Scandalize My Name: Book Talk & Reception - Terrion Williamson

Title: “Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life”

Who: Assistant Professor Terrion Williamson, RIGS

When: Friday, March 30, 2018, 1:30-3:00 PM

Where: Ford Hall 400

Book Description: From sapphire, mammy, and jezebel, to the angry black woman, baby mama, and nappy-headed ho, black female iconography has had a long and tortured history in public culture. The telling of this history has long occupied the work of black female theorists—much of which has been foundational in situating black women within the matrix of sociopolitical thought and practice in the United States. Scandalize My Name builds upon the rich tradition of this work while approaching the study of black female representation as an opening onto a critical contemplation of the vagaries of black social life. It makes a case for a radical black subject-position that structures and is structured by an intramural social order that revels in the underside of the stereotype and ultimately destabilizes the very notion of “civil society.” At turns memoir, sociological inquiry, literary analysis, and cultural critique, Scandalize My Name explores topics as varied as serial murder, reality television, Christian evangelism, teenage pregnancy, and the work of Toni Morrison to advance black feminist practice as a mode through which black sociality is both theorized and made material.

Bio: Terrion Williamson is an assistant professor of African American and African Studies with appointments in Gender, Women & Sexuality Studies and American Studies. Her research and teaching specializations include black feminist theory, twentieth and twenty-first century African American literature, black cultural studies, media studies, and racialized gender violence. Her first book, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, uses her experiences growing up in the small midwestern city of Peoria, Illinois as the staging ground for a study of how poor and working-class black women upend foregoing notions of black female representation and consequently circumvent the constraints of stereotype discourse in the making of alternative black communal formations and kinship networks. Her current book project, which builds upon work started in the last chapter of Scandalize My Name, is a victim-centered study of the more than 60 cases throughout the U.S. in which black women have been the sole or primary targets of serial killers since the 1970s.