Electric Blog

Who is Ravynn K. Springfield? I took this question two ways. First, how I understand myself—I am Ravynn, first and last of my name. I am a carrier of legacies. I am Thelia’s granddaughter, a storyteller, someone who chases starlight, and in the more practical sense I am a PhD Candidate in American Studies.

My historical training begins with my Nana. She was an archivist, not in the traditional sense, but in a familial and communal one. When you entered her home in Robeson County, North Carolina, you came in through the side door before entering the den. This is were she greeted you. The front door, which no one used, led to her living room, a place where only God and a selective group of Her adult children could enter. It was a place as a child I peeked into and entered only momentarily before hearing a yell from my snitching cousin, “NANA, CHRISTINA’S IN THE LIVING ROOM!”

Preparing for my move from Toronto to Baltimore, my advisor warned me of how easily graduate students grow lonely—a gentle reminder of the necessity to make and maintain community as a practice of black feminist survival in the academe. Despite forewarning, I don’t think anyone could have prepared me for the isolation that a global pandemic would bring.

For the young Black Feminist coming of age, a long line of women await you. For you, I have gathered some sounds of Black Femme Freedom so that the next time the call for freedom beckons, you will know, you will join in, and, like me, you can occupy your seat at the table.

Furtive glances, stolen embraces, fleeting touch, whispered promises—these are the practices of erotic marronage.

My parents made home on the corner of El Segundo y La Santa Fe, in an apartment building which housed a predominantly Latinx community.

With the various forms of police violence enacted on Black women and girls, we must still demand and shout today, "Why are they continuously forgotten?" And so this site is my form of protest, saying the names of cis and trans Black women and girls louder-not just for folks in the back, but for those up front too.

Social media is both ephemeral and lasting, as such, we wanted to chart the public response, and archive the discussion surrounding the #FugitiveHandbook. This post serves as a palimpsest. We seek to archive these discussions using them as a point of departure to define and engage with questions of fugitivity, and how its attending theories, shape our digital humanist practices.

Electric Marronage is excited to announce Dr. Yomaira Figueroa’s tenure as Associate Professor at Michigan State University. Dr. Figueroa, EM’s co-founder and co-curator, holds appointments in the Department of English, the Department of African American and African Studies, and the Chicano/Latino Studies Program where she teaches a range of courses including “Poetics of Liberation and Relation,” “Decoloniality, Diaspora, and the Human,” and “Afro-Diasporas and the Global Metropoles.” She is co-founder of the Womxn of Color Initiatives and a pioneer of MSU’s Mentoring Underrepresented Students in English (MUSE).

In the early twentieth century, African American physicians were particularly invested in challenging racial assumptions of disease susceptibility. As African Americans faced high rates of infectious diseases such as tuberculosis and syphilis, these physicians sought to prove that these diseases were not the result of racial inferiority, but rather stemmed from environmental and social conditions.

The great poet Lucille Clifton—a black woman and Baltimore native—captured the fact of blackness perfectly: “Come celebrate with me that everyday something has tried to kill me and failed.” It’s an invitation, first, but one quickly followed with a clear and unvarnished recounting of an attempted annihilation. The Johns Hopkins History Seminar attempted to annihilate blackness over and over again.

n the early days of the COVID-19 pandemic unfolding in the US, rumors of black immunity to the virus began to circulate on social media. After testing positive for COVID-19, Idris Elba even made a statement about why rumors of black immunity were dangerous. Even, public health officials concerted efforts to dispel these rumors.

“The body archive is an attunement, a hopeful gathering, an act of love against the foreclosures of reason. It is a way of knowing the body-self as a becoming and unbecoming thing, of scrambling time and matter, of turning toward rather than against oneself. And vitally, it is a way of thinking-feeling the body’s unbounded relation to other bodies. “