Brittnay L. Proctor, PhD
Publications
Selected Research, Reviews, and Public-Facing Writing
“‘Shout It Out:’ Patrice Rushen as Polyphonist and the Sounding of Black Women’s Affectability and Genius”
2017
The following article considers how Patrice Rushen's jazz‐funk album, Shout It Out (1977), implicitly works as a punctum that indexes the irreconcilable relationship between black women's affectability and black women musicians’ transgressive sonic praxis. Consequently, I consider how Rushen's use of sound technologies (i.e., multitracking, the clavinet) on Shout It Out attempts to reorient black women's affective and material labor to the end of sounding black women musician's multifaceted genius. As polyphonist, Rushen speaks to the expropriation of black women's affective and material labor and the vexed relationship black women musicians have with musical traditions and industries.
“It’s Not as Easy as It Looks on the Page”: Security, Precarity, and Working with Black Feminist Classics
2020
This article presents reflections on the contemporary academic workplace from two junior scholars working with Black feminism in interdisciplinary contexts. We reflect on our own interactions with two Black feminist “classics” Conditions V: The Black Women’s Issue (1979), co-edited by Lorraine Bethel and Barbara Smith, and Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), edited by Barbara Smith, and consider the challenges of teaching Black feminism in the classroom. We discuss both our experiences as education professionals working within and against hostile institutions, and our experiences in the classroom. We explore the dynamics of teaching Black feminist theorizing in an increasingly financialized and securitized environment, where our students’ desires for economic security index a worsening precarity they share with us. In the face of these desires for security, we explore what of the Black feminist tradition resists any reduction to the brutalizing logics of racial capitalism.
