I’m excited to have a platform that gathers the work we are doing through the Black Ecologies Lab
@ISGRJRutgers
. It is a real honor to work alongside
@TheBlackEcoFem
and my long term collaborator Justin Hosbey as well as our brilliant board. Check us out!
Let’s get it straight—protesting stay at home orders rather than say demanding monthly income until the crisis ends, while we know that the pandemic is killing Black and indigenous people at the rates it is, is a demand for genocide.
I’m very excited to announce that I will be a member in the Institute for Advanced Study in the School of Social Science for 2022-2023 and also that I will join the faculty at Rutgers-New Brunswick as Andrew W. Mellon Assistant Professor in the ISGJR Africana Studies & Geography.
There is no good time to announce this considering the pandemic, but here goes...I’m excited to receive one of the 2020-2021 Schomburg Scholars in Residence fellowships at the New York Public Library. God willing I’ll be there next academic year getting my archive on!
#Honored
We are excited to share with the world, our Black Ecologies Zine. 64 pages of brilliance--poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and original art by Alissa Diamond. This is a resource we hope you will consider using in classroom or community.
@ISGRJRutgers
To have a genuine mentor pour into you for who you are and who you want to be is nearly indescribable. So much about this world, esp the academy, is oriented by ones utility/ones future usefulness. One who finds a mentor is genuinely blessed. insight, support,& love are priceless
"Malcolm X does not live in the dry texts of his words as we read them; he lives in the energy we generate and use to move along the visions we share with him. We are making the future as well as bonding to survive..."-- Audre Lorde
I am excited to announce that next year I will join the faculty at Arizona State University in Africana Studies in the School for Social Transformation. I’m sad to leave my wonderful colleagues here at Cincinnati but I’m excited about what awaits in the Valley of the Sun.
that US officials are blocking the ceasefire in our collective name despite our majority desire for an end makes me sick. What can democracy even mean if our will for a basic peace isn’t ever respected? If resources extracted through our labor are used to bomb against our will?
If your first question to Black scholars doing Black Studies/ history is always have you seen [insert white scholar’s name]’s work, consider why this is your default.
3 million people are gone due to COVID. And we ain’t had a day yet where the horizon hasn’t been a “return to normal.” Lord can we pause, breathe, pray, cry, mourn, wail, beat our chests, sing, something other than pretend we haven’t lost worlds?
On this day in 1985 11 MOVE people perished in a bombing by philly police. We must never forget about them or the heinous violence. Here I wrote some about the context in the broader antiBlack social incineration of 1980s Philly
Teona Williams and I hosted our first Black ecologies lab salon in Harlem. A living room literally alive with brilliant geographers, artists, environmental scientists, historians, literature scholars, filmmakers, anthropologists, dancers, composers and organizers.
I have had historians dismiss me as not a historian— some in good vibes and far too many disparingly. I assure you, I was trained in formal history with all the discipline that entailed and rejected it (or maybe it rejected me). Black life exceeds the parameters of historicism.
COVID took Black life expectancy down 3 years. Alongside the Intercept coverage of pollution and public housing, I think we can conclusively rid ourselves of the notion of “pre existing conditions” unless that condition is the racial capitalism-ecocide complex of accumulation
We are pleased to announce the
#AAIHS2024
award winners–winners of the Pauli Murray Book Prize, the Maria Stewart Journal Article Prize, the C.L.R. James Research Fellowships, and the Du Bois-Wells Graduate Student Paper Prize! Read more:
Some of y’all woulda told Harriet Tubman to pray and plead without a pistol. Or asked Nat Turner to chill. Or decried the total resistance of runaways during the civil war and demanded they go back and wait for their masters to give them freedom.
Today marks the 35th anniversary of the City of Philadelphia’s bombing of MOVE. I return to this piece that we might consider the group’s vision and legacy and not just the bombing— Mothers 4 Housing and the Legacy of Black Anti-Growth Politics
Not sure what grad student might need to hear this but some of them that know everything in your seminar never going even write a diss. Keep your head down, find your people, do your research, and write!
Very excited that Justin Hosbey and I received a grant of $50,000 from the New Interdisciplinary Projects in the Social Sciences competition by SSRC’s Scholarly Borderlands Initiative. We proposed a Black Ecologies Working Group to build a “deep mapping” methods toolkit.
@ASUSST
“…these people are not to be taken seriously when they speak of the ‘sanctity’ of human life, or the ‘conscience’ of the civilized world.”— James Baldwin
We need a moratorium on the nation-state. The form is largely the materialization of war-market relations that forms a horizon of perpetual growth and competition on finite earth. We must practice and theorize forms of collectivity superseding plunder, violation, and management.
Happy birthday to the ancestor June Jordan. Your thought is as moving today as when you were alive. Your demands might easily be our own because you were prophetic and also because the world has only doubled down in the terrible. May you continue to inspire us.
This at least my 1100th time saying this— fascism doesn’t require coherency. Pointing out inconsistency and a lack of cogency will not rid us of the orange menace nor Bolsonaro nor any of the other right wing fanatics currently in power.
hype to announce that my first book project is contracted with
@NYUpress
. Please send me good vibes as for the next year and change I draft/re-draft/edit/scrap/come back to the various parts of "Dark Agoras: Insurgent Black Social Life and the Politics of Place in Philadelphia."
Right now everybody loves Black theory. Yet many of those same distillers of Black thought also detest Black scholars as well as persistent questions that seek to recenter the subjects of Black intellectual thought, proffering violently decontextualized Black theory as universal.
It is officially here! January 3,2022 is the release date of my first book Dark Agoras. You can still use the discount code on the flyer (DARKAGORAS30) for 30 percent off and free shipping. The book is also available at all online booksellers.
“The settler worldview saw the ecosystem in all its biodiversity as isolable and exploitable parts: forests became timber, deer became fur, water became irrigation, and people became slaves.”—Clyde Woods
Climate change is a euphemism for histories and present conditions of enslavement, colonialism, extractionism, ecocide, and urbicide. To end the so-called anthropocene we must transform these conditions, create an unprecedented path, & depart with the false hope of tech solutions
so very excited to see this collection of brilliant essays in the world in the special issue on Global Black Ecologies of Environment and Society that Justin Hosbey, Hilda Lloréns and I edited out and just in time for your Fall syllabi.
the Blackecologies Zine is an open resource containing sixty-six pages of essays, interviews, short fiction, poetry, experimental field notes, and original art
As part of the event on Saturday we will launch our long anticipated Black Ecologies Zine. 60+ pages of brilliance--poetry, fiction, essays, interviews, and original art by Alissa Diamond. Stay tuned for the digital launch on Saturday Aug. 19! A lil tease/ preview here for y'all!
Incoming new faculty for fall, put your head down and do your research. Your first year or two especially in sizable units, folks will try to “get you in their camp” often in some long spiraling drama that has nothing to do with your success. Learn your colleagues for yourself.
Too many of us looking for the revolutionary in the eventful and dramatic. And it is enticing. But just like there’s slow death there is quotidian revolution— quite often in the social worlds Black women generate and sustain in unnamed towns from Virginia or Jamaica to Brazil.
Excited for this upcoming series of discussions beginning March 31 at 5:30 pm EST and extending at the same time for every Wed. through April 28, 2021. We have keynotes by
@FreeBlackTX
&
@AMReese07
as well as a powerful lineup of Black artists, intellectuals, organizers & farmers
my archival methods class is not designed to reproduce History as a disciplinary enterprise. It's to get grad students to see they can use archives in many diff. ways-- history, fabulation, fiction, poetry, and film can all benefit. Opening assignments has already been fruitful
writing most days is rehearsal-- you struggle, don't hit the right notes, can't find the timbre. Forget the words. Then one day it come together for like 10 mins and that's your own little mini-concert to yourself. And maybe one day it goes in print and other people get to hear.
I am delighted that I will be a 23-24 Visiting Scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History to work on a book project about June Jordan's ecological and geographic thought. Next year's theme is Black Power. It's about to be lit!!
Please check out my latest, a deeply personal piece about home in its beauty and complexity ”Black Ecologies, Tidewater Virginia” with
@TransformEssays
a channel of
@LAReviewofBooks
@ASUSST
I get that we need the orange menace gone but please quit with the uncritical praise of joe. He also a fool ass racist with bad policy ideas and a pretty terrible voting record. Obscuring that won’t make things any better.
Black communities’ relationship to the environment is not only as victims of extraction, violence, toxic dumping, & climate change. Black Ecologies encompass relationships of mutuality, resistance, and abolition—here work to erect the world we need not just to end this order.
milestones for me and my partner. He gave a wonderful talk culminating years of research and curatorial work at the African American Museum of Phila. I turned in a full manuscript draft to my press for review (which they agreed to send out). My daddy gone but he would be proud!
it's easy to "demolish" a book when you never wrote one. approaching books always on the ready to shred them also ensures you won't write one. You will only have flexed and built the muscle of critique and not of constructing. Seek what works first.
I’m so very excited for my partner and primary interlocutor Huewayne. His exhibition at the African American Museum in Philly opens May 6 and is open until September.
Black folks be on red alert. Ive been writing about vengeful populist white mobs in 1980s philly. they usually start by galvanizing against political power and subsequently redirect toward us and other visible groups. It becomes a frenzy and they wake up in our blood.
Study. ESPECIALLY when you think you already know. That’s usually when you have subconsciously have filled in lots of blanks with preconceived or inherited interpretations.
“Our maps could never contain all the livingness.” —
@daniellepurifoy
’s brilliant latest in The Black Geographic collection (
@DukePress
) on Du Boisian approaches to place exceeding positivist science through his fiction centering Lowndes County, AL. A MUST read.
Don’t get caught up in the false austerity imposed by the academy on Black thought/ Black studies. there’s plenty of intellectual space in the project of Black liberatory thinking and praxis and boy do we need it given the overlapping social-ecological- political crises we face.
Telling 1 million people to move in 24 hrs or die, is genocidal. Western European countries are all banning support for Palestinians. We are at the precipice of Nakba 2.0 and post-9/11 repression 2.0 in one quickly devolving spiral.
Louisiana 1/3 Black...70 muthaf*cking percent of those who have died are Black. 70 percent. And naw we not naturally more prone to sickness or death. We are sequestered, starved, stressed, and policed. The “underlying condition” propelling our deaths is racial capitalism.
Ashley Farmer, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Imani Perry, and Sarah Haley thank you from the bottom of my heart for these generous and beautiful reflections on Dark Agoras. I could not be more excited to have such an esteemed, and brilliant group of reviewers
Some people don’t think your work is worth anything until someone else values it. Have your own compass around what is significant. Be open to critique because no one knows everything but also know when your work speaks to YOU.
Reading June Jordan's archived papers weekly has done something for how I think about writing, friendship, comradeship, and spirit. more to come as I process this through more writing.
ICYMI-- Blackecologies zine, co-edited by Justin Hosbey, J.T. Roane, Emerald Rutledge, and Teona Williams-- 60+ pages of interview, essay, speculative field notes, short fiction, poetry, & original art by Alissa Diamond. Free to use in classroom/community!
I’m very honored to have my work circulating and engaged. In 2021 so far Ive given invited seminars, talks, responses, or plenaries at Yale, Univ. of Washington, Univ of Delaware, British Assoc. of American Studies, Georgia tech, Wesleyan, UVA, Univ. Of Chicago & Michigan.
I’m 3/4 way done with a monograph 9/10 done with a journal article and 1/3 done with a short novel. Ancestors send help on these fractions especially in the spirit of FINISHING projects because the struggle is really really real. Ashe.
I got my copies 💜💜💜. I wrote a book. It’s actually tangible. It’s beautiful to me. It’s a culmination of work and life since circa 2009 but it was seeded during my time at the Woodson Institute as an undergrad. So many people to thank and honor. But just know it’s here.
Gentrification is a vexing term. Corps didn’t come and find nothing and then invest so that people returned to urban core neighborhoods. Developers found life flourishing where nothing was supposed to survive and colonized it. Lets call it urban colonialism.
I just landed after a long flight to some good news. Dark Agoras is a part of this great list of 2024 Finalists for the Pauli Murray Book Prize in Black Intellectual History
@AAIHS
Graduate Archival methods class on deck. excited to center Black feminist and queer approaches to archives of slavery, urban history, environmental history, and oral history along with a launch discussion in the philosophy of history analyzing narrative, historicism, and humanism
leave “junior” faculty tf alone. If you not aiding them in bringing their work and teaching goals and shit to fruition, then stay out the way. And stop punching down. When admins pressure y’all, push up. And stop passive aggressive threats and shit like that on socials messaging!
When I get anything other than a rejection, I get hype because publication never comes easy. I especially celebrate a rigorous revise and resubmit where comments help really transform the work. A lil tease for Summer 2021, Signs special issue on Rage.