The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making: A Reading List by Zalika U. Ibaorimi
A reading list by Zalika U. Ibaorimi from her teach-in "The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making” for the School for Black Feminist Politics.
Scholar Zalika U. Ibaorimi led a two-part teach-in for the School for Black Feminist Politics! Her first teach-in, "The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making” was held on Tuesday, April 5th at 6:30 PM EST and the second teach-in was held on Thursday, April 7th at 6:30 PM EST. You can watch Part One here and Part Two here.
About the teach-in: "The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making” by Zalika U. Ibaorimi considers the pleasures and horrors of a place termed the “Bottom;” however, in two parts, this lecture also regards “the Bottom” as a material space and immaterial human/counter-human sexual geographic space as fleshy. Identifying the bottom as a fleshy space provides a cognizance of place within a placelessness that exists outside of the boundaries of the perceived Black deviant femme's significance.
“The Bottom Dwellers” interlocks the creative and imagined applications of Black intracommunal relations of sexual shame, desire, and pleasure. Through Toni Morrison’s Sula (1973), the life of Billie Holiday, and W.E.B. Du Bois’ The Philadelphia Negro (1899), I analyze how the materiality and ontology of those who position themselves at the precipice of “the Bottom” create the interlocking pathways between what is down below and what births the “jawn.”
About Zalika U. Ibaorimi: Zalika U. Ibaorimi (she/they) is a multidisciplinary artist, doctoral candidate of African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin and 2021-2023 Carter G. Woodson Predoctoral Fellow at the University of Virginia. She engages Black material and digital publics as landscapes to trace the human sexual geographies between the relation of the Black femme and spectator. Their relationality is tethered to the logics of shame, desire, and pleasure. She uses Black gender and sexuality analytics to engage Visual Culture Studies through the logics of Black Studies and Black Porn/Sex Work Studies. Ibaorimi specializes in performance, haunting, Black queerness, ontology, horror, flesh, sonics, the human and deviant modalities of Blackness. As a scholar and performance-based photographer, she uses the experimental approaches of research-creation to engage Black Study.
The Bottom Dwellers: On Spiritual, Material, and Ontological Sites of Deviant Making: A Reading List
View Zalika’s reading list below. You can also access the PDF of the reading list by clicking “Reading List.”
Peach, Linden. Toni Morrison. Macmillan International Higher Education, 1995.
Philip, M. Nourbese. A Genealogy of Resistance: And Other Essays. Mercury Press (Canada), 1997.
Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York University Press, 2010.
Stockton, Kathryn Bond. Beautiful Bottom, Beautiful Shame: Where “Black” Meets “Queer”. Duke University Press, 2006.
McKittrick, Katherine. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle. U of Minnesota Press, 2006.
Harris, LaShawn. Sex Workers, Psychics, and Numbers Runners Black Women in New York City’s Underground Economy, University of Illinois Press, 2016.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. If You Can't Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Simon and Schuster, 2001.
Forrest, Leon. “A Solo Long-Song: For Lady Day.” Callaloo 16, no. 2 (1993): 332–367.
Spillers, Hortense, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, and Jennifer L. Morgan. "" Whatcha gonna do?": Revisiting" mama's baby, papa's maybe: An American grammar book": A conversation with Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, Farah Jasmine Griffin, Shelly Eversley, & Jennifer L. Morgan." Women's Studies Quarterly 35, no. 1/2 (2007): 299-309.
Holiday, Billie. Lady Sings the Blues [by] Billie Holiday with William Dufty. [1st ed.]. Garden City, N. Y: Doubleday, 1956.
Weheliye, Alexander G. Phonographies. Duke University Press, 2005.
Turner, Patricia A. I Heard It Through the Grapevine: Rumor in African-American Culture. University of California Press, 1993.
Quashie, Kevin. The Sovereignty of Quiet: Beyond Resistance in Black Culture. Rutgers University Press, 2012.
Spillers, Hortense J. "A Hateful Passion, A Lost Love." Feminist Studies 9, no. 2 (1983): 293-323.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval. WW Norton & Company, 2019.
Griffin, Farah Jasmine. "Black Feminists and Du Bois: Respectability, Protection, and Beyond." The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 568, no. 1 (2000): 28-40.
James, Joy. Transcending the Talented Tenth: Black Leaders and American Intellectuals. Routledge, 1997.
Ibaorimi, Zalika U. 2020. "Jawn Theory." Visual and New Media Review, Fieldsights, June 18. https://culanth.org/fieldsights/jawn-theory
Du Bois, William Edward Burghardt. The Philadelphia Negro [1899]. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2010.
Thompson, Krista A. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Aesthetic Practice. Duke University Press, 2015.