Zora's Daughters

It's Black History 365 over here! We're back for Part II of the first season of the podcast keeping it "spicy" talking about racialization, DaniLeigh's problematic song "Yellow Bone," and the intersection of Latinidad with anti-blackness. Alyssa and Brendane explain Louis Althusser and interpellation, Frantz Fanon's "Lived Experience of the Black Man," and discuss an article about "Puerto Rican" youth in New Jersey "appropriating" "blackness" to demonstrate "urban competency," and its contribution to the erasure of actual factual Black people. Here's the kicker: it's the first text in the "What We're Reading" segment not written by a Black person. In our final segment, we chat with PhD candidate Daisy E. Guzman, one of the few Garifuna-Guatemalan women in academia, to dig deep into Latinidad, thinking blackness as indigenous, and proclaim that folks are not "white passing" they are white!

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Discussed in this episode:

The Invention of Race (Throughline Podcast, NPR, 2020)

"Becoming American, becoming black? Urban competency, racialized spaces, and the politics of citizenship among Brazilian and Puerto Rican youth in Newark" (Ana Y. Ramos-Zayas, 2007)

The Lived Experience of the Black Man (Frantz Fanon, 2008 [1952])

Colorist Clown Culture-Vultures (MayowasWorld, 2021)

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out our Spotify Playlist for ZD 101 curated with our first discussion section group! ZD Merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 102 is here!

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

We're back! 

Next week marks the start of ZD 102, the second "semester" of our first season of the podcast! From February to July, we'll be dropping bi-weekly episodes that will continue to challenge and inform. It'll be everything you loved about the first semester, but a little extra because Alyssa and Brendane are where the money reside! 

Speak soon! 

Shop ZD Swag here!

It's our last episode of the ZD Semester! In keeping with the season, Alyssa and Brendane discuss #BlackGirlMagic via the popular Netflix holiday movie Jingle Jangle (SPOILERS)! We discuss the origins of the phrase via CaShawn Thompson and her coinage of the hashtag Black Girls ARE Magic and how it is both celebration of Black women and girls making a way out of no way and critique of a society determined to leave us behind. We read Savannah Shange's incredible essay "Black Girl Ordinary" which teaches us to celebrate the everyday achievements of everyday Black girls. Then, we deep dive into the wonderful world of Journey Jangle - is she really the epitome of the carefree Black girl or is she just another mule for the uplift of a Black man? Listen and find out! Finally, we discuss the problems with Black women having to "save" American democracy - AGAIN.

Listen all the way through for a little surprise that will help you in our book giveaway!

Discussed in this episode:

“Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography” (Savannah Shange, 2019)

Pushout: The Criminalization of Black Girls in Schools (Monique W. Morris, 2016) [Feature length documentary]

"Plantation Futures" (Katherine McKittrick, 2013)

Jingle Jangle (Netflix, 2020)

Liked what you heard? Donate here!

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100 - no prerequisites needed!

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

In this episode, Brendane and Alyssa tackle a fraught subject in the Black community: colorism. We discuss the paper bag test, dating "loophole" women for ascendance vs. unambiguously Black women to legitimize one's blackness. In our What We're Reading segment, we bring things full circle with Alice Walker's essay where she coins the term colorism, addresses why talking about colorism in relationships (platonic and romantic) is political, and the way she gathers all y'all faves! In our What in the World?! segment, we discuss interracial relationships IRL and on TV, Blackish Love on OWN, Jessica Krug and the fetishization of light-skinned women and Latinx identity in academia, "racial ambiguity," skin bleaching, and the image "That Little Girl Was Me" that depicted Kamala Harris walking with the shadow of Ruby Bridges. Hold on to your seats, friends, because things get HOT!

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Discussed in this episode:

Dark Girls (2011) and Dark Girls 2 (2020)

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100 - no prerequisites needed!

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

It seems we REALLY missed y'all because it's a long episode! Today we talked neoliberalism and waiting for Biden to make it rain with stimmy checks, Black political strategies and women's participation in political movements through the work of anthropologist Leith Mullings, Alyssa explains for 6 whole ass minutes why Canada the "cultural mosaic" isn't the nice post-racial oasis the country's PR team would have you think, why Black capitalism AKA buying Black won't free us, and why Barack Obama is the quintessential Black liberal. We get into Black liberalism and their abolition-ish ways of watering down Black radical politics, what being cancelled really means, and how Black masc & gender non-conforming folks are harmfully impacted by REAL cancel culture. Finally, Brendane tells us more about abolitionist politics, why we weren't begging y'all to vote like most of your other faves, and how Black folks are already practicing abolition.

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Discussed this week:

Mapping Gender in African-American Political Strategies (Leith Mullings, 1997)

To learn more about abolition in all its forms, check out the website launched by Mariame Kaba: Transform Harm

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100 - no prerequisites needed!

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

Brendane and Alyssa are on Fall Break this week! We'll be back on November 11 with a brand-new episode; in the meantime, listen to our full review of You Belong to Me: Sex, Race, and Murder in the South (2014) and the way the documentary perpetuates the same issue of silencing Black women it purports to solve. CW: sexual abuse, victim blaming, intimate partner violence.

If you'd like more of your fix of Zora's Daughters, check us out on Field Initiatives' Field Stories where we discuss being Black women in our research fields and the field of anthropology!

Thanks for your support, and if you liked what you heard please donate here! Don't forget to follow us @zorasdaughters on Instagram and @zoras_daughters on Twitter. Speak soon!

It's all about God's greatest hits today! Alyssa and Brendane kick off the episode with 'Defund Reform Abolish,' before getting into the colonial and religious history and use of the word diaspora. They debate whether the Jamaican immigrant community is a diaspora and get into some African diaspora religions before moving on to the text of the week: Transcendent Kingdom (2020) by Yaa Gyasi, the story of a PhD student dealing with grief, mental illness, and faith - it definitely elicited some strong feelings! Finally, we reveal who the blockheaded dude Brendane was talking about in the last episode and discuss the high - and problematic - standards women must meet in the church. Stay tuned to the end for another little behind-the-scenes of ZD!

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Discussed this week:

Transcendent Kingdom (Yaa Gyasi, 2020)

The Myth of the Negro Past (Melville J. Herskovits, 1941)

European Immigrants in the United States in 2014 (Migration Policy Institute, 2015)

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100 - no prerequisites needed!

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

In today's episode, Alyssa and Brendane explain why we chose 'Daughters', play a new game called "Defund Reform Abolish," and unpack Achille Mbembe's concept of necropolitics in conversation with Angela Davis' brilliant essay “Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights” who helps us contextualizes the history of birth control movements and eugenics. In our What in the World?! segment, we ask What in the Jordan Peele?! is up with the mass hysterectomies in ICE detention, the erasure of Black immigrants from the immigration outrage, and the neo-Malthusian rhetoric surrounding COVID-19 as a solution to overpopulation and climate change. Plus, we get a little off-topic and start talking about 90 Day Fiance.

Discussed this week:

Racism, Birth Control and Reproductive Rights (Angela Davis, 1983)

Necropolitics (Achille Mbembe, 2003)

Whistleblower Alleges 'Medical Neglect,' Questionable Hysterectomies Of ICE Detainees (NPR, 2020)

World's richest 1% cause double CO2 emissions of poorest 50% (The Guardian, 2020)

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100!

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

In today's episode, Brendane and Alyssa are doing the Lorde's work! We talk ideal care packages, the history of the fetish (wassup Freud, Marx, and problematic anthropologists!) and contemporary racial/sexual fetishization, the invisibility and hypervisibility of Black women, honor Audre Lorde's Transformation of Silence into Language and Action, PLUS a ZD first: a guest! In our What in the World?! segment, we discuss the sexual harassment allegations in Harvard's anthropology department and speak with Harvard Anthropology PhD candidate Chrystel Oloukoï about the double-edged sword of institutional whisper networks and how misogynoir excludes Black women from the "safety" of these networks.

P.S. Tune in until the end for a little surprise!

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Discussed this week:

The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (Audre Lorde, 1978)

How Do We Listen to the Living? (Brendane Tynes, 2020)

You Belong to Me: Sex, Race and Murder in the South (John Cork, 2014)

Summertime Selves (On Professionalization) (Nick Mitchell, 2019)

The Patron (Nell Gluckman, 2020)

Protected by Decades-Old Power Structures, Three Renowned Harvard Anthropologists Face Allegations of Sexual Harassment (James S. Bikales, 2020)

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100!

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

The world is a dumpster fire! Today we're talking about what's been helping us get through quarantine, the Anthropocene and the hypocrisy of its hyper-ethics, Black feminist futurity and imagination and environmental racism and the slow violence of redlining, superfund sites, and the water in Flint, MI. We also discuss the value of taking up arms versus taking up community care during and after the revolution, as well as the ethics, politics, and erotics of sharing videos of Black death.

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Discussed this week:

Blackness and the Pitfalls of Anthropocene Ethics (Axelle Karera, 2019)

Staying With the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene (Donna J. Haraway, 2016)

How Decades of Racist Housing Policy Left Neighborhoods Sweltering (The New York Times, Brad Plumer and Nadja Popovich, 2020)

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

Transcript is available on our website here.

Be sure to check out the Syllabus for Zora's Daughters 100.

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