Shange
Biographic Data
| ID | 50464 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Shange |
| FAMILY NAME | Shange |
| SIGNATURE | SHANGE |
| AFFILIATIONS | University of California, Santa Cruz |
| ORCID | 0000-0003-3980-9897 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 14 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 123 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 14 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2014 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 4 |
Jailbreak of the Imagination: Anthropology and the Practice of Abolition
Rooted in the freedom dreams of Black political movements across diasporas, abolition has emerged as a framework for the study and practice of building a world without captivity. Anthropologists of social movements have attended to the dreamers and destroyers doing this work, turning an analytic eye to the practice of abolition among community organizers, high school students, immigrant rights advocates, and queer activists. As the discipline fla…
Anthroman Lives: The Emcee Epistemology of Real Black
From Intimacies of Trauma to Intimacies of Struggle: Gaza Solidarity Encampments as Sites of Black Feminist Praxis
How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies-an ada…
Abolition in the Clutch: Shifting through the Gears with Anthropology
Abolition is not a metaphor, and it is essential that our notion of “abolition” not get defanged and deracinated within the self‐evident boundaries of a discipline or even the academy. Amidst the tangle of complicity that is anthropology, there are also parts of the disciplinary toolkit that are useful for worldmaking: listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross‐diaspori…
Citation as Ceremony: SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation
Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, …
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship
Hale County This Morning, This Evening RaMell Ross, dir. 76 min. English. New York: The Cinema Guild, 2018
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
"Savannah Shange's PROGRESSIVE DYSTOPIA is an activist ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a progressive Black and Brown school in San Francisco, which despite its commitments to social justice ends up replicating anti-Blackness. Black students are more likely to be punished, and progressive 'wins' at the school can come at a cost to Black San Francisco residents. Shange worked at the school for seven years. Moving through different registers…
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship
Using the weight of my whole body, I pushed Kairo into the empty computer-lab-cum-library and shut the door behind me. Her1 gleaming red-and-white Jordans2 paced back and forth, baby dreads bouncin
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well-documented in the literature. Using fl…
Toward Thick Solidarity
The 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, a Black New Yorker, at the hands of Chinese American rookie cop Peter Liang sparked months of protest and an increased interest in the fault lines between Asian American and Black communities in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data, mainstream media, and recent activist projects like Letters for Black Lives, this essay critiques the notion of "empathy" as a foundation for meaningful multiracial alliance…
First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner
Reviewed by: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner Savannah Shange Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 266 pp. In his first book, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, Damien Sojoyner delivers an extended critique of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline (STPP) model that has become hegemonic in both …
Unapologetically Black
A king named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee
This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of "bait and switch" on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as "straight" or "queer," while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj…
Toward Thick Solidarity
The 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, a Black New Yorker, at the hands of Chinese American rookie cop Peter Liang sparked months of protest and an increased interest in the fault lines between Asian American and Black communities in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data, mainstream media, and recent activist projects like Letters for Black Lives, this essay critiques the notion of "empathy" as a foundation for meaningful multiracial alliance…
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well-documented in the literature. Using fl…
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship
Using the weight of my whole body, I pushed Kairo into the empty computer-lab-cum-library and shut the door behind me. Her1 gleaming red-and-white Jordans2 paced back and forth, baby dreads bouncin
Citation as Ceremony: SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation
Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, …
Unapologetically Black
A king named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee
This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of "bait and switch" on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as "straight" or "queer," while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj…
A king named Nicki: Strategic Queerness and the Black Femmecee
This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj's complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of "bait and switch" on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as "straight" or "queer," while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj…
Unapologetically Black
Toward Thick Solidarity
The 2014 killing of Akai Gurley, a Black New Yorker, at the hands of Chinese American rookie cop Peter Liang sparked months of protest and an increased interest in the fault lines between Asian American and Black communities in the United States. Drawing on ethnographic data, mainstream media, and recent activist projects like Letters for Black Lives, this essay critiques the notion of "empathy" as a foundation for meaningful multiracial alliance…
First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner
Reviewed by: First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles by Damien M. Sojoyner Savannah Shange Damien M. Sojoyner, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016. 266 pp. In his first book, First Strike: Educational Enclosures in Black Los Angeles, Damien Sojoyner delivers an extended critique of the School-to-Prison-Pipeline (STPP) model that has become hegemonic in both …
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness, and Schooling in San Francisco
"Savannah Shange's PROGRESSIVE DYSTOPIA is an activist ethnography of Robeson Justice Academy, a progressive Black and Brown school in San Francisco, which despite its commitments to social justice ends up replicating anti-Blackness. Black students are more likely to be punished, and progressive 'wins' at the school can come at a cost to Black San Francisco residents. Shange worked at the school for seven years. Moving through different registers…
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship
Using the weight of my whole body, I pushed Kairo into the empty computer-lab-cum-library and shut the door behind me. Her1 gleaming red-and-white Jordans2 paced back and forth, baby dreads bouncin
Black Girl Ordinary: Flesh, Carcerality, and the Refusal of Ethnography
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well-documented in the literature. Using fl…
Hale County This Morning, This Evening RaMell Ross, dir. 76 min. English. New York: The Cinema Guild, 2018
Play Aunties and Dyke Bitches: Gender, Generation, and the Ethics of Black Queer Kinship
Abolition in the Clutch: Shifting through the Gears with Anthropology
Abolition is not a metaphor, and it is essential that our notion of “abolition” not get defanged and deracinated within the self‐evident boundaries of a discipline or even the academy. Amidst the tangle of complicity that is anthropology, there are also parts of the disciplinary toolkit that are useful for worldmaking: listening deeply, bearing witness, challenging the inevitability of the state, and building deep transnational and cross‐diaspori…
Citation as Ceremony: SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation
Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, …
Jailbreak of the Imagination: Anthropology and the Practice of Abolition
Rooted in the freedom dreams of Black political movements across diasporas, abolition has emerged as a framework for the study and practice of building a world without captivity. Anthropologists of social movements have attended to the dreamers and destroyers doing this work, turning an analytic eye to the practice of abolition among community organizers, high school students, immigrant rights advocates, and queer activists. As the discipline fla…
Anthroman Lives: The Emcee Epistemology of Real Black
From Intimacies of Trauma to Intimacies of Struggle: Gaza Solidarity Encampments as Sites of Black Feminist Praxis
How does it feel to learn through a genocide? How does one teach on the same campus where student protest is forcibly quelled? In this experimental dialogue between an undergraduate student and a faculty member, we answer these questions in a Black feminist call and response rooted in an ethics of mutuality and care. Drawing on Gutierrez's lived experience in a Gaza solidarity encampment collective, we conceive of encampments as antibodies-an ada…
Sociology (8 works) · Gender Studies (6 works) · Politics (6 works) · History (5 works) · Law (5 works) · Political science (5 works) · Anthropology (4 works) · Gender Studies (4 works) · Race, History, and American Society (4 works) · Art (3 works)