becoming undisciplined: a zine
becoming undisciplined is a zine that speaks from/to what it means, feels, and looks like to be Black in relation to the university. The zine includes essays, poetry, art, and photography from fifteen black graduate students and artists. It is available freely on the eScholarship platform.
contributors
Aliyah Abu-Hazeem
Alex Cunningham
Camille Dantzler
Taylor M. Jackson
Ciarra Jones
Timnit Kefela
Y. Norris
A. Pierce
Joshua Reason
Josalynn Smith
Tiffany Smith
megan spencer
Amoni Thompson-Jones
J. Victorian
Mariah Webber
Lauren Williams
contents
introduction
a collaborative independent study
Tongues
Alex Cunningham
The Whisper Campaign of Academic Trauma
Ciarra Jones
Misbehaving to Make Space
Lauren Williams
lessons on becoming undisciplined
Mariah Webber
The Toolkit
Timnit Kefela
Three Poems
Aliyah Abu-Hazeem
For Black Girls Considering Graduate School: Things I Wish I Knew Before Pursuing a Ph.D.
Taylor M. Jackson
Night Scholar Tales
Camille Dantzler
“Yo girl” Said
Camille Dantzler
Desire and Transnational Solidarity within the Black Queer Diaspora
Joshua Reason
Lemonade
Y. Norris
your name is a weapon
Timnit Kefela
a mantra of survivorship (honey never rots)
Timnit Kefela
I Can’t Feel Anything, I’m Already Dead
Josalynn Smith
Musings on Displacement
Tiffany Smith
Foreign Land
Tiffany Smith
notes on blackfeministgender
J. Victorian
on being in grad school next to the ocean.
megan spencer
Collages
Amoni Thompson-Jones
contributors
background
becoming undisciplined is a collaborative starting point for a larger intellectual community and project we hope to build. Black scholars have long troubled the anti-Black historical, political, and intellectual foundations of the university. This zine takes its title from Christina Sharpe’s call for Black scholars to “become undisciplined,” given that academic legibility often requires being “disciplined into thinking through and along lines that reinscribe our own annihilation” (In the Wake, 13). We seek to build a community of graduate students and independent scholars interested in engaging and extending the work of Black visionaries who dodge, evade, improvise around, and funk with architectures of Black suffering — and the many mechanisms that (re)establish and uphold them.
becoming undisciplined: a zine 