“Trauma and Arousal in the Archive: Black Women’s Sexuality, Gloria Naylor, and Bailey’s Café.” Naylor in the Archives, Eds. Suzanne Edwards, Mary Foltz, and Maxine Montgomery. University of Mississippi Press, 2027. 32pgs

“Naylor described Bailey’s Cafe as being set on a “metaphysical strip of earth” at the literal and figurative “margin between the edge of the world and infinite possibility” (Rizzo 1994). The novel constellates stories from people on the brink: Sadie flees from addiction and tragedy to a perfect house and picket fence in her mind; after being condemned to exile for exploring her nascent sensuality as an adolescent, Eve is accused of running a whorehouse; Esther, sold into sexual slavery by her older brother as a child, now seeks out Eve’s cellars; and Mary (Peaches) is so destabilized by external objectification that she wages war with herself. These are just a few of the women united by a shared connection to sex work and sexual violence. They each find themselves at Bailey’s Café—a small neighborhood dive where wayward people find solace in arbitrary routines, the repeat customers bicker, and the infinite possibility of self-annihilation lies off the back step.“

“Reducing, Reusing, Revising: Trials in Disrupting the Culture of Single-Use Assignments in Undergraduate Teaching,” Feminist Formations – Special Issue on Feminist Visions for a Gradeless University (Fall/Winter 2026)

A concept of waste relevant to instructors of all kinds centers, rather than discards, undervalued, unseen labor, and is attuned to both disposability and accumulation. Françoise Vergès’s theorizations of waste, the structural forces that produce it, and the people who manage and clean it up in “Capitalocene, Waste, Race, and Gender” are particularly instructive. She reminds us that “high-income countries,” accounting for 16% of the global population, “generate more than a third (34 percent) of the world’s waste (2019). Statistics like these do not, however, attest to the “waste generated by Western imperialism…countries and bodies that have been wasted [emphasis in original]” (2019). Cost-cutting, future-readying, academic fitness assessments often fail to account for how “neoliberalism overproduces waste and the disposing of waste is racialized.” Vergès conceptualizes waste in tandem with “economies of exhaustion,” as those who manage and clean waste are subjugated by compounding matrices of racial, neoliberal, gendered, and heteropatriarchal oppression. While I am careful not to extrapolate theories that illuminate the extractive realities of Black and brown women domestics worldwide onto academics navigating very different labor environments, these thematic overlaps help contextualize the disproportionate recuperative teaching of fundamental skills, advising, and other student-focused labor that typically falls to gender-diverse, women, and minority faculty. “The time for…reparation, for caring and cleaning what has been laid to waste in the past, clashes with the accelerated time of neoliberalism,” and thus, the labor that facilitates actual teaching and learning is devalued, gendered, and racialized (Vergès 2019).
 

“I had to make my own path”: The Discipline-Defying Work of Wendy G. Smooth, Ph.D.” Tiffany Willoughby-Herard, Lisa Beard, Lashonda R. Carter, Lisa Beard and Jessica Millward, eds. Conversations with Black Women in Politics: Using Oral History and Voice to Measure Impact, SUNY Press, 2027. 79-83.

“Dr. Smooth credits her formative
years for exposing her to paradigm-shifting examples of Black women who
questioned their personal relationship to institutional power. Joining her mother
on the picket lines of a union strike on the weekends gave a young Dr. Smooth
an example of political and ideological solidarity. The experience she shared
with her mother, a non-unionized ally in the union workers’ struggle, taught her
that “even if you are situated in a way that you might be considered immune to
some types of oppression, it is still your responsibility to act as an ally” for the
most marginalized.“

Little, Mahaliah. “Being Toward Trauma: Theorizing Post-Violence Sexuality.” Rejoinder: Special Issue – Trauma, vol. 7, no. 1, 2022.

“These questions gesture toward a more capacious theorization of Black women’s identity and sexual subjectivity in the aftermath of sexual violence—their post-violence sexuality. Imagining Black women’s sexual subjectivity after rape is more than a theoretical exercise when the threat of sexual violence is omnipresent and timeless. When Black women are included in popular discussions of life after sexual violence, what generative tensions escape us when reproductions of familiar “redemption after rape” tropes prevail?[1] …Grappling with the aftereffects of sexual violence as a spectrum of possibility is the work of imagining and theorizing comprehensive post-violence sexuality.”

Fair, Freda L. and Mahaliah A. Little. “Erotic Illegibility and Desire in Representations of Black Sexuality –  Erotic Representation in Underground.” American Quarterly, vol. 71 no. 1, 2019, p. 151-159.

“Freda and I share an investment in representation: in the ways that fiction and critical speculation can accomplish what seems comparably inaccessible, unattainable, or insurmountable to stark empiricism’s naked eye. To consider the question of ephemeral intimacy and erotic encounters among enslaved subjects, speculation rather ironically emerges as the most practical means of analysis.”

Little, Mahaliah A. “Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being: Review.” Spectrum: A Journal on Black Men, vol. 6, no. 1, 2017, pp. 137–140.

“Sharpe situates contemporary arguments in deep historical sediment and deftly demonstrates the past’s proximity to our modern present. She ruminates on the ungreivablility of Black suffering and death, writing that “. . . the disaster of the Holocaust is available as human tragedy in a way that slavery, revolution, and their aftermaths are not” (p. 34). She temporally recasts Black suffering, and her questions and the deep consideration their answers would suggest that
the past is written in ink that still threatens to smear if swiped.”

Little, Mahaliah A. “Why Don’t We Love These Hoes?: Black Women, Popular Culture, and the Contemporary Hoe Archetype.” Black Female Sexualities. Ed. Trimiko Melancon and Joanne M. Braxton. New Brunswick: Rutgers New Brunswick, 2015. 89-99.

“The hoe has evolved into a monstrous figure: a rogue, modern-day embodiment of Eve who is conniving and self-indulgent. It is precisely because of these implications of the term that—regardless of the action or reason that leads someone to label a black woman a hoe—it is assumed that she is a type of sexual deviant, even if that assumption is not explicitly acknowledged… Given the contradictory nature of the beliefs and assumptions about what a hoe is and what sort of debauchery hoes are considered capable of, they occupy a precarious position of being both admired and scorned in contemporary black society.”