"Who is She? The Politics and Imperatives of Black Feminist Historiography"

Jayna Brown is an Assistant Professor for the Ethnic Studies Program and the Department of English at the University of Oregon. Brown is currently a Rockefeller fellow at the Stanford Humanities Center and also holds a Ford Postdoctoral fellowship. She is writing a book on black women performers from the variety stage, tentatively titled "Babylon Girls", situating her analysis in the context of modernity, colonialism and discourses of the body. Her work challenges masculinist and nationalist biases within current work on popular cultural forms and their circulation. She seeks to expand the ways in which we think about, and discuss, black expressive forms.

As the last speaker in the series, Professor Jayna Brown offers some insights into just what is at stake in work on black women. How do we negotiate the tensions between a politics of social construction, by which we understand race, gender and other 'identities' as produced out of social relations, and our desire to write about black women as subjects? Can we write about black women, and not be invested in the idea of stable, cohered subjects? How do we deal with the partiality of the available historical records on the women we study? Need our remembrances always be celebratory to be 'feminist?' In exploring these questions, Brown draws from her own research experiences working on little known black women performers, including the singer Stella Wiley and the jazz trumpeter Valaida Snow.