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Ashley Farmer's 'Queen Mother' honors Queen Mother Audley Moore, finally
Given Moore's position as both a cultural and political figure of high regard, who is widely known amongst students of the Black Radical Tradition and in Black Nationalist and reparations-centered organizing spaces, she has been minimally studied with the degree of rigor she deserves.
The Parish of Seeds
Moira's Parish of Seeds had been born from the bones of a megachurch that was once known for its large and loud worship sessions. Inside, Moira and her crew had torn out the pews and converted the sanctuary into a seed-curing room. The baptismal font became a hydroponic lettuce tank, and the stained-glass Jesus now…
Black Zombie: Voodoo, colonial consumption, and the monsterization of Haiti
Black Zombie illustrates how the zombie exploded in Western culture with occultist and explorer William Seabrook's The Magic Island in 1929, a travelogue in which he claims to have seen Haitian zombies working in sugarcane fields.
Seekin' Freedom: The Hidden Curriculum of the Sea Islands
On the Sea Islands off the coast of South Carolina and Georgia, enslaved men and women built something that has never fit comfortably into the standard account of American religious history: a private course of study, weeks or months long, that a person had to complete alone before a congregation would accept them. It was…
Lay Down Body
My maternal grandmother's last words to my momma and uncle, her two youngest, were, "I'm getting out of this hospital tomorrow and I'm gone take y'all down to the fair grounds." My momma was 13. My uncle was 11. And my grandma wouldn't live to fulfill those wishes. At the age of 47, on a…
Homegoing: Death Care and Funerary Tradition in the American South
I hope these photographs invite viewers to reflect on their own mortality, on the traditions that shape how we grieve, and on the people who make it possible to say goodbye well.