Diasporadas: Black Women and the Fine Art of Activism

African American Review

2015

Starbucks in order to write even when I am running two hours behind. Kelli Hatfield, I know for a fact I would have never made it through this program without you. Although we do not see each other as often, your strength through all of life's intricacies have been an inspiration. Leslie Rzeznik, you are a poetic genius, and you have directed me through my journey as a poet while also teaching me to paint poetically. Angela Stanley, you kept me sane through this process by allowing me to run ideas past you, and forcing me to hang out even when I would rather write. Additionally, I would like to acknowledge the existence of two little creatures, Urban and Loco, to whom I have the continued pleasure of being a cat-mom. I got Urban from the Eastern Market in Detroit during a course outing for the Urban Education course with Dr. Williams, hence the name Urban. I adopted Loco from Heather Nicholson, and I am all the better for it. They stay up with me during the wee hours of the night, and attempt to wake me up early in the morning, which encourages me to keep pushing. Additionally, I acknowledge the love of my life, Ali Abdul, who, on many days, served as my strength when I felt there was no strength left to give. Above all, I acknowledge two people and one place that have remained my buttress and foundation on this earth. Detroit, Michigan (the people and places within it) helped raise me into a woman who can withstand anything or die trying. I am Detroit to my bones, and regardless where I end up in this life, I will always remember that I came from Motown blues, Paradise speak-easies, old-school Tiger Stadiums, and Rouge Plant workers. Detroit, this project is for you. Yolanda Carter, when I met you 16 years ago, I learned that a Black woman with an education was a force to be reckoned with. And, despite the distance that often exists between stepmothers and their step children, you gave me someone to look up to. Richard Carter, 27 years ago we lost a very special woman to both of us, Betty Carter, but 27 years ago we gained a v bond that no one can ever tear apart. You have dedicated your entire life to making sure that my mother's death was not in vain. You have supported me financially and emotionally when you did not have to. Frankly, you could have left like many fathers do, but you believed in me. You calmed my soul when cars and computer motherboards crashed, when I could have lost everything. You reassured me that what was important was "getting this paper," and all else would fall in place. Thank you.

2017

ArteFuse, 2017

Focusing on the interwoven narratives of more than forty artists and activists, We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85 at the Brooklyn Museum explores the political, social, cultural, and aesthetic priorities of women of color during the emergence of second-wave feminism. The first exhibition of its kind, We Wanted a Revolution brings to light the intersectional experiences of women of color, experiences that often subvert the primarily white, mainstream feminist movement of the 1960s in order to reorient conversations around race, feminism, political action, art production, and history in this crucial period.

Theory & Event, 2018

This essay articulates the possibilities of writing black ethnography that centers black and diasporic ways of knowing and thinking time, space, and place that are emptied of the modernist strictures of the formal essay. Black ethnography is conceived of as a decolonial, art-making practice that refuses genre as well as disciplinarity. Elaborating on Hortense Spiller's theory of interior intersubjectivity, this essay turns toward symbolic economies of blackness rooted in alternative cosmological paradigms and lifeworlds of postslave contemporary life. Using phonoethnography to loop time, s/place, and experience backward and forward simultaneously, this essay honors the Spillerian imaginary of the "speaking flesh.

Camera Obscura, 2020

This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.

The Black Scholar, 1999

2020

Part narrative reflection, part artistic installation, this work contemplates the tensions and the possibilities of Hip Hop culture, Black womanhood, and American democracy in the United States. The significance of this work is twofold: (1) The authors use Hip Hop feminism to develop a framework for Hip Hop activism as a public pedagogy on US politics, and (2) they provide commentary on US democracy from a Black Hip Hop feminist perspective through art. This article contributes an argument for a creative ontological space from which Black women can reimagine a justice-centered US democracy. 2 Journal of Hip Hop Studies, Vol. 7, Iss. 1 [2020], Art. 7 https://scholarscompass.vcu.edu/jhhs/vol7/iss1/7 72 Journal of Hip Hop Studies Dear US Democracy, I am searching for liberty in you like hunting for gray hair at age 30 You are dye, death, massacre, mascara, smoky-eyed romance Something alluring about your promises and proposals

in August 1967, as the slogan Black Power burst the confines of African Ameri-can subcultures and global anti-colonial movements began to circulate prominently within mainstream mass media, seven men from two countries met via a transnational telephone connection to talk about the colour black. Their conversation, and its subsequent publication in the arts journal artscanada's October 1967 issue titled "Black," provides this article's focus. While the thematic issue indexes a rare intersection between eiite art and racial politics, and while it is unlikely that any of these representatives of innovative contemporary art practices intimate with the radical countercultures of Greenwich Village and Yorkville saw any cloying taint of bigotry compromise their views about art and art-making, the issue nonetheless enforces covert racism sustained by ideologies of W/iiteness. The result is that rather than embracing creative expression associated with black, Black-as-race is construed as alien to contemporary arts mise-en-scène. RÉSUMÉ En août 1967, quand le slogan « Black Power » se fait entendre au-deld des subcultures afro-américaines et les principaux médias commencent à couvrir les mouvements anti-impérialistes mondiaux, sept hommes vivant dans deux pays, par l'intermédiaire d'un lien téléphonique interurbain, ont eu une échange sur la couleur noire. Cet article porte sur cette conversation et sa publication ultérieure en octobre 1967 dans un numéro de la revue artscanada intitulé « Black ». Ce numéro thématique est l'occasion d'une rare intersection entre l'art d'élite et la politique raciale. R est peu probable que ces représentants de pratiques innovatrices d'art contemporaii}, avec leur connaissance intime des contrecultures radicales de Greenwich Village et de Yorkville, aient été conscients d'avoir exprimé des préjugés à l'égard de l'art et de la création artistique. Pourtant, le numéro comporte des exemples de racisme implicite soutenu par une idéologie favorisant la blancheur. En conséquence, plutôt que de reconnaître l'expression créative associée à ce qui est noir, les interlocuteurs traitent le noir en tant que race étrangère par rapport à l'art contemporain MOTS CLÉS Art et politique raciale; artscanada; Black Power; Périodiqes Krys Verrall is a fine arts and cultural scholar with an interest in the relationship hetween marginal populations and cultural production. She teaches in the

Colliding with History: African American Works on Paper from the Collection of Wes and Missy Cochran, 2021

The majority of the prints and works on paper on exhibit are abstract works of art that can be thought of as anomalous among African American artists. Since the Harlem Renaissance, whose enigmatic leaders W. E. B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, and Langston Hughes encouraged African American artists to deeply mine African American culture as a source of inspiration for their work. They wanted artists to celebrate their culture and connect it to the motherland by using African visual elements. Such works of art needed to be readily meaningful, cogent, and unambiguous. However, what is presented here tests that assertion and forces the question of whether and how can abstract art be understood as activist and agency enabling. It is thought that abstract art cannot do the work of activism and protest because it appears ambiguous and its meaning elusive. Therefore, the definition of “activism” must be broadened to include a “visual activism” that is developed out of texts, events, or the multiple contexts of social engagement to catch the more esoteric assertions and instances within the practice of abstract art’s activism.