Durell M. Callier - Böcker

Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space.The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism—in the face of the continued murders of unarmed Black and queer people by police. And as each author mourns the loss of loved ones who have left us through illness, the contiguity of time, or murder, we all hold tight to each other and to memory as an act of keeping them alive in our hearts and actions, remembrance as an act of resistance so that the circle will be unbroken. But they also come together in the spirit of hope, the hope that bleeds the borders between generations of Black teacher-artist-scholars, the hope that we find in each other’s joy and laughter, and the hope that comes when we hear both stories of struggle and strife and stories of celebration and smile that lead to possibilities and potentialities of our collective being and becoming—as a people.So, the authors offer stories of witness, resistance, and gettin’ ovah, stories that serve as a road map from Black history and heritage to a Black futurity that is mythic and imagined but that can also be actualized and embodied, now. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and activists in a wide range of disciplines across the social sciences and performance studies.

Performative Intergenerational Dialogues of a Black Quartet promotes the importance of intergenerational Black dialogue as a collaborative spirit-making across race, genders, sexualities, and cultures to bridge time and space.The authors enter this dialogue in a crisis moment: a crisis moment at the confluence of a pandemic, the national political transition of leadership in the United States, the necessary rise of Black, Indigenous, and People of Color activism—in the face of the continued murders of unarmed Black and queer people by police. And as each author mourns the loss of loved ones who have left us through illness, the contiguity of time, or murder, we all hold tight to each other and to memory as an act of keeping them alive in our hearts and actions, remembrance as an act of resistance so that the circle will be unbroken. But they also come together in the spirit of hope, the hope that bleeds the borders between generations of Black teacher-artist-scholars, the hope that we find in each other’s joy and laughter, and the hope that comes when we hear both stories of struggle and strife and stories of celebration and smile that lead to possibilities and potentialities of our collective being and becoming—as a people.So, the authors offer stories of witness, resistance, and gettin’ ovah, stories that serve as a road map from Black history and heritage to a Black futurity that is mythic and imagined but that can also be actualized and embodied, now. This book will be of interest to scholars, students, and activists in a wide range of disciplines across the social sciences and performance studies.

Who Look at Me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body explores how we, as a society, see Blackness and in particular Black youth. Drawing on a range of sources, the authors argue that the ability to operationalize the sentiment that #BlackLivesMatter, requires seeing Blackness wholly, as queer, and as a site of subversive knowledge production. Continuing the work of June Jordan and Langston Hughes, and based on their work as a Black queer artist collective known as Hill L. Waters, Who Look at Me?! provides alternative tools for reading about and engaging with the lived experiences of Black youth and educational research for and about Black youth. In this way, the book presents not only the possibilities of envisioning teaching and research practices but presents examples that embrace, celebrate, and make room for the fullness of Black and queer bodies and experiences. This work will appeal to those interested in emancipatory methodological and educational practices as well as interdisciplinary conversations related to sociocultural constructions of race and sexuality, politics of Blackness, and race in education.

Who Look at Me?!: Shifting the Gaze of Education through Blackness, Queerness, and the Body explores how we, as a society, see Blackness and in particular Black youth. Drawing on a range of sources, the authors argue that the ability to operationalize the sentiment that #BlackLivesMatter, requires seeing Blackness wholly, as queer, and as a site of subversive knowledge production. Continuing the work of June Jordan and Langston Hughes, and based on their work as a Black queer artist collective known as Hill L. Waters, Who Look at Me?! provides alternative tools for reading about and engaging with the lived experiences of Black youth and educational research for and about Black youth. In this way, the book presents not only the possibilities of envisioning teaching and research practices but presents examples that embrace, celebrate, and make room for the fullness of Black and queer bodies and experiences. This work will appeal to those interested in emancipatory methodological and educational practices as well as interdisciplinary conversations related to sociocultural constructions of race and sexuality, politics of Blackness, and race in education.

A collection of bold and tender writing on June Jordan’s multidimensional legacy as a poet, healer, and activist.This Unruly Witness was curated for people who see love as a life force, who seek a community that can sustain us, who know that “we are the ones we have been waiting for.” Celebrating the life and legacy of the poet activist June Jordan, this collection illuminates why we need Jordan more than ever.Featuring a foreword by Alexis Pauline Gumbs, an afterword from Imani Perry, essays, poems, letters, and interviews from internationally acclaimed poets and thinkers such as Angela Davis, Pratibha Parmar, Margo Okazawa-Rey, Naomi Shihab Nye, Afaa M. Weaver, E. Ethelbert Miller, and many other people touched by Jordan’s work.