Books by Savannah Shange
Progressive Dystopia: Abolition, Antiblackness & Schooling in San Francisco, 2019
Papers by Savannah Shange
Transforming Anthropology, 2019
Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, thi... more Written at the confluence of Black girlhood studies and a critical anthropology of the state, this essay is an ethnography of social death in gentrifying San Francisco. I argue the gendered and raced patterns of school discipline at a San Francisco high school help us apprehend the afterlife of slavery. Within the context of schooling, the particular association of Black girls as loud and disobedient is well-documented in the literature. Using flesh (Spillers 1987) as a hermeneutic to understand Black embodiment in the late liberal US, the essay centers on two young women who are targeted for school push out. Ultimately, the self-making strategies employed by young Black women in San Francisco flummox the progressive political project and model "Black girl ordinary" as a practice of ethical refusal, both within and beyond the academy. [gender, youth, schooling, urban anthropology, blackness]
The Black Scholar, 2019
Through ethnographic engagement with queer kids of color coming of age in the San Francisco Bay A... more Through ethnographic engagement with queer kids of color coming of age in the San Francisco Bay Area, this essay explores the co-production of Black queer common sense across gender and generation. A social justice themed alternative high school allows us to examine schools as not just hostile territories to queer teachers or students in isolation, but also potentially as sites of the collaborative, contested production of queer communities of color. Drawing on the work of Riley Snorton (2017), Kara Keeling (2007), Kaila Story (2017) and Mel Michelle Lewis (2017), I critically engage stud-femme sociality as a contested site of Black queer kinship. Struggling through conflict and collaboration, the young women of Frisco teach us to engage girlhood as a coalitional space of queer possibility.
Women and Performance, 2014
This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in th... more This article explores the deployment of race, queer sexuality, and femme gender performance in the work of rapper and pop musical artist Nicki Minaj. The author argues that Minaj’s complex assemblage of public personae functions as a sort of “bait and switch” on the laws of normativity, where she appears to perform as “straight” or “queer,” while upon closer examination, she refuses to be legible as either. Rather than perpetuate notions of Minaj as yet another pop diva, the author proposes that Minaj signals the emergence of the femmecee, or a rapper whose critical, strategic performance of queer femininity is inextricably linked to the production and reception of their rhymes. This article engages a pair of music video releases that reflect the range of Minaj’s gender performances as cinematic lenses into the strategic moves that Minaj is able to make from her femmecee stance. King Nicki’s hypervisibility as a black femmecee and refusal to cede to any regime of recognition confound the multiple common senses that seek to produce her as a compliant subject.
A short reflection for Anthropology News on the national climate after a week of shootings.
In this brief essay for The Feminist Wire, I explore antiblack racism and the ethics of queer rep... more In this brief essay for The Feminist Wire, I explore antiblack racism and the ethics of queer reproduction in the context of a white lesbian family accidentally birthing a black daughter.
Edited Collections by Savannah Shange
Cultural Anthropology website, 2016
collaboration, n.
Pronunciation: /kəˌlabəˈreɪʃən/
Etymology: noun of action, < Latin collabōrāre ... more collaboration, n.
Pronunciation: /kəˌlabəˈreɪʃən/
Etymology: noun of action, < Latin collabōrāre to collaborate v.: probably immediately < French.
1. United labor, co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work.
2. spec. Traitorous cooperation with the enemy
—Oxford English Dictionary
Anthropology is always collaborative. We make our knowledge in cooperation with others: with interlocutors in the field, upon whom we are utterly dependent; with co-researchers and colleagues with whom we design projects and share expertise; with our disciplinary strictures and demands; and with the neoliberal institutions that train, employ, and fund us. Anthropology is also collaborative in the second sense—traitorous, or at least complicitous, with longer histories of disciplinary knowledge production that leave anthropology as, if not the handmaiden of colonialism, at least its kin (Asad 1973; Harrison 1991; Allen and Jobson 2016). The Oxford English Dictionary’s two definitions of collaboration coexist in anthropological practice, even as we have increasingly embraced the first as a means to challenge the second.
In the last twenty years, we’ve turned toward engaged, activist, and public anthropology, seeking to make anthropological knowledge production more participatory and political (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Lassiter 2005; Hale 2006; Checker 2010). Such possibilities have precedents in feminist and women of color ethnography, which have long cultivated reciprocal, dialogic, and horizontal relationships between researcher and researched—even as the challenges of such collaboration are well documented (Stacey 1988; Behar 1996; Craven and Davis 2013). Across the discipline, anthropologists have turned new attention to persistent problems of epistemology and representation: what counts as an object of knowledge; how we can rework binaries of anthropologist/informant, expert/object, and knower/known; and whether ethnographic ways of knowing are necessarily also ways of objectifying and controlling (Povinelli 2006; Robbins 2013; Simpson 2014; Hankins 2015). Collaboration as a method and a problem sheds light on the ethics of anthropological knowledge production—its potentials and its pitfalls, the hopes it reflects and the disappointments it yields.
At a time when collaborative ideals and practices have become standard across a variety of domains—from crowd-sourcing and data sharing to scientific laboratories and social movements (see Holmes and Marcus 2008)—this Correspondences session pays critical attention to the dilemmas of collaboration. Contributors consider: What are the political desires that incite and sustain collaboration? How does collaboration challenge but also reproduce more hierarchical, less liberatory ethnographic knowledge practices? What forms of accountability does collaboration demand? What are collaboration’s contradictions—its ethical limits and its hopeful horizons? Whose collaboration, and for what?
Book Reviews by Savannah Shange
Uploads
Books by Savannah Shange
Papers by Savannah Shange
Edited Collections by Savannah Shange
Pronunciation: /kəˌlabəˈreɪʃən/
Etymology: noun of action, < Latin collabōrāre to collaborate v.: probably immediately < French.
1. United labor, co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work.
2. spec. Traitorous cooperation with the enemy
—Oxford English Dictionary
Anthropology is always collaborative. We make our knowledge in cooperation with others: with interlocutors in the field, upon whom we are utterly dependent; with co-researchers and colleagues with whom we design projects and share expertise; with our disciplinary strictures and demands; and with the neoliberal institutions that train, employ, and fund us. Anthropology is also collaborative in the second sense—traitorous, or at least complicitous, with longer histories of disciplinary knowledge production that leave anthropology as, if not the handmaiden of colonialism, at least its kin (Asad 1973; Harrison 1991; Allen and Jobson 2016). The Oxford English Dictionary’s two definitions of collaboration coexist in anthropological practice, even as we have increasingly embraced the first as a means to challenge the second.
In the last twenty years, we’ve turned toward engaged, activist, and public anthropology, seeking to make anthropological knowledge production more participatory and political (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Lassiter 2005; Hale 2006; Checker 2010). Such possibilities have precedents in feminist and women of color ethnography, which have long cultivated reciprocal, dialogic, and horizontal relationships between researcher and researched—even as the challenges of such collaboration are well documented (Stacey 1988; Behar 1996; Craven and Davis 2013). Across the discipline, anthropologists have turned new attention to persistent problems of epistemology and representation: what counts as an object of knowledge; how we can rework binaries of anthropologist/informant, expert/object, and knower/known; and whether ethnographic ways of knowing are necessarily also ways of objectifying and controlling (Povinelli 2006; Robbins 2013; Simpson 2014; Hankins 2015). Collaboration as a method and a problem sheds light on the ethics of anthropological knowledge production—its potentials and its pitfalls, the hopes it reflects and the disappointments it yields.
At a time when collaborative ideals and practices have become standard across a variety of domains—from crowd-sourcing and data sharing to scientific laboratories and social movements (see Holmes and Marcus 2008)—this Correspondences session pays critical attention to the dilemmas of collaboration. Contributors consider: What are the political desires that incite and sustain collaboration? How does collaboration challenge but also reproduce more hierarchical, less liberatory ethnographic knowledge practices? What forms of accountability does collaboration demand? What are collaboration’s contradictions—its ethical limits and its hopeful horizons? Whose collaboration, and for what?
Book Reviews by Savannah Shange
Pronunciation: /kəˌlabəˈreɪʃən/
Etymology: noun of action, < Latin collabōrāre to collaborate v.: probably immediately < French.
1. United labor, co-operation; esp. in literary, artistic, or scientific work.
2. spec. Traitorous cooperation with the enemy
—Oxford English Dictionary
Anthropology is always collaborative. We make our knowledge in cooperation with others: with interlocutors in the field, upon whom we are utterly dependent; with co-researchers and colleagues with whom we design projects and share expertise; with our disciplinary strictures and demands; and with the neoliberal institutions that train, employ, and fund us. Anthropology is also collaborative in the second sense—traitorous, or at least complicitous, with longer histories of disciplinary knowledge production that leave anthropology as, if not the handmaiden of colonialism, at least its kin (Asad 1973; Harrison 1991; Allen and Jobson 2016). The Oxford English Dictionary’s two definitions of collaboration coexist in anthropological practice, even as we have increasingly embraced the first as a means to challenge the second.
In the last twenty years, we’ve turned toward engaged, activist, and public anthropology, seeking to make anthropological knowledge production more participatory and political (Scheper-Hughes 1995; Lassiter 2005; Hale 2006; Checker 2010). Such possibilities have precedents in feminist and women of color ethnography, which have long cultivated reciprocal, dialogic, and horizontal relationships between researcher and researched—even as the challenges of such collaboration are well documented (Stacey 1988; Behar 1996; Craven and Davis 2013). Across the discipline, anthropologists have turned new attention to persistent problems of epistemology and representation: what counts as an object of knowledge; how we can rework binaries of anthropologist/informant, expert/object, and knower/known; and whether ethnographic ways of knowing are necessarily also ways of objectifying and controlling (Povinelli 2006; Robbins 2013; Simpson 2014; Hankins 2015). Collaboration as a method and a problem sheds light on the ethics of anthropological knowledge production—its potentials and its pitfalls, the hopes it reflects and the disappointments it yields.
At a time when collaborative ideals and practices have become standard across a variety of domains—from crowd-sourcing and data sharing to scientific laboratories and social movements (see Holmes and Marcus 2008)—this Correspondences session pays critical attention to the dilemmas of collaboration. Contributors consider: What are the political desires that incite and sustain collaboration? How does collaboration challenge but also reproduce more hierarchical, less liberatory ethnographic knowledge practices? What forms of accountability does collaboration demand? What are collaboration’s contradictions—its ethical limits and its hopeful horizons? Whose collaboration, and for what?