Some of us die: a Black feminist researcher’s survival method for creatively refusing death and decay in the neoliberal academy

Abstract

I engage Black feminist thought in this genre-blending text to further theorize Black feminist memory work, a visual research tool for embodied reflexivity. Using my lived experience surviving bereavement, I demonstrate how Black feminist thought—as anchored to the concepts of creation, improvisation, and memory—shaped the aforementioned self-invented method for humanely undertaking the task of heeding the embodied intensities of grief-borne sorrow and suffering. Sorrow and suffering can be exacerbated by systemic marginalization in dehumanizing settings such as the output-obsessed neoliberal academy. Black feminist memory work extends a long lineage of Black women subversively creating alternatives that defy the body-numbing demands of the death and decay-inducing knowledge production normalized in academia. Alternatives to those repressive and oppressive demands offer qualitative researchers apparatus with which to creatively re-member—that is, to return to the body—in order to increase the heart’s capaciousness and capacity for compassion. As qualitative researchers, embodied (re)connection to the essentially compassionate core of our human/e selves is imperative for resisting, recovering from, and surviving the deadening trap/pings of neoliberal academia.

Keywords:

• Black feminism
• improvisation
• creativity
• memory
• methods
• grief

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Drs. Sherry L. Deckman and Susan E. Wilcox for supportive insights, and to the editors of this special issue for their invitation and guidance.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 I use academe, academia, and the academy interchangeably in this article; relatedly, I also make reference to “the university (as a specific institutional site) and academy (as a shifting material network)” [emphasis added] (Rodríguez, 2012, p. 811).

2 This subtitle pays homage to the canonical Black feminist text, Some of us did not die: New and selected essays of June Jordan (Jordan, 2002).

3 Miriam Atkin and Iemanjá Brown compiled Audre Lorde’s teaching materials into a text titled, Audre Lorde: “I teach myself in outline,” notes, journals, syllabi, & an excerpt from Deotha.

4 A guiding protocol providing prompts for curating photographs as well as examining how one’s body is holding memory and/or responding to remembering vis-à-vis photographs is presented in Ohito (forthcoming).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Esther O. Ohito

Dr. Esther O. Ohito is an assistant professor of curriculum studies in the School of Education at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. An interdisciplinary scholar, Dr. Ohito researches issues of Blackness, race, and gender at the nexus of curriculum, pedagogy, embodiment, and emotion. Dr. Ohito’s oeuvre centers and amplifies Black women’s and girls’ knowledges and voices.