Combahee River Collective Mixtape: Black Feminist Sonic Dissent Then and Now
Join BCRW in celebrating the 40th anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, the radical Black feminist manifesto completed in 1977 that laid out key tenets of intersectional theory and social justice reform. Taking the works of wide range of artists as our point of departure—from musicians such as the Knowles Sisters and Nina Simone to visual artists like Carrie Mae Weems and the L.A. Rebellion filmmakers—we aim to build a bridge from this historic document to the present and future of Black feminism. Audience participation is key, as we invite all attendees to find new directions in which music and image will allow us to carry forth the manifesto’s cogent wisdom.
About the Speakers
Daphne A. Brooks is a Professor of African American Studies and Theater Studies at Yale University. She is the author of two books: Bodies in Dissent: Spectacular Performances of Race and Freedom, 1850-1910 (Durham, NC: Duke UP), winner of The Errol Hill Award for Outstanding Scholarship on African American Performance from ASTR, and Jeff Buckley’s Grace (New York: Continuum, 2005). Brooks is currently working on a new book entitled Subterranean Blues: Black Women Sound Modernity (Harvard University Press, forthcoming).
She has authored numerous articles on race, gender, performance and popular music culture such as “Sister, Can You Line It Out?: Zora Neale Hurston & the Sound of Angular Black Womanhood” in Amerikastudien/American Studies, “‘Puzzling the Intervals’: Blind Tom and the Poetics of the Sonic Slave Narrative” in The Oxford Handbook of the African American Slave Narrative, “Nina Simone’s Triple Play” in Callaloo and “‘All That You Can’t Leave Behind’: Surrogation & Black Female Soul Singing in the Age of Catastrophe” in Meridians. Brooks is also the author of the liner notes for The Complete Tammi Terrell (Universal A&R, 2010) and Take a Look: Aretha Franklin Complete on Columbia (Sony, 2011), each of which has won the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award for outstanding music writing. She is the editor of The Great Escapes: The Narratives of William Wells Brown, Henry Box Brown, and William Craft (New York: Barnes & Noble Classics, 2007) and The Performing Arts volume of The Black Experience in the Western Hemisphere Series, eds. Howard Dodson and Colin Palmer (New York: Pro-Quest Information & Learning, 2006).
Brooks received her PhD in English from the University of California, Los Angeles.
Kara Keeling is Associate Professor in the School of Cinematic Arts at the University of Southern California. Her current research focuses on theories of temporality, spatial politics, finance capital, and the radical imagination; cinema and black cultural politics; digital media, globalization, and difference; and Gilles Deleuze and liberation theory, with an emphasis on Afrofuturism, Africana media, queer and feminist media, and sound. Her book, The Witch’s Flight: The Cinematic, the Black Femme, and the Image of Common Sense, explores the role of cinematic images in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic conceptions of the world and interrogates the complex relationships between cinematic visibility, minority politics, and the labor required to create and maintain alternative organizations of social life.
Keeling is author of several articles published in anthologies and journals and co-editor (with Colin MacCabe and Cornel West) of a selection of writings by the late James A Snead entitled European Pedigrees/ African Contagions: Racist Traces and Other Writing and (with Josh Kun) of a collection of essays about sound in American Studies entitled Sound Clash: Listening to American Studies. Currently, Keeling is writing her second monograph, tentatively entitled Queer Times, Black Futures and co-editing (with Thenmozhi Soundarajan) a collaborative multi-media archive and scholarship project focused on the work of Third World Majority, one of the first women of color media justice collectives in the United States, entitled From Third Cinema to Media Justice: Third World Majority and the Promise of Third Cinema.
Prior to joining the faculty at USC, Keeling taught at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill (UNC), and was an adjunct assistant Professor of Women’s Studies at Duke University, and a visiting assistant professor of Art and Africana Studies at Williams College. Keeling has developed and taught courses at the undergraduate and graduate level on topics such as Media and Activism, Cinema and Social Change, Race, Sexuality, and Cinema, and Film As Cultural Critique, among others. In the summer of 2005, Keeling participated in the National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Institute on African Cinema in Dakar, Senegal. She currently serves on the editorial boards of the journals Cultural Studies, Feminist Media Studies, and Catalyst: Feminism, Theory, Technoscience, and she is the Editor of the Moving Image Review section of the journal Gay and Lesbian Quarterly (GLQ).
Jacqueline Stewart is a Professor in the Department of Cinema and Media Studies and the College at the University of Chicago. Her research and teaching explore African American film cultures from the origins of the medium to the present, as well as the archiving and preservation of moving images, and “orphan” media histories, including non-theatrical, amateur, and activist film and video. She directs the South Side Home Movie Project and is co-curator of the L.A. Rebellion Preservation Project at the UCLA Film and Television Archive. She also serves as an appointee to the National Film Preservation Board. She is currently researching the racial politics of moving image preservation, and completing a study of the life and work of African American actor/writer/director Spencer Williams.
Stewart is the author of Migrating to the Movies: Cinema and Black Urban Modernity, which has achieved recognition from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies and the Black Caucus of the American Library Association. She is co-editor (with Allyson Nadia Field and Jan-Christopher Hoark) of L.A. Rebellion: Creating a New Black Cinema, winner of the 2017 Best Edited Collection award from the Society for Cinema and Media Studies. Her essays have appeared in Critical Inquiry, Film Quarterly, Film History and The Moving Image. Stewart has been awarded fellowships from the Shelby Cullom Davis Center for Historical Studies at Princeton University, and the New York Public Library’s Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture Scholars-in-Residence Program. Stewart earned her PhD in English from the University of Chicago.
This venue is accessible to people with mobility disabilities. For additional accessibility requests, please contact bcrw@barnard.edu at your earliest convenience.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP is preferred but not required and seating is available on a first-come, first-seated basi