This is so cool! Thank you so much for sharing. I’m very jealous of your students and wish I had been able to take a class with this syllabus!

Is it okay to ask a question about one of these books? I guess, just feel free to ignore this if it’s a complicated answer or just an unwanted question! (I won’t take it personally!) But I’ve been interested in that series by Alexis Pauline Gumbs for a while now (someone recommended Spill to me when it came out), but every time I go to pick them up, I worry about not understanding them because I haven’t read the theorists they’re based on. For Spill, I do have Black, White, and in Color so I at least have a starting point for what to read as my “prerequisite”, but for M Archive and Dub, I’m not even sure what it is by Alexander and Wynter that I should be reading to get that background. I notice you don’t have any specific book by Alexander on here—did you assign articles by her instead? Am I overthinking this? Maybe if I just jump in to the works by Gumbs, it’s actually very obvious what she’s referencing? (I’m realizing as I’m typing that potentially this is a question for the book forums. Just going to ask you here now but maybe will repost in the forum eventually.)

I love this question and I'm so glad you asked! I'm most familiar with M Archive, so I can answer most specifically for that one. M Archive is in conversation with M Jacqui Alexander's book Pedagogies of Crossing, which is a super dense book of theory that's thinking about imperialism as a transnational problem and the spirituality of examining counter hegemonic ways of thinking. It's very abstract and theoretical, an incredible read but definitely an undertaking. I wouldn't consider it a prerequisite, though. Gumbs riffs on it, but she's creating something that diverts from it from get-go. I think being familiar with Audre Lorde would be a better starting place, actually, because gumbs is incredibly inspired by her (she wrote Lorde's bio!) and incorporates much of her philosophy. The one note about M Archive is that it's a lot like prose poetry, it's not linear and there's a narrative but it's obscured. It's an incredible book, one of my all time favorites, and definitely worth the effort it asks of you.

To answer your other question about not including Alexander on the syllabus, I just didn't have the time in the semester to teach it!

I love these books so much and am always happy to talk about them, so please ask away if you have any other questions!