Publications

 

My newest article “Haunting Erotics” is a part of a special issue of Cultural Studies (Volume 39) entitled Issue 6: Bodies that Haunt: Rethinking the Political Economy of Racialised Death

This piece develops haunting erotics as a Black femme and feminist methodology. Following the implications of Saidiya Hartman’s formulation of ghostly pain as part and parcel of the anchoring of Blackness in abjection, I read Mayfield Brooks and Molondi Zondi’s processional and haunting performance entitled Dancing in the Hold which premiered in April of 2018 at Gibney Dance New York. With poly-vocalic attention to embodied and expressive theorizations of Black life, I locate haunting within the field of Black Studies, and more specifically in conversations about abjection and Black art. I engage Fred Moten's formulation of ‘absolute nearness’ in my discussion of intimacy in the afterlife of slavery, and then turn to Audre Lorde’s erotics in order to analyse why Black performance’s engagement of spectrality, opacity and haunting marks an emergent and healing, site of Black experimentalism

This special issue of Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges Journal is the result of several conversations amongst graduate students of color from the Seditious Acts symposium at the University of Minnesota. The works in this volume reflect the intersectional identities, experiences, and positionalities of its producers, who are working-class, first-generation, feminist, queer, and international students of the Global South. All of these locations contribute to the devaluation of their knowledges and experiences in institutions of higher education in the United States. As such, this issue is a series of self-reflections, interrogations, disruptions and (re)imaginings related to the substantial problems of knowledge production and academic culture. This issue also operates as a call and guide toward community building for those in academia impacted by systematic oppression. 

“Sedition is speculative. Even as our collected writings chart a possible way forward–in and through the various forms of dispossession enacted by the institution—there are no guarantees.  And yet, we gather, organize, and write to mark particular moments in this struggle.”

LESLIE PARKER & NAIMAH PETIGNY

MN Artists - Walker Art Center 

On methods for conjuring Black Space and dance improvisation as a way to access collective memory and ancestral wisdom

Naimah Petigny, Beaudelaine Pierre, Richa Nagar, Sima Shakhsari

This performance and transcript emerge from a collaborative journey that grapples with what it might mean to agitate dominant pedagogical and methodological conventions of Eurocentric Angophone academia. Together, we perform an argument and a search: for multiple entry points into decolonizing feminisms; for multiple modes of knowing and being that can interrupt and challenge the epistemes that are rooted in thoughts and practices of colonialism and coloniality; for interrogating the dominant politics of citation that often operate in academic practices in disembodied ways. We search for a politics of knowing that is firmly rooted in relationalities where power and authority can be shared across uneven and unequal locations and languages. We invite you to step into the spaces that we have started imagining here and push all of our collective conversations and imaginations further, beyond the silos that cage us in our disciplined modes of thinking, writing, arguing, and dreaming.

Routledge Handbook of Gender and Feminist Geographies 

By Beaudelaine Pierre, Naimah Petigny, Richa Nagar

Edited By Anindita Datta, Peter Hopkins, Lynda Johnston, Elizabeth Olson, Joseli Maria Silva

This collaborative article offer a multi-sited feminist intervention which searches for dynamic engagements with embodied translations for justice.

What might it mean to decolonize methods of knowing and being in the context of neo-colonial and neo-liberal academic institutions within, and despite, which we grow, resist, heal and build? Focusing on entanglements of space, identity and language in the knowledges and struggles inhabited by those who have been multiply marked, violated and erased, this multi-sited feminist intervention searches for dynamic engagements with embodied translations for justice. Such embodied translations fight the geographies of partition; reclaim peripheralized stories, places, paradigms and methodologies as knowing; and engender alternative possibilities of being in relation to institutionalized systems of learning.

Films for the Feminist Classroom

Truth exposes wounds yet works as a salve. The connective tissue between our world(s) begs that we move it—know its contours and how it may free us. Black women’s words are prisms—the generativity we’ve been waiting for.

Agitate! Unsettling Knowledges

By Siddharth Bharath, SeungGyeong Ji, Naimah Petigny, Sandra Rellier

In a world with so many (mundane and spectacular) struggles for social justice, why do academic theories matter? Throughout our graduate education within a U.S. imperial higher education institution, we have realized that we cannot help but make decolonizing struggles a part of our academic journey. Imperial knowledge production historically and currently violate and commit violence on our relations – beings that we love, we care for and we are ourselves. In this piece, we share our journey of exploring what it means to be academics in solidarity with decolonial struggles everywhere.