For Episode 12, our first episode of 2021, I am joined by Dr. Zandria F. Robinson to talk about whose bodies get sacrificed in the name of scientific advancement, the contours of consciousness, suffering as spectacle, ancestral ghosts, and “Black Museum” (Season 4, Episode 6 of Black Mirror), which first aired in 2017.
Zandria F. Robinson is a writer, urban ethnographer, and music scholar working at the intersections of race, gender, popular culture, and the U.S. South. She is the author of This Ain’t Chicago: Race, Class, and Regional Identity in the Post-Soul South (University of North Carolina Press, 2014) and co-author of Chocolate Cities: The Black Map of American Life (University of California Press, 2018), co-authored with long-time collaborator Marcus Anthony Hunter. Her cultural and music criticism has appeared in Rolling Stone, Scalawag, Hyperallergic, Believer, Oxford American, The New York Times Magazine, NPR.org and The Atlantic. Robinson is an Associate Professor of African American Studies at Georgetown University and President of the Association of Black Sociologists. She blogs at New South Negress and tweets sporadically at @zfelice.
- Amy Louise Wood, Lynching and Spectacle: Witnessing Racial Violence in America 1890-1940 (University of North Carolina Press, 2004)
- National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty (NCADP)
- Zandria Robinson, “Listening for the Country” (Oxford American, 2016)
- Jamey Hatley, “Always Open, The Eureka Hotel”
- Rebecca Skloot, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks
- Omar M. McRoberts, “Beyond Mysterium Tremendum: Thoughts toward an Aesthetic Study of Religious Experience” (The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, 2004)