SOUTHEASTERN WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION - KEYNOTE ADDRESS
Southeastern Women's Studies Association
University of South Florida St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg, FL
March 26-28, 2020
Re-membering #MeToo: Hip Hop Feminist Dispatches from the South - Hip hop feminism is a cultural, intellectual, and political project that extends the artistic, analytical, and advocacy-oriented work by from the “post” generations. Mining memory, Durham recalls her southern roots to narrate her hip hop be-coming as a diaspora daughter whose interpretive, intersectional approach to “bodying” (Chawla, 2008) culture echoes her foremothers righting and rewriting Black liberation. Her performance-informed autoethnography demonstrates how critically-engaged, community-centered, and culturally relevant research can be life-affirming intellectual labor within the academy and life-sustaining work fortifying movements outside of it.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Hilton San Francisco Union Square
333 O'Farrell Street
San Francisco, CA 94102
November 14-17, 2020
"Save the Human": A Review of Afrofuturism and Posthumanism in ME Hip Hop Feminist Soul (Paper)
Afrofuturism can be described as a politically-imaginative decolonial project that fuses fictions, fantasies, and folk traditions with technology to produce past-future narratives about being and belonging from a Black-centered framework (Nelson, 2000; Womack, 2013). Missy Elliot uses Afrofuturism to remap hip hop as part of the cultural landscape of the New South, and she uses posthumanism to reclaim her body within and against technologies attempting to fix the very fluidity and flexibility that has defined the third-wave generation hip hop artist. By decoding the music video “I’m Better,” Durham describes how Elliot serves as a prototype of emancipated blackness for her genderqueer contemporaries and as a visionary for hip hop feminism re-imagining its past-future possibilities.
AMERICAN STUDIES ASSOCIATION
Hawai'i Convention Center, Ballroom C
1801 Kalakaua Ave
Honolulu, HI 96815
12:00 to 1:45pm
November 7, 2019
Black Noise at 25 (Roundtable Participant)
In 1994, Tricia Rose published the award-winning Black Noise: Rap Music and Black Culture in Contemporary America. Notable for its pioneering and critical engagement with the complex cultural traditions, structural relations, and political interventions embedded in the production and consumption of rap music, Black Noise remains a foundational text for the study of hip-hop and has defined what is now an entire field of study. To celebrate the 25th anniversary of Black Noise, this roundtable considers its long-term influence in and beyond American Studies, its relevance to contemporary debates about black culture and racial inequality, and its usefulness as a model for interdisciplinarity and serious engagement with and analysis of black cultural production. In keeping with the conference theme of "Build As We Fight," panelists will also reflect on the capacity of hip-hop and other black expressive forms to advance political critiques and envision alternative futures in this historical moment.