Joyful Noise in Social Death: An Intergenerational Meditation

Abstract

This essay is an exploration of the critical in critical black studies.

Keywords:

• black studies
• critical black studies

About the Authors

Ula Taylor is a Professor of African American Studies at UC Berkeley.

Cherod Johnson is a graduate student in the African Diaspora Program at UC Berkeley.

Notes

1 W. E. B. Dubois, The Crisis: A Record of The Darker Races, August, vol. 8, no. 4 (1914): 181.

2 Robin D. G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002).

3 Thabiti Asukile, “J. A. Rogers: The Scholarship of an Organic Intellectual,” The Black Scholar 26, no. 2.3 (2009): 46.

4 Jarvis R. Givens, “There Would Be No Lynchings If It Did Not Start in the Schoolroom”: Carter G. Woodson and the Occasion of Negro History Week, 1926–1950,” American Education Research Journal 56 (2019): 3.

5 Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016), 29.

6 Sarah Haley, No Mercy Here: Gender, Punishment, and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2016).

7 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation — An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 266.

8 Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of The Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000).

9 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along The Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2007), 6.

10 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother, p. 6.

11 Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions 5 (2011): 17.

12 Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

13 Saidiya Hartman and Frank Wilderson, “The Position of the Unthought,” Qui Parle 13, no. 2 (2003): 189.

14 Frances M. Beal, “Double Jeopard: To Be Black and Female” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly-Guy Sheftall (New York, NY: The New Press), 154.

15 Jessica Marie Johnson, “Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads,” Social Text 36, no. 4/137 (2018): 57–59.

16 Noliwe Rooks, White Money/Black Power: The Surprising History of African American Studies and the Crisis of Race in Higher Education (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2006).

17 W. E. B. Du Bois, “The Conservation of the Races,” The American Negro Academy Occasional Papers No. 2 (1897): 7.