S2, E5 The Emancipation of ZD: Black Feminist Futurity

Zora's Daughters

Call my girls and put 'em all on a spaceship! In this episode, Alyssa and Brendane are joined by the co-hosts of the amazing Lose Your Sister podcast, Jordan and Liberty. Together, we unpack Black feminist futurity and temporality, the end of the/this world, community, and Squid Game (no spoilers, promise!).

What's the Word? Futurity. We explain what people mean by futurity, how in the Black feminist tradition futurity is created through visionary work and radical speculation, and why humans are always living in the past.

What We're Reading. Parable of the Sower by Octavia E. Butler. We're joined by Liberty and Jordan of the Lose Your Sister podcast to discuss age in our "apocacryptic" world and adultification of Black girls, whether Butler is "clairvoyant" or simply sees clearly, the recursivity of the past and time, and the importance of building community with more in common than shared pain.

What In the World?! Together we discuss the ways we're closer to Butler's Parable world than we think: billion shellfish that cooked in the ocean, supply chain and labor shortages and the WI senate bill that will allow under-16s to work until 11pm, housing scarcity, and the anti-capitalist? parable Squid Games.

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Discussed this week:

Parable of the Sower (Octavia E. Butler, 1993)
Black Feminist Futurity: From Survival Rhetoric to Radical Speculation (Caitlin Gunn, 2019)
Marking Indigeneity: The Tongan Art of Sociospatial Relations (Tēvita O. Ka'ili, 2017)
Emergent Strategy: Shaping Change, Changing Worlds (adrienne maree brown, 2017)
Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (Sharon P. Holland, 2000)
Captive Maternal Love: Octavia Butler and Sci-Fi Family Values (Joy James, 2015)
Wisconsin Senate approves longer work hours for teenagers (AP News, 2021)
Extreme heat cooked mussels, clams and other shellfish alive on beaches in Western Canada (CNN, 2021)

ZD merch available here and the syllabus for ZD 201 is here!

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Transcript will be available on our website here.