Black Feminism and the Sonic Archive
Please join us at today at Noon PST for the third event in our speaker series celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Barbara T. Christian. The conversation will feature two of her former students sharing their groundbreaking work on Black sound, Black archives and Black feminist thought.
About The Speakers
Daphne Brooks (Speaker) is William R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of African American Studies, American Studies, Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Music at Yale University. She is the author of Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910; Jeff Buckley’s Grace and Liner Notes for the Revolution: The Intellectual Life of Black Feminist Sound. She is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia, and her liner notes essay for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set was published in fall of 2020.
She is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia, each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing, and her liner notes essay for Prince’s Sign O’ The Times deluxe box set was published in fall of 2020. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, The Nation, The Guardian, Pitchfork.com and other press outlets.
Carter Mathes (Associate Professor of English, Rutgers University) is a specialist in African American Literature, Twentieth Century Literature, and African Diaspora Studies. His first book, Imagine the Sound: Experimental African American Literature After Civil Rights focuses on the relationship between sound and literary innovation during the 1960s and 1970s. Currently, he is working on a second book, Ecologies of Funk, that examines formations of black radical thought in literature and music as they move between Jamaica and New Orleans during the second half of the twentieth-century. He has published essays in venues including Small Axe, Contemporary Literature, Callaloo, and African American Review, and has articles and chapters in progress and forthcoming on jazz in the civil rights movement, dub music within contemporary Jamaican literary aesthetics, and afrofuturism in low-fi hip hop production.
Leigh Raiford (Moderator) is associate professor of African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches, researches, curates and writes about race, gender, justice and visuality. She is the author of Imprisoned in a Luminous Glare: Photography and the African American Freedom Struggle and co-editor with Heike Raphael-Hernandez of Migrating the Black Body: Visual Culture and the African Diaspora.
UPCOMING IN THE CRITICAL CONVERSATIONS SERIES
MONDAY, MARCH 1: Abolition, Black Studies and the Law
Speakers: Geoff Ward, Phil Goff
Moderator: Nikki Jones
MONDAY, MARCH 29: “Abolition for the People”: A Conversation with Kaepernick Publishing
Speakers: Mariame Kaba, Ameer Loggins, Christopher Petrella, Connie Wun
Moderators: Nikki Jones, Gabriel Regalado
MONDAY, APRIL 5: Black Feminist Geographies of Emancipation
Speakers: Savannah Shange, Brandi Thompson Summers
Moderators: Tianna Paschel, reelaviolette botts-ward
Part of a larger project to amplify the interdisciplinary, political and world-building work of Black Studies, Critical Conversations aims to create generative exchange about the legacies and futures of Black Studies within this pivotal moment. Our Spring 2021 series is organized around two themes. Firstly, we will be celebrating the life and legacy of Dr. Barbara T. Christian, an architect of Black feminist criticism, a founding member of our Department and a gifted writer and teacher. We will also be exploring the concept of “abolition democracy,” thinking creatively and collaboratively about the practice of abolition as necessary to building life-affirming institutions and robust democratic structures. Through both themes, we ask: what are the lessons of the Black Feminist, Black Radical, and Black intellectual traditions for our moment and what is the role of Black Studies in building more just futures?
Critical Conversations Spring 2021 launches two new department initiatives: the Abolition Democracy Initiative, funded by UC Berkeley’s Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research, and the Black Studies Collaboratory, funded by an Andrew W. Mellon Foundation Just Futures Grant.