Kinitra Brooks
Associate Professor | Michigan State University
East Lansing, MI, UNITED STATES
Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of black women, genre fiction, and popular culture.
Media
Publications:
Documents:
Videos:
Audio/Podcasts:
Biography
Dr. Kinitra Brooks is the Audrey and John Leslie Endowed Chair in Literary Studies in the Department of English at Michigan State University. Dr. Brooks specializes in the study of Black women, genre fiction, and popular culture. She currently has two books in print: Searching for Sycorax: Black Women’s Hauntings of Contemporary Horror (Rutgers UP 2017), a critical treatment of Black women in science fiction, fantasy, and horror and Sycorax’s Daughters (Cedar Grove Publishing 2017), an edited volume of short horror fiction written by Black women. Her current research focuses on portrayals of the Conjure Woman in popular culture. Dr. Brooks served as the Advancing Equity Through Research Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research at Harvard University during the 2018-2019 academic year.
Industry Expertise (2)
Education/Learning
Writing and Editing
Areas of Expertise (6)
Short Horror Fiction
Genre Fiction
Black Women
Popular Culture
Treatment of Black Women in Science Fiction
Literacies
Education (3)
Tulane University School of Public Health and Tropical Medicine: M.P.H., International Public Health and Reproductive Health Counseling 2001
University of North Carolina - Chapel Hill: Ph.D., Comparative Literature 2008
Xavier University of Louisiana: B.A., English Literature 2000
Links (1)
News (3)
Nia DaCosta's "Candyman" isn't just "Black trauma," it's horror triumph and here's why
Buzzfeed online
2021-08-31
Recently, we talked to Kinitra Brooks, associate professor at Michigan State University, about how the new Candyman deals with Black trauma — and how it stacks up against the original. Here's some of what we learned: "I really enjoyed it," Brooks said. "It was not horribly scarring the way the first one was for me. I thought it was smart. I thought the visual language of it was snappy. I love getting to know the cast as a director and I enjoy how they handled Black trauma in dealing with the Black horror idea. They were very smart and intentional about it through their use of shadow puppetry and mirrors and reflections as a way to sort of take the punch out of some of the more violent or gory or traumatic parts of the film.”
Beyonce, Folklore And the Power of Pop Culture
WDET online
2020-09-11
While the term “pop culture” is often used to imply lighter topics in films, music or books, Dr. Kinitra Brooks, a Michigan State University scholar of Black feminist theory, says that it’s often through that lens that more complex ideas about identity and politics are introduced to the masses...
Examining the power of pop culture to shape perception, issues and trends
MSU online
2020-07-06
Kinitra Brooks grew up connecting ideas, asking questions and demanding the freedom to do so. Today, the associate professor in MSU’s Department of English continues to push boundaries through her study of Black women, genre fiction, popular culture and the work of conjure women as intellectual history...
Journal Articles (7)
Conjure Feminism: Tracing the Genealogy of a Black Women's Intellectual Tradition
Hypatia2020-01-01
We are excited to announce a call for papers for a special issue of Hypatia on "Conjure Feminism," African diasporic feminist scholarship that explores the long history of black women's active construction and maintaining of a generative cosmological framework that centers spirit world as well as sacred space where the physical and spiritual worlds meet.
The Safe Negro Guide to Lovecraft Country: 'I Am
The Root2020-09-29
Welcome back to Lovecraft Country! Wow! Talk about the Afrofuture! Talk about Black feminism! Episode 7, “I Am.” hit all of my academic erogenous zones and I can’t wait to dig into it with you...
With ‘Black Is King,’ Beyoncé has gone all in on Black. And Beyoncé doesn’t lose
The Washington Post2020-08-04
“Black Is King,” the visual companion to Beyoncé’s 2019 album “The Lion King: The Gift,” personifies Simba as a newborn, a young boy and ultimately a man who takes a journey of self-discovery — with Beyoncé as a fabulously adorned muse midwifing him through the process.
I USED TO BE YOUR SWEET MAMA Authors
The Lemonade Reader: Beyoncé, Black Feminism and Spirituality2019-05-24
The iconic songstress Beyoncé Knowles challenges her audience to think outside the artistic lines in her 2016 audiovisual album, Lemonade. Employing a powerful display of black cultural ways of knowing, the album turns away from the artist’s popular music roots to gather a score of other black female creatives in a communal bond of artistic hoodoo.
Speculative Sankofarration: Haunting Black Women in Contemporary Horror Fiction
Obsidian2016-01-01
In a powerful short blog post celebrating Black women in horror, poet Linda Addison traces the origins of the very first appearance of horror published by Black woman. Addison encounters what she considers the origin of Black women's horror in the folktales found in Every Tongue Got to Confess (2001), a collection of stories painstakingly recorded - in early twentieth century Southern Black dialect - by then-budding anthropologist, Zora Neal Hurst.
The Importance of Neglected Intersections: Race and Gender in Contemporary Zombie Texts and Theories
African American Review2014 In her essay "The Oppositional Gaze: Black Female Spectators," bell hooks coins the term "oppositional gaze" to analyze the treatments of black women in film theory. hooks conceives of the oppositional gaze as a site of raced and gendered resistance that allows black women to "critically assess the cinema's construction of white womanhood as object of phallocentric gaze and choose not to identify with either the victim or the perpetrator...thereby continually deconstructing" previously simple filmic binaries.
Maternal Inheritances: Trinity Formations and Constructing Self Identities in Stigmata and Louisiana
Femspec2012-07-01
The idea of motherhood as a tool of resistance occupies a not complex place within the African American cosmology. I begin my essay exploring these often subversive acts of motherhood, which Audre Lorde explores in her foundational collection of interviews and essays Sister Outsider (1984).
