Zora's Daughters

Now that we're "back to normal," it takes more than hitting 'Leave Meeting' to exit a boring talk! We skip the usual structure of our episodes and speak freely about preparing for and attending conferences as graduate students. We answer listener questions like, What's the point of going to conferences? Should I attend a conference as an undergrad? How do I socialize and connect with others at an academic conference? How do you manage the financial aspect of attending conferences?

We also spill the tea on people getting roasted after their talks and our best and worst experiences of conference-going! Tune in, because it's helpful and entertaining - our specialty!

Book recommendations:

How to Be Yourself: Quiet Your Inner Critic and Rise Above Social Anxiety (Ellen Hendriksen, 2019)

Support us on Patreon, check out the syllabus for ZD 301 here, or read the transcript on our website here.

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

"I'm not Black, I'm OJ!" Today, Brendane and Alyssa are talking kinship, belonging, diaspora wars, and what we need to do to get free.

What's the Word? Kinship. Kinship studies are foundational to the discipline of anthropology, but in this section we talk about how people are taking up the concept to tell their own stories today.

What We're Reading. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade by Saidiya Hartman. In this segment, we read the first two chapters to trace Hartman's attention to kinship and belonging in the afterlife of slavery. What does it feel like to be a stranger everywhere?

What in the World?! We talk about the "intratribal conflict" of the African diaspora wars, the choice of identity and how it's a shortcut for people to understand how to oppress you, dating tips from our moms, boycotting The Woman King, how ADOS and FBA strategies disenfranchise Black Americans and promote anti-blackness, and Brendane's personal experience visiting Ghana.

By the way, we're on break! We'll be back with episode 5 on November 9th - just in time for the AAA Annual Meeting!

Discussed In This Episode

Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade (Saidiya Hartman, 2008)

Other Episodes

S1, E7 Holy Is the Black Woman

Syllabus for ZD 301 is available here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

We're getting down with Marxy Marx and the Foucky Bunch! In this episode, Alyssa and Brendane discuss reproductive justice, dispossession, and the stakes for Black birthing people in a post-Roe v. Wade world with Dr. Mali Collins (IG | Twitter).

What's the Word? Dispossession. We draw a thread through Karl Marx's primitive accumulation, Rosa Luxemburg's The Accumulation of Capital, and David Harvey's accumulation by dispossession to thinking about the ways Black birthing people have been dispossessed of reproductive rights and motherhood.

What We're Reading. "The Meaning of Liberty" in Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty by Dorothy Roberts. In this chapter Roberts argues that we must reshape (or perhaps exceed) our understanding of reproductive liberty by accounting for the experiences and needs of Black women.

What in the World?! We are joined by Assistant Professor Mali Collins to discuss who expansive definition of reproductive labour, the spectacle of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, the whiteness of the abortion access movement, what we can do to survive this moment in community, reconnecting with your body, and black maternal dispossession.

Sister Song Reproductive Justice Collective | The People's Paper Co-op | GoFundMe for Murdered Black Mother of 6 | Help a Pregnant Black Mother Rest

Other Episodes

S1, E6 Deathcraft Country

Discussed In This Episode:

Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty (Dorothy Roberts, 1997)

Syllabus for ZD 301 is available here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

Ding dong! In this week's episode, Alyssa and Brendane are talking about sovereignty, non-sovereignty, and the death of the sovereign Queen Elizabeth II to ask whether it's possible (and desirable!) to leave the past behind while creating our collective future.

(CW: rape, sexual assault 1:05:00- 1:16:00)

What's the Word? Sovereignty. Defined as autonomy, freedom from external control, sovereignty is typically considered a positive. Brendane and Alyssa unpack the ways the concept is also rooted in power and domination.

What We're Reading. Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment by Yarimar Bonilla. Bonilla examines how contemporary activists in Guadeloupe imagine and contest the limits of postcolonial sovereignty, challenging us rethink our received ideas about freedom, independence, nationalism, and revolution, and our commitment to sovereignty itself.

What In The World?! In this segment, we discuss the death of Queen Elizabeth II and why Alyssa has complicated feelings about it; why turning to past values (that never existed) is evidence of crisis; the problem with Jeremy O. Harris' Slave Play, Bridgerton, and The Courtship; and whether you can really have love under racial or patriarchal domination.

Listen to the exclusive Patreon content! Check out our new merch!

Discussed In This Episode

Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (Yarimar Bonilla, 2015)

Season 1, Episode 6: Deathcraft Country

Syllabus for ZD 301 is available here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

Your favorite terrestrial commoners are back! For our first episode of the new season, we're talking about popular culture, the cult of celebrity and influence, and how they undermine radical movements for change.

What's the Word? Postfeminism. Originally used to describe the backlash to the second wave feminist movement, postfeminism is an ideology that suggests we no longer need feminism because we have accomplished the goals of the women's movement. This ideology is expressed culturally in TV, film, and other forms of media. 

What We're Reading. “Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture” by Kimberly Springer in Interrogating Postfeminism: Gender and the Politics of Popular Culture. In this essay, Springer contributes a racial analysis to the critiques of postfeminist media, examining the presence and absence of Black women in television and film in order to promote the idea we're living in a postfeminist and post-Civil Rights Movement world while making us responsible for racial uplift.

What in the World?! In this segment, we discuss the infamous 'submission' interview between Shan Boodram and Jasmin "WatchJazzy" Brown, why withdrawing from labor does not confer the same status as it does for white women; why Beyonce and prosperity gospel is not going to save us and actually perpetuates the oppressions that hold us down; Meghan Markle and her feminism without teeth; and the difference in the smoke the internet has for Tiffany Haddish compared to Aries Spears being a reflection of the way Black women are required to be responsible for the race.

Join our Patreon community!

Check out our new merch!

Discussed In This Episode

"Divas, Evil Black Bitches, and Bitter Black Women: African American Women in Postfeminist and Post-Civil-Rights Popular Culture" (Kimberly Springer, 2007)

Syllabus for ZD 301 is available here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

In this final episode of the season, you will hear our incredible conversation with Professors Riché J. Daniel Barnes, Kevin Quashie, and Autumn Womack, and vocalist and composer Candice Hoyes from Wednesday, May 4th.

Traditionally, Zora Neale Hurston has been more widely celebrated for her contributions to American literature than as an anthropologist and folklorist. In recent years, we have begun to see more mainstream recognition of her interventions into the discipline of anthropology. This re-membering has been accompanied by a variety of aesthetic invocations, particularly to signal disruption, authenticity, and the avant-garde. In this way, Zora is called into practice and treated as an object of use. We will invite academics and artists to discuss how Zora Neale Hurston inspires their work and the phenomenon of Black women’s use as the “sliding glass door” (James 2015) that opens up into new conditions of possibility. We will reflect upon the instrumentalization of Black women to ask: How can we tend to Black women’s memory and legacy with care?

Thank you for listening to Season 2 of the podcast! We'll be back in September for Season 3. In the meantime, you can keep up with us via Twitter, Instagram, and Patreon over the summer. Love and light, y'all!

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

In today's episode, we are too TIED to repeat ourselves! There is simultaneously so much to talk about and little we haven’t said in previous episodes, so we're treating this as a moment to hold space, be in community with each other and you all, and really, just rant about what in the world is going on?! You'll hear an update from Brendane and Alyssa (and why she's joining one of the industrial complexes they mentioned in the last episode!).

Discussed today:

Roe vs. Wade and the Supreme Court leak

Previous episodes to help you make sense of our current moment:

S1, E6 Deathcraft Country

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

The industrial complex is an industrial complex! Today we’ll be talking about the spread of industrial complexes, non-profits, so-called activist influencers, the controversy around BLM Global Network spending, and the whispers around Nikole Hannah-Jones and Kimberlé Crenshaw being problématique.

What's the Word? Industrial Complex. Popularized by President Dwight D. Eisenhower, the industrial complex refers to the profit-driven enmeshment of the state and private industry in a way that makes it more profitable to perpetuate the problem they claim to solve.

What We're Reading. “In The Shadow of the Shadow State” by Ruth Wilson Gilmore in The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex. In this essay, Gilmore discusses the rise of the non-profit industrial complex as an industry that takes up "kindness" work for those the state has abandoned and operates to suppress revolution. Her solution is to take the money and run, without fooling ourselves into believing the state or capitalism will give us the keys to our freedom.

What in the World?! In this segment, we discuss our ongoing experience of forming a non-profit, the questionable financial decisions of Black Lives Matter, what Alyssa and Brendane would do if we came into $90 million, whether we really should be putting our faith or support in famous people or so-called "activist influencers," and why you should stay away from Teach For America.

Join our Patreon community!

Discussed In This Episode

The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: Beyond the Non-Profit Industrial Complex (INCITE!, 2017)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

Sometimes it's love and light, sometimes it's love and light that ass up! In this episode, we're joined by founder, inventor, and curator Adero Knott to discuss accessibility, disability, technology, and the ableist joke Chris Rock made that got him slapped at the Oscars.

What's the Word? Accessibility. We define the term, explain how we prioritize accessibility, discuss its connection to disability justice, and talk about norms and how they harm all of us. 

What We're Reading. "Engineered Inequity" in Race After Technology: Abolitionist Tools for the New Jim Code by Ruha Benjamin. Technology is often offered as the solution for racism, ableism and all the other ills of society. But what about when robots do racism better than humans? Through Benjamin's book, we discuss the way technology can amplify the effects of historical and contemporary biases and discriminatory practices.

What in the World?! In this segment, we speak with founder, inventor, and curator Adero Knott about accessibility and its affective dimensions, how ableism is built into society, toxic masculinity, erasure of our Black "heroes'" disabilities, Tyre Sampson, why disability justice must be anti-capitalist, and the all important question du jour: Would we want our baes to do the same as Will Smith?!

Support Adero's work at AK Prosthetics on IG, and follow her on Instagram!

Discussed this week:

Project LETS

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

Is rejection and trauma the Black Manosphere and Toxic Femininity villain origin story?! In today's episode we're joined by soon-to-be PhD Candidate Anuli Akanegbu to discuss patriarchy, the know-your-place aggression towards Black women online, and what draws people to these spaces on the internet.

What's The Word? Patriarchy. This term is used to describe a society that organizes itself around the idea that cis men are superior to and should dominate over... everybody else. This structure imposes the gender binary and influences the way we're socialized. We also discuss the spiritual side of the divine feminine, which looks nothing like what we see on YouTube.

What We're Reading. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman by Michele Wallace. The chapter we discuss asserts that the men in the Black Power movements were relying on Norman Mailer's "The White Negro" and the Moynihan Report to shape what Black manhood and a revolutionary should look like.

What in the World?! We speak with Anuli Akanegbu about the outgrowth of the Black Manosphere from Hotep Twitter, the "applesauce" that helps some folks swallow the red pill, Steve Harvey, capitalizing on tearing down Black women, the aesthetics of these spaces, being "high-value" as an afterlife of slavery, the way all of this is tied to capitalism, and what it means to feel welcome in your own body.

Check out Anuli's podcast BLK IRL and follow her on Twitter and Instagram! 

Discussed in this episode:

The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (bell hooks, 2004)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 202 is here!

Let us know what you thought of the episode @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.