Unbroken

In this critical autoethnography, I examine my lived experiences as a Black woman doctoral student during the rise of the Black Lives Matter movement. Further, as I recount my academic journey in the wake of assaults to Black life and resulting Black resistance, I discuss the pedagogical interventions of Black women faculty members that made me feel as if my life and work mattered in their classrooms. I revisit spoken word poems and class assignments written between 2015 and 2017 along with news articles documenting national events occurring at the time as relevant texts to help me explore and understand my experiences. I utilize Critical Race Theory as an analytic lens, focusing on the following tenets: persistence of racism, critique of color-evasiveness, and counterstorytelling. I conclude with implications regarding how introducing graduate students to critical theory and methodologies can equip them with the tools to empirically explore and articulate their lived realities. Moreover, I discuss how such explorations can be validating and healing as students navigate particularly challenging academic and sociohistorical contexts. Additionally, I describe how providing students with creative outlets to express themselves in coursework can help them process their experiences and produce material that is humanizing, liberating, and life-giving.

A Bluesman's Beards: A Sign of Black Resistance in Bahian Rap

ABSTRACT Beards are an indication that man has reached maturity. It is with this idea in mind that the songs from the second album by artist Baco Exu do Blues, Bluesman, are analyzed. At the early age of 22, in his act of creation, Baco criticized the conditions of socioeconomic inequality and racism imposed on people of African descent, acting as an ideological sign in the construction of a Black Consciousness. As a symbol of insurgency, Baco also used mythical language to compose an identity and format his rap, creating a hero. Hip hop criticizes racial capitalism, established in Brazil with the colonization and the arrival of enslaved Africans. The compositions are analyzed as cries of resistance to necropolitics – a call to perform acts that relate ethical values and poetry when doing politcs.

Black dissent in America: exploring Ava DuVernay’Selma and 13th against the background of the 2020 anti-racial discrimination protests

The 2020 protests on police brutality and racial discrimination in the United States constitute the most recent event of black dissent in what is a history marked by injustice, humiliation, exploitation and the denial of freedom, equality and self-representation of a specific group of people. Dissent can be exercised in many ways and in different areas of society. Over the past few years, Ava DuVernay has produced filmic works that are counter-narratives to the forms of representation imposed on African-Americans by the dominant white majority. This paper analyzes two of those works, Selma (2014) and 13th (2016), and considers their potential as instruments of dissent within the context of black resistance, at a time when racial relations are once again under scrutiny.

NOISY SOUNDS! It’s a Listening Affair: Jazz Aesthetic, Improvisation, and Womanism in M. NourbeSe Philip’s She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks

Black writers adapted jazz music to “say the unsayable” or employed the “jazz aesthetic,” which includes improvisation, citation, and variation as a stylistic device to distance their literature from European forms of narration. These elements can also be found in M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry collection She Tries Her Tongue, Her Silence Softly Breaks (1988) which rigorously challenges the way language and words are perceived. Philip denounces the Western ideology of non-ambiguity, dichotomies, and narration altogether by engaging the reader as jazz musicians engage their audience. What role did music play in the Black resistance? What is the “jazz aesthetic” and how is it incorporated into Black diasporic literature? How does jazz music create community and how did Black female musicians speak up in a rather hypermasculine jazz universe? How does Philip incorporate the jazz aesthetic, improvisation, and womanist thoughts in her poems? And what is the intention of noise, dissonance, and (musical) violence?