Climate justice requires racial justice, which Dr. Goffe explores in this talk by tuning into Black, Indigenous, and Asian traditions of mountain ballads. Listening to the life mountains give birth to and what they have witnessed of conquest across the Americas, she proposes a way to hear the multi-layered soundtrack of the co-production that exists in the natural environment. Reflecting on her practice as a DJ and sound artist, she shares techniques and modes of sound mixing and experimentation. Looking to the reverberations of Black feminist poetics on rural life in Toni Morrison’s Sula and bell hooks’ Appalachian Elegy, she will explore how many mountainous landscapes hold ancestral songs that echo freedom and possibility. How, she asks, can we understand “telling it on the mountain” as a strategy of witness for a shared future?
This event is a part of Berea College’s bell hooks center’s Gender Talk speaker series and luncheon, which invites scholars to discuss research focusing on issues of sex, gender, sexuality, race/ism, and their many and varied intersections throughout the year.
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Dr. E. Gale Greenlee (she/her/hers) is a Black feminist legacy keeper and a children’s literature and Black Girlhood Studies scholar. She holds a B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communication from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, a Master of Arts in Africana Women’s Studies from Clark Atlanta University, and a doctorate in African American literature from The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her research sits at the intersection of Black and Latinx girlhood studies, critical geography, and children’s and young adult literature. She is the author of the article, “A Blueprint for Black Girlhood: bell hooks’s Homemade Love” and one of the co-curators of the installation housed in the bell hooks center. At the center, Gale continues to amplify hooks’s children’s writings as an unexplored archive of feminist thought/praxis and a creative vehicle to resist domination.
Dr. Tao Leigh Goffe is an assistant professor of literary theory and cultural history. She has a joint appointment between the Department of Africana Studies and Program in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Cornell University. She is also a writer and a DJ specializing in the narratives that emerge from histories of imperialism, migration, and globalization.
She received her Bachelor’s degree in English from Princeton University in 2009 and PhD in American Studies from Yale University in 2015. She has held research positions at Princeton University, New York University, and Leiden University in the Netherlands.
At the intersections of the environmental humanities and science and technology studies, her interdisciplinary research and practice examines the unfolding relationship between technology, the senses, memory, and nature. DJ’ing is an important part of her pedagogy and research. Film production, sound editing, digital cartography, and oral history are also integral to her praxis. Her writing has been published in Small Axe, Amerasia Journal, and Asian Diasporic Visual Cultures and the Americas.
She is at work on a book on the ecological poetics and entanglements of the Caribbean plantation. Her second project is a manifesto on digital technology, black feminist praxis and DJ culture called Pon De Replay.