Center for Humanistic Inquiry CHI Fellows Symposium 2023

April 7 at 9:00 a.m.-10:15 a.m.

Location: CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)

Tiesha Cassel (Pennsylvania State University)

Title: A History of Black (W)holes: Black Feminism and the Concept of History

Abstract: In this paper, I delve into black feminist theorizing on the black (w)hole, arguing for expanding its framework to include critical interactions with history. Specifically, this paper asserts that the black feminist concept of the black (w)hole can engage in the method of writing described by historian Saidiya Hartman as critical fabulation. Due to the in-between of the status of being and non-being denoted by Black women, girls, and femmes via the Black (w)hole, these communities can displace and place a static rendering of the event in danger. To develop the historical potential of the black (w)hole, this paper engages critical theorist Walter Benjamin’s “On the Concept of History” alongside the scholarship of Hartman to argue that the black (w)hole’s radical possibilities are contained in its ability to rupture through the assumed static and linear nature of history. 

Bio: Tiesha Cassel (she/they) is a Ph.D. candidate in Philosophy and African American and Diaspora Studies departments at The Pennsylvania State University. Her research interest sits at the intersection of 20th-century continental philosophy, black feminist thought, and metaphysics. 

Jasmine Wallace (Georgia Southern University)

Title: Embodying Black Archives: Living in the Afterlife of Slavery

Abstract: In her 2016 essay, “The Dead Book Revisited,” Saidiya Hartman poses the following question: “How do we find life where only the traces of destruction remain?” How do we tell the stories of enslaved subjects whose lives are incompletely recorded in historical archives? Where Hartman turns to critical fabulations in search of life within the traces of destruction created in and through the enslavement of Africans, this paper posits an alternative archive: the embodiment of Black memory as a living archive. Appropriating Foucault’s concept of the 'archive' and Merleau-Ponty’s theory of the 'habit body,' I argue that the violent history of enslavement and anti-Black violence is etched upon the contemporary Black subject through a ‘hieroglyphics of the flesh,’ which constitute an inter-generational memory of Black embodiment. Thus, I explore the traces of destruction left in the wake of the Middle Passage as it conditions contemporary Black subjectivity.

Bio: Jasmine Wallace (she/her) is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy & Religious Studies Department at Georgia Southern University. She works in social and political philosophy with an emphasis on race, gender, sexuality, (dis)ability, and decolonization. She is co-organizer of The Balkan Society for Theory and Practices, which brings together scholars, activists, and artists from around the globe to share works in progress. She has also taught, tutored, and facilitated reading groups in prisons for over a decade.

April 7 at 10:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m. 

Location: CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)

Rudy Aguilar (Kennesaw State University)

Title: “You Sound like Atlanta”: The Politics of Sounding and Visualizing Black Soundscapes and Mexican Sensibilities in Kap G’s Trap Rap

Abstract: The city of Atlanta catapulted onto the global stage with the hosting of the 1996 Summer Olympic Games. On cultural fronts, Outkast and Lil’ Jon also provided international visibility for Atlanta with their Southern-style rap discographies. The city would receive further recognition at the cusp of the 20th and 21st centuries when increases in Latinx migrations arrived to the South and altered the region’s racial/ethnic landscape. The rise of Mexican American trap rap artist Kap G, emerging from College Park, symbolically represent the alterations to Atlanta’s demographic and cultural landscapes. While the majority of Latinx rappers have been based in California and New York respectively, Kap G makes inroads into Southern trap rap, giving him a platform to collaborate with local Black artists including rapper T.I. More importantly, Kap G’s bodily presence in Atlanta’s trap rap scene signals how the genre continues to evolve with the help of Latinx musicians. This essay interrogates how Kap G’s trap rap sound creatively blends Black Soundscapes with Mexican and Latin American sensibilities in order to push the contemporary hip-hop South in new directions.  

Bio: Rodolfo “Rudy” Aguilar is Assistant Professor of Latin American/Latinx and American Studies at Kennesaw State University. He received a B.A. in Latin American and Latino Studies from the University of Illinois at Chicago and a PhD in American Studies from the University of Minnesota. His scholarly interests include Mexican communities in the Midwest and the U.S. South, popular music, immigration, and informal economies. His work has appeared in Aztlan: A Journal of Chicano Studies, The Black Scholar, and most recently, Interdisciplinary Humanities.

Ayendy Bonifacio (University of Toledo)

Title: Our Patrias Cannot Liberate Us from Anti-Blackness: Post-Racial Myths in the Latinx Diaspora

Abstract: In this personal essay, I trace my own upbringing as a Dominicanyork immigrant who regularly travelled between the U.S. and Dominican Republic to interrogate racial hierarchies and anti-Black discourses that emerged from Latin America as a product of the legacy of colonialism and the institution of slavery. Using the works of María Elena Martínez, Lorgia García Peña, and Juliet Hooker, I analyze how mestizaje as a nation- and identity-building apparatus is embedded in the anti-Black colonial legacy of Latin America and how the generative force of anti-Blackness is white supremacy allied with the regretful lack of political solidarity among many non-Black Latinxs. Through personal narratives and contemporary news about the political and cultural moment in the Dominican Republic and diaspora, I argue that political solidarity, in and out of our communities, should not be interpreted as simply an optical performance of trust and obligation but rather as an act of confrontation of anti-Blackness wherever it spreads.

Bio: Ayendy Bonifacio (he/him/his) is an assistant professor of English at the University of Toledo. He writes and teaches about American literature and culture, Latinx studies, and print culture from the nineteenth-century to the present. His book, Paratextuality in Anglophone and Hispanophone Poems in the U.S. Press, 1855-1901 (forthcoming with Edinburgh University Press), proposes a theory and methodology of “poetics of paratextuality”—a theory that he argues shaped the production of newspaper poetry, and a methodology derived from the archive that lets us analyze the anatomy of the page, the links between and among poems and reprint poems, as framing elements that could generate poetic value and taste. His writing is published and/or forthcoming in American Periodicals, Prose Studies, American Literary Realism, The New York Times, Slate, ASAP/Journal, J19, The Black Scholar and other scholarly and public-facing venues.

Bryce Henson (Texas A&M University-College Station)

Title: Brazilian Post-Soul: Karol Conká, Hip-Hop Cultures, and the Political Tensions of Blackness

Abstract: This essay theorizes and examines Brazilian post-soul (BPS) and its social, cultural, and political contexts. As a Black Brazilian cultural expression, BPS draws on earlier Black Brazilian cultural genres such as soul, the Re-Africanization movement, and hip-hop. Pre-BPS arts movements disrupted brasilidade and its biopolitical erasure of Blackness. In this moment, BPS affirms a Blackness distinct from a mestiço-oriented brasilidade but also holds different political commitments, especially around ideas of freedom and empowerment. This is exemplified in the work of Black Brazilian pop star Karol Conká. Analyzing Conká’s music, videos, and media appearances, BPS is explored through three themes: (1) its generational context in Brazilian multiculturalism where Black culture is a commodified resource for inclusion rather than political transformation; (2) aesthetics that explore Blackness between ancestrality, popular culture, meta-identities, and mediation; and (3) political tensions between Black individual empowerment and upholding existing racial, religious, and regional hierarchies. This essay argues that BPS can draw on Afro-Latinidad decolonial aesthetics while upholding brasilidade as an anti-Black project by positioning some Black Brazilians as valuable within multiculturalism and others as disposable.  

Bio: Bryce Henson is an assistant professor of Media, Culture, and Identity in the Department of Communication & Journalism and an Africana Studies Program faculty associate at Texas A&M University. His forthcoming book Emergent Quilombos: Black Life and Diasporic Cultures in Brazil (University of Texas Press) analyzes how Black hip-hop artists in Salvador da Bahia, Brazil create contemporary quilombos (Brazilian maroon communities) with and for their marginalized communities by providing safe havens from experiences of anti-Black racism, sexism, and classism as well as establishing alternative social, cultural, and political systems that foment practices of Black freedom. He is a co-editor of the book Spaces of New Colonialism: Reading Schools, Museums, and Cities in the Tumult of Globalization (Peter Lang, 2020). He also serves on the Executive Board for the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD).  

Regina M. Mills (Texas A&M University-College Station)

Title: Otherhood and Mestizo Futurism in Insomniac’s Marvel's Spider-Man: Miles Morales

Abstract: In 2011, Miles Morales made his debut as Ultimate Spider-Man. A Black Puerto Rican teenager in Brooklyn, Miles Morales was not merely a re-skin of Peter Parker’s Spider-Man and his origin story. I argue that Miles Morales as Spider-Man is what Adilifu Nama calls “a racially remixed superhero” who offers readers and players “cultural points of interests, compelling themes, and multiple meanings that were not previously present” in the original source material. In Insomniac’s Marvel’s Spider-Man: Miles Morales (2020), remixing Spider-Man means reinterpreting the iconic phrase “With great power comes great responsibility” to move from the individualist focus that Peter Parker models to a communal one. Miles riffs on what responsibility for power entails: self-questioning and doubt but also belonging and investment in a community. Miles Morales’ video game asks, “to whom is Spider-Man responsible and what does responsibility look like?” Players explore the ways in which Miles Morales’ superpowers, Afro-Puerto Rican identity, and his new neighborhood re-shape Spider-Man’s relation to themes of power and responsibility. 

Bio: Regina Marie Mills is Assistant Professor of Latinx and U.S. Multi-Ethnic Literature at Texas A&M University in the Department of English and is affiliated with the Latina/o and Mexican American Studies and Africana Studies programs. She was the guest co-editor of the special issue of The Black Scholar, “Post-Soul Afro-Latinidades” (2022). Her work in AfroLatinx literary studies, U.S.-Central American literature, and games studies has appeared in Latino Studies, The Black Scholar, Chiricú Journal: Latina/o Literatures, Arts, and Cultures, Latinx Talk, Black Perspectives, and Teaching Games and Games Studies in the Literature Classroom (Bloomsbury Academic). She has publications forthcoming in The Routledge Handbook of Refugee Narratives, Atravesados: Essays on Queer Latinx Young Adult Literature (UP of Mississippi), Latinx Literature and Critical Futurities, 1992-2022 (Cambridge UP) and Los Bros Hernández: Snapshots (SDSU Press). Her first book, on AfroLatinx life writing from 1920 to the present, is under contract with the University of Texas Press through the “Latinx: The Future Is Now” series, edited by Lorgia García-Peña and Nicole Guidotti-Hernández.

Omaris Z. Zamora (Rutgers University)

Title: Before Bodak Yellow and Beyond the Post-Soul: Cardi B Performs AfroLatina Feminisms in the Trance  

Abstract: In this essay, I focus on AfroLatina rapper and reality-tv star Belcalis Almanzar, more widely known as, Cardi B as a figure that embodies the pinnacle of what it is to possess multiple understandings of Blackness (i.e. Caribbean, transnational, diasporic), womanhood, and feminist epistemologies. Cardi B vacillates among subjectivities from stripper to reality-tv star to hip hop artist and political critic. She moves at the intersection of multiple identities—ebbing and flowing in ways that are outside the U.S. social logics of blackness and Latinidad. In this essay, I use “trance” as an afro-diasporic framework to grapple with the fluidity of transnational AfroLatina subjectivities in ways that blur the borders of Blackness, as well as that of Black and Latina feminisms, creating a space for re-articulating Black diasporic subjectivities and self-making—which we might miss otherwise. Trance is an alternative state of consciousness, which may be facilitated in afro-diasporic religions by instruments of hypnosis, movement (dance), and repetition (rhythm or music) among others. We can theorize trance as a frame to analyze AfroLatina women’s embodied archives from which an epistemology is rooted in constant movement, but also in the ways that this centrifugal movement of leaving and coming back pushes their own consciousness and subject formation into a transcendental space where new subjectivities can be formed. In analyzing one of Cardi B’s many social media videos, I argue that through this framework we can see how her AfroLatina feminism is centered in an unapologetic practice of refusal, and rejection of Black and Latinx respectability politics in ways that challenge the boundaries of U.S. hegemonic Blackness and Latinidad.  

Bio: Omaris Z. Zamora is an Assistant Professor of AfroLatinx Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is jointly appointed in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Africana Studies Department. She is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches. Her current book project tentatively titled, Cigüapa Unbound: AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation examines the transnational Black Dominican narratives put forth in the visual art of Firelei Baez, narratives by Nelly Rosario, Ana-Maurine Lara, Loida Maritza Pérez, Josefina Baez, and social media videos by Cardi B and La Bella Chanel. Her work has been published in journals such as Small Axe, Latino Studies, The Black Scholar, Post45, among others. 

April 7 at 1:45 p.m.-3:15 p.m.

Location: CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)

Panel Description

This immersive panel features a screening of Deborah Jack’s video installation “the water between us remembers, so we wear this history on our skin, long for a sea-bath and hope the salt will cure what ails us," which serves as the catalyst for a discussion amongst interdisciplinary scholars. Panelists will engage in a conversation surrounding themes emerging from “the water between us remembers..." such as Caribbean landscapes, curation, memory, recovery, migration, displacement, and intergenerational bodies of knowledge.

Emma Chubb (Smith College Museum of Art)

Emma Chubb is the inaugural Charlotte Feng Ford ’83 Curator of Contemporary Art at the Smith College Museum of Art (SCMA). Her projects at SCMA include Younes Rahmoun: Here, Now. (2024-25), the first retrospective for one of the most important artists living and working in North Africa; Amanda Williams: An Imposing Number of Times (2020-22), a campus-wide commission in three parts; and the creation of SCMA’s Artist-in-Residence Program, which Williams inaugurated in 2019. A scholar of contemporary art in Morocco, she earned her PhD in art history with a certificate in Middle East and North African Studies from Northwestern University. 

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles (Northeastern University)

Régine Michelle Jean-Charles is the Dean’s Professor of Culture and Social Justice at Northeastern University as well as the Director of Africana Studies. Her scholarship and teaching include expertise on Black feminism, African diasporic literature, Black France, and Haitian Studies. She is the author of three books, including most recently, Looking for Other Worlds: Black Feminism and Haitian Fiction (University of Virginia Press, 2022). Dr. Jean-Charles is a regular contributor to media She is a regular contributor to media outlets like Ms. Magazine, The Boston Globe, and WGBH, where she has weighed in on topics such as #metoo, Black girlhood, and issues affecting the Haitian diaspora.

Mary Pena (Princeton University)

Mary Pena’s work lies at the intersection of space, material culture, gender, race, embodiment, and the senses. Her research analyzes everyday spatial practices in the Atlantic port city of Puerto Plata, Dominican Republic, focusing on how sensory modes of knowing unsettle established historical narratives of the region and its built environment. Pena holds a Ph.D. in Anthropology and a graduate certificate in Museum Studies from the University of Michigan. She is currently a Postdoctoral Mellon Fellow and Lecturer at the School of Architecture and the Program in Latin American Studies at Princeton University. Prior, she held an internship as a community programming organizer at Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, NY, and coordinated Making Sensory Ethnography, a working group dedicated to experimental formats of conveying research using curatorial and artistic methods. Pena has curated exhibitions, co-directed a short documentary in Cuba, and worked as a production designer on the film, Drip Like Coffee, which screened at Newfest in 2019, among other festivals. 

April 7 at 3:30 p.m.- 4:00 p.m.

Location: CHI Think Tank (Frost Library, 2nd floor)

Performance Description

Clarinetist Darryl Harper and pianist Eugene Uman will present a recital of original and curated pieces that picks up such themes from the symposium as embodied understandings of history, memory, and the Afro-Latin.

Darryl Harper (clarinet)

Darryl Harper is a jazz musician investigating how race, culture, and political economy intersect with music. His current projects include Chamber Made (Stricker Street, 2022), his album that examines the aesthetic values and racial politics of jazz and Western classical chamber music; two new composition for jazz orchestra presented by the newly formed New England Jazz Collaborative (NEJC); the formation of an Open Access record label, ACP Records, that centers peer review; and performances with pianist/composer Jason Moran's project in tribute to World War I veteran James Reese Europe, Jason Moran’s Harlem Hellfighters: James Reese Europe and the Absence of Ruin. He is the John William Ward Professor of Music at Amherst College and serves as director of the Center for Humanistic Inquiry.

Eugene Uman (piano)

Eugene Uman directs the Vermont Jazz Center (VJC) where, for 25 years, he oversees educational programming and has produced over 250 concerts. While under Uman’s direction, the VJC received an Acclaim Award from Chamber Music America. A MacDowell Colony fellow, Uman initiated and designed the curriculum for the Jazz Studies Program at La Universidad de EAFIT in Medellín, Colombia. He is the recipient of the 2023 Vermont Arts Council, Ellen McCulloch-Lovell Arts Education Award. He has been commissioned by the Big Band de Medellin, the Windham Orchestra, Juno Orchestra and the Pittsfield Jazz Festival. Uman’s band, the Convergence Project features original compositions influenced by the rhythms of Colombia.