Duke on Gender Colloquium: "Diasporic Legacies and Black Feminist Sonic Visualities"

I learned to pray through my fingertips. These are poignant words Dr. Yona Harvey shared from her poem “Communion with Mary Lou Williams” during her talk. Harvey’s poem presents prayer as a productive process. These words assert that the production of Black feminist art and knowledge is a spiritual act. Therefore, it is fitting to describe the Gender Colloquium: Diasporic Legacies and Black Feminist Sonic Visualities featuring Drs. Yona Harvey (assistant professor at The University of Pittsburgh Writing Program), Meta DuEwa Jones (associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill’s Department of English and Comparative Literature), and Daphne Brooks (professor of African American Studies at Yale University) as a Black Feminist communion.

Each presentation delivered by these Black women professors seemingly stood on the foundation that had been given by the preceding talk, providing a live example of the through line themes at the center of their respective analyses: repetition, renovation, and temporality. During Harvey’s talk she reads poems that contain a significant amount of repetition. She communicates to her audience that its usage can be a way of accessing and expressing discomfort and rage. Harvey uses repetition as a string to weave together a story of Black people’s struggles and resistance in her poem “Segregation Continuum”. Jones picks up this salient string of repetition and threads it to the function of renovation in the production of Black cultural expression. Jones offers renovation as a grappling with the past’s enduring connection to the present. She argues that “contemporary Black poets thread strings of poetic grace”, grace notes, to connect the old with the new. Jones calls on Harvey to help her illustrate the renovative work of grace notes in Black musical poetics. She has Harvey read her poem “Sound Part II” which renovates Yusef Komunyakaa’s “Ode to the Drum”; more specifically she takes the violent repetition of the kadoom of a drum and claims it for a Black woman’s maternal experience. Brooks continues along a similar line of analysis. She centers contemporary Jazz artist Cecile McLorin Salvant’s sonic curation of Jelly Roll Morton’s “The Murder Ballad” (1938), an explicit song about a “blues heroine” who murders the woman who slept with her lover. The heroine finds love in queer Black female intimacy in prison. Salvant performs a “heist” when she sings Morton’s song. Through the hyperbolic pronunciation of lyrics, the execution of high and low notes, Salvant embodies the pain and nuances of this imprisoned Black woman and others like her. Together these scholars provide an analysis of Black Feminist Time, the ever present past.