Alabama
Dr. Hilary N. Green has a tremendous compilation of research resources for studying slavery, Black history, and the civil rights movement in Alabama and across the South. View it here: https://hgreen.people.ua.edu/research.html. Her African American Memory Reader, which she created with her students and has chapters on the history and memory of the Civil War and Reconstruction plus suggested readings, is especially rich. Her book, Educational Reconstruction: African American Schools in the Urban South, 1865-1890 (Fordham U, 2016) is a must read.
Rereading Autumn Womack’s “Contraband Flesh: On Zora Neale Hurston’s Barracoon” https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2018/05/07/contraband-flesh-on-zora-neale-hurstons-barracoon/. Revisiting Hurston’s Barracoon: The Story of the Last Black “Cargo” and the testimony of Kossula (Cudjoe Lewis) who was the last captive from the ship Clotilde to pass away. That ship landed in 1859 at Mobile, Alabama, illegally given the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade in the U.S. fifty plus years earlier. So the slavers sank the ship to avoid detection and sold the captives in the region. After freedom, many joined to form Africatown, and kept the history of their landing and their experiences unto the last survivor, Kossula, and passing memories down through their descendants.
The Mobile Public Library (built with Omeka!) has docs from the community formed from that ship. Things like news clips from his passing in 1935, Mobile Black community efforts to commemorate the community and Kossula, and articles in Mobile press on the history of the Clotilde.
This is technically part of a research haul as I do some work on Alabama’s Black history.
#BlackTheory
“No. At times black thought is not always a refusal outright; it is not a denial or a rejection. Black thought is the intellectual praxis of living this world and seeking liberation; living this world and seeking liberation engages and disrupts this world and, importantly, allows us to gather and learn about ways of liberation that are already here, while imagining better futures. Sometimes refusals refuse too much. I, we, refuse what they want us to be while also gathering clues (notes, songs, grooves, memories, the forgotten) within and in excess of our present system of knowledge. The clues are insurgencies.” Katherine McKittrick. Dear Science and Other Stories. Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2021, page 67, footnote 31.
“You know that the kulcha we call black has allowed for the most racist conceptions of race--namely, that one drop of black blood is enough to deny you a right to love, live and work where you desire--we know that black kulcha has taken one drop as an opportunity to bleed and draw blood and spread dark energy all over the globe.” Greg Tate, "Black Ontology Now: Dark Matters and Meeting the Lady Gaga Challenge" Black Renaissance Noire, Spring 2011. [PDF]
Haiti
Afghanistan
Note: This is a topic I know very little about and am unlearning on. My generation grew up on this war and the one that preceded it with Bush I. If you are reading this and you are my age let’s unlearn empire together. If you are of any age and know of resources and things to read, post in comments/reply.
M. Jacqui Alexander is always on time….
“At this point we need to dwell a bit more on the ways in which order is a gendered undertaking and how gendered militarization becomes crucial in securing the “vital interests” of the state as it aligns those interests with those of the American people.” M. Jacqui Alexander, “Whose New World Order? Teaching for Justice” in Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred (2005).
Technical Issues
Surviving the demise of dh.jmjafrx.com: Backed up the archive using this Wordpress to Markdown tool: https://kevq.uk/how-to-convert-wordpress-to-markdown/
And officially said goodbye in this Sundown Post: https://dh.jmjafrx.com/2021/08/15/sundown-dh-the-blog-and-where-to-find-me-next/
Twitter: Got my account un-suspended so technically I’m out of jail, but I’m staying offline for a bit. We’ll call it voluntary home detention. Back soon.
xo,
jmj