100 Years of Fire!!: Young, Gifted, and Queer
A century later, Fire!! still burns. This project gathers the magazine’s public-domain texts and surrounding archival traces to map Harlem as a living network of art, nightlife, and survival.
Built for teaching, student-project building, and collective study, it lifts up young Blackqueer creators too often left as fragments.
Project Creator: Cortnie S. Belser, Manifold Graduate Fellow.
Cortnie uses Black Studies archival praxis (Black feminist, Black history, and BlackCrit) and interdisciplinary digital humanities pedagogies to inform her project reclamations and recovery designs. She is concerned with excavating buried blueprints of Black education history, culture, and pedagogies.
*Tech Tip: Click on the collaborative playlist link below to see all songs in the playlist. "More videos" does not show the playlist, but click the right or left arrow will shuffle through it. Happy listening!
Do you have stories of “messy” ancestors? What makes them messy, misunderstood, or unforgettable?
Who gets to define messiness? How have ideas about respectability, queerness, gender, race, or class shaped what gets called “messy”?
Why is queerness often treated as mess?
How have queer and gender-expansive people created beauty, joy, and survival inside that mess?
What is the relationship between mess and fire? How does creative fire exist without disruption, conflict, or refusal?
How did the music, listening guide, or sounds of the 1920s shape your understanding of Fire!!?
What did you hear that helped you feel the era differently, search up something to learn more, etc?
What beautiful thing have you created, or could you create, with your messiest friends?
How might friendship, collaboration, or chosen family become a source of art?
How do generational divides in art, sexuality, and respectability show up today? What has changed, and what still persists?
Power!, a Radical Black Feminist Magazine inspired by Fire!!
