The Ordinary Middle: Everyday Black Women and the Depths of the Unspectacular

Centering the ordinary lives of poor and working-class Black women in Cleveland, Ohio—a midwestern, deindustrializing city in the midst of rapid decline since the 1940s—I draw on performance studies, Black feminism, and life writing to foreground “resilient weariness” as a crucial affect that frames how they engage each other, local and national policies, and ecological phenomena through the unspectacular and uneventful matter of their lives. In this essay, the ordinary also describes the types of matter that are passed down through mundane rituals. Here, those types of matter are snippets of conversations, memories, and the visual vernacular of a 1976 photograph of my mother, grandmother, and great-aunt at a party. My focus on what I have inherited through conversations and memories are the afterlives of the photograph, occurring in moments that I registered as inconsequential because they were strewn throughout my everyday life. In doing so, I use these experiences to conceptualize the middle as a temporality and positionality that allows me to read archives I have lived amongst, to wade through and tarry in my ordinary worlds that were either unconscious to me or discredited in the academy.