Desireé Melonas is an Assistant Professor in the departments of Political Science and Black Study at the University of California, Riverside. She searches and teaches in the areas of black political thought, critical geography, new materialism, and black feminist thought, and is working on her book manuscript entitled Place in Black: Moving Racial Geographies. Her work has appeared in publications such as Theory & Event, Meridians, Women Studies Quarterly (WSQ), National Review of Black Politics, and the Journal of Women, Politics, & Policy. Dr. Melonas is a 2020-2021 Woodrow Wilson Career Enhancement Fellow and is currently a Co-Principal Investigator on a $1.25 million National Academies of Sciences grant to assist in developing environmental justice-focused, service-learning based curricular interventions in an Africatown, AL middle school as well as in neighboring schools. She is also a certified yoga instructor and currently in training to become a doula.
I interviewed Dr. Melonas on November 17, 2023 via Zoom to talk about her work as a Black political thinker with a focus on Black feminism and radical self-care as a form of resistance and resilience in Black political struggles for liberation. This interview has been edited for length, clarity, and flow.
Christina Young: Would you like to start by telling me a little bit about yourself and the work that you do?
Professor Desireé Melonas: Sure! So, I am a political theorist. Currently, I am at the University of California, Riverside. I straddle two departments, which I’m really glad to be able to do. I’m in political science, but I’m also in their new program, the Department of Black Study. So, it enables me to have a little more elbow room to do the kind of theorizing at the intersections that I like to do. All of my work is grounded in Black Studies. I think about different theoretical concepts and ideas like freedom, justice, liberation, and futurity, usually through the lens of Black Studies.
I’ve always gravitated toward Black thinkers in part because that’s also my positionality. I’m an ecumenical thinker and researcher, so I can’t help but to think about the intersections. I really am problem-driven. And so, it makes sense to me, if we are thinking about Black liberation struggles, that we would not just be focused on the political, but we might also consider theorizing from the geographical and the historical. My book project is called Place in Black: Moving Racial Geographies. So, I aim to think about the ways that Black individuals move in place, the way our movements in place move place, and to think about places as moving while also considering how those moving elements impact us sentimentally at different levels, including all the way to the level of our biological bodies in the flesh. I’ve also done work on radical self-care. I like to think about a feminist ethics of care and self-care, and how that promotes Black liberation broadly speaking.
Those are really cool topics!
I think so! [laughter] I like to have a little bit of fun.
[Laughter] I think about the body also, because I’m a dancer too.
Oooh yes!
So choreography and movement, that’s a really cool topic to focus on.
Yeah, it just makes sense. One of my fundamental points of departure—and I know it might seem so basic, but it really grounds my work—is just the reminder that we are always in place. We can’t really think about the politics of liberation without considering the place in which the liberation or struggles for liberation happen.
You touched on one of my questions, so I’ll start there. Can you talk about what radical self-care means to you?
Oh! That is a good question. To be radical, self-care cannot be a project of individualism. I think radical self-care always assumes a community in which one is embedded. So, one takes care of oneself, and that can look a lot of different ways. It doesn’t even have to look like a care that is given over to the self: it could be a care that is given over to other people and in so doing sustains the self. I think it’s the work that one does in order to be whole and to invest one’s whole self in one’s community.
Hence, while radical self-care is still self-care and does deal with oneself, it ought to be both self- and other-regarding. So if it is a care that you give yourself, it’s with the knowledge that this helps, this taking care of oneself helps you be fully in your community so that you can sustain that. I think it’s definitely a departure from conventional definitions of self-care that foreground just the individual. It can be the individual but it’s always a consideration of the individual as rooted and connected to their community. What do you think? [laughter] I wanna chat with you about this!
[Laughter] This is interesting because I experienced burnout in high school. I had never really thought about self-care before that. I thought “if you’re not burnt out then you’re not doing enough.” Or if you’re not tired, then you’re not doing enough. [Both laugh]. So, taking time to myself never felt like something that was beneficial to the movement. I never really thought about self-care. And then I started to do more reading, and to get more into Black Feminism specifically. And self-love and self-care became such a critical point from the readings. I was like, “Oh, this is important. This is something I need to do.”
And so honestly, it was music and dance that became my self-care. Just moving my body in ways that made me happy. I didn’t know this until I read Aimee Meredith Cox’s ethnography, Shapeshifters, with my mentor and that changed everything. I never thought about doing self-care through movement and dance. It was freeing. My body as a Black person and as a Black woman is constantly being policed and contested and judged, and people are always trying to put Black bodies in order or contain them or confine them. So, movement was very freeing, but I didn’t have that sort of theoretical understanding until recently. I was doing that work late in high school and early college, but I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until this past semester. So, I’ve just started to really understand how those moments of restoration sustain you, give you the energy to get up and fight the good fight every day.
Exactly. Yes! Yes! I love the idea that movement—literally moving your body through space, and doing it in a joyful way—is care. Because you are throwing off the idea that your body ought to be confined and surveilled. I really do appreciate that. Because you mentioned Audre Lorde, I was thinking about her theorization of self-care, and the way that she talks about Black people, Black women in particular, as inhabiting environments that accost us. That sort of wear and rub away at us. So, self-care is political in that sense because we are militating against forces that seek to wear us out and wear us down. You’re like, “No! I’m not gonna get a stomach ulcer today! Not gonna do that!” [Both laugh]. And also recognizing that what those kinds of toxic environments are intended to do, is to inhibit, to stymie our movements so that we don’t fight the good fight, as you said. It’s political in a lot of ways.
In addition to this, could you talk about the role that you think self-care and forms of restoration have for the success of Black political movements and struggles? How do you think people should incorporate self-care and restorative practices into their freedom movements?
I’m thinking of an interview that Angela Davis gave. They asked her specifically about when she started thinking seriously about the importance of braiding self-care into her politics as a critical part of her struggles for liberation. She said (paraphrasing), “You know, when I was in jail, I really didn’t think so much about the yoga that I was doing. Like I started to move just because I was being put in a jail cell, and I needed to move and exercise my body.” She’s like, “but then it became clear to me that this is a really vital part of liberation struggles.” And it sort of leans back on something that we already touched on. And that is that one cannot continue on if you’re tired, if you’re exhausted, if you don’t have much to give. So, I do think it’s important.
There’s a rhythm to struggles, and not even in the more spectacular moments, but in order to be able to capitalize on the moments, you have to mobilize in the interstices of the struggle. You need to be sustaining yourself. So, I think it’s important while you’re in the moments of struggle, but also in the in-between as you’re anticipating the need to move forward, anticipating the need, as we ought to be, of anticipating what it looks like to keep the struggle moving forward. I think it’s important just as a matter of sustaining oneself and sustaining the rhythm of the movement as what those are becomes apparent to us.
I’m thinking, too, about things that I’ve seen, like activists and the way they talk about naps, for instance. [Laughter]. The politics of rest. What was the song that was going around on social media? “I’m bout’ to go lay down.” You know what I’m talking about? And it really had a catchy tune: [in a sing-song voice] “I’m about to go lay down!” [Both laugh]. But I think that lying down, suspending, and taking time for rest is important. If we are also resisting capitalist and neoliberal ideas of what it means to be with one another and to be a human being, rest is part of it. Because what neoliberalism teaches us is that we have to move, we have to keep constant forward motion, whatever that looks like, and that is through doing that that that we access our value as human beings. But in reality, we can go and lie down. We can take a nap. And that doesn’t take away from our humanity or our capacity to do what society values.
The history taught to us when we are in middle or lower school makes Civil Rights figures into martyrs. And it puts that imagery in us that they never slept, they never rested, they never napped, you know?
Yes! Yes! Right. And maybe they did inhabit life like that. Maybe there was a kind of necessity to keep going in that way, but that’s not the only way one can, and indeed ought to, engage in struggle. I think that we can foreground the importance of resting. Because we also know that a lot of those folks who we extol, who did really excellent work, many of them died prematurely. Of course, some of them died early because they were murdered. But then you have James Baldwin who talks about Lorraine Hansberry. She died very, very young, in her early thirties, of cancer. In a posthumous piece about her, Baldwin argued that we can’t disentangle her dying of cancer from the caustic environments she inhabited. We need to hold these together in the same space. Audre Lorde likewise spoke about her cancer and her friend Pat Parker’s cancer. She didn’t decouple them from the political or social context that likely caused their cancer to emerge in the first instance. And she’s not thinking about them idiopathically. So, I think that probably a lot of them did move fast and without a lot of rest, but we also need to recognize that maybe their having felt the need to move is what contributed, in part, to their premature deaths.
Yeah, definitely. What role do you think art forms—poetry, music, dancing, painting, creative writing, any of them, play in Black political movements?
I’ve been thinking more about art lately. I like to write poetry. For a while, I had stopped writing poetry, but now I feel a real yearning to get back into it. I think that there’s something about engaging art, whether it’s visual, performative, or whatever kind of art form, that can offer a different kind of language to make sense of the world, to articulate one’s place in the world. In articulating one’s experiences, sometimes regular prose and conventional structures of language might make you feel kind of straight-jacketed. Art offers access to reality in a way that conventional prose just doesn’t offer. For me, it’s been freeing. In that way, it has felt like a form of self-care.
When I teach Black political thought, I always introduce an art form in some fashion. Black people have not always had access to formal centers of education, so there’s a tradition of engaging, of theorizing, of articulating aspects of the world, and of making those legible through forms that wouldn’t have been legible through Western lenses. There’s a tradition of Black people articulating or conveying aspects of their experience through these other forms.
I taught W.E.B. Du Bois’s Souls of Black Folk a few weeks ago and we really centered on his chapter where he’s discussing music within the church. And he’s like, there’s just something within the Black experience that can’t be packaged, that can’t be neatly contained within structures of language. But you can feel it, you can sense it, in the vibrations, in the undulations of the voice, in the ways that the folks are shouting and writhing and there’s a vibration in the atmosphere. And that’s something that offers a different kind of language in order to be able to make sense of the world and its absurdities.
Those were all the questions that I had! I really enjoyed our conversation. We talked about a lot of really cool things, so thank you!
Thank you! I’m so glad that Dr. [Jane] Gordon put us in touch.
Me too.
You certainly have different insights than I had at that stage of my career. I went to a predominantly white institution for college and it wasn’t really until graduate school that I was able to actually read and engage in Black thinkers. I remember asking my political theory professor why there were no women, people representing the global south, or Black people on the syllabus. And he basically said, “This is it.” That narrow range, he was saying, is just what political theory is. So, I really appreciate that you have access to these ideas, these thinkers.
Christina Young
Christina Young is a senior Political Science major at the University of Connecticut with a double minor in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, and Africana Studies. Born and raised in Brooklyn, New York, Christina is incredibly interested in social justice issues and movements that center the experiences of Black women within the United States. In the coming years, Christina plans to pursue higher education to continue to engage Black feminist theory and praxis.
