Black Feminist Theory/Thought

Future. Il domani narrato dalle voci di oggi, an anthology published in Italy in 2019, comprises writing by 11 self-identified black Italian women. As the book’s title suggests, their work, mostly personal accounts of being black women in Italy, is forward-looking while grounded in contemporary realities: a tomorrow narrated by the voices of today. The essays also are steeped in Italian history and particularly a past that only recently has begun to be acknowledged: that of Italian empire and its African colonies. The book—the first literary anthology by black Italian women— is a political intervention, an act of resistance to the racism and anti-immigrant attitudes that have become alarmingly widespread in Italian society and politics.

First this paper will discuss Michel Foucault foundation of his ideas, and why more than a critical intervention from scholars of color is needed. Moreover, we should be aware that not only were Foucault’s deficient of political ideas or a vision of what the world ought to be, but in neglecting question of the human he indirectly made a very ontological statement “only white lives matter”. His ideas are well-known already and I don’t want to site them there or spend a lot of paper space discussing them, what is more important is who and what he represent. Secondly, I want to turn my focus on Marx, to argue that Marxism and Marxist do not and cannot provide us a solution to black suffering. I am not against Marxism, I believe that capitalist exploitation dominates the world and I am against it, but the ontological question “what and who is human?” when answer by the Marxist is always the white, worker, male. So if blacks are outside of human whose racial experiences are not relevant then how can we understanding the student slave, the worker slave, when chattel slavery has already ended? If black people are surplus, therefore disposable, then what is left of Marx? If black people do not have function or purpose within capitalism? I want to follow up with offering an alternative, the work of black feminist Sylvia Wynter is vital to understanding the racialization and the category of human in western modernity (Weheliye, 2014), I will attempt to piece together her call for a new humanism, alongside and relation to work by Afro-Pessimist and Critical Race Theory to gain a perspective of racialization and what does that mean for black students in the Afterlife. In all, I want to argue that the afterlife should be a more proper way of looking at history and progress here in the West. This will cause us to rethink slavery and freedom. Hopefully I will be able to messy picture of schooling where black children are posted to a social death but life is also worth living. To life a life in death or black life is not white social life.

Beyonce is an image icon who presents three different identities in music videos: the singular self, the hybrid self, and the integrated self. Her representations call attention to class performances of racialized gender and sexuality by Black women. Drawing from hip-hop feminism, the author discusses how the singer's shift in representation signaled a shift in the cultural criticism produced about Beyoncé within a ten-year period.

Teaching the research paper has been considered a “present controversy” for over fifty years (Saalbach, 1963). Some scholars believe that it prepares students for “generalized academic writing” (Reiff and Bawarshi, 2011; Sutton, 1997; Schwegeler and Shamoon, 1982). However, others have referred to the research paper as a “fossilized,” “pseudo-academic,” “mutt genre” (Nowacek, 2011; Wardle, 2007; Carroll, 1999; Larsen, 1982). This chapter argues that radical openness and information overload--two major features of new media composing environments--compromise the relevance of the traditional research paper. First, the research paper has been praised and blamed for its (in)ability to help students learn the importance of writing from sources (Brent 2013, Rooney 2000). However, the parameters of most research assignments are incapable of matching the scale of data available at any given time. For instance, typical constraints like “use 5-7 sources” for a first-year college writing course seems ridiculous when it takes seconds to retrieve thousands, if not millions, of possible sources. Next, open-access publishing and collaborative authorship have transformed the way that research is conducted and recognized across disciplines. Although teaching students how to crowdsource research makes the most sense in a data deluge, the research paper privileges single authorship. Moreover, the problems of authorship and source attribution implicate the research paper in certain kinds of fraud. For instance, plagiarism and term paper mills are a “built-in” problem of research papers (Howell, 1977).  In sum, this chapter focuses on what the term "research" means in a context of too much information.  It concludes by offering a brief discussion of literature relevant to this topic.

With the “controlling images” of the Jezebel, the Mammy, and the Sapphire constantly reiterated in movies, television shows, and popular culture, serving the interests of what bell hooks has identified as white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy, a consumer has to wonder if there is any way for Black women performers to thrive and empower other Black women while working within these constricting institutions. Although pop culture is the predominant cultural space where these controlling images and stereotypes have been reproduced there are many Black female entertainers who attempt to challenge and undermine such representations.
Scholars such as hooks and Patricia Hill Collins introduce us to the diverse forms of black feminists and black feminism by showing how black women from all walks of life produce and engage black feminist practice. In common cultural discourse, however artists such as Jill Scott, Erykah Badu, Janelle Monae, Meshell Ndeogeocello are upheld as leading black feminist entertainers of our contemporary period while artists Nicki Minaj and Beyoncé are denounced as disempowering to black women and merely reproducing dominant racist, sexist, and hetero-normative stereotypes of black women.
Much Black Feminist scholarship has focused on Black women’s resistance to the patriarchal, racist structures that continue to police and attempt to restrain Black women’s bodies and freedom within material social and political realms, but less scholarship focuses on the ways in which Black female entertainers produce Black feminist knowledge and empowerment within the realms of pop culture.
The purpose of this study is not to show how Badu and Monae are the best examples of “true” Black feminism in the entertainment industry and how artists like Minaj and Knowles are tools of white supremacist, capitalist, patriarchy. The purpose is to take the expansions of Black feminism that Collins, Davis, hooks, and several other Black feminist intellectuals, have articulated in order to reflect the broad ways in which Black feminism plays out in the popular music industry and to argue against the grain of critiques of popular culture to demonstrate how, despite its limitations, this realm of cultural representation and performance can be emancipatory for black women.

Hello, I'm Shelley Tremain and I'd like to welcome you to the thirty-ninth installment of Dialogues on Disability, the series of interviews that I'm conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism, racism, sexism, and other apparatuses of power; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. I acknowledge that the land on which I sit to conduct these interviews is the traditional territory of the Haudensaunee and Anishnaabeg, covered by the Upper Canada Treaties and directly adjacent to Haldiman Treaty territory. I offer these interviews with respect and in the spirit of reconciliation.

This response paper considers the gender realities of the subjects in Isoke's Women, Hip Hop, and Cultural Resistance in Dubai in relation to U.S. based hip hop artists who have recently begun to situate their work and image in larger international contexts. Neal argues that the while recent and publicized acts have begun to mark US hip hop artists as “citizens of the world,” in fact hip hop artist have always been cosmopolitian.

Anndretta Lyle Wilson (2019) Interview with Raniyah Copeland, President and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute Discussing Black Feminist Leadership, and Black Women at Risk. As the new President and CEO of the Black AIDS Institute, Raniyah Copeland offers insight on her commitment to the organization being a model for nonprofit community based advocacy and intervention. Copeland shares ideas about collaborative Black solutions for Black people, and including Hollywood influencers in the effort to
reach Black families. The Black AIDS Institute is the only national Black organization dedicated to ending HIV and supporting those living with HIV.

This Annotated Bibliography cites and reviews pertinent scholarly work that explores the ways in which spirituality is embraced, encouraged, discouraged or resisted in the lives of African American Males in the United States of America and predominantly in the 21st century or the later part of the 20th century. It also explores Black Masculinities and the social problems (primarily the education system and structural barriers) that are presented to African American males. This paper is also concerned with the way in which spirituality correlates to achievement gaps and opportunity gaps within the American school system. I understand that as a Nigerian-Canadian, I may not completely align culturally and socially with African American males and their lived experiences however, as a Black-racialized product of a North American public school as a Black-racialized educator in a colonial state such as Canada, I am strongly connected to this issue and research problem and I believe that I do indeed share similar characteristics to this demographic due to my personal characteristics.

Introductory Chapter to the Winner of the 2017 Race, Gender, and Class Section Book Award from the American Sociological Association

"Popular discussions of professional women often dwell on the conflicts faced by the woman who attempts to “have it all,” raising children while climbing up the corporate ladder. Yet for all the articles and books written on this subject, there has been little work that focuses on the experience of African American professional women or asks how their perspectives on work-family balance might be unique.

Raising the Race is the first scholarly book to examine how black, married career women juggle their relationships with their extended and nuclear families, the expectations of the black community, and their desires to raise healthy, independent children. Drawing from extensive interviews with twenty-three Atlanta-based professional women who left or modified careers as attorneys, physicians, executives, and administrators, anthropologist Riché J. Daniel Barnes found that their decisions were deeply rooted in an awareness of black women’s historical struggles. Departing from the possessive individualistic discourse of “having it all,” the women profiled here think beyond their own situation—considering ways their decisions might help the entire black community.

Giving a voice to women whose perspectives have been underrepresented in debates about work-family balance, Barnes’s profiles enable us to perceive these women as fully fledged individuals, each with her own concerns and priorities. Yet Barnes is also able to locate many common themes from these black women’s experiences, and uses them to propose policy initiatives that would improve the work and family lives of all Americans."

Decolonization and Feminisms in Global Teaching and Learning is a resource for teachers and learners seeking to participate in the creation of radical and liberating spaces in the academy and beyond. This edited volume is inspired by, and applies, decolonial and feminist thought – two fields with powerful traditions of critical pedagogy, which have shared productive exchange.

The structure of this collection reflects the synergies between decolonial and feminist thought in its four parts, which offer reflections on the politics of knowledge; the challenging pathways of finding your voice; the constraints and possibilities of institutional contexts; and the relation between decolonial and feminist thought and established academic disciplines. To root this book in the political struggles that inspire it, and to maintain the close connection between political action and reflection in praxis, chapters are interspersed with manifestos formulated by activists from across the world, as further resources for learning and teaching.

These essays definitively argue that the decolonization of universities, through the re-examination of how knowledge is produced and taught, is only strengthened when connected to feminist and critical queer and gender perspectives. Concurrently, they make the compelling case that gender and feminist teaching can be enhanced and developed when open to its own decolonization.

Sycorax shapes a powerful figure and narrative thread through colonial and postcolonial thinking. This essay, written in the 1990s, lays out some of the influential ways in which the figure of Sycorax influenced postcolonial feminist methodologies.

(fr.) Fondé sur ce que l’autrice nomme l’« approche féministe de la décolonisation des savoirs », cet article aborde la place du féminisme noir dans la philosophie politique. L’autrice montre que la pensée féministe noire est une philosophie de la justice sociale. À partir de la notion de « modestie épistémique » proposée par Eva Feder Kittay, l’autrice examine comment l’ignorance du système de valeurs et des expériences des femmes noires dans les théories libérales constitue une injustice herméneutique pour les intellectuelles qui édifient le Black feminism comme théorie de la justice raciale et de genre.

(eng.) Based on a « feminist approach to the decolonization of knowledge », as designated by the author, this article focuses on the place of Black Feminism in political philosophy and shows why Black Feminism thought is a philosophy of social justice. Through Eva Feder Kittay’s notion of epistemic modesty, the author examines how ignorance of the value system and experiences of Black Women constitutes a hermeneutic and epistemic injustice toward this theory of racial and gender justice.

This essay analyzes intersections of blackness and womanhood in William Faulkner’s THE SOUND AND THE FURY and LIGHT IN AUGUST and Zora Neal Hurston’s THEIR EYES WERE WATCHING GOD to explore (1) how two authors of diverging races and genders engage the multiple jeopardy of marginalized race and gender in their novels; (2) how an author’s own racial and gendered positioning affects and informs his or her textual presentation of race and gender; and (3) the degree to which a novel’s treatment of race and gender provokes readerly engagement of these selfsame constructs. Ultimately, the paper concludes that Faulkner, perhaps limited by his own racial and gendered positioning, utilizes his black and female characters primarily to speak out of and to a white and male perspective. Accordingly, characters such as Dilsey Compson and the “womanshenegro” reveal more about the position and privilege of white men living in the American South than about the marginalization and oppression of black women in the same geocultural space. Hurston, conversely, in depicting Afra-Americans not as absent, subordinate, and victimized but as present, principal, and resilient, celebrates the fullness of Afra-American life, independent of—and without the need to invoke—dominant (white male) culture, power, and privilege. Moreover—through conversations held between Janie Crawford and Pheoby Watson and dialogue sustained between the narrator and protagonist—THEIR EYES not only bears witness to Afra-American traumas and triumphs but also impels the sometimes reluctant, non-Afra-American reader to engage intersections of blackness and womanhood in American (literary) culture.

Incongruities explores the suicide of black journalist, Leanita McClain, who was head of the Chicago Tribune's Editorial page; she was the first Black and second woman ever to sit on the Tribune's Editorial Board in 185 years of it's history.  The chapter was a published Master's paper that offers a critique of feminist theory and its failure to account for the lives of Black women.  It is the beginning of my movement towards a theory of Black feminism

Through a content analysis of the maternal relationships in Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Alice Walker’s In Search of Our Mothers Gardens, the author evaluates how southern black women writers construct black motherhood. This study is based on the premise that Eurocentric paradigms of motherhood confine black mothers to controlling images that continue to criminalize, distort, and devalue black motherhood. The researcher finds that the institution of black motherhood exists independently of Eurocentric paradigms. The conclusions drawn from these findings suggest that black women writers construct motherhood in terms of Womanist leadership. In the aforementioned memoirs, Womanist leadership is learned and defined in the black church. In summation, this thesis finds that southern black women writers use spiritual reconciliation as a form of Womanist leadership.

In this essay I examine the racial achievement gap in American education in terms of an impaired psychosocial developmental process. I argue that the well-documented academic underperformance of certain minority groups may stem from the unfavorable resolution of a key developmental crisis in constituent members’ early scholastic experience. I go on to suggest that individual educators can play an important role in eliminating the achievement gap by changing the way they teach in their own classrooms. In part, they may do so by adopting a "transcultural" pedagogy or teaching style, according to which both teachers and their minority students develop (at minimum) transcultural proficiencies and (at maximum) transcultural identities, as a promising way to achieve two important ends. First, the fostering of an academically-industrious self-concept in members of historically underachieving minority groups and hence, second, the closing of the achievement gap "from the bottom up"—one classroom at a time.

“Policy doesn't help us,” was a refrain I heard repeatedly from one of my School for Social Work graduate students in a family policy course where I teach students how to complete a family impact analysis. The objective is to help social work practitioners understand the ways in which policies overlap to create often dire circumstances for families in need and how variously situated families experience these circumstance differently. In this article, I highlight the experiences of three of my students, each an African American woman social work student between the ages 25 and 50. I use black feminist anthropology to explore primary themes that centralize the importance of understanding varied raced, classed, and gendered experiences when delivering family and children's services. I use student's critical engagement and family impact analyses to discuss the ways in which black women's roles as service providers impact policy analysis and implementation of social services. I also discuss the ways in which I use the social work classroom as a site for the translation of anthropological research findings into changes in public policy and practice. At the root of this focus is an eye toward social change and social justice that benefits all families.

Studies indicate that African American men report more personal experiences with discrimination than do African American women. According to the subordinate male target hypothesis, this gender difference reflects an underlying reality in which African American men are the primary targets of anti-Black discrimination. From the perspective of intersectionality theory, African American women and men experience racial discrimination differently; and therefore greater reports of discrimination among African American men might be a result of measurement bias that favors the experiences of African American men vis-à-vis African American women. To assess these perspectives, the authors analyze data from the 1995 Detroit Area Study and the 2001–2003 National Survey of American Life. The authors use multiplegroup confirmatory factor analytic models with latent means and categorical outcomes to observe the degree to which gender bias in measurement accounts for disparities in perceived discrimination among African American women and men. The results show that gender bias in the measures most often used to assess unfair treatment in social surveys is responsible for the gender gap in certain kinds of perceived discrimination among African Americans. Measures of everyday discrimination are mostly gender balanced, but measurement bias is responsible for a large portion of the gap in perceptions of major life discrimination and the entire gap when major life discrimination is attributed to race. The results highlight the importance of intersectionality theory for assessing discrimination, and the authors argue that revisions in the measurement of perceived discrimination are required to better reflect the experiences of African American women.

Il est nécessaire que le mouvement féministe reconnaisse et combatte le racisme, tant dans la société qu'en son propre sein. En République Dominicaine, Identidad est le premier groupe à lutter de manière simultanée contre le racisme et le sexisme. Il est à l'initiative de la 1ère rencontre de femmes noires latino-américaines et des Caraïbes de 1992, qui marque l'émergence d'un mouvement de femmes noires. Mais malgré ses succès, la lutte est complexe, dans un pays marqué par la colonisation et l'esclavage, et où l'Etat a construit un nationalime raciste sur l'anti-haïtianisme et la négation des racines africaines. Noires? Afrodominicaines? Comment se désigner? Comment s'organiser? Quelles stratégies de lutte formuler? Refusant le rôle de victimes et rompant le silence, les féministes et les lesbiennes noires invitent les autres féministes à travailler elles aussi sur la question.
Feminism must acknowledge and fight against racism, both in society in general and within the movement itself. In the Dominican Republic, Identidad is the first group whose aim is to simultaneously struggle against racism and sexism. This group launched the first conference of Black women from Latin America and the Caribbean, held in 1992 and from which emerged a strong Black women's network. In spite of this achievement, the struggle remains complex since the Dominican Republic is a country with a heavy heritage of colonisation and slavery. The state-elaborated nationalism is racist, anti-haïtian and denies any form of African roots. How should they call ourselves : black? Afrodominican? How should they get organised? What kind of strategies should be developed? Rejecting the status of victims and breaking the silence, Black feminists and lesbians invite all other feminists to think over these matters as well.

Constructions of black mothers and fathers are often complicated intersections of gender, race, class, sexuality, and place. This chapter seeks to examine the contested representations of black mothers, black fathers, and the black family in hip hop discourses and offers a typology of hip hop families. Specifically, the chapter focuses on the ways in which hip hop texts are in conversation with historical discourses on the
black family and the ways in which hip hop has challenged traditional notions of family, kinship, and familial love. The chapter examines representations of hip hop fathers and hip hop mothers, complicates notions of the “modern” American family, and frames new trajectories for how black families are imagined in hip hop discourses.

There are long traditions in Western literature that indicate a superiority of reason over emotion. Reason became linked to rational thought and emotions to irrational passions. From Plato and Descartes to Spinoza and Kant, reason was the path to a purer knowledge and enlightenment (Lehrer 2009). It is no surprise, then, that these phallocentric teachings of science and philosophy also linked reason to the masculine, and emotion to the feminine. To explore the use of emotion in feminist politics is also to remember the historical traditions of epistemology. If there is political potential surrounding the place of emotions in feminism, then there are also barriers to overcome in the existing politics of emotion, their historical delegitimisation and inextricable association with the feminine. 

In this essay, I will approach the use of emotion in feminist politics, through an examination of the political potential of anger in feminist movements, from the perspective of Black Feminism and the writings of women of colour. Through an analysis of Audre Lorde and bell hooks’ work, I will examine how anger can be used as a tool to increase social consciousness within the movement and build an inclusive feminist approach to women’s liberation through the acknowledgement of intersecting oppressions—namely racism, classism and sexism. I will explore whether or not the use of anger in this way is still relevant in contemporary feminism by dissecting the work of feminist theorists on emotion and their collective analysis of what constitutes anger, where it comes from and how it moves between bodies.

This pdf contains the Table of Contents and Introduction to Black Women's Intellectual Traditions: Speaking Their Minds (Burlington: University of Vermont, 2007), co-edited by Kristin Waters and Carol B. Conaway.  Also included from the book: "Some Core Themes in Nineteenth-Century Black Feminism," by Kristin Waters.  The volume, which contains 19 essays on authors such as Maria W. Stewart, Sojourner Truth, Frances E. W. Harper, Pauline Hopkins, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Anna Julia Cooper, and Ida B. Wells, was a recipient of the 2007 Letitia Woods Brown Award from the Association of Black Women Historians,

This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.

The prevailing disciplinary and theoretical frameworks for comprehending black feminist subjectivity and its integral relationship to world/land/territory/earth ethics are impoverished. We can address this impoverishment by turning to black women cultural producers like author Octavia Butler and visual artist Wangechi Mutu to configure a heteromorphic understanding of the social, political, and physical worlds we currently inhabit. Through narrative and visual culture, Mutu and Butler articulate political ecologies that move beyond the limited correctives made available through the conventions of Western formal politics. Moreover, I argue that Butler and Mutu disrupt environmental studies frameworks informed by colonial European notions of “the political.” These disruptions allow both visionaries to reconstitute the (un)limits of humanity and construct alternative conceptions of ecological ethics within our present world and beyond it.

How do the visualities of Black Lives Matter
protests relate to—maybe amble into—the
nonperformative textures of mourning?2
What happens to the question of nonperformativity
in the face of the protest photo’s
presumptive publicity? I ask these questions in
relation to a 2014 New York Daily News photo
of the late Erica Garner.

In this paper, I argue that black women should be circumspect of the recent phenomenon of “black girl magic.” I claim that when it is used to congratulate black women’s accomplishments or motivate stressed and overwhelmed black women, it can contribute to our invisible struggle against multiple inequalities, and encourage black women to continue to neglect their most fundamental physical and psychological and emotional needs. My concern is that the magical black woman, if internalized, could function in the same fashion as the myth of the strong black woman and contribute to our failure to practice self-care. Magic by definition defies explanation. If our tenacity is magical, and thus illusory, others may be less inclined to take our needs seriously and we may be less inclined to recognize and address the real mental and bodily effects of oppression.

In this article I consider how discourses of crisis and politics of respectability make it difficult to imagine black boyhood. While both forms of intervention are guided by good intentions, they nonetheless stymie research and critical engagement with how black boys experience boyhood. This article considers how a speech by President Barack Obama functioning as a precursor to formal announcement of the My Brothers Keeper initiative demonstrates the difficulty with distinguishing black boys from black men and, therefore, from developing interventions and research, in general, that attends to the needs, interests, and ways of being of black boys. I propose that in the absence of discursively focused research and empirical data, the inner thoughts and lives of black boys can be located in culture, specifically soundscapes created by black male recording artists that offer disruptive imaginations.

This term paper is a sociological review analysing how the inequality (re)producing social categories and the
intersectionality of these inequalities in 1960s in Mississippi,
U.S. are reflected throughout the controversial cinema movie
‘The Help’ directed by Tate Taylor in 2011. After stating the
main characters and relevant stories in the movie, and the
public and academic profile of ‘The Help’, this paper moves
on to the theoretical framework which is later to be applied in
the analysis section. This framework covers the theories of
gender order, social boundaries and intersectionality. The
sociological analysis of the movie has three parts. First,
gender and sexuality boundaries are stated. Second, it is
elaborated how power is negotiated through the use and
ownership of space, and how the inequalities are indicated
along spatial boundaries. Third, building on these two
analyses, it is discussed whether the intersections of the
boundary-generating and inequality (re)producing categories
(gender, sexuality, race/ethnicity and class) is underlined. It is
concluded that ‘The Help’ handles a very rich material in
terms of inequalities, boundaries and possible intersection of
them. Even though in the first layer of the analysis it is seen
that the depiction of symbolic and social boundaries are
addressed quite well in the movie, the second layer reveals
that it has reductionist tendencies to ignore the intersecting
inequalities by highlighting only one category or by putting
the characters and events on a simple scale of good and evil

With the outbreak of World War I, being a soldier offered an opportunity for
black males to acquire black manhood in America’s segregated society.
Investigating black soldiers and war veterans in Sula, men who have always been
perceived as peripheral and minor characters, could offer a promising direction in
Morrison criticism for constructing a positive black image. Therefore, this paper
seeks to explore the black WWI veteran characters in Sula Shadrack, in
particular from his dreadful experience on the battlefield in France to his return
to the Bottom, and examines the meaning of his existence in the black community
along with his declaration of National Suicide Day. Through his war experience,
Shadrack gains the power to recognize his damaged sense of identity as a black
man, and, rather than being devastated by this experience, he undertakes to heal
the wounded black identity by establishing an ingenious, communal ritual,
National Suicide Day, which connects the cultural and historical identity of the
Bottom’s people with one’s individual black identity. The ritual makes him a
creator, a healer, and most of all, a leader in the Bottom. He also tries to heal a
young black girl, the protagonist Sula, by soothing her fears. This relationship
between Shadrack and Sula presents and represents a strongly positive aspect of
him as a more affirmative black male figure than any other black male characters
in Morrison’s novels have been shown to be. Through these analyses, this paper
aims to focus upon the complex, problematic status of black male characters in
Morrison’s novels and to supplement their limited and negative evaluation with a
more positive one by drawing attention to Shadrack.

"The Feminine Mystique" (1963) passed off the struggles and conditions of a specific group of white women as the struggles and conditions of ALL women. This has had an immense impact on feminist theory and activism; the contemporary feminist movement has been coopted by white women in order to serve their particular interests and continually forgets/ignores the needs of "Other" groups of women.

I teach courses such as “Black Popular Culture in D.C.” and “Beyoncé,” and other topical courses in race, gender, sexuality, class, spatial politics, and language using popular culture. This is a lesson plan I've designed for use in Sexuality Studies, Gender Studies, or Africana Studies courses.

This article analyzes two films by the twentieth-century filmmaker Bill Gunn, who wrote and directed STOP! (1970) and Ganja and Hess (1973). Both films are unique because they show the complicated, multidirectional power relations among erotic subjects without sexual exploitation as its aim. The phrase “let it go black” refers to Gunn’s approach to the erotic subject on film, which privileges multiple evocations that blackness can bring to sexuality. I also posit a dialectic between the radical spectator and filmmaker who together can transform cinematic relationships through a shared desire to expand our imaginative perspectives outside of the bounds of the Jezebel, the Buck, and other pervasive racialized sexual types circulated by Hollywood filmmakers of all races, nationally and globally.

This paper explores black feminist thought, its interpretive framework, critical and epistemological modes of inquiry, and the political significance underlying its terrains of contestation in and outside academia. It emphasises the limitations of additive or mutually constitutive models of social divisions and thus privileges an intersectional approach that renders the complicated experience of black women within multiple categorizations of oppression understandable. By grounding intersectionality in a set of interlocking systems of social, cultural and political violence, this research explores black women’s politics of resistance to “epistemic violence” and institutionalized racism and sexism in Toni Morison‟s Beloved- an important work that captures one of the most significant junctures in African-American history, slavery and the Reconstruction era. This work offers an opportunity for understanding how intersectionality deepens notions of gender, race, and class and how they collaborate together in marginalizing the influence of black women on the social, cultural, and intellectual arenas. Revisiting the condition of black women through the lens of intersectionality suggests a desire to reconceptualize identity formation as inseparable from the external effects that determine black women’s realities.

This essay explores variant stories surrounding the 1803 'Igbo Landing' on St. Simons Island, Georgia, in which a group of enslaved Africans mutinied against their captors and ran aground upon a shoal. Following Tiffany Lethabo King and other scholars of Black feminist thought, the essay explores not only the littoral fact of shoals in seafaring but also the concept of shoaling for troubling historical narratives oriented to settler colonial plot points. Following island studies scholar Jonathan Pugh, the essay asks what thinking with performance and the concept of liminality might offer attempts to account for sand, drift, and, in this case, accounts of Africans who fly. The essay also tells a story of its own regarding the author's attempt to approach the historical site of Igbo Landing by sea. An example of performative writing, the essay does not so much launch and unpack a singular argument as it explores the littoral zones among and between ideas, stories, arguments, facts, and fabulations in relation.

In the wake of the murder of George Floyd on the 25th of May 2020 in the city of Minneapolis, a global anti-racist rupture in the fabric of racial capitalism has occurred. Floyd was murdered by police officer Derek Chauvin, who knelt on Floyd’s neck for almost nine minutes. Floyd after calling out “I can’t breathe!” was essentially choked to death on an open street. The act by Chauvin and the lack of action by the other police officers was captured through the cell phone cameras of bystanders. Despite this event happening under the conditions of the dispersion of the visual field and in an era of technological surveillance, the cops did what cops do.

Critical academic feminist scholarship on the body, often views the body as disciplined and docile, continually being trained, primped, and prepped causing a strenuous relationship between individuals, their bodies and the institutions attempting to discipline the body. However, this scholarship often marginalizes the attempts to discipline the black body through hair. In this paper I investigate how virtual spaces, created around the body, more specifically blogs centering natural hair, can be viewed as possible spaces of resistance that serve to (re)humanize, helping black women recover from the damage of hypervisibility, negative controlling images and the disciplining and regulating of their bodies while also creating self-affirming knowledge formations. I build on hooks notion of "homeplace" to explore the possibility of virtual homeplace, a space for black women to network, heal and affirm one another. Consequently, this chapter explores two aspects: first, can the digital space of natural hair blogs operate as a virtual homeplace; and second, can self-identified black women use the digital spaces of hair blogs to challenge and reformulate understandings of their body. I employ the methods of content analysis and participant observation and find that this social media forum is not transformative by itself but instead have little moments that make for resistance and a virtual homeplace.


Lee, L. 2015. “Virtual Homeplace: (Re)Constructing the Body through Social Media.” (Pp. 91-112) in Women of Color and Social Media Multitasking: Blogs, Timelines, Feeds and Community, edited by Keisha Edwards Tassie & Sonja M. Brown Givens. New York: Lexington Books.

The dissection of Sarah Baartman's body is considered a colonial scientific practice that rendered the Africans “less than human.” This paper is interested in how this project travels into Francophone literature through the autobiographical novel 53cm (1999) by Swiss–Gabonese author Sandrine Bessora van Nguema. Dedicated to Baartman, 53cm depicts Bessora's alter-ego, Zara, an illegal alien in Paris. Although skinny-bottomed Zara is the embodied opposite of Baartman's steatopygia, she too is considered “alien” by French society. I analyse Zara's lived experience as a “known” body who is subject to a dissecting gaze based in the anatomical “knowledge” of Sarah's enlarged buttocks. Conversely, I consider dissection as a subversive practice in Zara's satirical performance of being an ethnographer of French (the “knower”). I conclude that the Zara/Sarah representational model reframes dissection as a subversive performance born of the feeling of indignity created by persistent colonial ontological categories.

I had the pleasure of having this conversation with Cathy Cohen, the David and Mary Winton Green Professor of Political Science and chair of political science at the University of Chicago, in late 2015. Cohen’s work, both academically and as an activist, has inspired my own, particularly in terms of making connections between black feminist theory, social movements, and issues of race and racism in the United States. Cohen is the principal investigator of two major social change projects: The Black Youth Project and the Mobilization, Change and Political and Civic Engagement Project. Her books, Democracy Remixed: Black Youth and the Future of American Politics and The Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics have offered important interventions in scholarship on race and politics. She is also the coeditor, with Kathleen Jones and Joan Tronto, of Women Transforming Politics: An Alternative Reader.

Since the publication of my book, Black Celebrity, Racial Politics, and the Press: Framing Dissent, I have been particularly compelled by the use of technology by racial justice activists like the women who started #BlackLivesMatter. My recent collaborative work with Brooke Foucault Welles, “Hijacking #myNYPD: Social Media Dissent and Networked Counterpublics” and “#Ferguson is Everywhere: Initiators in Emerging Counterpublic Networks," has illustrated that everyday citizens—particularly young women and people of color—are having a very real impact on national narratives of equality and citizenship. In the following conversation, Cohen and I discuss the potentials for feminist theory in racial justice movements, the unique ways in which race and gender intersect in state violence, challenges for feminist academics of color engaged in activism, and the shape of the #BlackLivesMatter movement. You can follow us on Twitter at @cathyjcohen and @sjjphd respectively.

Pretendo compreender o lugar do lugar de fala como uma dimensão espacial constitutiva dos atuais conflitos discursivos em torno da produção e da legitimação de saberes e de a quem se atribuem  autoridade e credibilidade. Comparo as discussões em torno de outros “enunciados situados”, anteriormente conduzidas pelos estudos subalternos, pelos feminismos e pela literatura decolonial, com o debate sobre o lugar no campo da geografia. Finalizo com comentários inconclusivos e questões em aberto sobre o lugar do lugar de fala, com vista a análises futuras.

Palavras-chave: lugar de fala; enunciados situados; lugar; geografia; subalterno.