“This sculpture is a representation of Osain, a deity of wild plants and healers, according to Yoruba religion. Here Lind imagines the deity embodying the mangrove forest of Loíza. This maquette is a small rendition of a public sculpture that was displayed in the Botanical Garden in Caguas.” Puerto Rican Art by Lena del Sol Langaigne. “Artist Feature Friday: ‘Portales’ by Samuel Lind,” November 18, 2020. https://www.lenadelsol.com/blog/artist-samuel-lind. (H/T Daniel Morales-Armstrong of Taller Entre Aguas)
Been working on sending this since October. Shout out to break finally giving me a chance to sit in front of the computer long enough to do so. Shout out to everyone treading water right now.
Reads (Here’s what my tabs look like right now (this might be a long one):
Evans, Stephanie Y. “Emergent Themes in Critical Race and Gender Research.” Black Women’s Studies Booklist. Accessed October 4, 2023.
https://bwstbooklist.net/
Evans, Stephanie Y. Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2008.
Remezcla. “Followers of the Yoruba Faith Reflect on the Impact of Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade.’” https://remezcla.com/features/music/beyonce-lemonade-yoruba/.
Zimmerman, Sarah J. “The Gendered Consequences of Abolition and Citizenship on Nineteenth-Century Gorée Island.” Journal of Women’s History 35, no. 3 (2023): 19–38.
Nash, Jennifer C., Samantha Pinto, Marisol LeBrón, Monica L. Miller, Ann Cvetkovich, Julie Livingston, Psyche Williams-Forson, et al. “2020 Keywords Symposium.” Theory & Event 25, no. 1 (2022): 124–214.
Drucker, Johanna. Graphesis: Visual Forms of Knowledge Production. Harvard University Press, 2014.
Steele, Catherine Knight, Jessica H. Lu, and Kevin C. Winstead. Doing Black Digital Humanities with Radical Intentionality: A Practical Guide. Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2023.
Saidiya Hartman: “The method guiding this writing practice is best described as critical fabulation. “Fabula” denotes the basic elements of story, the building blocks of the narrative. A fabula, according to Mieke Bal, is “a series of logically and chronologically related events that are caused and experienced by actors. An event is a transition from one state to another. Actors are agents that perform actions. (They are not necessarily human.) To act is to cause or experience and event.” (“Venus in Two Acts” was read in Black World Seminar last week)
Godreau, Isar, and Yarimar Bonilla. “Nonsovereign Racecraft: How Colonialism, Debt, and Disaster Are Transforming Puerto Rican Racial Subjectivities.” American Anthropologist 123, no. 3 (2021): 509–25. https://doi.org/10.1111/aman.13601.
Ben Schmidtt. “Sapping Attention: Reading Digital Sources: A Case Study in Ship’s Logs.” Sapping Attention (blog), November 15, 2012. http://sappingattention.blogspot.com/2012/11/reading-digital-sources-case-study-in.html.
Toro, Ariana K. Costales Del. “Uncovering the Digital in the Caribbean,” December 15, 2022. https://openbooks.lib.msu.edu/makingsensedh/chapter/uncovering-the-digital-in-the-caribbean/.
Bruno, Sarah. “‘Yo La Bomba No La Bailé, La Bomba Yo La Vivé’ (I Didn’t Just Dance Bomba, I Lived It): The Pedagogy of Daily Puerto Rican Life, Black Feminist Praxis, and the Batey.” Transforming Anthropology 30, no. 2 (2022): 93–106. https://doi.org/10.1111/traa.12242.
Lara, Ana-Maurine. Queer Freedom : Black Sovereignty. Albany: SUNY Press, 2020.
Paton, Diana. “Gender History, Global History, and Atlantic Slavery: On Racial Capitalism and Social Reproduction.” The American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 726–54. https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac156.
Baker Josephs, Kelly. “DH Moments, Caribbean Considerations: On Reaction, Response, and Relevance in the Digital Humanities.” Digital Humanities Quarterly 013, no. 3 (October 14, 2019).
Castor, N. Fadeke. “Ifá/Orisha Digital Counterpublics.” The Black Scholar 52, no. 3 (July 3, 2022): 17–29. https://doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2022.2079065.
Zamora, Omaris Z. “Transnational Renderings of Negro/a/x/*: Re-Centering Blackness in AfroLatinidad.” Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism 26, no. 2 (68) (July 1, 2022): 93–99. https://doi.org/10.1215/07990537-9901654.
Projects
Mapping Marronage (led by Dr. Annette Joseph-Gabriel, Duke University) is an interactive visualization of the trans-Atlantic networks of intellectual, creative and political exchange created by enslaved people in the 18th and 19th century. It traces the geographic reach, crossings and intersections of letters, testimonies and financial exchanges by enslaved people of African-descent. “Welcome | Mapping Marronage.” Accessed October 4, 2023.
https://www.mappingmarronage.com/
Shift Collective: https://www.shiftcollective.us/collective: “We strive to create measurable and lasting social change by developing inclusive cultural memory experiences that give voice to unheard narratives and perspectives. We help communities tell and amplify their own stories, so that incomplete dominant narratives do not persist. We are focused on inclusive narrative and historical representation in order to support social, cultural and resource equity.”
The Sustainable Futures Blog https://medium.com/community-archives
Black Haunts in the Anthropocene: The project by Dr. Marisa Parham (dir. AADHum) that started it all, as they say.
https://blackhaunts.mp285.com/
Caribbean Diasporas: Panorama of Carnival Practices is a Digital Humanities initiative by The Diaspora Project aiming to revitalize, reuse and recover primary and secondary sources, as well as artifacts, all related to carnival practices and mobility in the Caribbean. Based at UPR.
https://caribbeandiasporaproject.org/
Some more stuff from the archives:
If you’re spending break trying to write and need an organizing strategy, try this tried and true. I use it with Scrivener, it can be adapted to whatever your flavor of writing platform or device is, including notecards on the floor: Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Small Chunks Go Down Easier (Ft. Scrivener) #writing.” Substack newsletter. Kitchen Table History (blog), December 31, 2021. https://jmjafrx.substack.com/p/small-chunks-go-down-easier-ft-scrivener.
The piece above references this post on Academic Coaching and Writing which is now available only via the Wayback Machine: “Chunk Your Writing Project into Small Chunks” by Dr. Sally https://web.archive.org/web/20171027173005/http://www.academiccoachingandwriting.org/academic-writing/academic-writing-blog/vii-chunk-your-writing-project-into-small-assignments/
It also references this post from the PhinisheD forums (also apparently long gone) by “Bombay” about churning out writing by creating storyboards (“Writing Up a Storyboard to Avoid Restructuring”). The era of message boards has been hate speeched into oblivion, but the North remembers. A pdf of that post is here.
Back with the Afro-Latinx Lab was a part of Electric Marronage and not a Diaspora Solidarities Lab microlab: [Afro-Latinx Lab] Puerto Rican Studies at 50: Current and Future Practices, 2021.
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I love the top image and plan to show my high school world history class. Students discussed a few excerpts from Wicked Flesh today and we have discussed African diasporic religion.