like ta heah it heah it go

*blows away cobwebs*

in my defense, i really *did* mean to keep posting, but i got sidetracked by....stuff, i.e. writing/finishing a thesis, graduating/getting my degree in Southern Studies, moving to Nashville, starting school again, this time for a PhD program in history, making it through my first semester in one relative piece........yeah. it's been real.

but it's also 2011. i've got plans and one of them includes allowing/encouraging alla that stuff knocking round inside my head to exist outside of my head, and wouldn't you know i have this old thing lying around, so i figured i'd dust it off and see if i can't get anymore use out of it.

so this still won't be personal, save for agnst-filled soliloquys on being a grad student, complete with occasional pre-quarter century crisis cries of "WHAT AM I DOING WITH MY LIFE BLAH BLAH BLAH" thrown in. but i intend to spend 2011 answering that question, so i'll keep the whimpering to a minimum. but the point is i'm not about to get all anne frank or post pictures of my dinner or anything. (although i should note, ya girl definitely threw down on some collard greens yesterday. nobody was ready, not even me. i am glorious.)

what im interested in now is working through all of the artistic and academic questions that incessantly popping up for me. my field, as much as i've declared one, which i haven't, is black performance and performativity in the 20th century (former) Atlantic world/circum-Atlantic. by performance, i pirmarily mean dance; by performativity, i mean how blackness is performed and is mediated through things like gender, place, and time; by the 20th century (former) Atlantic world, i mean the U.S., the Caribbean, and Latin America, namely New Orleans, Haiti, Jamaica, and Brazil (a mess i know); by circum-Atlantic i mean this. oh yeah and im also trying to get back into that whole working artist thing, a goal that academia has slowly chipped away at the past couple of years. im trying to find a balance.

i need space for teasing out the kinks. for making and dissecting connections. for throwing shit at a wall and seeing what sticks. blah blah blah you get the point.

& just because i've been here don't mean i've been gone. i've got a nifty little tumblr, Dust Tracks On a Road, that's kinda a sister to this space, so there will be some overlap 'twix the two. and my main tumblr is here. im just all over the place in that one.

so yeah, fall down a bunch of times, get back up one more time. or something.