My aim in this brief article is to introduce a new international and interdisciplinary project on Black Europe which could be of some interest to German Studies for a variety of reasons that will hopefully become evident. In doing so, though, I would like to focus initially on one particular aspect of this project; it is, incidentally, the one that might seem less than fascinating at first sight: the attempt to re-discover and re-contextualize archival materials on the black presence in Europe. My central argument here is that a rethinking of the uses of archives could open up a number of exciting possibilities going beyond this particular subject: in making history usable and relevant for people who would not normally go near an archive, for students who have abilities in information processing their teachers often fail to tap into, for activists linking worldwide through internet-based networks, and for a new reading of existing but largely unknown or ignored materials.

This module aims, first, at showing that precarity is not a recent symptom of a crisis of late capitalism (to be potentially solved), but a long-term structural element of the modern capitalist system, securing its survival at the expense of various “disposable populations,” and, second, to point to strategies of resistance to this process of precarization, in particular those strategies that produce translocal and transdisciplinary coalitions.

This module aims, first, at showing that precarity is not a recent symptom of a crisis of late capitalism (to be potentially solved), but a long-term structural element of the modern capitalist system, securing its survival at the expense of various “disposable populations,” and, second, to point to strategies of resistance to this process of precarization, in particular those strategies that produce translocal and transdisciplinary coalitions.

My dissertation considers how the field of border studies within Ethnic Studies is inherently both translocal and interdisciplinary by looking at the U.S.-Mexico border. Specifically, my dissertation focuses on diasporic art activisms (artivism) and translocal social movement organizing in the San Diego-Tijuana border region against global settler colonialism, heteropatriarchy, environmental racism, and climate change.

Post-Revolutionary Fervor explores the intersection of class and gender politics in Iran over the last eighteen years, within the context of historical revolutionary Iranian consciousness broadly. I center a cohort of mostly women activists who are members of the generation born after the 1979 Revolution. Most of these individuals were among the younger key leaders of the most prominent grassroots campaign of the women’s movement during the 2000s, known as the “One Million Signatures Campaign to Change Laws that Discriminate Against Women,” which took place from 2006-2008. Many of these leaders had cut their teeth among the ranks of a growing left within the broader student movement in the 2000s. Their political consciousness was produced as a result of overlapping spaces and cross-fertilizing activist currents, including women’s rights groups, left student organizations, and illegal workers’ syndicates and labor unions. These activists were shaped both by Iranian intellectual history and transnational traditions of radical political thought. Analyzing a repertoire of oral history, poetry, public intellectual work, and film to explore activists’ political consciousness, I argue that this cohort expanded debates within these organizing spaces beyond both Western liberal feminist and Islamic feminist frames. They are among a generation that came of age during a period which saw ongoing attempts at economic neoliberalization in their country. In this context, I argue that the intersection of Islamic governance, neoliberal ideologies, and U.S. imperialist sanctions have produced gender relations in Iran. Contrary to the Orientalist view that intensified after 9/11 that presented Islam as standing in the way of Western-led market liberalization and capitalist expansion, I argue that neoliberal ideologies hostile to working people and friendly to privatization have intersected often successfully with Islamic governance in Iran. Thus, I also center the stories of working-class and working-poor women who have experienced precarious jobs, the informal economy, and state repression. I ultimately show that Iranians have challenged these forces of interlocking class and gender inequity through persistent popular protest.

The relationship between artistic practice and liberatory politics in Palestine is framed by two related and pervasive problems affecting both Palestinian lives on the ground and representations of the Palestinian people in media, politics, and intellectual discourses: Narrative disenfranchisement, or the enforced lack of discursive control and narrative agency stemming from the “shrinking” of Palestinian identity, culture, and history in dominant political discourse; and relative humanization as the sociopolitical and discursive practice of both differentially distributing and limiting the protections or applications of inalienable human rights for those bodies and communities deemed not fully human. Palestinian displacement, oppression, collective criminalization, and death continues to exemplify and be informed by the discursive and actual dehumanization of Palestinian identities and bodies. Consequently, Palestinian cultural and artistic performances of nationalism and national identity involve an affirmation of or demand for human rights in the face of inhumane campaigns of violence and ongoing cultural erasure amid widespread international indifference and the geopolitical hegemony of human rights as both policy and industry in Palestine. I examine this interplay between humanization and narrativization as it is played out in the production and performance of Palestinian collective identity and cultural resistance through theatre, literature, and film as artistic and political practices of literary, performative, and visual storytelling. I broaden the term “texts” to include and accommodate informal, everyday, or marginalized storytelling practices so often central to the survival of persecuted communities, cultures, histories and narratives, and communal and collective memories. Combining onsite ethnographic observations from fieldwork with firsthand Palestinian narrations and artistic interventions, my aim is to paint a comprehensive portrait of the often underexplored quotidian and popular ways in which Palestinians confront and negotiate their misrepresentation in news media, their underrepresentation in historical and political narratives, their simplification in Euro-American politico-cultural imaginaries, and their ambivalent interactions with the global industrialization of human rights. The interdisciplinary nature of my study highlights the necessity of engaging with Palestinian popular culture and narrative practices through bottom-up cultural studies approaches and interventions invested in de-limiting and de-centering academic research practices on Palestine and Palestinians.

This dissertation, Making Space in a Militarized Global City: The Racial and Gendered Politics of Producing Space for Black Queer Women in San Diego, examines histories of black queer women during different historical moments that defy a politics of respectability in relation to sexuality, class and gender performance. I re-read archives and conduct interviews with a different focus that not only explains why histories of certain black queer women are invisible, but also what these stories can reveal about black life in general. The dissertation is organized into three chapters. In the first chapter, “Racializing and Gendering Sin in Early 20th Century San Diego,” I use Maya Angelou’s autobiographical text, Gather Together in my Name (1974), to discuss how her entrepreneurship efforts within San Diego’s sex tourism industry in the 1940s – in which many of her clients were white U.S. service men – defied normative black respectability. Chapter 2, “Alternative Safe Spaces,” uses the oral history of Granville “Bubba” Hughes, a black trans woman who migrated to San Diego in 1965 from Arizona, to understand how gay neighborhoods are not always safe for black queer women. Through her narrative I examine how mixed-race, working-class neighborhoods figure as alternatives to gay enclaves in the mid-20th century. In Chapter 3, “Properly Political,” I show how black lesbian and gay activists, beginning in the 1980s, challenged racism within the San Diego gay neighborhood, which later inspired the Mackey-Cua Project – a multi-generational LGBT group. This project explains how and why certain narratives are absent from the historical and social imaginary. I show how black queer women make alternatives forms of space that diverge from masculinist revisionist histories, gay enclaves as safe spaces, and consumerism catering to the national body politic.

"Property in Modern Aesthetics," grapples with how discourses of race, gender and class affected US literary and visual modernist forms. I examine art objects ranging from Marcel Duchamp's Fountain (1917) and Noah Purifoy's White/Colored (2001) to texts such as Susan Howe's My Emily Dickinson (1985) and Don Mee Choi's The Morning News Is Exciting (2010). Utilizing critical gender, race and legal scholarship, I trace how legal notions of exclusionary properties situate the politics of modern abstract forms. Modernist artistic and literary productions were the historical manifestations of US racial and gender formations, and I argue that the abstract forms of modernist art and literature were politically consistent with early 20th-century property laws. The modernist found-object form can be understood as the aestheticization of property. Inspecting the aestheticization of property as a formal imperative allows for analyses of historical and political strictures, and for the production of diverse cultural narratives to converge.

In order to investigate visual and literary production that expounds colonial and legal understandings of property, I contrast canonical, modernist approaches with Black and Asian American cultural producers whose bodies of work interrogate the very premise of property, by re-imaging provenance beyond its current origin/financial narrative. In my project, Black and Asian American cultural producers, though marginalized by current canonical constructs, are poets and artists currently offering modes of expression outside systems of the colonial imaginary. I contextualize the interactions of individual poets and artistic movements with and against the social movements of their time, offering a broader view of US visual cultures and poetics.

My dissertation positions Black and Mexican migrant women workers’ reproductive labor as the foundation of Jim Crow era agriculture and extractive economies. My sites of analysis include racialized women’s reproductive labor in turpentine and lumber camps in Northwest Florida, the cotton fields of the San Joaquin Valley, and beet picking in Bracero era Salinas Valley. This dissertation argues that although women were contracted through relations of marriage and family to industries that produced their labor as non-value and which erased them as historical subjects, they created forms of sociality in excess to the demands of capital. Such an examination brings into conversation Critical Gender Studies, Black Studies, and Chicana/o Studies, alongside interventions by women of color feminists into Marxist labor theory, to reveal how Black and Mexican women workers created forms of life while negotiating the depletion their own. To explore the transmission of their life producing labor, I dovetail readings of plays, legal affidavits, and poems about turpentine debt bondage; coming-of-age stories about Black and Mexican migrant children’s reproductive labor in the cotton economy; oral histories about beet harvesting during the Bracero Program and the transnational labor of Mexican women on which it relied; and experimental ethnographies on Black and Mexican migrants’ gardening practices. Ultimately, this dissertation opens new lines of theoretical inquiry for exploring early twentieth century agriculture and extractive industries by centering the little explored histories of Black and Mexican women’s reproductive labor.