When black women enter public space acts of retrieval and reproduction are possible. R&B singer and performer Erykah Badu took as her public space Dealy Plaza in Dallas, Texas. In her “Window Seat” music video Badu follows the route of JFK’s motorcade, bridging together history and geography while also making visible black women’s ambulatory actions.

West African dance classes are sites of social and choreographic reproduction. They depend on difference, mistranslation, and choreographic failure rather than sameness.

A couple of days after the 2016 election, poet Treasure Shields Redmond responded to a prompt asking about “the future of protest” by channeling a figure from protests past. In so doing she challenged the prevailing models of the relationship between Black Lives Matter activists and their generational elders.

Respiration is a choral practice; the interplay between oxygen, hydrogen, and carbon dioxide complexly threads the reproductive fates of oceans, trees, flesh, and cells together. We might say breathing is reproduction’s ur-text.