The Quilt: Towards a twenty-first-century black feminist ethnography

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

¹See Helen Pyne Timothy, ‘About the Name’ (1998), tracing the socio-cultural, linguistic and intellectual genealogies of MaComère (macumé, makumeh, macoomé, macomeh) and other linguistic/geographical variants.

²For other seminal examples of written and embodied black feminist collaborative models such as that of the Combahee River Collective, see edited volumes produced by Barbara Smith (1983); Stanlie James and Abena Busia (1993); Carole Boyce-Davies and ‘Molara Ogundipe-Leslie (1995); Carole Boyce-Davies (1994); Beverly Guy-Sheftall (1995); Irma McLaurin (2001) and the performance work of Urban Bush Women <http://www.urbanbushwomen.org/>.

³Caribbean novelist and cultural critic George Lamming (2004) conceives Caribbean language ‘as a field of power relations’, noting distinctions between the ways in which ‘official King's English’ and ‘vernacular’ or ‘home’ languages are used to assert different kinds of agency dependent on social context.

⁴We draw here from Houston Baker's definition of a generational shift as ‘an ideologically motivated movement overseen by young or newly emergent intellectuals who are dedicated to refuting the work of their intellectual predecessors and to establishing a new framework of intellectual inquiry’. However, we question if a generational shift must ‘refute’ the work of predecessors and suggest rather that a shift could be a repositioning reflecting a particular context (2000: 179). Fanon's position on generational mission seems more applicable – respecting the work done by previous generations, we seek to build on it by understanding and meeting the historical challenges of our own with the possibilities that this moment offers us (1963: 166).

⁵During the question-and-answer portion of her presentation at the Northwestern University Sociology Department Ethnography workshop on Wednesday, 14 February 2007, Celeste Watkins talked about the narratives that form around you in the field. She was referring the impressions that respondents had of her and the way that she would have to change her self-presentation in different environments. The title of her paper was ‘Am I My Sister's Keeper? Racially Representative Bureaucracies in the Post-Welfare Reform Era’.

⁶In his article ‘Performance Studies Interventions and Radical Research’, Conquergood articulates Performance Studies as creativity (artistry), communication (analysis), and citizenship (activism) (2002: 152).

⁷Cimarrones assisted English privateers like Francis Drake and pirates like Henry Morgan to successfully sabotage Spanish colonial trade practices in Panama and to secure their own freedom.

⁸The local artists were Virgilio ‘Yaneca’ Esquina, Virgilio ‘Tito’ Esquina, Reynaldo Esquina, Gustavo Esquina de la Espada, Ariel Jiménez, Jose ‘Moraito’ Angulo, Manuel ‘Tatu’ Golden, Jeronimo Chiari, Hector Jiménez and Danilo Barrera. National and international artists included: Jenny Arribu, a visual artist from the United States who initiated a children's art class in Portobelo; Carla Escoffery, a Panameña visual artist studying in the United States who assisted with Jenny's class; Pamela Sunstrum, a visiting Botswanan artist from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill; Michelle Lanier, an independent artist from the United States; and me. Panamanian photographers Sandra Eleta and Gustavo Esquina shared their art practices by helping to document the event.

⁹Carmelita, Estaban, Alejo and El Grupo Española/The Spanish Group are pseudonyms.