What do we consider ordinary? Is it the mundane everydayness of black life or the extraordinary violence of black death? Is it the repetition and accumulation of rhythm or the fragmented complexity of time? How do the choreographies of care, in the forms of mothering, protest, spatial politics, and the use of language, whether performed, illegible, archived, or forgotten, contribute to the ordinary? How do people and the archives of their lives create space and opportunities to consider ordinary forms of loss and dispossession? Finally, for whom and under what conditions does the ordinary become extraordinary? These were some of the questions a community of scholars brought together by Jennifer C. Nash sat with during Duke's second annual Black Feminist Summer Institute (BFTSI).
In a space that honored vulnerability and offered profound generosity, students and faculty participants gathered for a week of critical reflection, grappling with the many facets and enduring legacies of Black Feminist Theory. In many ways, the institute felt like an ode to writing and thinking in community. Invited faculty shared essays and musings on current projects that bridged the personal, the theoretical, and the archival. At the same time, graduate student participants had the opportunity to share our research and receive feedback and questions from many of the scholars with whom our work is guided and in conversation. Dr. Jennifer C. Nash began by asking, "What does it mean to lose something that was only partly yours?" and read versions of her essay, "My Mother's Clocks: On Losing Time with Dementia." This essay, a reflection on her mother's dementia and its impact on Nash's family, her relationship with both of her parents and her own experience as a mother, evolved into a meditation on black feminism's "commitment to making beauty" even when faced with loss. The essay and the following conversation also began a critical exploration of black feminism and motherhood's seeming inextricability.
On our second morning, Marquis Bey and Tiffany Lethabo King's talks meditated on abolition, the Black ecological, and untethering from the existing notions of race, family, and gender to imagine new possibilities. Their talks encouraged us to consider how we navigate spaces and engage the relational dynamics of liberation. Marquis Bey's talk, presented as "meditation and meandering musings," asked how we understand blackness and gender within the confines of the often-illegible dispossession of these categories. Citing Hortense Spillers, Bey spoke of black feminism's capacity to make life systems sustainable for all. In searching for other ways of being and living, Bey arrived at parantology, which is "a project of desedimentation" that rejects all pre-existing categorical distinctions, hierarchies, and orientations. Bey's presentation ended with a challenge to imagine and attend to how we have been "excluded from becoming" by the rigid confines of gendered and racialized signifiers.
Tiffany Lethabo King invoked the character of Darla from the television show Queen Sugar to discuss Black ecological desire. King considered the interconnectedness of Black people's relationship to the land and family abolitionist narratives. In particular, Darla's character's "waywardness" and seeming refusal to participate in the Black middle-class family ideal became a mirror through which King sought to unravel these misguided dynamics of ownership and dispossession. King asked participants to consider where, when, and under what conditions black feminist family abolition emerges.
On the third morning, Mercy Romero and Bianca Williams's talks centered on memory as an archive. They encouraged participants to consider the various forms of archives that become part of the everyday, ordinary processes of pedagogy, family making, care work, violence, and loss. Both speakers also encouraged us to consider what counts as scholarly, theoretical production and the forms they are allowed to take. Mercy Romero's talk was a meditation on her family's loss of their home in Camden, NJ, and a presentation on an archival excavation of the Goldwater Memorial Hospital. Mixing poetry, home videos, and letters to explore the tensions present in care work both within the family and in hospital spaces, Romero also reflected on the boundaries and fissures underlying how to think about home and geography when confronted with the loss of property, while also bringing attention to ways we might think with the archive to understand the complexities within the stories they tell. In the presentation, Romero also reflected on her writing practice. Weaving together a poetics of care and tenderness deeply bound in the family archive. Romero encouraged us to turn to writing to think about the questions we continue to grapple with, asking, "What can home and property mean to us on the other side of dispossession?"
Bianca Williams framed her talk as a "public testimony." Reflecting on her role as co-founder of Black Lives Matter 5280, a chapter of the national organization, and the racial battle fatigue inherent in the organizing work of Black feminist activists, Bianca Williams encouraged us to see Black feminist organizing, teaching, and community-building in movement organizations and in the classroom as two sides of the same coin. Using images of BLM actions, Williams challenged us to imagine how movement strategies can resonate with classroom teaching and pedagogy. Williams also asked us to consider the broader meaning of doing theory, to look beyond how theory is often interpreted and framed within academia, and to consider how strategies of resistance used in movement spaces can also be taught to students in academic spaces to confront institutional and structural injustices.
Erica Edwards' and Sherie M. Randolph's fourth-day presentations leaned into contradictions. Edwards, interested in the material history of literary forms, spoke about Black feminist after-futures and the possibilities presented in Black feminist literature. Drawing on Gloria Naylor's novel Linden Hills, published in 1985 and based on a middle-class black community living in a mythical community, Edwards grappled with the ontological conundrum of Black erasure and the promises of Black humanity.
Based on the life and legacy of Black feminist artist Camille Billops, including Billops's art, interviews, personal papers, and other archival sources, Sherie M. Randolph's lecture explored the idea of "bad" Black mothers and asked, "How do we understand "bad" Black mothers who rejected contemporary forms of mothering in favor of their own creative and political work during the long 1960s?" One figure framed as a "bad" mother who nonetheless understood her contribution to Black art as more valuable than her role as a Black mother is Billops, who gave up a five-year-old daughter for adoption to pursue her art and personal happiness. Randolph's talk meditated on how Black feminist understandings of the possibility of Black liberation might change when motherhood is rejected altogether.
On the final day of the Summer Institute, we were challenged to think critically about what we know and how we approach the unknowable by the presentations of Sarah Jane Cervenak and Jovanna Jones. Cervenak's presentation focused on Renee Gladman's Prose Architectures, a collection of drawings. These works, which originated from Gladman's extensive writing practice, display stylized yet indecipherable scripts arranged in lines that frequently gather to indicate structures or cityscapes. For Cervenak, Gladman encouraged new modes of engaging black feminist writing, thinking about writing as art, and about black feminism's poetical project. Cervenak encouraged us to reflect on what it might mean to write about art and consider the forms this writing might take.
In her presentation on Black Boston, Jovanna Jones considered the relationship between grief, catharsis, and memorialization. She questioned the importance of claiming space through presence as opposed to ownership. The presentation, which Jones, a participant in the first annual Black Feminist Summer Institute, hopes will eventually be turned into a book titled The Last Thanksgiving at West Rutland Square, was framed as a "rumination on desire. Examining her grandmother's life and family archives, Jones addressed a history of displacement in her family and invited us to consider possible forms of memorialization beyond reclamation, including proximity and collective memory.
All things considered, BFTSI was the most nurturing academic space I've ever experienced. The intimacy and vulnerability encouraged throughout the week empowered all participants, graduate students and faculty alike, to meaningfully engage with each other's work. The questions we built together at the beginning of the session and added throughout the week enabled a generative space of mentorship and ordinary gestures of spectacular care.