A Bird Sang (the Blues) to Me: Collage as Black Study

This essay reflects on faithful practices of remembrance performed by Black women in New Orleans, in the extended wake of Hurricane Katrina and in the current context of unprecedented disaster. Returning to a Baptist church support group for mothers who have lost children to violence, the essay foregrounds rituals of restorative kinship including congregation, prayer and fellowship, and the continuous marking of birthdays and death anniversaries that reclaim lost loved ones in the space of death and social abandonment. The essay draws anew on the scholarly work of Clyde Woods, alongside the artistic work of John Thomas Biggers, to center Black women as summoners of life in a reinvigoration of the blues epistemology that anchors creative consciousness in the cultivation and transmission of Black know-how, in contemporary forms of resistance and mobilization, and in the reenvisioning of humanistic social inquiry. Experimenting with arts-based modes of Black study and focusing on collage as a key aesthetic and practice, the essay considers the shifts in orientation, practice, and knowledge production necessary for Black being and becoming in an increasingly fragmented world.