Wednesday, March 31, 2010

Eternal Summer for Real: The BrokenBeautiful Press Spring Update!

Greetings Brilliant Transformative Flowers in Bloom!!!!

It is SPRING at the Inspiration Station and we are discovering surprise perennials, witnessing the birth of dreams planted long ago and preparing the soil of our interconnected communities for the future. This update is to let you know how you can participate in the ecology of Broken Beautiful Press and our two major projects. The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Eduational Series and the Queer Black MobileHomeComing Project. Bloom baby! BLOOM! (p.s. this is a long post...so click here to get directly to the info about self-directed artist residences @ the Inspiration Station and how to become an Eternal Summerian)

The Itinerant Professor: Sista Docta Lex


After 25 years of schooling with no breaks (whew!) Lex and her committee have affirmed her dissertation on the Queer Survival of Black Feminism (click to read the prologue)!!!! Hooray it is SUMMERTIME from now on! Lex is excited to bring her skills, knowledge, reverence, confidence and new swag to support the intellectual visions of educational institutions of all kinds, and community organizations and initiatives. Go to: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/lexicon/ to learn about the residencies, workshops and lectures Lex is available for and set up a transformative educational tryst, longer term affair, repeated divine encounter etc with Dr. Lex!

(All proceeds from paid engagements go to support Lex's work on the MobileHomeComing Project and the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind.)

Lex and the MobileHomeComing Project are grateful for the support of Queers for Economic Justice, the Disabled Young People's Collective, Public Allies of Cincinnati, the SpiritHouse Choosing Sides Program at New Horizons Academy of Excellence, the American Studies Program at University of Texas-San Antonio, the Women in Learning and Living Program at University of Richmond, the Sexual Assault Task Force at Reed College, the Ellen Stone Belic Institute for the Study of Women and Gender in the Arts and Media, the Women's Center and Multicultural Center at Duke University, Holton Community Center for hosting Lex as a speaker/workshop leader and for donating honoraria to the MobileHomeComing Project.

The Inspiration Station: Community Education in Action


Loving the June Jordan Saturday Survival School!

This year so far the community educational experiences at the Inspiration Station have been over the top!

Queer Families in Durham played danced, created hallway murals and their own all-ages illustrated intergenerational stories based on the unpublished speeches and out-of-print children's books by June Jordan at the June Jordan Saturday Survival School!

Devoted Durhamites gathered on Sunday mornings to sing the praises and celebrate the words of Audre Lorde, Joseph Beam and Toni Cade Bambara during Queer Black Sunday School.


School of Our Lorde Poets at the Audre Lorde B-day Celebration and Poetry Performance

And Durham's poets and educators (joined by distance learning crews from Chicago, Western Mass, Tuscaloosa, Cairo, Rio Grande Valley, and NYC) deepened the meaning of life with interactive exercises and engagement with the archival and published work of Audre Lorde in the Poetics and Pedagogy units of the School of Our Lorde!


Chicago Participants participate on the School of Our Lorde Social Network!

AND our beautiful local community gathered for potlucks to discuss the work of the Salsa Soul Sisters... Here is the audio documentary we created over brunch (Carolyn and Harriet drop knowledge!)the short non-fiction of Maia Williams on the complexity of transnational solidary (with a special guest skype appearance from the esteemed author live and direct fromCairo) and the poetry of asha bandele (deepened by our visiting guest expert on women in prison and resistance: Vikki Law!)

Actualizing Abundance!

Participants in the educational programs and readers of the RAGE Edition of the Little Black (Feminist) Book Series from as far as Berlin, raised and donated $1, 531 towards the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Community School in just 2 months proving that our Beloved Community in Creation VALUES community accountable education.

Become a part of our community sustained educational movement in any of the following ways:

Get Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Educational Materials!!!!

1979: Transforming the Meaning of Survival

VIIB29What does it take to survive a year like 1979?

This first podcast is about the year 1979 and how the world, and black feminism began and ended in some crucial ways that year. With the election of Ronald Reagan, the Boston Murders, the Atlanta Child Murders and the Greensboro Massacre all attacking the the lives, minds and spirits of black women 1979 was a crucial year. This podcast focuses on how Audre Lorde, Alexis DeVeaux, June Jordan and Barbara Smith reach(ed) across time and space to transform the meaning of survival. (And there is some good period appropriate and anachronistic music too!)

Be sure to put "1979 podcast and study guide" in the subject line with your donation


Meditate on the Rainbow: The Poetry of Sapphire

Filled with great music…rare and priceless poetry from Sapphire all presented in that quirky, interactive, meditative, writing workshop-esque Eternal Summer style! Based on Sapphire's out of print seven movement poem "Meditations on the Rainbow" this podcast moves us through the colors of resistance and trasnformation.

This podcast is dedicated to all of us, but especially to Tyli’a Nana Boo Mack, a black transwoman made early ancestor in a brutal act of violence in Washington DC. Get your pen and or your paintbrush and listen.

The study-guide brings Sapphire's poetic work into conversation with her book PUSH and the recent film Precious.

Be sure to write "Meditate on the Rainbow Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation!


In Your Hands: Mothering Ourselves

lorde_old

Because it takes a whole month to prepare for the day of the dead. Because some of us have to create eclectic Sunday morning rituals to hear our own truth. Because I want you to have this for when you need it. This podcast is based on letters from my black feminist ancestors, and the study guide will lead you through a process of communicating with and remembering insight from your own ancestors, spirit-guides and sheroes. For more about the “In Your Hands” project check out www.motherourselves.wordpress.com.

Be sure to put "In Your Hands Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation!


Be Bold Be Red: Legacies of Response to Gendered Violence


In October 2007 women of color came together and transformed terror on Halloween, declaring October 31st Be Bold Be Red Day, a day for women of color and allies to speak out against violence against women. And 30 years ago women of color came together to respond to violence in the same critical and poetic spirit.

Towards the world the we all deserve, fully transformed from the misogyny and internalized racism we face in popular music to the frightening expendability of the lives and bodies of women of color this podcast places the brave voices of women telling the truth about gendered violence over the remixed sounds of Miles Davis by Apple Juice Kid. With this piece which includes critical work on the work of the Combahee River Collective, and Toni Morrison's Sula we take every sound back, starting with our own voices and the background that seeks to silence them.

Listen with your community, your class, your friends, your study group, your church, your crew, pass the link on or listen by yourself and see, hear and wear red.

Be sure to put "Be Bold Be Red" podcast in the subject line with your donation of $15 or more :)

A Revolutionary Act...: On the Legacy of Joseph Beam

In honor of this brilliant Black Gay literary genius ancestor and and the fact that both In the Life and Brother to Brother are back in print thanks to RedBone Press this podcast includes readings and reflections from Lisa Moore of RedBone Press, La Marr Jurelle, Darnell Moore, Justin Smith and a round the kitchen table conversation with some of Durham’s most inspiring Black queer visionary men: Ashon Crawley, Sendolo Diaminah, Thaddeaus Edwards and Justin Robinson. (Plus music, love and archival goodies from an ancestor obsessed devotee who you know much too well :) Informed by archival research in the Schomburg Black Gay and Lesbian Archive, this conversation will be particularly useful as you honor Black Gay History Herstory and discuss the transformative possibility of LOVE in queer community across gender.

Be sure to put "Joseph Beam Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line of your donation of $15 or more!


Anger is Useful!: On the Poetics of Rage

Who’s afraid of the Angry Black Woman? Well BE AFRAID because Angry Black Women are speaking our minds and transforming the world in the service of our vision. Oppression beware the well-directed rage of Black feminism!

Enter the ANGRY BLACK WOMAN edition of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Podcast Series! As always, we start with the brilliance of our ancestors…informed by Audre Lorde's essay "Uses of Anger," meditating on the poetic of rage in June Jordan’s angry letters to racist editors and including reflections from Nia Wilson, Mai’a Williams, Moya Bailey, Daria Bannerman and the young visionaries at New Horizon’s Alternative School…plus as always music that rocks (including a track from the genuis Jon Anonymous project by Durham’s own Shirlette Ammons!)

Be sure to write "Angry Black Woman Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation of $15 or more!


"Coming Home": The Legacy of the Salsa Soul Sisters


“because they were coming home.”-Carolyn Grey

On Saturday January 30th Harriet Alston and Carolyn Grey brought decades of memories and a Linda Tillery album that Harriet had spent days digitizing through the rare (and unplowed) North Carolina Snow to have a conversation with eager listeners at the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Potluck about their time in the Salsa Soul Sisters and the lessons they learned about building community. Use this podcast as a precedent to your own community building projects or to recontextualize the history of Black feminist, 3rd World Women's and lesbian feminist organizations in the 1970's.

Be sure to write "Salsa Soul Audio Documentary and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation of $15 or more!


On Cancer and Survival: In Honor of June Jordan, Audre Lorde and Andria Hall


Cancer is a major factor in the lived experience of Black Feminist herstory and legacies. How do we understand survival, the body, love and relationships as we survive and lose our loved ones to cancer? This podcast includes the voices of survivors of cancer, and those who have survived their loved ones. Investigating how life continues and how we can center our wellness, this podcast is memorial and salve, and a call of communication across every boundary, even our understandings of life and death.

Be sure to write "Cancer and Survival Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation of $15 or more.


"The Best Way to Do it is to Do it": The Legacy of Toni Cade Bambara


In honor of Toni Cade Bambara’s 71st Birthday we present a podcast full of reflections, laughter, poetry, music and LOVE for the brilliant sister warrior mother writer, dancer, filmmaker, screenplay transformer, community organizer Toni Cade Bambara!
I created this podcast with much inspiration from Cheryll Y. Greene and with the priceless collaboration and words of Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Cara Page, Linda Janet Holmes, Kai Lumumba Barrow and Nikky Finney. Contextualize your day with the brilliant insights of these women and listen to music from Sarah Vaughn, King Pleasure, Erykah Badu, Amel Laurrieux, Cassandra Wilson, Abbey Lincoln and some of my favorite producers and learn and teach about the work of this crucial Black feminist warrior!

Be sure to write "Toni Cade Bambara Podcast and Study Guide" in the subject line with your donation of 15 or more :)


The Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind DVD

For your classroom, living room, workshops etc. get your own DVD of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Video Series (link for previews) for a donation of 20 bucks or more to the Eternal Summer Educational program. Remember to put a note on your transaction that you want the DVD and be sure that your address is current!!!


Become an Eternal Summerian by joining the Inspiration Station EasyPass Club! Monthly sustainers will get special juicy audio/video/poetic content sent directly to your inboxes every single month for ETERNITY!!!!!!!!

SPECIAL INCENTIVE!!!! Everyone who becomes a monthly sustainer in April will get an audio experiential piece about responding to police brutality in queer communities of color written and performed by Lex and sonically designed and transformed by the dashing Julia R. Wallace that is not available on the web!

Push the button to sign up to be a monthly sustainer (the big blue number is how much you'll be donating each month automatically)!


************Durham Locals!!! You can also support by bringing food, paper (in any form from toilet paper, to butcher paper, to paper plates) and art supplies or dv tapes... to the inspiration station any time. Or rides to the airport so Dr. Lex can keep hustling to bring insight and resources back to the Bull City (you know how we do!!) Email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com to set it up!!!!

Rejuvenating Revolutionary Retreats at the Inspiration Station:


Living Room Ancestor entryway @ the Inspiration Station

Are you getting excited and lustful from all of this shameless bragging on the beautiful city of Durham, NC? Want to see for yourself and help support the Inspiration Station? Durham devotees...want to help with Lex's long-lived and blatant recruitment strategy to get the rest of our tribe of brilliant artists, thinkers, and organizers to move to the center of the universe? We GOT you! Introducing Artist/Intellectual/Organizer retreats @ the Inspiration Station.

This is what we call sustainable community transformation!!!! Tell your friends or avail yourself of an immersion in the magical energy of Durham, NC and the special light of the Inspiration Station...fortified by so many beautiful thoughts and brave moments. Help us create a sustainable use of the space over the summer or for the 10 days a month that Lex and Julia are off on the MobileHomeComing Tour. You'll get a set of Durham local edible goodies (from the Tierra Negra Farm and the Bread Uprising Bakery) a list of inspiring walks and journeys to take in Durham, the use of a beautiful wrap around front porch with a hammock and a table and chairs and beautiful honeysuckle and crepe myrtle trees....

AND even though you may think that the most fun thing about Durham is the chance to hang out with Lex...the truth is that Durham is full of brilliant visionary ambassadors who love to show off our cities transformative glow...so if you want you can even get assigned a buddy to show you the Durham ropes and share their lovely talents and experiences with you as part of the welcoming committee!

So email brokenbeautifulpress@gmail.com if you might want to spend a week (or the month of July) in the center of love, inspiration and transformation. We are hoping that folks can offer $100-200 a week for residencies...but everything you have to offer is valuable and the conversation is always open!

OKAY!!!! Congrats on reading this content-filled message. Take home: Summer is Eternal and Spring is NOW!

We love growing with you!!!!!

Infinite love,

Lex

Thursday, March 25, 2010

Happy Birthday Toni Cade Bambara!!!: New Podcast

Today in honor of Toni Cade Bambara's 71st Birthday we present a podcast full of reflections, laughter, poetry, music and LOVE for the brilliant sister warrior mother writer, dancer, filmmaker, screenplay transformer, community organizer Toni Cade Bambara!

I create this podcast with much inspiration from Cheryll Y. Greene and with the priceless collaboration and words of Aishah Shahidah Simmons, Cara Page, Linda Janet Holmes, Kai Lumumba Barrow and Nikky Finney. Contextualize your day with the brilliant insights of these women and listen to music from Sarah Vaughn, King Pleasure, Erykah Badu, Amel Laurrieux, Cassandra Wilson, Abbey Lincoln and some of my favorite producers.

[audio http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/happy-birthday-toni-cade-2.mp3]

Direct link: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/happy-birthday-toni-cade-2.mp3

If you are just learning about Toni Cade Bambara please get your hands on her beautiful fiction: Gorilla, My Love, The Seabird are Still Alive, The Salteaters, Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions, Those Bones Are Not My Child. Her groundbreaking 1970 anthology The Black Woman and definitely pick up the anthology about Bambara's work created by Linda Janet Holmes and Cheryll Wall: Savoring the Salt.

Also, if you have the great fortune to live near or in Durham, North Carolina join us for Sunday school, this Sunday March 28th to praise the name of Toni Cade (more info here: http://blackfeministmind.wordpress.com/2010/03/19/sunday-march-28th-sunday-school-sunday-dinner-for-the-devoted/)

Friday, March 19, 2010

Sunday March 28: Sunday School in the the Mornin' and Sunday Dinner for the Durham Devotees!

Greetings loved ones,

There is a lot to celebrate in this the birthday month of Toni Cade Bambara and the rebirth of SPRING in our hearts! Hooray!!!!!

So mark your calendars..download the reading and get ready to have your spirit lifted and transformed. First at 10 am on Sunday Morning (Location TBA) (March 28th we'll be celebrating the afterglow of writer, organizer, film-maker, teacher, mother, visionary Toni Cade Bambara's 71st Birthday with a spirited discussion of her classic essay "On the Issue of Roles" from her classic anthology The Black Woman! Possibly maybe possibly in a very maybe way featuring the insight of Kai Barrow...one of Toni Cade's cherished mentees!

Download "On the Issue of Roles" here: http://blackfeministmind.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/toni-cade-on-the-issue-of-roles.pdf

and join us for bagels, donuts, juice, coffee and praise! Toni Cade On the Issue of Roles



AND THEN!!!!! Because you just can't get enough.... stay saved with Sunday Dinner at your monthly Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind with a discussion of asha bandele's work on love and the Prison Industrial Complex with special insight and goodness from Vikki Law...author of Resistance Behind Bars an awesome book about women in prison who are organizing for their own liberation!!! This promises to be an amazing discussion!


We'll be reading bandele's poem "Long Days Journey Into Night: The Remix" which was the basis for several SpiritHouse and UBUNTU Arts awareness-raising transformative poetic performances. Download the piece here: http://blackfeministmind.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/bandeleremix.pdf

bandeleremix

and come to the Inspiration Station at 5pm on Sunday March 28th with food and insight to share!!!!!!!

love,

lex

Monday, March 15, 2010

Lex's Dissertation: Introduction Part 2 (Queer Intergenerationality)

Today is the day family! I will call this the morning of my intended dissertation AFFIRMATION by my superstar dreamteam committee of advisors! I am so grateful to have all of your affirmation and good thoughts with me. Your spirits crowd the small room with love! And it's Monday morning so here I am offering the second half of my dissertation introduction which is about Queer Intergenerationality...aka what WE generate between us despite everything.

I look forward to a million conversations about this!

Intro Part II Queer Intergenerationality!!!!!

direct link here: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/intro-part-ii-queer-intergenerationality.pdf

and if you missed part one of the intro...here it is: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/2010/03/08/introduction-part-1-1979/

Infinite love!

lex

Lex

Saturday, March 13, 2010

Lex's Prologue: Saturday Mornin' Abridged Version :)

How excited am I about y'all reading my dissertation? Words cannot express! And true teacher/tract-passer-outer, black feminist evangelist style I want to have interfaces for you in every learning style and every preferred way of knowing.

So....here is a "take home message" abridged version of the prologue love letter to you!
Remember to be thinking of me with "yes in mind" from 9am-11am Monday morning!

For those of us who live at the shoreline

standing upon the constant edges of decision

crucial and alone

for those of us who cannot indulge the passing dreams of choice

who love in doorways coming and going

in the hours between dawns

looking inward and outward

at once before and after

seeking a now that can breed

futures

like bread in our children’s mouths

so their dreams will not reflect

the death of ours.

-from Litany for Survival by Audre Lorde

This is spiritual and stolen work. We are the dream-children caressing doorways, looking for what breadcrumbs were left here. Teacher-poet-visionaries Audre Lorde and June Jordan did (not) survive their lifetimes. Writer-publisher-renegades Alexis De Veaux and Barbara Smith sacrificed wealth, health, and stability to (almost) leave a legacy in print. I am a dreamchild, crucial but nevermore alone, searching basements, independent under-funded archives, and e-bay for evidence. Lest our dreams reflect the death of theirs. This is for us, at once before and after, seeking another kind of now.

For those of us who live at the shoreline...

This is for those of us who live at the shoreline, and those of us who live on the deadline, hustling to make a living off ever more glamorous analyses of systematic death. Driven by the intellectual marketability of the paradox: Though life is all we can theorize, some lives remain incomprehensible. Though death is the limit of theory, some deaths are so predictable as to seem understandable. We are the purveyors of the horizon, approaches to sensibility that continue to recede, because life escapes us, and death prevails. For those of us who live on the shifting edge of the world, close or brave or stupid enough to sell the details of the line we walk, to guess the conversation between sea, sand and air...for those of us who know the truth of erosion and bet against it. This is for us. Beloved community. We are neighbors, if not housemates, if not soulmates sharing organs. (See? We were never meant to survive.)

But we want each other.

Drawing on Audre Lorde’s theory of the erotic, this dissertation is located at the point of a desired rendezvous, the desire for our differently named and positioned analytics for each other. The excellence, the fullness of our critical practice comes, I think, from our willingness to live in this meeting space. You are an audience that I want (to exist).

I wrote this dissertation at home, at the shoreline, a place that I define as a queer place, a diasporic site of knowledge production, theft and sale, a place that helps us learn about survival. Survival, here, is the name for the intervention, the shared need that brings a Black feminist use of critical Black diaspora theory and queer theory together in this dissertation.[1] The structure of the dissertation follows the shape of the shoreline. The chapters examine the edges of Black feminist literary historiography and criticism by tracing the implications, the tidal significance, the disappearance and re-emergence of Black feminism as a queer practice dispersed through space and time.

The shoreline is an organizing metaphor in this dissertation, which describes the spatial and temporal position of the subject matter as well as the approach I will use to engage the topic of Black feminist literary historiography. The shoreline is a queer place, more than marginal, the shoreline erodes, it is the contested limit of the nation-state, the place where the refugee stands, where the land erodes, where elements live, where the wind howls the loudest. The shoreline also reveals a queer and repetitive time, lunar and recurring with difference and cycles, but no clear progression. The shoreline, useful as a metaphor that signifies the shifting ground of identification and political practice, is useful to contemporary activists who address multiple issues. I choose to follow Lorde’s invocation of the shoreline, instead of the spatial categories of the margin or the intersection because of the queer diasporic beckoning of the shore, the Caribbeanist motivation of my study of Jordan and Lorde in particular and because using the shoreline as a heuristic allows me to think critically about the legacies and limitations of the categories of intersection and margin that have been so instructive in anti-oppressive theoretical work.

Sebastian Margaret, a genderqueer disability activist who organizes around access and power, critiques the way that intersectionality is usually framed as some collection of “Tupperware boxes” and instead argues for an understanding of multiplicity that resembles the tide, particular issues move to the foreground and others move to the background depending on the particular facet of oppression a multiply oppressed person is experiencing or responding to proactively.[2] In other words, the ground that we stand on shifts, which is also a diasporic concern, highlighting the way that displacement, the violence of dispersal and queer relationships to the hegemony of the nation make the boundaries of political units and identities unstable.

I argue that here, at the shoreline, where space and time are stolen, we are in need of a robust and transformative redefinition of survival. This dissertation inhabits the dead, live and haunting remains of Black lesbian and bisexual feminists Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Alexis DeVeaux and Barbara Smith for all of us, this instant, and this triumph.

For those of us who are practicing a different kind of mothering, in childcare collectives and non-patriarchal families, as radical doulas and midwives, the period of experimentation between 1968-1996 by anti-capitalist anti-imperialist Black feminists offers alternative theories of home through the anthology Home Girls, and June Jordan’s anti-imperialist collections of poetry Living Room; alternative theories of domesticated labor through June Jordan and Alexis DeVeaux’s elaboration of “poetry as housework,” in Essence; alternative ideas of family through Audre Lorde’s articles on “lesbian parenting” and “mothering ourselves” and each other, especially relevant in a time period of economic shift when, similar to the Reagan era, funding for community services like housing, welfare, healthcare and education are declared bankrupt while massive amounts of state money goes towards military invasions and private sector bailouts.

For those of us who are organizing to end violence against women of color in the face of mass media vilification of survivors, the forgotten strategies of these Black feminists, who organized against police brutality, rape, domestic violence and womanslaughter are important to remember as we too stand on the constant edges of decision built by legal practices designed to criminalize self-defense by oppressed people while downplaying the severity of crimes that draw on the logics of racial violence like noose-hangings, gang rapes, truck draggings and the kidnapping and torture of women of color.[3]

For those of us determined to teach the world open, to instigate the unlearning of oppression and nurture the growth of livable, loving logics, the pedagogical experimentation and faith of these Black feminist professors, and community workshop facilitators can impact what, how and if we teach in university classrooms and in our communities in the age of what radical feminists of color are now calling the Academic Industrial Complex.[4]

For those of us who write, read and live the poetic as a radical practice of collaborative creation[5], these Black feminist poets offer an intergenerational archive with which to engage as readers and practitioners of poetry, generating a definition of poetry that turns the (re)production of language into life itself and an intervention into the practice of form that offers alternative forms of sociality and possibility for all of us.

For those of us who hold out foolish hope that our borrowed time in universities need neither kill our spirits nor tame our vision, I offer this critical literary work itself as a model of intergenerational practice, a method of engagement and survival full of faith, love and poetic falling apart as an intervention into what we mean by scholarship and where that ship should take us. This is spiritual work, an offering made of love. For all of us.

[1] The word “Black” though often repeated is never quite redundant in this essay. The feminist practice of this dissertation is always modified by the word “Black” in honor of the self-identified Black feminist theorists who are featured in this dissertation and who make this work possible. Because of the political tension which remains within and around the discourse of feminism, feminism does not stand alone.

[2] Sebastian Margarget at “Intertwined” a workshop sponsored by Southerners on New Ground, April 22, 2009, Durham, North Carolina.

[3] On the Jena Six case when Black children were charged with attempted murder in a schoolyard fight instigated by the hanging of nooses from a tree on public school property: http://colorofchange.org/jena/message.html accessed January 25, 2010. On the New Jersey 4 case when young Black lesbians were charged with attempted murder after defending themselves from a racist and homophobic attacker: http://www.racewire.org/archives/2007/06/black_lesbians_in_nyc_get_11_y_1.html accessed January 25, 2010. On the Megan Williams case where a young Black woman was held captive and tortured for weeks by 6 white assailants: http://www.cnn.com/2007/US/09/11/woman.tortured/index.html accessed January, 25th 2010. On the 1998 Texas truck dragging lynching: http://www.cnn.com/US/9807/06/dragging.death.02/index.html accessed January 25, 2010 and a similar more recent lynching in Paris, Texas in 2008: http://jessemuhammad.blogs.finalcall.com/2008/10/jasper-style-lynching-reporting-on.html accessed January, 25th, 2010.

[4] For example see the language of the Campus Lockdown: Women of Color and the Academic Industrial Complex Conference at University of Michigan. (woclockdown.org—site expired, referenced at http://greaterdetroit.wordpress.com/2008/02/29/campus-lockdown-tenure-for-andrea-smith/ viewed January 25th 2010)

[5] Here I depend on Sylvia Wynter’s definition of the poetic as that which creates new relationships between human beings, each other and their environment by seeking (and failing) to describe what those relationships could be, beyond objectification, in a manner that is disruptive of the product to product relationship of capitalism in “Ethno or Socio Peetic” in Alcheringa....

Monday, March 08, 2010

Lex's Dissertation: Introduction Part 1 (1979)

Greetings loved ones,

Bit by bit we keep it going. Here is part 1 of the introduction to my dissertation entitled 1979. This was also the basis of the first Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Podcast (with the same name) which you can listen to here. Thanks for everyone's loving affirmation of the Prologue and the great conversations you all have blessed me with in the past week! Looking forward to more!

Here is the pdf: Introduction Part 1: 1979

(direct link: http://brokenbeautiful.files.wordpress.com/2010/03/introduction-part-1.pdf)

Here is the podcast version: 1979

Infinite love!

Lex

Monday, March 01, 2010

My Dissertation Prologue is a Love Letter to YOU!

Hey loved ones,

Now that my dissertation is formatted and officially in the hands of my superstar dream team committee I see it as an act of spiritual release and community accountability to share it bit by bit with you! So starting with the prologue which is literally a love letter to you: the audience of my dreams aka this community that transforms the world by existing aka facebook friends and neighbors alike, here we go! This is my much belabored baby that I am sending into your hearts. Please let me know any thoughts you have, any desires this sparks, any possible collaborations that reading this inspires and just generally what you think is possible!

Ta dah: Prologue for the masses!

Or paste this link in your browser: http://brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com/?attachment_id=411

And don't forget to come to the party at the Inspiration Station that Julia is throwing at 7pm on March 5th!

love,

lex

p.s. for those of you who want to ask the loving question "what's next" check out www.mobilehomecoming.wordpress.com