Posts tagged POC

POC Zine Project’s 2013 ‘Race Riot! Tour’ Dates & Cities

Community,

Last year’s inaugural tour was amazing but that was just the beginning. 14 cities last year = 12 more cities this year <3 

Dates may shift slightly before October and we are still accepting invites from academic and community spaces, collectives, orgs and individuals. If you haven’t contacted us already, please do: poczineproject@gmail.com.

If you look at this list and think “Why the heck do they keep missing the full Midwest?” Don’t trip, chocolate chip. The 2014 NATIONAL Zinester Conference is going down in YOUR house! Yeah! Midwest all the way! And we’ll be bringing in FIVE international zinesters/activists to share their work! Yeah, buddy! If you want to help, reach out! 

Thoughts become things. Be intentional with your thoughts.

2013 TOUR DETAILS: What we know so far

#IdleNoMore solidarity will be a core component of this tour. If you’re actively involved in local efforts in your city, please reach out. We want you to speak at our events & help you distribute your printed zines/materials nationwide. We hope our small platform helps to make a difference.

We will be doing TWO events in each city, just like last year’s tour. There will be an academic event at a participating university in the daytime and one DIY/community show in the evening. The academic events will be free and open to the public, while the evening DIY shows will be a sliding scale cover. NO ONE TURNED AWAY FOR LACK OF FUNDS <3

The DIY show covers pay for our gas and food, so give what you can.

We will be able to share accessibility/child care details for each city once we have more information.

The Race Riot! touring member lineup will be revealed in the coming weeks. HINT: Think more people, rotating members and lots of guest readers in each city.

OK, enough context. Here are the dates & cities!

1) 10/1: Atlanta, GA (Tuesday)

2) 10/2: Montgomery, AL (Wednesday)

3) 10/3: Jackson, MS (Thursday)

ALERT: Jackson has the only remaining abortion clinic in the entire state, which is in danger of being shut down.

4) 10/4: New Orleans, LA (Friday)

10/5: Travel Day (Saturday)

10/6: Research/Advocacy Day (Sunday)

5) 10/7: Austin, TX (Monday)

10/8 Research/Travel Day (Tuesday)

6) 10/9: New Mexico - but where??? Let us know! (Wednesday)

7) 10/10: Tucson, AZ (Thursday)

It is very important for POC everywhere, and especially in Arizona right now, to have access to independent publications by and for people of color.

10/11: Travel Day (Friday)

8) Los Angeles, CA as recharge zone/multiple events

10/12: Research/Advocacy Day in L.A. (Saturday)

10/13: Los Angeles, CA (Sunday evening DIY show)

10/14: Los Angeles, CA (Monday academic daytime event)

10/15: Travel Day (Tuesday)

9) 10/16: Bay Area, CA (Wednesday)

10/17: Research/Travel Day (Thursday)

10) 10/18: Sacramento, CA (Friday)

10/19: Travel Day (Saturday)

11) 10/20: Portland, OR (Sunday)

12) 10/21: Seattle, WA (Monday)

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All details subject to change. We will share specifics about each city as we finalize tour logistics.

MICHIGAN FOLKS: Wow, such love! We’ve received a few requests from y’all to come out this year. We did two events there in 2012 and cannot return in 2013 (we are not a funded entity - we rely on donations and have day jobs/other obligations <3). If you’re in Michigan and want to support this tour in other ways, contact us, thanks.

We can only do so much, and we do a lot with very little. Richmond, VA and other cities: We wish we could be everywhere for this tour, but we can’t. Let’s figure out ways to partner that will yield long term outcomes for local POC orgs and collectives. Thanks for understanding.

OTHER WAYS TO PARTICIPATE

We are looking for the following:

• Guest readers in every city (you must be a person of color)
• Rotating tour buddies: Join us on the road and participate in 1-3 tour events as a panelist/reader/tabler
• POC (or POC fronted) bands to perform at each #raceriottour event!
• More POC & ally tablers for each city: come to a POCZP event in your town and table for your zine/org/collective/creative project (check out some of the POC artists/merchants who tabled last year) <3

We’re also looking for folks to help us produce #raceriottour fundraiser events between now and September. This might be a good solution for you if you are unable to travel.

Contact poczineproject@gmail.com for more details. Make sure to use “2013 RACE RIOT TOUR” as the email subject.

ABOUT THE RACE RIOT! TOUR

POC Zine Project held its first Race Riot! Tour in 2012, producing 20 events in 14 U.S. cities, which included speaking engagements at six universities. Click here to view photos from the POC Zine Project: 2012 Race Riot! Tour tour finale at Death By Audio in Brooklyn and access all the tour stop recaps.

We will be taking the Race Riot! Tour through 12 more U.S. cities in 2013. Stay tuned for updates as we work on partnering with POC-affirming orgs overseas. If you are outside the U.S. and want to be a part of our emerging POCZP Global Ambassadors program, email poczineproject@gmail.com. 

SUPPORT POC ZINE PROJECT

If everyone in our community gave $1, we would more than meet our fundraising goal for 2013. If you have it to spare, we appreciate your support. All funds go to our 2013 tour, the Legacy Series and the poverty zine series.

DONATE link via PayPal: http://bit.ly/SHdmyh

Meet POCZP’s Chief Fanalyst for the Legacy Series: Julia B. aka Ju!

NAME: Julia B. (also goes by Ju)

ROLE: Chief Fanalyst for POC Zine Project’s Legacy Series

REGION: East Coast (Brooklyn), USA

COMMUNITY: Ju has been a POCZP member since the beginning. You’ll be seeing more of their contributions manifest on this Tumblr and in other digital and physical spaces very soon …. <3

IN JU’S OWN WORDS

Hi there. I’m Julia B., or Ju (if we’re being informal, which suits me fine), and I’m the first Official (and Chief) Fanalyst to participate in the POC Zine Project’s Legacy Series!

I’m very excited to be part of this series, and I’m looking forward to sharing more about the first Legacy Series selection: Fire!!: A Quarterly Devoted to the Younger Negro Artists, published in 1926. I should probably begin by explaining what my role will be.

fan: As in, amateur. I’m not a professional historian, just an enthusiastic history lover with library access. Whether it’s sci-fi fans swapping self-written stories through the mail, or specialized distros offering up all manner of self-published work at concerts, zine readings and the like, zine culture has consistently been defined by its place outside of the traditional publishing world. Keeping that in mind, the folks writing this series are taking part because we genuinely love the works we’re talking about, and want to share those works as laypeople in an accessible way.

analyst: I’ll be doing a close read and giving background details about the magazine, page by page. Sort of like “Pop-Up Video” but in written form.

 In lieu of elaborate on-location choreography, I’ll be taking you further into not only the text of Fire!!, but also the world in which it was published—from the author’s contemporaries to the neighborhood in which their office was situated, and more. Ideally, by the time you’re done checking out what I’ve got for you, you’ll have music to listen to, visual artists to check out, books you’ll want to look for. Like I said, I’m enthusiastic about history, and my goal is to make sure that you’re just as thrilled about learning more as I was doing the research.

So why exactly am I so thrilled to be working on Fire!! in particular? Well, as a literature fan, I’ve loved Zora Neale Hurston’s, Langston Hughes’, and Countee Cullen’s writing for years. For many, those names might be the most familiar in the list of contributors to Fire!!, and I’m sure a lot of you out there are already fans of their work. But what of the other contributors alluded to in the “younger negro artists” of the magazine’s title? I see this as a chance for those who are more familiar with the writers in this publication to learn more about the visual artists who contributed, and vice versa, while I take a look at the perspectives that link them all together.

I’m also excited because Fire!! was controversial in its time. The contributors were not interested in perpetuating the politics of respectability. They did not create the magazine to keep in step with the artists of generations before them. In short, they were uncomfortable because they refused to conform to more (Black middle-class) palatable sensibilities.

I mean, check out some of the stuff people were saying when this little magazine out of Harlem made its way into print:

Rean Graves of the Baltimore Afro-American [newspaper] was incensed by the magazine and wrote in his review, “I have just tossed the first issue of Fire!! into the fire.” Benjamin Brawley went so far as to say that if the U.S. Post Office found out about Thurman’s “Cordelia the Crude,” the magazine might be barred from the mail.[1]

Pretty strong reactions to a fledgling publication! The contributors wrote about touchy subjects such as colorism among Black Americans and prostitution. They made deliberate use of Black American vernacular, in an effort to make the voices of their works ring true to the people they represented. And pissed off a bunch of uptight people in the process, even though only one issue of Fire!! was ever published. It’s easy to think of “cutting edge” in the present tense, but in exploring the magazine, we get the chance to check out what the Black American nonconformists of 1926 had to say, and what value those messages hold for us in the present day.

Anyway, enough out of me! I’m looking forward to talking with you further… hopefully we can start a cool conversation (or several) about this classic work. Stay tuned!

[1]: Patton, Venetria K., and Maureen Honey. “The Harlem Renaissance.” Oxford African American Studies Center: Guest Scholars. Oxford University Press. Web. <http://www.oxfordaasc.com/public/featureded/guest_5.jsp>

DO YOU WANT TO BE A FANALYST FOR THE LEGACY SERIES?

The only criteria is that you have to be a person of color! Submit here and tell us a little about yourself. Please include links to some writing samples. Good luck!

White allies: There are other ways for you to support the Legacy Series. Please email daniela@dcapmedia.com for details.

ABOUT THE LEGACY SERIES

Kicking off with FIRE!!, POC Zine Project will make zines by people of color created from the 1700s-1990s available to read and share.

Every Friday (Editor’s note: date pushed to February), you will find a legacy zine by a person of color on poczineproject.tumblr.com. We will share more details in 2013.

WHY WE ARE FOCUSING ON LEGACY ZINES

People of color in the U.S. have produced independent publications (zines) for decades. Many of these zines were political in nature, creating cracks in the lens of white supremacy that shaped (and continues to inform) popular culture and legislation.

These zines were new maps to our liberation, countering the negative propaganda of what people of color looked like, thought and were capable of achieving.

We want the world to know about these legacy zines, so we are going to archive and share them to the best of our ability.

We look forward to partnering with distros, academic spaces, libraries, anti-authoritarian collectives, literary journals, bloggers and more to share the Legacy Series.

“NEW” ZINESTERS: We will still share information about new and upcoming zines by people of color :) Please continue to submit your zines to the archive.

ABOUT THE RACE RIOT! TOUR

POC Zine Project held its first Race Riot! Tour in 2012, producing 20 events in 14 cities, which included speaking engagements at six universities. Click here to view photos from the POC Zine Project: 2012 Race Riot! Tour tour finale at Death By Audio in Brooklyn and access all the tour stop recaps.

We will be taking the Race Riot! Tour through 14 more cities in 2013. Stay tuned!

SUPPORT POC ZINE PROJECT

If everyone in our community gave $1, we would more than meet our fundraising goal for 2013. If you have it to spare, we appreciate your support. All funds go to our 2013 tour, the Legacy Series and the poverty zine series.

DONATE link via PayPal: http://bit.ly/SHdmyh

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: ‘The Black Panthers Worldwide Revisited’ event Nov 30 in NYC!

Institute of African American Affairs at NYU presents:

The Black Panthers Worldwide Revisited

An international symposium on the influence of the revolutionary and liberation movement of Black Panthers in the 1960s/1970s in the USA

Friday, November 30th, 2012 / 6:00 pm

Free and Open to the Public

DETAILS

This roundtable reunion of Panthers from America, India, Israel, UK, and Australia will primarily be focused on the experiences of the members of their respective movements.

The participants will explain why they formed a Panther Party, what was their inspiration, what were they rebelling against, what were they up against in their respective countries, and how did they hear about and create a bound of solidarity with the US Black Panthers.

The idea is to provide students, scholars and the general audience with an opportunity to be exposed to an international oral history, archives, and memories that are not widely known and associated with the history of the Black Panthers in America. Additionally, the roundtable will also explore the links between the struggle for justice then and now.

LOCATION: Tishman Auditorium , Vanderbilt Hall (first floor)

New York University School of Law

40 Washington Square South, NY, NY 10012

Panel 1) 6:00—8:00 pm

The Panthers Worldwide Reunited

Moderator: Gerald Horne (USA)

Participants: Kathleen Cleaver (USA), Zainab Abbas (UK), P. K. Murthy (India), Nissim Mossek (Israel), Reuven Abergel (Israel), Marlene Cummins (Australia)

Panel 2) 8:00—9:30 pm

The Relevance of Revolutions Today

Moderator: Robin D. G. Kelley (USA)

Participants: Malia Lazu (USA), Abdoulaye Niang (Senegal)

For more information: http://africanastudies.as.nyu.edu/object/iaaa.black.panthers.worldwide

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Point of awareness: APOC-NYC listserv

COMMUNITY SPOTLIGHT: Support the Dari Project, first bilingual publication of LGBTQ Korean American stories!

SIGNAL BOOSTING and we’re going to make a donation on 11/15/12 (click here for thoughts on supporting beyond the re-blog):

Please consider supporting this wonderful project to publish the first bilingual publication of LGBTQ Korean American stories designed as a resource by and for queer Korean Americans and their families:

http://www.crowdrise.com/dariproject/fundraiser/dariproject1

Like and keep up to date with Dari Project on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/DariProject

Dari Project is a volunteer-led, grassroots organization that develops resources to increase awareness and acceptance of LGBTQ people of Korean descent in Korean American communities.

Dari Project seeks to build bridges among Korean American families, social networks, institutions and faith communities by documenting and sharing the life stories of LGBTQ Koreans.

Since its inception in 2006, the Dari Project leadership has dreamed of publishing the first collection of personal narratives of LGBTQ Koreans as a bilingual resource for LGBTQ Koreans and their friends and families, and they’re so close to making this dream a reality!

They’ve solicited 27 stories from members of their community, which represent a wide range of experiences, including homo/bi/transphobia in Korean American communities, coming out as an LGBTQ person, building relationships with family, and membership in faith communities.

This publication is designed to provide young Korean Americans coming into LGBTQ identities with stories in which they can see their lives reflected and as a resource for Korean American families coming to terms with having LGBTQ children.

Thanks to some friends and supporters they’ve been able to get started, but they need your help to publish this collection as a bilingual print resource for our community.

Your generous contributions will help edit, translate, design, and print their stories as a book.

If they can make their goal of $7000, it will help make this book available for FREE to your friends, families, communities, and people you care about.

Your generous contributions will go towards:

• Full Korean and English translation services
• Editing Korean and English Stories
• Publication Design
• Publication Printing
• Dari Project Marketing

Point of awareness: Mark in the Queer Commons google group

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: A Zine about Mixed-Race Queer & Feminist Experience

Hi y’all,

Lior, Lil, and Lee at Bluestockings in NYC are working on a new zine about mixed-race queer and feminist experience. Here is their call for submissions:

CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS A Zine about Mixed-Race Queer & Feminist Experience

Deadline: December 15th, 2012

Hey, mixed-race folks, how do you respond when you get asked what you are? Do you feel at a loss for words when trying to describe your racial, ethnic, or cultural background? Do you find yourself struggling to understand where you belong in the context of prominent racial paradigms? Do you run into a POC-white binary that is reductive, incomplete, or simply not enough? What does it mean that there often isn’t an easy answer? And what happens when you add gender, feminism, and queerness into the mix?

Hey, queers and feminists, let’s respond to the lack of representation of mixed-race folks like us. Yes, we are deeply indebted to the countless beautiful queers and feminists of color who have demanded to be heard; who fight, survive, and die on a daily basis. We are indebted to colonized people and feminists of color around the world and in the states who have taught us that black and brown are beautiful; who have shown us how to act with compassion and love and thoughtful rage in the face of white supremacist violence.

This zine is a call to continue this work; to build upon the work of anti-racist and decolonial literature, given the nuances of our lives as mixed-race queers and feminists, so often living on stolen land while refusing to forget the land stolen from our ancestors.

No doubt, racism against folks of color is fucking real, and those of us who are mixed race and sometimes or always pass as white are much less prone to the multiple forms of violence faced by black and brown folks. However, too often, that’s the end of the conversation.

This zine strives to challenge the narrow conception of POC vs white, a binary which doesn’t allow space for many folks’ experiences or for more complex identities (even among POCs and white folks).

As mixed-raced queers and feminists, we refuse to whitewash our histories.

We refuse to label individuals based solely upon our perceptions of their skin color or features. Colonialism attempts to whitewash, erase, assimilate and subjugate through violence and oppression.

We refuse to finish this work. We invite you to collectively participate in this refusal.

A Working Definition of Mixed-race

While this may not be the perfect term, we are using it to frame a very broad set of experiences and identities, which may include tracing all or part of one’s culture or heritage to brown people and colonized people, inclusive of all skin tones. This may also include being raised with multiple cultures or with immigrant experience.

Why Queers & Feminists?

Not only are we interested in the ways that mixed-race folks’ identities interact with queerness and feminism, but we also believe that it is important to prioritize stories from queers and feminists, whose voices are often marginalized.

Moreover, with a topic as broad as race, we want to anchor our discussions in some common politics. This anchor is important because it is a big part of how we (the editors) choose who to organize with, live with, form community with, fuck, and, in this case, write zines with.

Possible Topics

Privilege. [Not] Passing. Sex, relationships & dating. Conflicting and conflated identities (especially related to race and queerness, transness, feminism, class, dis/ability). The POC/white binary. Cultural appropriation. Structural and institutional oppression. Art, music & creativity. [Not] Belonging. Cultural estrangement. Immigrant experiences. Families & histories. Colonizing processes in family, work, activisms & relationships. Being too brown/not brown enough. Home. Diaspora. Performing identities. Physical manifestations of race, and intersection with other forms of identity and presentation. Preserving and paying respect to heritage & history (eg: interviews, oral histories, folklore). Remembering. Tracing origins and roots. The importance of race/ethnicity/culture to political formation. Mixed-race community. Food & recipes. Remedies. Developing new language(s). Race/religion overlap (and exclusion). And much, much more.

Media and formats

Poetry, prose, essay, visuals (B&W for zine, possibly color online), audio (for online), interviews, and other formats (pitch them to us!— we’re good catchers).

Deadline for submissions

December 15th, 2012.

Submit to  mrqfzine@gmail.com.

Contact:  mrqfzine@gmail.com www.mrqfzine.tumblr.com (See tumblr for information on the editors.)

You can also follow the making of this zine on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/mrqfzine

About the Editors

Lee Naught is a radical, genderqueer, homo, chican@ organizer who has participated in a variety of collective, feminist, and sexuality-based projects. They grew up in confusing, undulating, and ultimately class-privileged environments; raised on one side by their Mexican mom, tía, grandma, and older sister in SoCal, with additional parenting on the other side by their gringo dad and sometimes by step-moms, too. These days they also get to share family space with their queer collective home in Brooklyn, NY. Lee spends most of their time working as a collective member at Bluestockings Bookstore, in addition to sex educating with Fuckin’ (A) (also known as the NY Radical Sex Positivity Project). Lee plays drums in a queer cuddlecore band, and enjoys bikes, politically rowdy queers, cooking vegan enchiladas for a friendly crowd, watching too much Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and pretty much anything that involves excessive glitter. Through this zine, Lee hopes to do some learning from other folks whose histories contain both colonization and race privilege, and folks thinking about the ways that queerness and gender non-conformity impact their relationship with their ethnicity.

Lior is a homo-queer musician, jewish-moroccan radical educator, interested in collectively cultivating the fierce political power of brown love and loving brown; which he learned about from Audre Lorde, his Ima and abuelita. Most recently, Lior was teaching a poetry class to high-school sophomores that focused on works by queers and women of color. Over summer, he played guitar in the downtown musical The Material World. And currently, he is an advocate-counselor at a high school in Brooklyn. Lior is hoping for lots of submissions from other brown and arab jews who are making the connections between apartheid, zionism and mizrahi struggles; who are telling their stories and the stories of their families: from the violence of assimilation/immigration, to being complicit in zionist colonization, to the love bubbling so patiently in grandmother’s kitchen. Lior plays guitar in the post-punk-dance band Gay Panic and the cuddle-core band Kitty and The Fags. He is also behind the acoustic project Music Was My First Gay Lover.

Lil Lefkowitz is a mixed-race, queer, second generation, latina with a passion for feminisms that create space for a myriad of complex identities, orientations, and experiences (read: a tica with attitude). Lil’s endeavors in new york city have been varied distinct and include being an Upward Bound creative writing instructor, a community supported agriculture project organizer, and a nonprofit worker at a women’s foundation. Lil recently graduated with a degree in women gender studies, sociology, and queer studies and now works as a community support worker with developmentally disabled adults. It is Lil’s hope that the MRQF zine will incite a discussion about the many nuances that comprise mixed-race queer folks’ identities specifically within the diasporic experience.

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PLEASE SIGNAL BOOST

We’ll definitely be adding this zine to the archive once it’s complete <3

- POC Zine Project