Tools
Libib: I used to desperately want an app that would scan the barcodes of my books and let me build virtual bookshelves. Between my graduate school office and home, I was always losing track of where a book I needed might be. I still am. Thank you to scholar and archivist Jes Neal for recommending Libib. Simple, private (not Goodreads-owned-by-Amazon), it allows you to scan barcodes and build collections of your books without all of the social, gamification features. Just a clean, simple space to put book lists. The best Christmas gift anyone could ask for.
jrnl: I am tweaking my workflow, once again, and have been struggling to find a way to balance building a journaling practice and wanting to write by hand with the reality that most of my day is spent on a device. I finally decided that what I really wanted was a simple, clean interface that could sync with the cloud, be encrypted, and kept the data in as minimal a file format as possible (basically TXT format). jrnl covers all of those bases. It is journaling on the command line, has options to encrypt, saves files as plain text which lets them sync easily to cloud storage, and I can export and customize as needed. https://jrnl.sh/en/stable/overview/
Reads
A throwback: Regina N. Bradley, “I Been On: BaddieBey and Beyoncé’s Sonic Masculinity,” Sounding Out! (blog), September 22, 2014, https://soundstudiesblog.com/2014/09/22/i-been-on-baddiebey-and-beyonces-sonic-masculinity/.
Jason R. Young, “The Last African: Zora Neale Hurston and the Making of Africa in America,” Palimpsest 11, no. 2 (2022): 51-79,82-83.
Solimar Otero, Archives of Conjure: Stories of the Dead in Afrolatinx Cultures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2020).
Kendra T Field, “The Privilege of Family History,” The American Historical Review 127, no. 2 (June 1, 2022): 600–633, https://doi.org/10.1093/ahr/rhac151.
Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The God of Every Day,” Topical Cream (blog), December 22, 2022, https://topicalcream.org/features/the-god-of-every-day/.
Crystal N. Feimster, “Rape and Mutiny at Fort Jackson: Black Laundresses Testify in Civil War Louisiana,” Labor 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 11–31, https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9475688
Kaisha Esty, “‘I Told Him to Let Me Alone, That He Hurt Me’: Black Women and Girls and the Battle over Labor and Sexual Consent in Union-Occupied Territory,” Labor 19, no. 1 (March 1, 2022): 32–51, https://doi.org/10.1215/15476715-9475702.
What They Said
"The pandemic has revealed deep inequalities and injustices in the access ot health services, that the right ti breathe is not a universal one, and the unsurprising yet enraging fact that the death rate has been higher among black, indigenous, brown and poor communities, communities that carry the weight of lost jobs and increased poverty while billionaires are becoming richer." - Françoise Vergès, A Decolonial Feminism
“And so to be afraid of entering the cemetery by night was to fear not the loving ancestors who lay buried, but the gut kick of our history, which I was bracing to absorb.” Louise Erdrich, The Round House
"There are many names for God. The name I use is “every day.” - Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The God of Everyday” Topical Cream
And if you aren’t doing her God of Every Day course, which became available January 1st, please get into it here.
“Of course, the idea that Africans sold their brothers and sisters down the river into slavery is a myth—though a powerful one—rooted in the faulty idea of an authentic, primordial African Eden basking in the glow of universal black unity.” - Jason Young
“For enslaved women and men, delivering one’s family history was itself a radical act…For enslaved women and men, delivering one’s family history was itself a radical act.” - Kendra Field
“Like Douglass, Garnet was born enslaved in Maryland and escaped slavery as a young person. But unlike Douglass, Garnet grew up with his mother and father and escaped slavery with his family. Unlike Douglass, Garnet knew his birthday: he was born two days before Christmas of 1815. And Garnet knew his family history. In preparation for this escape, his father, George, actively relayed their family history to Henry, that he was the grandson of “a Mandingo chieftain and warrior.” George Garnet impressed upon his son the tradition of resistance from which they descended and for which they were destined.” - Kendra Field