable participants discuss their own notions of creative labor/work and its relationship to Black feminist methodologies.

The roundtable will consider the following:

What aspects of our methodologies require experimentation and risk taking?
What kinds of attentions, senses/sensibilities and ways of looking/listening do you have to develop to do this work?
What non-academic resources did you draw upon?
What was your writing and or creative practice/ceremony?
Who (ancestors/descendants) traveled with you during this process?
What aspects were you unable to fully control?
What did you have to release?
What gifts did you receive?
What relationships did you discover or strengthen?

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association 2020

Chair

• Sarah Juliet Lauro, The University of Tampa

Comments

• Vanessa Agard-Jones, Columbia University

• Charmaine Lurch

• Tiffany Lethabo King, University of Virginia

• Savannah Shange, University of California-Santa Cruz