Suchergebnisse

Kimberly Juanita Brown explores the literary and visual representations of how black women bear the marks of slavery, centers black women in narratives of slavery, and uncovers and critiques the refusal to see the violence done to black women's bodies.

This article discusses Brown's use of Afrofuturism and critical pedagogy in her creation of the class, Black Women and the Pandemic Imagination (BWPI), which she taught in Spring 2021 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Brown explains her implementation of precarious pedagogy to attend to the affective needs of students struggling under the effect of Covid-19. She discusses how the analytics of Afrofuturism and critical pedagogy provide strategies for combating white supremacy and for promoting social justice. Brown demonstrates how reading theoretical works by black women about cataclysmic moments (i.e., the apocalypse, contagions, pandemics and even the Middle Passage), as well as studying representations of black women during these moments provides an opportunity for students to "rehearse hope." Brown sees BWPI as a course premised on Black Lives Matter and committed to black futurity – "there are black people in the future." Through BWPI, she hoped to ignite the radical imagination of her students, thereby empowering them to think about creating a more equitable future.

This essay examines the iterations of patriarchy that seamlessly appear in heteronormative familial structures. Specifically, the paper illuminates the practice of patronymic naming—from surnames to name duplications (juniors) in the overarching framework of patriarchy. Such a framework contributes to the ubiquity and rigidity of naming practices and resists alternate ways of presenting generational offspring. Popular culture reinforces patriarchal normalcy via the ritual of representation. This essay explores the ritualized cementing of generational naming and the reverberations of masculine identity it encloses.