For Episode 4 of The Chorus, we discuss Katherine McKittrick’s “On Plantations, Prisons, and a Black Sense of Place”. Our guests for this episode are Bobbi Kindred, Ph.D. student, author, scholar, and artivist and Kelly Clemen, Ph.D. student and scholar in Black and Indigenous Studies. Bobbi shared prose writing that explores sobriety and recovery through Harriet Jacobs's loophole of retreat. Kelly shares a poem about Black land and water relationships that is sparked from her experience in Black Surf Week. Brittney shares a triptych painting that visualizes alternative narratives and Black imaginations toward another Black world. Rasheena shares a poem that explores a Black sense of place through The Great Migration.
Guest Bios
Kelly Clemen is an English Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, Seattle, having recently graduated with a B.A. in Literature and Cultural Studies from the University of California, San Diego. Kelly's research explores Black and Indigenous literatures, racial conceptualizations, and solidarity movements towards a decolonial future, primarily through analysis of literary, filmic, and various multimedia texts depicting speculative futures.
Bobbi Kindred, Cierra Green, writer, artist, and storyteller, is a Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies Ph.D. student at the University of Washington, Seattle, and have recently graduated with their B.A. in Africana Studies from San Francisco State University. Bobbi’s research and artivism praxis is rooted in Black Feminist Theory and centers the experiences of Black women, queer and trans folk whose lived experiences intersect with navigating substance addiction within a system that perpetually criminalizes and stigmatizes folk on this particular axis. Their current book, “This (Boi)yant Body” argues the importance of nuanced accounts of Black trans narrative as self-definition, despite the violence of the literary archive of recovery subverting these voices.
