Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought by scholar-artist Bettina Judd is an offering in five chapters, honoring and exploring Black women's grief, joy, pleasure, and anger. Through the lens of Black feminist thought, creative expression, and archival research, Judd invites us with care into her way of studying Blackness. She uses close readings of poetry, music, images, drawings, paintings, and performance technologies to illustrate her study of feelin (distinct from feeling) Blackness into being. Judd offers what Torkwase Dyson (2023) terms “a liquid belonging”—crafting beauty even under conditions of terror and brutality.
In my language, Setswana, we use the term utlwa interchangeably to mean experiencing an emotion as well as to listen/hear. Utlwa carries multiple colloquial meanings that break colonial languaging to fashion the boundless ways that Black corporealities experience and express feeling—“go utlwa” is to listen to or hear (with) feelin. Judd's use of...
