Black Phoenix Rising

Black Phoenix Rising is a course and research project that explores black people’s ways of resisting material and symbolic death in American life and culture. Grounded in antiracist practices of creative expression and scholarly critique that emerge out of the black radical tradition, the project was collaboratively conceived and produced through the power of collective memory and the medium of storytelling. Through the figure of the phoenix, Black Phoenix Rising aims to regenerate black life by subverting the dominant narrative that black people can only existence in a state of social, physical, and psychic death. Dr. Hatch co-created Black Phoenix Rising with a group Wesleyan students and community artist Ernesto Cuevas, Jr. as part of a 2018 faculty fellowship at the Wesleyan Center for the Humanities. Black Phoenix Rising was offered as a free Wesleyan Online Mini Course in Spring 2022. Black Phoenix Rising is supported by the Center for the Humanities, Creative Campus, and the Information Technology Services’s Digital Scholarship Innovation Fund.