I recently revisited my application for this Fellowship to check in with myself, if I was indeed doing what I said I wanted to do. Sometimes it was easy to lose my bearings as I was knee deep in finding …
Coming out of our Silence
A spidering path to Aunt Jemima and “Black & Blue”
It’s amazing what twisting paths spiders can lead us on if we let them. Several months ago I started checking out the biographies of the women captured with Louise in a 1935 Chicago Defender photo with the headline “They Are …
The Sisterly Affection of Friendship Albums
Three years ago, I participated in a project led by Anaïs Duplan of the Center for Afrofuturist Studies and Katie Parry of The Fabric Workshop and Museum. The project was called Endgame: Black Artists for an Urgent Black Future…
Assembling ‘The 10’ and Reverse-Engineering
As a December 1st deadline approached, I was talking with another Chronicling Resistance Fellow about the challenge of fulfilling the assignment of identifying at least 10 objects from PACSCL institutions that would be included in the culminating exhibition of our …
Imagining and Filling in Lost Narratives
There have been a lot of times when this research process has been incredibly frustrating. I haven’t found what I wanted to find in the archives. I have been worried that what I’m finding did not fit the narrative that …
Fred’s Skin Whitener, Colorism, and ‘Passing’
I’m delighted when the themes and personalities that surface in my research reappear in unexpected places, both in the archives and in current arts and cultural happenings. That was my reaction when, a few weeks ago, I was at the …
Resisting by Doing What She Had to Do
I am unavailable for servitude. I refuse it.
These words, from Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (New York: W.W. Norton 2019, p. 299), encapsulate what I imagine was …