zora • zora
@zorafuture
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ooloi. all/no pronouns. black(ness) practitioner. assistant professor (english) | black literary studies | writing about blackness and the human
muscogee creek territory
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the name of my employer does not appear (and has never appeared) in my twitter bio. i often tweet about my scholarship, the professional field, the tradition of afam literature, and black literary studies more generally. please resist the urge to surveil and report my tweets. 😐
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yesterday houston reported that all covid-19 strains have been present in the city. today the governor of texas lifted the statewide mask mandate and gave the green light for all businesses to fully operate.
the message is death.
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they stood in *that* black church and shouted “four more years” in response to protests against genocide. my lord.
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Where is TeNiya Jones?
TeNiya Jones, sophomore at the University of Kentucky, was last seen in Tel Aviv, Israel. Her friends said they have not seen her since going midnight swimming. TeNiya’s mother said midnight swimming in the ocean/sea is unusual behavior for her daughter.
American college student missing in Israel after going for 'midnight swim'
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they. cut. off. the. water. 🤬😩🤬
The University of Minnesota just ordered janitors to shut off water supply, lock bathrooms and lock doors to Coffman Union where pro-Palestine protests have set up an encamptment.
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do you remember when you first read octavia e. butler’s 📖parable of the sower📖, and 2024 seemed so far away? maybe you, like many of us, thought “we can still change course.” well… lauren oya olamina’s fifteenth birthday is saturday, july 20, 2024.
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imagine getting on here and saying octavia e. butler has no influence on your work when one of your books repeats the opening of dawn—verbatim, with no attribution. just imagine that. 🫠
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since airb*b has become a “necessary evil” (for some folks), i will live upon the hill from which i proclaim that no person who pays a $250 cleaning fee should have to clean anything—not a dish, a sheet, a trash bin, a counter, nor a floor. not one damn thing. 😐
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antiblackness is not just another word for racism. antiblackness, as i understand it, names the depravity, the [sociopolitical and personal] impulse, disposition, affect, and performance that is already and always in opposition to illegible and uncontrollable expressions of life.
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next semester i am teaching an advanced undergraduate seminar called “reading the black 80s.” ✨
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du bois was in his late sixties when he was like “maybe the black bourgeoisie ain’t the answer.” 🤔
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i am happy to share that these (unsigned) first editions of morrison’s 📖 song of solomon and beloved 📖 have arrived intact. we give thanks. 🙏🏿✨👏🏿
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empire has done a number on us all. i appreciate that many people are publicly contending with the depth of political betrayal, the form and function of celebrity (culture), the complexity of our complicity, and many other things that require an honest, world-ending, assessment.
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since my tweet has reached the author, and she has said that i am “trying to inflate things” so i can “grumble and get people grumbling,” here are two photos—an excerpt from butler’s dawn (1987) and an excerpt from okorafor’s the book of phoenix (2015).
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the relief and the uncontrollable tears just betrayed the ways i have been holding this collective angst, grief, worry, stress, trauma, and sadness since they arrested brittney griner. i hope—against hope—that she and her loved ones experience something akin to healing.
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“why do i write? because, to me, in spite of what my family believed, even uncertainty and occasional poverty is better than the narrowness of a life sentence to work i don’t care about.”
-octavia e. butler
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this decision and its rationale go against the very premise of the novel. 😩
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i probably told you all this already, but: once i gave up the idea that i had to sit in front of my m*cbook (with a hot drink) in order to get my “good/real writing” done, and accepted that i could write on my phone, the game changed. you hear me? CHANGED.
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teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom changed me.
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the director of the color purple 2023 said he made the decision to omit shug avery’s “you sure is ugly” comment because “it didn’t work in [mine] because the levels and the investment in the narrative around sisterhood — there’s certain things you can’t come back from.” 😐😐😐
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“sometimes being a friend means mastering the art of timing. there is a time for silence. a time to let go and allow people to hurl themselves into their own destiny. and a time to prepare to pick up the pieces with when it’s all over.” ~gloria naylor, the women of brewster place
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i love the way that black women are on here celebrating
@tressiemcphd
‘s macarthur genius award. it is truly heartwarming. congratulations to tressie, n.k., jacqueline, larissa, catherine, cecile, and all the 2020 macarthur fellows! 👏🏿
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y’all… i passed my defense today.
🗣 dr. hamsa in the house!!!
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“she did not tell them to clean up their lives or to go and sin no more. she did not tell them they were the blessed of the earth, its inheriting meek or its glorybound pure. she told them that the only grace they could have was the grace they could imagine.”
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i remember my first year of graduate school when i was like 🗣 my dissertation is gonna be 🔥🔥🔥
reader, this dissertation is not 🔥 (🔥🔥).
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before i had any formal training in “theory,” octavia e. butler’s body of work helped shape my thinking about community/kinship/family outside—before and beyond— cis/het relational paradigms. she really gets expansive family right in so many ways. i really do give thanks. 🙏🏿
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ancestor zora neale hurston, we speak your name. and we give thanks for your lives and your work. ✨🙏🏿
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maybe it is bc i am an old(er) person who works as an early-career academic that i am acutely aware of how the university system(TM) and its agents make infantilization a feature of the tenure process in ways that are similar to, and as sinister as, the graduate-training process.
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imagine accusing people of not reading (well) because they disagree with one—or more—of your theoretical gods. it is giving immature.
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wait!?!?! so… someone posted CONFIDENTIAL GRADUATE STUDENT FEEDBACK on this app, and then accused those GRADUATE STUDENTS of tanking a “guaranteed hire”??? 😐
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ancestor barbara christian.
we speak your name.
and we give thanks.
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and, for the record, the group chat has the screenshots. i don’t just get on here saying shit—or at least i try not to. 😐
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relatedly, the omission of celie’s voice(over), which is central to the 1985 film, and the chorus, which is essential to the musical production(s), contributes to a feeling of dizzying disjointedness in the color purple 2023.
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state universities in florida will now accept exam scores from a conservative, christian-backed, exam called the classic learning test (CLT), an “alternative” to the SAT.
we are really watching this disaster unfold in real time… 😩 😩 😩
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is it possible to disavow the machinations of the academy and simultaneously acknowledge the ways in which we take pleasure in being tethered to its structures and projects?
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it seems irresponsible to cut these things and replace them with… beautiful gowns. 😩
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@TheRandiSavage
exactly. who is this (imagined) “new audience,” and what does this 2023 film tell us about what is/is not expected of it?
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antiblackness, then, is enacted by, and instantiated through, (acts of) racism and via the (ongoing) process of racialization. it is relentless violence expressed through (and as) relentless violence.
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to be clear, i am not mentioning these things to nitpick instances of infidelity to the novel and/or musical. my concern is what elements of (the) story seem to be necessary for narrative coherence and emotional resonance.
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i’m waiting for blue to decide that what is best for her game is to tell cirie that miss felicia is jared’s mother. 🤣🤣🤣
#bb25
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y’all… i have a defense date. and SO MUCH MORE to do. 😩😳😩 ancestors, please help your child. 🙏🏿
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my eleventh-grade english teacher taught me the “old-school” index-card way of collecting research materials. i had all but abandoned that method in favor of “research tech,” but listening to tanisha c. ford on the “drafting the past” podcast reminded me of how much i enjoy it.
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What am I teaching this semester? Black Women and the Afterlives of Slavery: An Introduction to Afro-American Literature
#ENGL267
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among other things, this article announces a forthcoming (beacon press, 2021), six-volume work, from gayl jones. yes, the(e) gayl jones!
👀 💜
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ancestor bell hooks, we speak your name. and we give thanks for your life and work. 💜🙏🏿💜
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someone on this app said that (many) people believe that “cruelty and violence are the right(s) of the beautiful,” it is such an insightful invitation into an ongoing conversation about how “pretty” is constructed as a cruelty itself + the transformative potential of “ugly.”
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i believe the ancestors gave him thirty more years for that revelation. 🙏🏿
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to be clear, i am not saying that there is no space to talk about the pleasures of graduate school. i just do not think we have to do so in ways that undermine the experiences of people who have explicitly said they have had a terrible time.
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black folks out here determining presidential elections and can’t get laws that prevent police from killing us. 😢
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whoever negotiated this on behalf of these families is as despicable as the settlement itself. 🤬🤬🤬
UVALDE, Texas (AP) — The families of 19 Uvalde school shooting victims agree a $2M settlement with the Texas city.
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“scholarship is a collaborative enterprise.” - cheryl a. wall 🙏🏿
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me. looking for new verbs after i have written “highlights, elucidates, limns, demonstrates, elaborates, explains...” fifty-eleven times. 😩😩😩
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please tell me that folks are not saying that students taking down a teacher’s braids is liberatory pedagogy. 🫠
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what?!?!? 😐
imagine saying this movie was too deep for [some] black folks and using that claim as evidence of the vacuous, and hackneyed, phrase “black people are not a monolith.”
"There were Black people who were triggered by seeing something that they weren't ready to admit to themselves." Justice Smith talks about the focus group reaction to "The American Society of Magical Negroes."
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for folks who are interested:
carole boyce davies authored TWO very important books about the political import, and impact, of claudia jones.
• left of karl marx: the political life of black communist claudia jones
• claudia jones: beyond containment
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short story: i love me some em dashes and parentheses—LOVE. 🤣 yesterday, during the mellon dissertation-writing seminar, the professor was like 🗣 those dashes and parentheses are lowkey disruptive. why don’t you try creating whole sentences out of those parenthetical thoughts.
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when did we stop being honest about the quality of books—as projects that attempt to do particular kinds of thinking? when did critique/debate/difference become synonymous with “being a hater”?
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higher education is in SHAMBLES, and folks are still on here mad that six black people have jobs at a college/university. whew, chile. 🤣🥴🤣
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coursework✅
qualifying exams✅
oral exam✅
prospectus / defense✅
dissertation, chapter one✅
candidacy✅✅✅
beloved community,i have officially advanced to doctoral candidacy! i give thanks for your encouragement,care,and support and for ancestral love and guidance. ashè. 🙏🏿
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they are changing the definition of peaceful protest in real time. dystopia is now.
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ancestor whitney elizabeth houston, we speak your name. and we bless your rest. ✨
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ancestor toni cade bambara, we speak your name. and we thank you. 🙏🏿✨💜
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i almost forgot to tell y’all that i formatted my dissertation! 🎉🙌🏿🎉
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i finally get to visit octavia e. butler’s papers at the huntington library. summer 2023. ☀️
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ancestor maryse conde, we speak your name. and we thank you. 🙏🏿✨
We’re deeply saddened to hear that Maryse Conde has died. The Grande Dame of Caribbean literature, she was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize twice, in 2015 and 2023, and leaves behind an extraordinary body of work. We send our heartfelt condolences to her family.
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y’all… the sinister smile. the satisfaction with depravity. wow.
Houston ISD’s Chief Human Resources Officer (Jessica Neyman) says the librarian position has been been removed from HISD schools going forward…
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celebrity and its agents should always be the objects of critique. critical neutrality is not even possible under these imperial conditions.
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today students connected naylor’s the women of brewster place to morrison’s beloved through concepts like “ungendering,” “female/ing/ization,” “(re)memory,” and “deferred dreams/dreaming.” y’all, they have been listening and thinking. 🎇
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the gag is that jared absolutely cannot win without cirie. however, cirie can win without jared.
again: he is not the advantage.
#BB25
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when students comprehend, and clearly articulate, the ways
@dem8z
sets up the argument in “new directions for black feminist criticism…” collaborative close reading for the W-I-N! “reading the black 80s” is off to an excellent start. ✨✨✨
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not AI (post-racial) alice walker being the ethnic studies chair… 🤣🤣🤣
What AI thinks professors looks like based on their department.
What do you think academic Twitter? Accurate or no?
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what do you call it when an essay you think you need for something you are currently writing appears at the right time??? thank you for sharing,
@abolitionista
. let me try to access this right now. 😳🙌🏿
New essay in “The Cambridge History of Queer American Literature”
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“you will love again the stranger who was your self…”
🗣️ sit. feast on your life.
(d. walcott)
what’s a random line of poetry you say aloud or in ya head from time to time unprovoked?
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university classrooms are not—and should not—be replicas of middle/high school classrooms. yes, having teaching experience in elementary and secondary education is useful, but the pedagogical aims, investments, and expectations in higher education are different.
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i have reached the point in writing the dissertation at which i am starting to see all the different (better?) ways i could have approached this.
i guess i will have to save it for the book.
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i still do not even know where, when, and/or how to enter this conversation about that award. but i will say one that i do not think that “all money is blood money” is a productive entry point—because where does that (obvious) point get us?
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"remember your dead… keep them around you. and remember what you want.”
-octavia e. butler, fledgling (2005)
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as promised, here are the reading lists for “blackness and the problem of the human,” fall 2023
*canvas files include excerpts from:
• s. wynter
• n.d. chandler
• h. j. spillers
• k.j. brown
• r.a. judy
• d. scott
•j. james
•a.p. gumbs
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y’all, my grades have been submitted and rolled!!! it’s a whole wrap!!!!
academic year 2022-2023: ✅🎉✨
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antiblackness is so f*cking nonsensical and insidious—bc what the f**k do “pookie and ray ray’s” pants have to do with voting???
🤬🤬🤬
“We need to make sure we are talking to the people next to us. Pookie and Ray Ray got their pants under their butt talking about they’re voting for the other guy because of what they believe that is not real.”
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some news you can use: the department of english at auburn university is hiring TWO tenure-track assistant professors in african-american literature/black diasporic literature. i am on the search committee, and
@Prof_ELGIII
is chairing the search.
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i am here to testify: since returning to my analog ways, i have experienced a tremendous shift in thinking and “productivity” related to this book. the haptic organization is already changing the way i engage with interlocutors, and it is changing the way i organize the text. 🙌🏿
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let me offer this: citation-as-conversation is an ART. it requires careful reading and engagement with the works of your interlocutors. otherwise you risk citation/quotation dependence that obscures your unique perspective and contribution to the field(s).
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@Nnedi
: you wrote, on this platform, “…and i love octavia butler, i’m definitely a big fan, but she is not an influence.”
how is using the exact lines from one of her novels not “an influence” (to put it mildly)????
butler’s dawn, 1987 & okorafor’s the book of phoenix, 2015
The truth is the truth. But yes, keep telling me about my own self.
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why are folks calling job candidates “guaranteed hires.”’ doesn’t “guarantee” involve an actual job offer? and even then… 🫤
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professing is a job, sure. no argument here. however, the traditions in/through which many of us work are *before* the terms and limits of the job. and, for many of us, working for/at the university makes serving those deeply-meaningful traditions easier, if not possible.
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