Finding a livable feminist academic life through Rasanblaj

Abstract

In this article, I poetically gather the conceptual and methodological approaches of Black and Indigenous women scholars that have kept me, as an anthropologist scholar-teacher from elsewhere, alive and interdisciplined in the US academy, ethico-erotically oriented in my research-creation. The women scholars to whose work I turn breathe life into my feminist intellectual woodland—the anthropological cannon—the scholarly commons. In the bounty of their generous sharing of methodological remix and political commitments, these mentors point to the need for subverting the pain of dismemberment and fragmentation effected by different forms of domination at different scales (Alexander 2005). Drawing on the legacy of these elders and colleagues, I mix genres, languages, and sounds as I evocatively gesture to the ways these women scholars have sustained and mentored me through their collective scholarly care.