Thinking with Our Hands: A Conversation with Professor Ashanté Reese
By Chinonye Alma Otuonye (CUNY)
When we pay attention to the materiality of our worlds, how are we forced to contend in different ways with our relations with each other and ourselves?
These are the questions that linger as Professor Reese discussed transitions in her work. Professor Reese reckons with food as an infrastructural tool used to manage, order, and discipline but also to dream, grow, hope, and care. Her multimodal practice is one that asks us to conceptualize a methodology that sees the hands as a vehicle for thought. It disrupts the oppositions of mind/body and theory/practice to say that when we fail to think with our whole selves, we lose something in our relations with others and in our ability to live and see the world (pasts, presents, futures) and its impacts. As ethnographers, the “field” is both fully experienced by us and by the communities/peoples we work with. So, when we are attentive to affective and material textures, the question becomes: What can the materiality of our worlds tell us about Black life, Black geographies, and Black futures and how we choose to engage with them?
Sharing space with Professor Reese over Zoom, she recounted her chosen method of grappling with those spaces and times: baking. For her, baking has become a tool—a form of witnessing in the wake of anti-Black violence. As she spoke about the feeling of the dough between her hands, the improvisations that are forced to occur, and the beauty in the crumbles, it was apparent her experimentation symbolized both what survives in the wake and what is made possible: the ways Black peoples have had to make different, challenge, and work around various infrastructures of violence.
The relationship with baking emerged because of her ethnography with the dead, her research with and about the Sugar Land 95—a reminder of the reverberations and hauntings of violence, time, and infrastructure. Her piece “Tarry with Me” further discusses the connections between her baking and altar work in relating with Black peoples whose labor and bodies serve as the foundation for places like Sugar Land, Texas. The non-innocence of food becomes a way of grounding the ways people “make different.” This making different requires us to grapple not only with how we relate to each other but also where those relations occur, on what lands are those relations made possible, and through what structures and counter-structures those relations are shaped. These lessons are central to how we do research differently: a coming to terms with the realities that our research is never just “out there” but always about what types of worlds/connections we nurture through the multiple facets of our lives.
Grounding Our Worlds
CAO
I wanted to start off by talking about the elsewheres that brought you to anthropology. You’ve mentioned several times that Black feminism has been really instrumental to you as both a scholar and a person, and I wanted to know if you could talk a bit about how your relationship to Black feminism has potentially changed your relationship to anthropology as a discipline and your process as an ethnographer.
AR
Yeah, that’s a good question. I think I’m going to reword it a little because I think my experience and commitment to Black feminism hasn’t changed my relationship to anthropology. It informs my relationship to anthropology. So, I’ll talk about it in that way. When I started grad school, I was looking for Black women, Black feminist mentorships, and I was really just thinking about the political project of Black feminism: what it means as a world-making project, what it means as an aspirational project, and what it means as a set of daily commitments around how I engage with people, what care looks like, and how I engage with power.
So, I think its informed me in terms of the collective endeavor, how I think about power, how I think about care, and how we theorize care. It’s become a very naturalized assumption that women should be doing, or that only it belongs to a certain class of people to do, all this burdensome care work, but really trying to shift into thinking about care as a relational project that we are all engaged in on some level. Part of my commitment to Black feminism and studying Black feminist texts that talk about care helps me see that. At least in the Black feminist context, it has the power to do something that capitalism cannot, and because I think it has this power to build these relational dynamics that are built on reciprocity and mutuality, then I think it has the potential to be a part of the force that takes down capitalism. But I think it all depends on how we define and theorize a thing, because not everybody theorizes care in the same way. I’m informed by the work from people like Christina Sharpe and Audre Lorde or even thinking about characters from books and how particularly Black women characters like in The Color Purple take care of each other in the midst of violence. So, I don’t see care necessarily as the absence of violence (this is also what Black feminism taught/teaches me), but care as something that we give and do in spite of, often sometimes right in the midst of, violence. So, it’s a long-winded answer, but I think anthropology, if I’m honest, is capacious enough to hold the multitude and various ways that we do the work that we do as Black feminists, and I also think that anthropology, like most disciplines, is afraid to fully embrace the work that we do as Black feminists. So, I have a complicated relationship to anthropology, but I think that’s healthy. I think we should all have a complicated relationship to anthropology.
CAO
There’s a lot there that I want to talk about from the care aspect, especially as I begin my own fieldwork. So, I guess part of my question for you is: How does your thinking about care translate in your ethnographic practice? Do you think of your ethnographic practice as care work in a way, and how do you hold the extractive nature of research with that?
AR
Research is extractive. I tell my grad students this all the time. We’re trying to hold two things in tension with each other, the very extractive nature of taking things from people that help by and large build our careers, and maybe it does have other kinds of impacts in the world, but it’s mostly building our careers. And at the same time, I do think that there is a way that we can approach the work that we do. Dr. Faye Harrison did a great two- or three-part series with what used to be known as the Savage Minds blog where she talks about decolonizing anthropology and trying to push back against extractive notions of research in how we build relationships with people. So, I don’t know if I necessarily think about ethnography as care work, but I think about care work as a mode of attending to people I’m in relation to. So, I do that while I’m doing my ethnographic work, too. I guess the thing that I think about in terms of how I draw boundaries around ethnography is mostly around the parameters of my project. But the way I show up for people within my fieldwork is my way of life, basically. It’s something that shows up in both my work and my nonwork life. Bianca Williams has the concept of “radical honesty,” and I think there are a lot of ways that we have to be a certain self when we’re doing fieldwork, but at the same time I think the core of how we show up in a genuine, authentic way is the foundation for the kind of care work that we’re able to do. I think it’s tough when you’re doing research in communities that have far less than what they presume you have, because I think the expectations and the potential burdens can be great. But care work isn’t static; it’s always this constant set of negotiations that includes you and the community, and that includes individuals within the community, and I’d add the environment. If we think about it as a dynamic practice, then it helps to understand that we’re going to always be negotiating these relationships.
The other thing I want to say about care, at least my understanding of it, is it’s not unidirectional. If it’s going to be relational, then it flows in multiple directions. So, you know you’re not the only one extending care to people; the people in your fieldsite are also often extending lots of care and grace and all these other things to you. I know that it’s important to try to have some boundaries in life, generally, and in fieldwork, specifically, and I don’t think of boundaries as keeping people out. I think of boundaries as helping people be very clear about how to care for you and relate to you. And I think that feels really important in fieldwork when your feelings and other people’s feelings are potentially at stake. I think that’s an important way to think about care: as a collective project.
Textures of Thought
CAO
Going along with this conversation. I think something that you’ve been talking about is thinking about ourselves, as ethnographers, as implicated in the process as well, and I’ve been thinking about the friction between ethnography as a practice/experience and the writing part, which is maybe why I’m very attracted to the potentials of multimodality. I’m not sure if you would consider yourself a multimodal anthropologist, but your work requires one to be attentive to the embodiment and materiality of ethnographic work. So, given that you’re purposeful with acknowledging yourself, how do you translate that embodied experience?
AR
That’s a great question. I think when we’re doing ethnography, we’re not trying to reproduce the world as we see it. Rather, we’re trying to understand this world through whatever the objects or people that we are working with while also trying to pay attention to our own bodies. While that’s awkward holding the two, we do it on a daily basis. I think part of how we relate to people as humans is how we emote or feel. It’s not the only way, but it is part of the way, and I think folks who do affect studies would say emotions are a form of data, too: they’re a form of knowledge that we should be paying attention to. When I feel something, I often note that in my fieldnotes, too, alongside whatever the bigger thing is that I’m actually writing about.
For my current work, I bake. Baking as part of my ethnographic practice is very awkward in some ways because it is mostly just me in my kitchen baking things that I share with people and often send through the mail. I feel like what is true about baking is that every time I am making something, I usually make a mistake (which is its own thing), but it triggers some thought or some feeling, and then I sit and I write it down. Sometimes those thoughts or feelings are directly related to my life, like in an autobiographical sense, but often those thoughts and feelings are connected to some theoretical something that I’m working through. If we think of ourselves as part of the field experience, then the things that we experience can also generate theoretical and methodological inquiries, curiosities, or data points for our work. So that’s just my long way of saying that I do think it’s important for us to pay attention to what we’re experiencing, and what we’re experiencing is always in relation to something bigger.
CAO
Yeah, I remember in “Tarry with Me,” you talked a bit about your baking process, and I remember reading that and being so excited because you’re in part dealing with the reality of the fullness of our thinking. So, for me, there’s something really important in your work about the hands as a mode of thought, relation, and action both in your baking practice and your engagement with community members in DC or with the Sugarland 95. So could you talk a bit more about how baking has been an exercise in thinking with our hands and the fullness of food as a non-innocent, fully connected material.
AR
So, baking requires technique, and this is what’s so fascinating to me about it. I don’t know a lot of the technique, and I haven’t taken the time to study. I just try to figure it out. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn’t. But the thing that’s really intriguing to me about baking is that while it’s considered one of the most scientific form of cooking and requires some precision, my experience with baking growing up was in a household with people who improvised, and stuff still turned out fine.
My baking experiences trigger those memories of improvisation for me, and they become connected to these theories of abolition and more. I mean, part of what I’ve been thinking through is what is Black life in the United States or even beyond without these improvisations, without these ways that we work around different systems, and what does that teach us? What does that tell us? What might that bring forth? And those things come directly from working with my hands and kneading dough and using a mixer and making mistakes. I know we don’t like to mess up. But we make mistakes, stuff messes up, and there’s something about watching a cake crumble and being disappointed about it and then having my friend say to me, “But it’s still beautiful.” That just makes it feel like being able to feel your successes but also the errors. As Dionne Brand wrote in A Map to the Door of No Return, “even beauty crumbles.” I love that phrasing because there is no contradiction between beauty and crumbling, and I think there’s something that can be said for things falling apart and still producing something that can be valuable. Even the crumbles themselves are valuable. So, I think that can be the case with fieldwork. I know so many people, especially graduate students, have been stressed during the pandemic because how do you do fieldwork during a pandemic? I can really empathize with that, and then at some point when the stress is over and when you’re not freaking out anymore, it’s really this question of this project as I knew it may have crumbled, but the crumbles are still here and might I reassemble them and make them into something else? I’m not suggesting that it’s not hard work, but I think especially for Black people, and I mean Black people globally here, our whole lineage is fixing, rearranging, reassembling, reimagining, redoing, making ways out of crumbles.
Black Possibility: Improvising, Reimagining, and Re-Creating
CAO
OK, so that leads me into a different question, since you used the word “improvisation.” I think that there is something really thoughtful about the way you use food to think about Black survival and placeness. But play or improvising are integral to that, so I think when you were talking about baking, and the experimentation that goes along with baking and cooking in general, I was also thinking again about the ways in which we have to play because of the nonlinearity of time. So, I was wondering if/how you see your baking practice as a form of witnessing, thinking along with Deborah Thomas’s notion of witnessing?
AR
Yeah, this is such a good question, and I love the idea of being in the same sentence as Deborah Thomas’s work, which I greatly admire. I’m going to take this in two parts. The first one about play. I’m a very serious person, until I’m not. So, there is something really cool about the fact that I play with dough a lot, and this becomes this very tactile thing for me. I like the sound of it when I’m throwing it on the counter. I like smashing it. I just really like playing with dough, and I do think the thing about play is that I often don’t think about play as being very structured, and I also think about play as a form of curiosity, and so baking has been such a cool thing. I already like to cook, but I never really started baking before I started this project. Shoutout to Savannah Shange, because she’s my baking guru. But also speaking to your thing about play, the way I got into this baking thing is when I started this project. I was having a conversation with Savannah and I told her that I didn’t feel right writing about the people who are called the Sugarland 95. I’m still trying to figure out how I want to talk about them, but I didn’t feel right without making an offering. I was just feeling—speaking back to extraction—I was trying to think of a way that if these were humans who were still living, I would be making some form of offering in some other way. They’re not living now, so what do I do? It’s this question for me about what doing fieldwork with the dead looks like. And I remember her suggestion was that maybe I should make candy. And I was like “I’m gonna make candy.” So, I buy all these things and I was going to make candy from this recipe from Imperial Sugar Company. Long story short, as I was flipping through this cookbook from 1930—I think it’s 1930—the first recipe that I land on is a recipe for tea cakes, which is something that my mom would make for me. So, this is what I mean by intuition, right? I’m like, “Oh, this doesn’t feel like an accident to me. I have a connection to this particular treat. I’m going to do that.” And that’s how I got here.
I definitely think the altar work that I’m doing maybe I would consider it a form of witnessing. I’m going to have to think about that a little bit. I’ve been trying to figure out how I want to talk about what it means to write about such violent systems and then try to counteract them. So, speaking of time, most of my current project is writing about basically 1885 to 1914. And trying to track part of the Texas Department of Criminal Justice’s development and the convict leasing system. So there’s a part of my project that is stuck in that time period, and then I am jumping from there to like 2018, when these prisoner’s bodies are disturbed or “found” at a construction site, and then I’m jumping to these moments in my kitchen when I’m baking and then these other moments when I’m mailing out these things to people so that they can have these cookies and cakes and all that kind of stuff. So, time is all over the place.
But all these points in time are informing every single thing. I only get to this place where I’m looking for what I am looking for around convict leasing because of this discovery in 2018. I am baking because of these two things, so I’m jumping back and forth across different time periods. But then I think there’s something in how fieldwork itself becomes this interesting way of living out the fact that nothing is ever linear. Most people are already standing at the nexus of past, present, and future all the time. Acknowledging that feels like a form of witnessing to me.
CAO
Right, that’s really important. And I think there’s something really odd about death as a finality in ways because, even in the archives, for me the story didn’t feel finished, in part because the archive as an institution isn’t the end for these people who I’m not sure are even aware they exist in these spaces and also because of the way these stories reverberate across space and time.
AR
Yes, yeah, I think this is also the beautiful thing about it because I definitely think that there are a lot of people who write about the archive in ways that animate the lives of people who are in the archives. When we do fieldwork with people who are living, we expect that their lives are going to continue after we’re done with fieldwork, and I think that this is part of what it means for me to talk about doing fieldwork with the dead, because I expect that their lives continue. There is death as an event and then there is the fact that people are dead, but at the same time we know—thinking of the Sugar Land 95 and how the discovery of their remains has disrupted everything in the present—we know that something that isn’t living cannot cause a rupture. Having a sense of being causes ruptures. And so that’s why I think about them as still asserting something. They’re asserting their presence there. Opening up pathways for people to write about or think differently about the prison system here, or even just the convict lease era more broadly.
It’s hard for me to think about death meaning it’s over. Yes, the living, breathing being in four-dimensional form, three-dimensional form may end. But we also just know whether people are religious or not that people’s spirits are with us all the time. Our ancestral spirits are with us all the time. Right now I’m writing about it as a certain kind of haunting, and I don’t mean that in a bad way, and I don’t know if I’m going to keep writing about it that way, but Blackness haunts all the time. And this haunting, in my opinion, disrupts white supremacy such that white supremacy has never and can never have a complete hold or be a completed project. That’s my claim, and I’m sticking to it. And I think it’s in part because of these different kinds of specters and hauntings that emerge and pierce holes in the consciousness of white supremacy.
CAO
Thinking along this incomplete project of white supremacy, land and placeness become really central, especially having to contend with US settler colonialism. So, in part, this conversation about Black futures is predicated on very real unfreedoms, like those within the prison plantation system, as you’ve mentioned. I’m curious how thinking about Black food geographies has helped you understand confinement and the multiple refusals that come along with strategies to confine.
AR
Yes, I like thinking about confinement. Someone just reminded me that I’d said somewhere that confinement doesn’t necessarily mean containment, and I like that because I do think that being “locked in place” in a particular kind of physical way doesn’t necessarily mean that the work of the imagination, etcetera, etcetera, can be contained within those confinements. I think the thing about containment and containers is that no container is permanent, so the thing that I think about with Black geographies in relation to the question you ask around confinement is that even when we think about prisons, the way prisons have been imagined and have been built and have been designed has shifted over the decades; they’re always shifting, and in part because infrastructure fails. This is partly what I am writing about. The one guarantee about infrastructure is that at some point it will fail. So, I guess what I’m getting at is that Black geographies are not just necessarily a reaction. But we adapt. Black geographies are not static: they adapt, they mold, they change, they resist, they push back, they spill over, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera. And so this language of containment and confinement works, until it doesn’t. Until you start to trace how things and people move through the cracks. You brought up Black Food Geographies: it’s one of the reasons why this language of food deserts doesn’t work. Because people don’t just stay in their neighborhoods because of these imaginary boundaries. They go find what they need.
We find other ways to make lives and make connections beyond confinement. So, I think this is one of those things where I’m like, yeah, you know, Blackness can’t really be contained in all the ways the state has tried to contain it, but we see it, you know. Again, just studying history, it has not been true, whether that’s in the United States, or anywhere, really. We can look and see how Black people have been able to figure some things out. This refusal to be confined feels like a facet of a lot of Black life in a lot of places . . . just this downright refusal. I may change my mind on this, but I think I believe that without the liberation of land, the sovereignty project will always be incomplete because land is, in part, what white supremacy stakes it’s claim on.
Until we get to the place where we fully abolish private property, what do we do? And what do these relations look like and what do reparations look like for Black people in this country? What does land reclamation look like for Indigenous people in this country? I think often about what my hopes are. Is it that Black folks and Indigenous folks—this would look differently in various regions—would build relations such that when the land is liberated, there can be the kind of agreements around how to relate to each other and the land that do not require the settler state intervention? I think that would be the goal, right? Is there a way to do that? I don’t know; I’m actually really unsure. But what I do know is that what we have in common is a shared history of dispossession. And how do we begin to think about rectifying that dispossession? I don’t think the tools of the state are necessarily legitimate to rectify this. I think for most people, if we really think about it, the notion of private property does not benefit Black people or Indigenous people in the US in any kind of way.