Zora's Daughters

The revolution will not be sold! We're back with the first episode Season 2! In today's episode, Brendane and Alyssa share what they got up to over the summer break and then jump right into the episode unpacking the philosophical concept of Aesthetics and how it is bound up in politics and power. In the What We're Reading segment, the pair discuss Angela Davis' 1994 essay "Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia" to think about the ways society refashions the revolutionary past - in this instance how Davis' afro goes from symbol of resistance to fashion statement, evacuating her contribution to Black radicalism through commodification. In What In the World?! Brendane and Alyssa discuss Tiffany's new "About Love" campaign that features Jay-Z, Beyonce, a rarely viewed Basquiat, and a priceless blood diamond. Finally, they touch on the issues and contradictions of the activist-influencer industrial complex through the recent events with the Jessica Natale (formerly @soyouwanttotalkabout on IG) and bestselling author Ijeoma Oluo.

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Discussed this week:

Afro Images: Politics, Fashion, and Nostalgia (Angela Davis, 1994)

Other Readings:

The Politics of Aesthetics (Jacques Rancière, 2013)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 201 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.

Cultural appropriation is not the sincerest form of flattery! On today's episode, Alyssa and Brendane tackle the slippery concept that is cultural appropriation. In What's The Word? they tackle the age old anthropological question of what is "culture," and explain what cultural appropriation most certainly is not. What We're Reading for this episode is bell hooks' "Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance" to unpack how cultural appropriation serves a double duty, simultaneously reinforcing the power and dominance of the appropriator and it diminishing the value of the appropriated by objectifying and exoticizing elements of their way of life. In the What in the World?! segment, we discuss some reader questions and talk about Kahlil Greene's TikTok series “How everything Gen Z does originated with Black people,” white women twerking and saying 'gang gang,' and the new film In The Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda.

Also, the book Alyssa mentions about red beans is actually Rice and Beans: A Unique Dish in a Hundred Places edited by Richard Wilk and Livia Barbosa. Oops!

Thank you all for an incredible year of the podcast! We'll be back in September with a new semester. In the meantime, take care of yourself and each other. Asé

P.S. Our episode art this week was inspired by Sha'Carri Richardson, future Olympian!

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Discussed this week:

Eating the Other: Desire and Resistance (bell hooks, 1992)

Other Readings:

Consuming the Caribbean: From Arawaks to Zombies (Mimi Sheller, 2003)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 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.

Happy Earthstrong to our resident Gemini, Brendane!

This week we're bringing you the mental health and self-care episode. We open up with chatting about what we're doing to take care of ourselves. In our What's the Word? segment, we discuss Dr. Arline Geronimus' concept of weathering and how chronic racial stress impacts our physical and mental health. This week, we're reading Dr. Koritha Mitchell’s essay “Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care” to unpack strategies of self-care that go beyond bubble baths and facials. Mitchell's work helps us understand why we don't need to have the confidence of a mediocre white man, strategies for mitigating know-your-place aggression (spoiler: it's white people holding themselves to the standards they hold others), and why Black capitalism really isn't going to save us. In our What in the World?! segment, we discuss Naomi Osaka saying "Nah" to the French Open, the way Nikole Hannah-Jones' denial of tenure is a form of know-your-place aggression, and finally the co-opting and commodification of self-care. On the latter topic, Alyssa catches the spirit and leaves us with a WORD, hunny!

CW: rape culture, child sexual abuse in Hollywood (00:36:30-00:39:00)

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Discussed this week:

Identifying White Mediocrity and Know-Your-Place Aggression: A Form of Self-Care (Koritha Mitchell, 2018)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 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.

Abolition is not about your feelings! It's the long awaited episode where we discuss in detail what it means to be and practice PIC (prison-industrial complex) abolition. In our What's the Word? segment, Brendane and Alyssa unpack Michel Foucault's concept of discipline and docile bodies to think about the way power compels us to regulate our bodies and behaviors. Today, we read Mariame Kaba's new book We Do This 'Til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice. We pulled out three important themes that we felt help us understand how we got to a place where we can't imagine a world without prisons: punishment vs. consequences, transformative justice vs. restorative justice, and safety vs. security. This leads us into conversations about non-reformist reforms, the difference between crime and harm, accountability, gaslighting of Black sexual assault survivors, and the usefulness of hope. In our What in the World?! segment, we discuss the murder of 16-year-old Ma'Khia Bryant by Ohio police, the ongoing punishment and incarceration of Ashley Diamond, and the cancel culture "crisis" and who really gets cancelled (spoiler: it's not rich celebrities).

CW: Throughout the episode we make reference to sexual assault and perpetrators of sexual harm. We describe the medical and juridical process of rape cases from 00:57:00 to 01:01:00. Please take care of yourself as you need while listening.

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Discussed this week:

We Do This 'til We Free Us: Abolitionist Organizing and Transforming Justice (Mariame Kaba, 2021

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 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.

So you want to go to grad school?! It's the episode you've been waiting for: Brendane and Alyssa talk all things PhD life while incorporating that critical analysis you know and love. In our What's the Word segment, we discuss the four waves of feminism and why people have got intersectionality à la Kimberlé Crenshaw all the way messed up. For What We're Reading, we discuss the essay “Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology” by Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, and Attiya Ahmad in order to discuss the Self/Other problematic of anthropology that excludes and alienates women of color the discipline, as well as the particular racialized and gendered experiences that make the academy an unwelcoming place. Finally, in What In the World?! we answer your questions and we spill the tea on our application process, our journey to the PhD, shout out the folks that helped us get here, and why you need friends both inside and outside of the Ivory Tower. We also talk the best advice we received about grad school, and self-care where Alyssa shares how her hot girl semester helped her have a healed girl summer.

Get ready - it's a long one! And also, apologies for the audio - we're still learning our new mics and audio software!

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Discussed this week:

Sitting at the Kitchen Table: Fieldnotes from Women of Color in Anthropology (Tami Navarro, Bianca Williams, Attiya Ahmad, 2013)

Resources for Grad School:

Black Girl Does Grad School

Grad school merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 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.

We did more than write, hunny! In this episode, Alyssa & Brendane explain the what happened between them and Dr. Kiona AKA How Not to Travel Like a Basic Bitch and the "multiracial coalition" on Instagram that led to the baby viral YouTube video. It's a conversation on theory and practice, particularly how theory and experience inform how we perform criticism in our everyday lives and how that lens will make our world better. We also address more of the comments and questions we received on posts and in our DMs. Finally, you'll hear a slightly different version of the conversation than is available on YouTube, as we had to record twice!

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Discussed this week:

Zora's Daughters' Reaction to How Not To Travel Like a Basic B*tch

ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 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.

Mo' money, fewer problems? Today, Brendane & Alyssa take on the question of getting that government guap - reparations, baby! Our new sound is finally here - shout out to our music producer Segnon Tiewul for di big tuuuune! Let us know what you think on Twitter and Instagram. Additionally, the Graduate Workers at Columbia University are currently on strike to push agreement on a fair labor contract with the university, who has threated to dock pay. Donate to the solidarity fund here. *Note* The conference panel Alyssa talks about moderating was postponed due to the strike.

An opinion poll released last summer found that 80% of Black Americans believed the federal government should compensate the descendants of enslaved people, compared with 21% of white Americans. In our segment What's the Word? we discuss reparations - what it has meant and what it could mean. In What We're Reading, we talk about Deborah A. Thomas's introduction and coda to her monograph Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (2011) to understand what it means to use reparations as a framework for thinking. In our last segment, What in the World?! we have Dr. Thomas on to discuss how her thinking has evolved from reparations to repair, embodiment to affect, and citizenship to sovereignty in her follow up book, Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (2019). We also talk about the questions that animate her research, the announcement of reparations for (some) Black residents in Evanston, Illinois, the 'conjuncture' that's got everyone talking about reparations, and why we should mobilize for reparations and repair on multiple scales.

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Discussed this week:

Exceptional Violence: Embodied Citizenship in Transnational Jamaica (Deborah A. Thomas, 2011)

Political Life in the Wake of the Plantation: Sovereignty, Witnessing, Repair (Deborah A. Thomas, 2019)

The Case for Reparations (Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2014)

U.S. Museums Hold the Remains of Thousands of Black People (Delande Justinvil and Chip Colwell, 2021)

Payback's a B**** (Code Switch, NPR, 2021)

ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 is here!

Follow us @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

Stop trying to make Black happen! In this episode, Alyssa & Brendane return to the game Defund Reform Abolish to think discuss and clarify (no pun intended) light skin privilege, the one-drop rule, and white passing. Our What's the (Unclear) Word segment covers the basics of Afropessimism, as well as the difference between economic Afro-pessimism vs Afro-optimism vs. Afrofuturism. In our What We're Reading segment, we discuss the essay "Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying" by Patrice D. Douglass to understand how Black feminist theory and Afropessimism can come together to undo the theorizing of violence against Black women into non-being. Finally, we bring on fellow Daughter of Zora, Chloé Samala Faux, 5th year Anthropology PhD candidate at Columbia University, to help us delve deeper into Afropessmism and its critiques and get to the bottom of 'what is Black?" The conversation gets productive when we debate about whether Meghan Markle is Black, whether it's useful to consider her a non-Black woman of African descent, and the way partus sequitur ventrem (the law of slavery that says "that which is brought forth follows the womb") ultimately does and undoes her. Finally, we remember Breonna Taylor on the one year anniversary of her murder with a moment of silence.

It's a long episode and we still didn't get to everything we wanted to talk about!

By the time you're listening, Alyssa will be in the thick of her PhD qualifying exams - send good vibes and gifTs (though she loves gifs too)!

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Discussed this week:

Black Feminist Theory for the Dead and Dying (Patrice D. Douglass, 2018)

Afro-Pessimism: The Unclear Word (Jared Sexton, 2016)

Brendane's Feature on Savage x Fenty (2021)

Prerequisites:

Episode 2: Ain't I a Woman

Episode 6: Deathcraft Country

Episode 11: Not My Latinidad

ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 is here!

Follow us @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

It's back to our regular programming with just Brendane and Alyssa getting deep into atmospheric anti-blackness, "natural" disasters, and the Texas Deep Freeze. Our What's the Word? is anti-blackness where we explain why the term racism doesn't fully capture the experiences of Black people in the diaspora and how Renaissance and Enlightenment philosophers finessed the category of human. For What We're Reading, we discuss the final chapter of Christina Sharpe's brilliant work In the Wake entitled "The Weather" and get into the importance of Black redaction and annotation in the wake of disaster. In our final segment, What in the World?! (see content warning below), we discuss the 1902 volcanic eruption of Mount Pelée in Martinique, Hurricane Katrina, the Texas Deep Freeze and why white people are so concerned about Ted Cruz leaving Man's best friend behind. We also address the calls for solidarity among increased anti-Asian violence - TL;DR: Bring the fight to the whites.

CW: We discuss Black suffering as a result of state neglect (00:33:00).

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Discussed this week:

In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Christina Sharpe, 2016)

“Call It What It Is: Anti-Blackness” (kihana miraya ross, 2020)

Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument (Sylvia Wynter, 2003)

Alyssa on the Just Three Podcast (Center for the Study of Social Difference, 2021)

ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 is here!

Follow us @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript will be available on our website here.

In this episode, Alyssa and Brendane discuss our elders and ancestors of Black feminist anthropology with Associate Professor and President of the Association of Black Anthropologists, Dr. Riché J. Daniel Barnes! Dr. Barnes tells us about how she defines Black feminist anthropology, her journey to and through the discipline, who she thinks of as her unsung Black heroines, and offers advice for the next generation of Black feminist anthropologists. We discuss her book Raising the Race: Black Career Women Redefine Marriage, Motherhood and Community and talk about the importance of care and community in graduate school and academia widely.

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Get involved with the Association for Black Anthropologists!

Zora Neale Hurston Summer Virtual Institute

Visit Dr. Barnes website here or follow her on Twitter.

ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 is here!

Follow us @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter!

Transcript is available on our website here.