Black Movement: Black Stillness 2023–2024
Ruha Benjamin, Faculty Convener
This year-long seminar explores quiet, rest, imagination, and play as essential for Black aliveness. What does it mean to imagine Black culture beyond resistance, Black labor buoyed by leisure, Black thought marked by hesitance, Black movements rooted in stillness? We take up these questions in light of Kevin Quashie’s contention in The Sovereignty of Quiet: “Blackness is always supposed to tell us something about race and racism, or about America, or violence and struggle and triumph or poverty and hopefulness. The determination to see blackness only through a social public lens, as if there were no inner life, is racist… and it practically thwarts other ways of reading.” So let us read otherwise.
In reflecting on the relationship between Black movement and stillness, we will consider how labor struggles are, at once, rest struggles. Here, we will take up Tricia Hershey’s critique of grind culture as we question the idea that the purpose of rest is to “recharge” and “refuel” to produce more "output to capitalism.” Engaging Black childhood studies, we will reckon with how play and games are no less important than education and study, and we will reflect on how celebrations of “Black excellence” can obscure Black exhaustion, vulnerability, and disability. As we consider the chronic weathering of Black bodies, we will investigate the importance of sleep and other forms of rest for intergenerational healing. Sleep deprivation, after all, is dream deprivation. But we will insist on dreaming… as the basis of collective organizing and intimate worldmaking.
Taken together, this series is experimental as much as interdisciplinary — practicing, playing, and imagining alongside a wide range of scholars, artists, and activists. If, as Toni Cade Bambara cautioned, “not all speed is movement,” then this seminar invites a slower approach to thinking and being in and beyond the academy.
Speakers
Ariana Brazier
(This resource is representative of Ariana Brazier's scholarship.)
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Brazier, Ariana. “'Please Keep Playing.' An open letter to my son, Remix” Scalawag. 5 May 2023.
Crystal Fleming
(This resource is representative of Crystal Fleming's scholarship.)
How to Be Less Stupid about Race by ISBN: 9780807050774Publication Date: 2018-09-18Drawing upon critical race theory, as well as her own experiences as a queer black millennial college professor and researcher, Fleming unveils how systemic racism exposes us all to racial ignorance--and provides a road map for transforming our knowledge into concrete social change.
Akil Fletcher
(This resource is representative of Akil Fletcher's scholarship.)
- Fletcher, Akil. "Black Gamer's Refuge: Finding Community within the Magic Circle of Whiteness." The Routledge Companion to Media Anthropology. Edited by Elisabetta Costa, et al. vol. 1, Routledge, 2023.
Kyra D. Gaunt
(This resource is representative of Kyra D. Gaunt's scholarship.)
The Games Black Girls Play by ISBN: 0814732739The Games Black Girls Play illustrates how black musical styles are incorporated into the earliest games African American girls learn--how, in effect, these games contain the DNA of black music. Drawing on interviews, recordings of handclapping games and cheers, and her own observation and memories of gameplaying, Kyra D. Gaunt argues that black girls' games are connected to long traditions of African and African American musicmaking, and that they teach vital musical and social lessons that are carried into adulthood.
Ayana Jamieson
(This resource is representative of Ayana Jamieson's scholarship.)
- Jamieson, Ayana and Moya Bailey "Emergent Counter-Memories in the Field of Octavia E. Butler Studies"Women's Studies, 48:1, 2019, pp. 1-7. DOI: 10.1080/00497878.2018.1559405
Bettina Judd
(This resource is representative of Bettina Judd's scholarship.)
Patient by ISBN: 1625579233Publication Date: 2014-11-30Bettina Judd's phenomenal debut poetry collection, PATIENT., is about recovery in many senses: recovery of the subjectivity of several historical figures, through the recovery, reconstitution, and telling of their stories—among them Anarcha Westcott, Betsey Harris, Lucy Zimmerman, Joice Heth, Saartjie Baartman, and Henrietta Lacks, who were infamously 'patients' or subjects of inspection and 'plunder' by, among others, J. Marion Sims, the controversial gynecologist, and P.T. Barnum, showman and circus founder.
Zahyr Lauren
(This resource is representative of Zahyr Lauren's scholarship.)
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Lauren, Zahyr. “We Are That Wave — with Zahyr Lauren aka The Artist L.Haz” The Solidarity Index. Podcast Episode 4. 23 June, 2023.
Rahsaan Mahadeo
(This resource is representative of Rahsaan Mahadeo's scholarship.)
- Mahadeo, Rahsaan. "Marinating Over the Anti-Ebony Tower: An Academic 'Grammar Book'."Theory in Action 12.3 (2019): 105-27. ProQuest. DOI:10.3798/tia.1937-0237.1923
Joshua Myers
(This resource is representative of Joshua Myer's scholarship.)
- Of Black Study byISBN: 9780745344140Publication Date: 2022"Of Black Study explores how the ideas of Black intellectuals created different ways of thinking and knowing in their pursuit of conceptual and epistemological freedom. Joshua Myers explores the work of thinkers who broke with the racial and colonial logics of academic disciplinarity. Bookended by meditations with June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara, the book focuses on how W.E.B. Du Bois, Sylvia Wynter, Jacob Carruthers and Cedric Robinson contributed to Black Studies approaches to knowledge production within and beyond Western structures of knowledge."—PLUTO PRESS
Shaun Ossei-Owusu
(This resource is representative of Shaun Ossei-Owusu's scholarship.)
- Ossei-Owusu, Shaun. “THE SIXTH AMENDMENT FAÇADE: THE RACIAL EVOLUTION OF THE RIGHT TO COUNSEL.”University of Pennsylvania Law Review, vol. 167, no. 5, 2019, pp. 1161–239. JSTOR. ISSN: 0041-9907
Kevin Quashie
(This resource is representative of Kevin Quashie's scholarship and relates to the seminar theme.)
Black Aliveness, or a Poetics of Being by ISBN: 1478021322Publication Date: 2021-02-05Kevin Quashie analyzes texts by of Lucille Clifton, June Jordan, Toni Morrison, Evie Shockley, Gwendolyn Brooks, and others to argue for a Black aliveness that is disarticulated from antiblackness and which provides the basis for the imagination and creation of a Black world.
Sabrina Strings
(This resource is representative of Sabrina Strings's scholarship.)
Fearing the Black Body by ISBN: 9781479886753Publication Date: 2019-05-07There is an obesity epidemic in this country and poor black women are particularly stigmatized as "diseased" and a burden on the public health care system. This is only the most recent incarnation of the fear of fat black women, which Sabrina Strings shows took root more than two hundred years ago. Strings weaves together an eye-opening historical narrative ranging from the Renaissance to the current moment, analyzing important works of art, newspaper and magazine articles, and scientific literature and medical journals--where fat bodies were once praised--showing that fat phobia, as it relates to black women, did not originate with medical findings, but with the Enlightenment era belief that fatness was evidence of "savagery" and racial inferiority.
