Archives

  • A picnic on a sunny afternoon, with flowers sprawled about. Meant to illustrate calm and comfort, feelings often overlooked within the black experience.

    In the Spotlight: An Exploration of Sexuality, Media, Art and More by Black Women
    Vol. 1 No. 1 (2024)

    This journal issue tackles the theme of Black womanhood and its complexities through literary essays, poetry and the visual arts. While we open with two academic essays exploring issues of gender and sexuality, the journal includes a variety of pieces that emphasize what it means to be a Black woman from the viewpoint of various young, Black women who are current undergraduate students at Vanderbilt University. The different works featured grapple with the intricacies of femininity, migration, violence, love, community, and more. Through this issue, we hope to uplift Black women, their stories, their voices, and their individuality.

    Ashley Rogers and Lesleigh Taylor, Guest Editors

  • The Spectacle of Blackness: Reconceptualizing the Black Experience in America
    Vol. 1 No. 2 (2025)

    To be Black in America is to bear the weight of history while forging a path forward. We navigate a world that often seeks to define, confine, and undermine Black existence–through systemic racism, economic inequality, and cultural erasure. The Spectacle of Blackness: Reconceptualizing the Black Experience in America is a narrative of Black endurance, resistance, and rebuilding in the face of perpetual adversity. 

    Our reality is rooted in the mother working twice as hard for half the pay, the students who navigate institutions never created for them, and the activists tirelessly advocating against systems designed to silence them. We acknowledge the grief entrenched in loss, the burden of expectations, and the exhaustion of proving one’s worth in spaces that undermine Black humanity. Yet, the reality of Blackness is simultaneously conceptualized in the ways we persist–through community, innovation, and an unshakable credence that we deserve more than this nation has offered us. 

    This edition of the Vanderbilt University African American and Diaspora Studies Undergraduate Research Journal seeks to highlight these simultaneous truths. Our contributors examine how Black people face oppression yet rise above it. Through historical analysis, cultural critique, and personal storytelling, The Spectacle of Blackness: Reconceptualizing the Black Experience in America tells a story of hardship, but more importantly, one of power. Use this journal to grapple with the undeniable strength of Black people; the reality of Blackness is not just about what we endure, it’s about how we overcome.

  • Shattered Mosaic
    Vol. 3 No. 1 (2026)

    Blackness in Higher Education

    To occupy educational spaces as a Black person is to carry history into every room. From the criminalization of literacy during slavery, to the enforced separations of segregation, to contemporary debates over affirmative action and diversity initiatives, there persists a throughline: a persistent questioning of whether Black students belong, whether we have earned our place, or merely been permitted it. 

    Because of this characterization and its contemporary manifestations, the narratives we produce and circulate demand careful attention. Narratives are not passive; they shape the conditions of our reality. They inform policy, justify exclusion, and seep into the interior lives of students who must navigate institutions that simultaneously admit and interrogate them. When our presence is politicized, when our legitimacy is made conditional, it does not remain external. It fractures inward.