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"Brown, Kimberly Nichele"
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Black Women and the Pandemic Imagination
This article discusses Brown’s use of Afrofuturism and critical pedagogy in her creation of the class, Black Women and the Pandemic Imagination (BWPI), which she taught in Spring 2021 at Virginia Commonwealth University. Brown explains her implementation of precarious pedagogy to attend to the affective needs of students struggling under the effect of Covid-19. She discusses how the analytics of Afrofuturism and critical pedagogy provide strategies for combating white supremacy and for promoting social justice. Brown demonstrates how reading theoretical works by black women about cataclysmic moments (i.e., the apocalypse, contagions, pandemics and even the Middle Passage), as well as studying representations of black women during these moments provides an opportunity for students to “rehearse hope.” Brown sees BWPI as a course premised on Black Lives Matter and committed to black futurity – “there are black people in the future.” Through BWPI, she hoped to ignite the radical imagination of her students, thereby empowering them to think about creating a more equitable future.
Journal Article
Writing the Black Revolutionary Diva
Kimberly Nichele Brown examines how African American women since the
1970s have found ways to move beyond the double consciousness of the colonized
text to develop a healthy subjectivity that attempts to disassociate black
subjectivity from its connection to white culture. Brown traces the emergence of
this new consciousness from its roots in the Black Aesthetic Movement through
important milestones such as the anthology The Black Woman and Essence magazine to
the writings of Angela Davis, Toni Cade Bambara, and Jayne Cortez.
eBook
STAY WOKE
Arguably one of the most poignant scenes of contemporary African American film history is the ending of Spike Lee’s School Daze (1988). Vaughn “Dap” Dunlap (Larry Fishburne) sprints onto the yard of the fictitious historically black Mission College pointedly at the crack of dawn and loudly beseeches his fellow classmates and black viewers alike to “wake up!” Although stay woke has gained traction as a millennial phrase popularized by the Black Lives Matter movement, permutations have existed, I would imagine, since Europeans first set foot on the African continent. “Staying woke” is to employ bell hooks’s “oppositional gaze”¹ or to
Book Chapter
Sniffing the \Calypso Magnolia\: Unearthing the Caribbean Presence in the South (Response to John Lowe)
In \"Sniffing the 'Calypso Magnolia': Unearthing the Caribbean Presence in the South,\" Kimberly Nichele Brown discusses the multifarious ways in which John Lowe takes the academy to task for its rigid conceptual framing of southern literature. She further examines how Lowe's proposition for widening the southern literature canon to include Caribbean influences marks a potentially paradigmatic shift in our understanding of not only southern and Caribbean studies, but of African American and Latino studies as well. Although Brown discusses the multiple benefits of blurring the boundaries of literary and cultural specialties within the academy, she voices concern about what consequences Lowe's proposal might have on the future of African American, Caribbean, and Latino studies--disciplines founded by scholars who fought for autonomy in resistance to an inflexible canon. Finally, Brown challenges Lowe to more fully define what constitutes southern literature and what characteristics (place of birth, style of writing) make someone a southern writer.
Journal Article
Revolutionary divas and the emergence of the decolonized text: Black women's subjectivity, images and ideologies (1970–present)
This project explores the cultural production of African American women between 1970 and the present in order to examine how these women create texts that can be labeled decolonized to a greater extent than their predecessors' texts. I define decolonization as the process by which African American creative artists attempt to disassociate black subjectivity from its connection to whiteness. I assert that the women in this study offer alternative models of black subjectivity that seek to transform their audiences into radical/revolutionary agents. Most contemporary scholarship continues to focus on W. E. B. Du Bois's concept of double-consciousness and the James Weldon Johnson-influenced notion of the structural doubleness of African American texts. These concepts are problematic because they lead us to see African American texts from the perspective of a white gaze. Equally problematic is the continued preoccupation with the effect of whiteness on the black psyche, which hinders an analysis of the text in the context of its black audience. My project necessarily reevaluates the importance of the Black Aesthetic Movement by finally providing black audiences the attention they deserve. Documenting the contemporaneous development of black studies programs and black and Third World journals and publishing houses, I argue that the Black Aesthetic Movement was a defining moment in the history of African American culture. The Black Aesthetic Movement's primary initiative was the decolonization of black Americans, and as a result fostered a new collective black consciousness that privileged the black gaze. I posit the women analyzed in Revolutionary Divas as the successors of the Black Aesthetic Movement. I examine the extent to which each woman's text can be labeled “functional, collective, and committed”—Maulana Karenga's definition of the Black Aesthetic. My assertion is that critics have ignored the indebtedness to Black Aesthetics that many contemporary African American women's writing reflects. Throughout the project, I demonstrate each woman's connection with the Black Aesthetic, as well as how each woman offers programs for revolution that extend beyond the sometimes essentialist and sexist limitations of Black Aesthetic ideology.
Dissertation
Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities
Picking up where his last book, New Black Man (Neal, 2005), left off, Looking for Leroy evokes Leroy John- son, the fictional character from the movie Fame (Alan Parker, 1980) and the ensuing hit television series by the same name (NBC, 1982-1987) as a conduit for conveying the complexities of black masculinity in the post-civil rights era.3 As a corrective to Locke's oversight, Neal uses the sexual ambiguity of both the character of Leroy and the actor who portrays him, Gene Anthony Ray, to queer contemporary representa- tions of black masculinity.
Book Review