https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/about daily 1.0 2025-09-22 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/fdadcf26-3584-4960-bd4d-8d28517b680a/IMG_2279+%281%29.jpg Jordan Taliha McDonald Jordan Taliha McDonald is an essayist, critic, editor, cultural worker, and (sometimes) poet. Her public writing, journalism, and cultural criticism have appeared in New York Magazine, The Believer, Artsy, Vulture, Africa is a Country, The Offing, The Harvard Review, Lux, Complex, and more. Her newsletter, “East Coast Lit(erary) Thot” can be read here. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in English at Harvard University with a secondary field in History of Science. Her scholarship primarily examines how literary, scientific, and aesthetic ideas of complicity and fidelity were shaped by the legacy of slavery, settler colonialism, and the construction of racial Blackness. For the 2025-2026 academic year, she completing her dissertation as a Hutchins Family Foundation Fellow at the Hutchins Center for African & African American Research. Jordan’s research interests include 19th and 20th-century Black/Afro-diasporic literature, rhetoric of science, critical theory, gender and sexuality studies, visual culture, psychoanalysis, political philosophy, animality studies, the history of aesthetic surgery, and the development of race science. Her work has been supported by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Beinecke Scholarship, and the Ford Foundation. In the winter of 2018-19, she served as a reference intern for the Smithsonian Archives of American Art. During that time, she conducted archival research resulting in four essays for the Archives of American Art blog and Smithsonian Voices. She is a host for the New Books Network’s “New Books in African American Studies” podcast and the co-host of Lose Your Sister podcast alongside writer Liberty Martin. Further examples of her audio work can also be found in the Audible audiobook edition of Minor Notes, Volume 1, edited by Joshua Bennett and Jesse McCarthy, wherein she reads the poems of Georgia Douglas Johnson. If you ask her nicely, Jordan will explain to you why Aretha Franklin’s 2018 assessment, “great gowns, beautiful gowns,” is one of the most succinct cultural critiques of the 21st century. . https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/new-page-71 daily 0.75 2025-11-18 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/4ecf4c33-b0e3-4511-aacc-f9362a67dbb3/Screenshot+2023-02-01+133546.jpg Scholarship - Abstract What if the category of the pet was defined by forced domestication rather than species? In her 1943 essay “The Pet Negro System,” published in The American Mercury, Zora Neale Hurston theorizes the “pet Negro” within the social and political structure of the 20th century American South as a figure whose existence is shaped by an anti-Black economy of allowances, which has significant consequences for what Hortense Spillers refers to as “intramural Black life.” Exploring Hurtson’s formulation and delineation of the “pet Negro” and “stray” classes, this article argues that Hurston offers us a critique of Black elite comfort and complicity beyond the popular rhetorical discourses of domesticated (dis)loyalty thus opening up a framework for thinking of intraracial betrayal not as a matter of idiosyncratic cowardice, but as a reminder of how the singularity of anti-Blackness assures ontological precarity and produces anti-sociality. Taking seriously Saidiya Hartman’s articulation that “the domestic space, as much as the field, defined [the enslaved’s] experience of enslavement and the particular vulnerabilities of the captive body,” this essay considers the narrative of domestication as it concerns theories of the pet, the animal, and the enslaved fungible Black subject. Read Here https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eclt daily 0.75 2025-11-18 https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore daily 0.75 2025-10-13 https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore/phd-application-editing-assistance-one-draft monthly 0.5 2025-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/a4a1b2a2-3b7c-4c20-847d-d489e79a7670/Urgent+PHD+application+assistance+%283%29.jpg East Coast Lit(erary) Thought Store - PhD Application Editing Assistance (One Draft) https://www.jordantmcdonald.com/eastcoastliterarythoughtstore/phd-application-consulting-30-min-session monthly 0.5 2025-07-29 https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/606bef5f2f277851e3a89104/0cadc3d2-1c31-4b71-9166-a143d4594c51/Urgent+PHD+application+assistance+%282%29.jpg East Coast Lit(erary) Thought Store - PhD Application Consulting (30 min session)