Black Feminist Theory/Thought

Coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989, intersectionality has become the key analytic framework through which feminist scholars in various fields talk about structural identities like race, class, gender, and sexuality. This essay situates intersectionality within a long history of Black feminist theorizing about the interlocking nature of systems of power and oppression. It argues that intersectionality is not an account of personal identity but rather an account of power, and it challenges key feminist theorists including Robyn Wiegman, Jennifer Nash, and Jasbir Puar who have attempted to move past intersectionality, because of its limitations in fully attending to the contours of identity. The essay also maps conversations within the social sciences about intersectionality as a research methodology. Finally the essay considers what it means for Black women to retain paradigmatic status within intersectionality studies, whether doing so is essentialist and therefore, problematic, or whether attempts to move “beyond” Black women constitute attempts at erasure and displacement.

Resumo: Interseccionalidade, conceito cunhado e difundido por feministas negras nos anos 1980, constituí-se em ferramenta teórico-metodológica fundamental para ativistas e teóricas feministas comprometidas com análises que desvelem os processos de interação entre relações de poder e categorias como classe, gênero e raça em contextos individuais, práticas coletivas e arranjos culturais/institucionais. Há, contudo, uma plêiade, por vezes contraditória e vazia de sentido, de usos e concepções acerca do conceito. No presente texto, analiso a recepção e difusão do conceito de interseccionalidade no Brasil e sua influência sobre o pensamento feminista negro no país. Na primeira parte do artigo, apresento a-americano e sua recepção no Brasil. A seguir, me debruço sobre os múltiplos sentidos que o conceito tem adquirido, sobretudo no que tange à quais, e em que contextos, categorias de diferenciação privilegiar, ao peso conferido às relações de poder e ao espaço de negociação, individual e/ou coletiva, conferido aos atores sociais. Finalmente, reflito sobre a atualidade do conceito para estudos de gênero no Brasil, argumentando que um de seus pontos fracos-sua maleabilidade e imprecisão teórica-também garante sua vivacidade e popularidade. Palavras-chave: Interseccionalidade; Feminismo negro; Categorias de diferenciação; Estudos de gênero. As Fronteiras entre Raça e Gênero no Ativismo Social Brasileiro No esforço de entendermos a recepção do conceito de interseccionalidade no contexto das práticas e teorias feministas a partir da década de 1980, faz-se mister reconstruir o percurso histórico de formação do ativismo negro e do movimento de mulheres no Brasil contemporâneo, bem como seus dilemas para incorporar pautas específicas das mulheres negras.

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.

This essay employs the 2016 police shooting of Korryn Gaines by Baltimore SWAT to ask critical questions about how various conceptualizations of gender violence occlude critical theorizations of how black people die at the hands of the state. Black death is thus taken up as a Black feminist theoretic to challenge the discursive capacity of gender as a singular category to articulate conclusively the suffering of Black gendered subjects. Thus, by examining the narrative maneuvers of the 2017 Women's March to articulate police violence as a gender concern, this essay demonstrates how the specificities of Blackness are crowded out by the drive towards a collective politic.

This article seeks to examine some of the processes through which gender comes to be racialized in order to challenge the tendency in much feminist theories of gender to analytically separate these categories.  The paper explores the theoretical and political consequences of that separation for those that bear the historical mark of slavery and colonization, while also examining how an attentiveness to these histories and bodies paves the way towards new critical questions as well as a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between oppressed and oppressor. Drawing on the work of decolonial thinkers such as Maria Lugones and Sylvia Wynter, I propose developing at least four ingredients that could be considered integral to the making of a decolonial feminist methodology.  I argue that these ingredients allow us to maintain “gender” as a critical political category of analysis that can serve to denounce and transform colonial relations of power and colonial ways of relating that continue to persist in our present.

In this essay, we elaborate on the ways in which colonial unknowing is always itself a response, an epistemological counter-formation, which takes shape in reaction to the lived relations and incommensurable knowledges it seeks to render impossible and inconceivable. Apprehending colonial unknowing as a counter-formation is also a way of de-centering whiteness. We look specifically to Black and Indigenous relations of study as a being and thinking with under conditions often inhospitable—conditions predicated on the uneven distribution of suffering and sustenance—as “dissident relations” shaped by collective struggle. This essay is written in conversation with Alex Trimble Young’s criticism of the “On Colonial Unknowing” special issue we edited for Theory & Event.

The Black subject in Lee Edelman’s queer negativity is explored here as both absent from and productive of its most radical critiques of futurity. The essay attempts to read a different queer negativity within the tradition of Black feminist theorizing.

In “The Animal That Therefore I Am (More to Follow),” the late French philosopher, Jacques Derrida contends “the question” of “the animal” in philosophy refers “not to the animal but to the naive assurance of man.” In critically approaching the “bestiary at the origin of philosophy,” Derrida would later clarify that it is less a matter of asking “whether one has the right to refuse the animal such and such a power…[than of] asking whether what calls itself human has the right rigorously to attribute to man, which means therefore to attribute to himself, what he refuses the animal, and whether he can ever possess the pure, rigorous, indivisible concept, as such, of that attribution.” At the close of what is assuredly a towering work of philosophical inquiry, a number of interrelated questions at the center of what he calls the “philosophical bestiary” nevertheless remain. In particular, if sexual difference and its attendant Oedipal anxieties and oppositions structure the foundational violence of the Western philosophical tradition, a violence that is constitutive with and recalled by human-animal oppositions, how might a consideration of the mode by which the symbolic logics of both dualisms are cut and qualitatively intensified by antiblack racialization clarify the terms and stakes of his inquiry? This paper investigates this constitutive lacuna in Derrida’s thought, by thinking a being where the normative symbolics of gender and personhood do not take hold, due to a concerted attempt to apportion and delimit characteristics presumed to be proper to Man in a manner that accords with the paradoxical dictates of a racializing Law. In a reading of Frederick Douglass’s 1845 Narrative and Toni Morrison’s Beloved in relation to philosophic and bioscientific discourses on the plasticity of life, I offer a consideration of how blackness constitutes and disrupts the historical and philosophical terms of Derrida’s meditation.

This essay concerns black feminist theory’s experimentation with the disciplinary discourses of chaos theory and physics to investigate the trace effects of blackness and explore the limits of conceptualization and representation in light of the particular problem that blackness’s diffuse and immeasurable conditioning power poses to thought and representation. I argue that when considering the genealogy of black feminism, it is possible to discern a black feminist poetics that anticipates recent feminist materialism’s attentiveness to the mutually-constitutive effects of discursivity and materiality. Said poetics approaches a shared worry over the problem of referentiality, not in representationalist terms, as recent materialists would suggest, but rather through a poetics attentive to the racially sexuating bases of an (anti)black sublime that conditions, exceeds, and potentially ruptures the scales of the empirical.  Privileging performativity, gesture, resonance, and metaphor over the authority and purported veridicality of Western empirical science, the poetics of black feminism investigated here is instructive for a general theory of representation.

single-issue liberation movements. That is, intersectionality allows us to understand how racism can operate within feminist movements, and how misogyny can operate within black liberation movements. To illustrate intersectionality as a lens through which to notice internal systems of oppression within liberation movements, we begin with nineteenth-and twentieth-century Black feminism.

This article offers a reading of the spatial politics of Black feminist theorizing to examine recent critiques of intersectionality produced under the heading of “assemblage theory,” especially in the work of Jasbir Puar. I argue that these critiques reductively produce intersectionality as a spatial metaphor that locates and fixes compound subjects, a fixing complicit with the work of the national security state. Intervening in these critiques of intersectionality, the article traces alternative theorizations of spatiality and subjectivity internal to Kimberlé Crenshaw’s work, extending them through Hortense Spillers’s theorization of the interstice as the nonsite of the Black female subject. In this rereading of Crenshaw through Spillers, I explore how intersectionality belongs not only to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on particularity and compoundedness but to a tradition of Black feminist theorizing on placelessness, singularity, and absence. Rather than bolster oppressive institutions through liberal models of inclusion, Black feminism names a monstrous potential to disrupt and to disappear within institutional space.

An inquiry into onto-epistemology, this essay investigates the reciprocal production of aesthesis and empiricism, both the seemingly scientific and the perceptual knowledge that signifies otherwise under conditions of imperial Western humanism. In a reading of Nalo Hopkinson’s Brown Girl in the Ring (1998), I argue that as an enabling condition of imperial Western humanism, the black mater(nal) is foreclosed by the dialectics of hegemonic common sense and that the anxieties stimulated by related signifiers, such as the black(ened) maternal image, voice, and lifeworld, allude to the latent symbolic-material capacities of the black mater(nal), as mater, as matter, to destabilize or even rupture the reigning order of representation that grounds the thought-world relation. In other words, the specter of the black mater(nal)—that is, nonrepresentability—haunts the terms and operations tasked with adjudicating the thought-world correlate or the proper perception of “the world” such as hierarchical distinctions between reality and illusion, Reason and its absence, subject and object, science and fiction, and speculation and realism, which turn on attendant aporias pertaining to immanence and transcendence. Exploring the mind-body-social nexus in Hopkinson’s fiction, I contend that in Brown Girl vertigo is evoked as both a symptom and a metaphor of inhabiting a reality discredited (a blackened reality) that is at once the experience of the carceral and the apprehension of a radically redistributed sensorium. I argue the black mater(nal) holds the potential to transform the terms of reality and feeling, therefore rewriting the conditions of possibility of the empirical.

This contribution wants to retrace American feminist Betty Friedan’s fascinating biography and controversial reflection, adopting as focal point the book which allowed her to become a strong reference for the Liberal Women's Rights Movement of the ‘60s and ‘70s, and at the same time made her an extremely discussed and criticized public figure within the new Radical Feminist Reflection: The Feminine Mystique (1964).
This brilliant work was able to bring to light the famous “problem that has no name”, the sense of frustration and incompleteness lived in ‘50s by many American middle-class women, placed in name of their docile and uncompetitive femininity within the domestic sphere of suburban reality, in order to ensure political and social stability to the so-called “American way of life”.
Can we really affirm that Betty Friedan has consciously removed part of her young radical engagement – as historian Daniel Horowitz affirmed in his Friedan’s provocative biography of 1998 – to embrace a more comfortable liberal feminist discourse? Can we actually consider The Feminine Mystique «the revolutionary manifesto of women's liberation», as it was by many defined? Is Friedan’s liberal analysis – aimed to examine the status of white heterosexual middle-class and educated American women – based on a primary exclusion according to class, race and sexual orientation? I will move from these still open questions to reconstruct the political debate which arose around Friedan’s work and her later commitment within the National Organization for Women (NOW), with a particular emphasis on the main criticisms to the structural limits of her political vision.

Modern racial ideologies are inseparable from the production of hierarchical differences giving shape to what Frantz Fanon characterized as a "division of the species". The process has historically accompanied European imperial and colonial expansion and the conceptualization of whiteness as a self-conscious project of global supremacy along political, economic, and epistemic lines. Drawing on long-standing images casting blackness or darkness as the opposite of morality, progress, and civilization, the globalization of White supremacy sought legitimacy in definitions of humanity that defined the Black as its inhuman other. Violent Black enslavement and the Middle Passage turned the division of the species into a principle of organization, unity, and value for White/Human civil society.

“This is an Accepted Manuscript of an article published by Taylor & Francis in The Black Scholar
Journal of Black Studies and Research
ISSN: on October 19, 2015, available online: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rtbs20
To cite this article: Joan Morgan (2015) Why We Get Off: Moving Towards a Black Feminist
Politics of Pleasure, The Black Scholar, 45:4, 36-46
To link to this article: https://dx.doi.org/10.1080/00064246.2015.1080915

Love has been theorized as a way to rebuild fractured communities, and a potential way to overcome differences on the political Left. However, might it be dangerous to invest so much potential in the power of love? In this paper, I reflect upon Michael Hardt's work on the necessity of love for politics. Hardt emphasizes the radical and transformative potential of love, seeing it as a collective and generative force. Yet, I argue that Hardt's reading of love, tied to a Spinozist theorization of joy, provides a limited understanding of the affective dimensions of love. Instead, I propose that we need to think about the ambivalence and incoherence of love: how love can be both joyful and painful, enduring and transient, expansive and territorial, revolutionary and conservative. That is, to consider how love, even in its seemingly most benevolent and unconditional form, can still be a source of exclusion, violence, and domination. Ultimately, I seek to challenge this fantasy of coherence and togetherness, asking if there is still space for aspects of politics that are not joyful, that do not feel like love, that anger us, disappoint us, and that make us desire distance rather than togetherness.

Since its inception, the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement has opened space for three interrelated discourses on the polysemic nature of matter, but so far two have dominated Black and commu- nication studies. First, the BLM organization promotes the thought that Black lives, as human lives, should matter enough to convict White people of the murder of unarmed Black people. Second, some argue that while BLM is an important organization, historically, the lives of Black people in the West have not mattered. The third dis- course, one suggested in the growing work of Black feminist new materialism, is more complicated, as it inherently calls into question the human: Why do Black lives equal matter? This article interrogates the relationship between blackness, matter, and communication to argue that racial violence situates Black bodies as matter/“elemental media” necessary for the materialization of Western (White) man as the dominant raced, gendered genre of humanity.

Ao longo da última década, temos assistido a um crescente interesse acadêmico pelo feminismo negro e pelo conceito de interseccionalidade, criado e operacionalizado inicialmente por feministas negras. Importantes feministas, como Sonia Alvarez (2014), têm revisitado algumas de suas abordagens teórico-metodológicas à luz do impacto do ativismo de mulheres negras no Brasil e na América Latina no conjunto do movimento feminista na região. Há também uma nova geração de mulheres negras – pesquisadoras, ativistas e gestoras de políticas públicas, entre outras – empenhadas em reconstruir a historiografia das mulheres no Brasil, mas, desta feita, dando vez e voz ao papel desempenhado por mulheres negras em diferentes lutas contra a opressão do período colonial aos tempos atuais (Cf. Pereira, 2016; Cardoso, 2012; Ratts, Rios, 2010).
Outro aspecto importante a ser ressaltado é o esforço conjunto capitaneado por acadêmicas e ativistas em trazer para o centro dos debates contemporâneos conceitos, ferramentas analíticas e metodológicas produzidos por mulheres negras e que permaneceram, por um longo período, à margem das teorizações feministas. Nessa empreitada em torno da consolidação de um pensamento feminista negro para além das margens um conjunto amplo de intelectuais negras têm sido recuperadas e suas obras disponibilizadas em diferentes espaços. A reabilitação de autoras do porte de Virgínia Bicudo, Beatriz Nascimento e Lélia Gonzalez no contexto brasileiro, e a criação de espaços, por vezes informais, para o debate, tradução e divulgação do trabalho de intelectuais estrangeiras de renome, como Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, entre outras, são o exemplo desse projeto coletivo de, para parafrasear Sueli Carneiro, enegrecer o feminismo acadêmico.
Neste artigo, eu examino alguns aspectos analíticos envolvidos nesse interjogo entre gênero, raça e classe, além de outros marcadores de hierarquia social, que tem sido trazidos à baila no debate público e nas produções acadêmicas nas ciências sociais especialmente por feministas negras. Analiso de maneira detida como esses debates tomaram corpo a partir dos anos 1980, quando feministas negras passaram a sistematicamente desafiar um modelo hegemônico e essencializante de se pensar sobre gênero e raça, e seus impactos teóricos e sociopolíticos desde então. Na segunda parte do artigo discuto o conceito de interseccionalidade, sua proximidade e distanciamento em relação às políticas de identidade que adquiriram certa centralidade na luta política a partir dos anos 1990.

This essay provides a robust introduction to the vexed
and generative terrains of Afro-pessimisms and black feminisms.
Taken together, the essays reviewed address what each tendency
says about the nature of black positionality and the significance
of the meanings and histories attached to black female flesh and
the slave polity—the “arbiters of blackness itself”—via considerations
of deep literacy, psychoanalysis, sound theory, black
m/othering, drama, ethnography, material conditions of knowledge
production, canon formation, intellectual appropriation, coalition
politics, state and vigilante murder and sexualized violence,
and the risk of repeating Euro-American Enlightenment through
mischaracterizing the relationship between colonialism and slavery.

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.

Vampires are a ubiquitous presence in contemporary American culture. e recent popularity of Bu y the Vampire Slayer, the Twilight Saga, Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles, the Underworld lms, and HBO's True Blood, among other works, not only re ects how saturated popular culture is with vampires but also the enduring importance of these gures. Today's vampires, whether they are bloodthirsty killers or brooding romantic heroes, are as seductive to the public imaginary as were their nineteenth-century counterparts and o en represent both an enchanted escape from our understood reality and a commentary thereof. Previous manifestations of the vampire phenomenon re ected, for example, xenophobic concerns about foreign contagion or the horrors of same-sex desire, among other things. Contemporary iterations, however, o en underscore some of the anxieties mainstream culture has with our current multicultural and "postracial" society by seeking to "reinstate" the supremacy of whiteness, o en through such tropes as the triumph of a lily-white vampire slayer or through nostalgia for an all-powerful white man who is a vampire.

This essay argues that objections to nonblack suffering in Trump’s America obscure racism’s primary operation as a cut that makes human body from racialized flesh. It returns to Frank B. Wilderson III’s argument in “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Whither the Slave in Civil Society?” (2003) that the civil society that organizes our political and social relationality is necessarily exclusionary to posit a libidinal critique. It adds to Wilderson’s intervention a paradigmatic analysis of social and political constructions of time to call not for inclusivity, which Trump betrays as an antiblack praxis, but to call for the exclusivity of the black feminine.

This paper offers a critical re-reading of the understanding of stigma forged by the North American sociologist Erving Goffman in his influential Stigma: Notes on the Management of a Spoiled Identity (1963). One of the most widely read and cited sociologists in history, Goffman was already famous when Stigma was published in 1963. His previous books were best-sellers and Stigma alone has sold an astonishing 800,000 copies in the fifty years since its publication. Given its considerable influence, it is surprising how little sustained engagement there has been with the historicity of Goffman’s account. This paper resituates Goffman’s conceptualization of stigma within the historical context of Jim Crow and the black freedom struggles that were shaking "the social interaction order" to its foundations at the very moment he crafted his account. It is the contention of this paper that these explosive political movements against the ‘humiliations of racial discrimination’ invite revision of Goffman’s decidedly apolitical account of stigma (Robinson, 2000, p. 318). This historical revision of Goffman’s stigma concept builds on existing body of critical work on ‘the relationship between race, segregation and the epistemology of sociology within the United States’ (Bhambra, 2014). Throughout, it reads Goffman’s Stigma through the lens of ‘Black Sociology’, a field of knowledge that here designates not only formal sociological scholarship, but political manifestos, journalism, creative writing, oral histories and memoirs. It is the argument of this paper that placing Goffman’s concept of stigma into critical dialogue with black epistemologies of stigma allows for a timely reconceptualization of stigma as a governmental technology of ‘racialized capitalism’ (Robinson, 2000).

Lauryn Hill was twenty-three years old when her 1998 solo debut album, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, burst upon the global music market and swiftly became one of the most acclaimed and popular hip hop albums in history. Heralded by a hip hop beat, crooning love songs and rally cries, beaming black pride, and clamoring womanist wisdom, Hill scaled the treacherous summit of global pop stardom and was hailed as genius and prophetess. However, within four years Hill fell from the favor of much of the mainstream market. To have many pundits tell it, she veered across the thin line that supposedly separates genius from madness and prophecy from lunacy. This essay explores how various publics and pundits impute madness to Lauryn Hill and--most centrally--how Hill herself produces, mobilizes, and brandishes madness for radical art-making and self-making. Toward these aims, I closely examine her 2002 Unplugged 2.0 live album, as well as other performances, interviews, and media accounts. Her voice tuned to a mad pitch, Hill speaks truth to power and issues a sound that sometimes booms, sometimes sputters. Ultimately, this meditation upon Hill's life and work yields rich insights on black womanhood, performance, protest, and madness in American popular culture and beyond.

More than 95 percent of criminal convictions in the U.S. never go to trial, as the vast majority of defendants forfeit their constitutional rights to due process in the pervasive practice of plea bargaining. This paper analyzes the relationship between American mass incarceration and this mass forfeiture of procedural justice by situating the practice of plea bargaining in the normative framework drawn by recent Supreme Court rulings and the recent proliferation of criminal statutes, including mandatory minimum sentencing legislation. Looking at systemic racial disparities in sentence severity and incarceration rates for otherwise similarly situated defendants, I argue that, rather than a voluntary waiver of constitutional rights, this mass forfeiture of due process rights ought to be conceptualized as the product of an entrenched system of procedural entrapment. Such entrapment, I argue, ought to be abolished not only on grounds of procedural injustice, but because the practice refashions rather than redresses forms of racial domination derived from prior eras. The article concludes by exploring the tactic of mass conscientious plea refusal through the collectively organized assertion of constitutional due process rights as a strategy of resisting mass incarceration.

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.

The science fiction concept of alterity is the author’s attempt to depict a level of difference that expands the reader’s spheres of knowledge. An ironic example of this concept is represented in Suzanne Collins’ depiction of Rue in the first Hunger Games novel, where Rue, a young Black girl, is characterized as innocent and childlike, a depiction that counters stereotypical portrayals of Black girlhood. Using critical discourse analysis (CDA) and systemic functional linguistics (SFL), the author acknowledges how the combination of language, characterization, and Black girl stereotypes influenced some readers’ interpretations of Rue’s race. For elementary and middle school teachers, the author notes the implications of using CDA and SFL with students to assist them in delving more deeply into text analysis and connecting it to larger societal practices, emphasizing how hegemonic discourses can be reified or dismantled on micro and macro levels.

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.

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.

The concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”—a precursor to “intersectionality”— was introduced in a social movement context by the Combahee River Collective (CRC) in pamphlet form in 1977. Addressing Black lesbians’ and feminists’ experiences of invisibility within white male-dominated New Left and socialist politics, male-dominated civil rights, Black nationalist, and Black radical organizing, and white-dominated women’s liberation and lesbian feminist movements, the CRC argues for an “integrated analysis and practice” of struggle against “racial, sexual, heterosexual and class oppression” (CRC 1977/1981/1983, 210). I argue the CRC articulates and problematizes sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows racialized lesbian visibility and resists the tendency to “heterosexualize” women of color feminisms. I delineate three aspects of the concept of “interlocking systems of oppression”: its attentiveness to the phenomenological simultaneity of multiple oppressions; its synthesis of identity politics and coalition politics; its immanent critique of socialist concepts of class and class struggle. While some accounts of “intersectionality”—the now-predominant way of referencing the multiplicity of identities and oppressions—tend to reproduce a race-gender dyad (or a race-gender-class triad), the CRC notably articulates sexuality as a category of analysis from a “queer” subject position which avows lesbian visibility and thereby enables contemporary readers to resist the tendency to “heterosexualise” intersectionality—and women of colour feminisms more generally.

What does it mean to be Black? If Blackness is not biological in origin but socially and discursively constructed, does the meaning of Blackness change over time and space? In Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology, Michelle M. Wright argues that although we often explicitly define Blackness as a “what,” it in fact always operates as a “when” and a “where.”

By putting lay discourses on spacetime from physics into conversation with works on identity from the African Diaspora, Physics of Blackness explores how Middle Passage epistemology subverts racist assumptions about Blackness, yet its linear structure inhibits the kind of inclusive epistemology of Blackness needed in the twenty-first century. Wright then engages with bodies frequently excluded from contemporary mainstream consideration: Black feminists, Black queers, recent Black African immigrants to the West, and Blacks whose histories may weave in and out of the Middle Passage epistemology but do not cohere to it.

Physics of Blackness takes the reader on a journey both known and unfamiliar—from Isaac Newton’s laws of motion and gravity to the contemporary politics of diasporic Blackness in the academy, from James Baldwin’s postwar trope of the Eiffel Tower as the site for diasporic encounters to theoretical particle physics’ theory of multiverses and superpositioning, to the almost erased lives of Black African women during World War II. Accessible in its style, global in its perspective, and rigorous in its logic, Physics of Blackness will change the way you look at Blackness.
$25.00 paper ISBN 978-0-8166-8730-5
$87.50 cloth ISBN 978-0-8166-8726-8
240 pages, 5 1/2 x 8 1/2, February 2015

What does the image of Rachel Dolezal want? This paper intersects myth, violence and racial structures by examining how the acceptance of Dolezal achieves the exact opposite of post-racialism and racial justice. I put forward reasoning that outlines how this phenomenon and the acceptance of Dolezal’s rhetoric is part of an ongoing cultural violence against people of colour. Race is a social construct however I object to the notion that this entire construct can be collapsed by the braiding of one’s hair or the application of a darker shade of makeup.

You can also locate this piece at Academe, the AAUP Blog--where you can leave comments.

https://academeblog.org/2018/03/31/i-will-not-be-silenced-the-vital-work-of-free-expression-in-the-academy-in-the-education-of-free-citizens/

Enclosed is an account of my continuing efforts to gain greater attention and solidarity concerning recent attempts to repress academic freedom--and the university administrations who, out of either paralyzing aversion to controversy or active complicity, aid and abet the effort to intimidate, harass, and ultimately silence professors. There is so much more to be said--especially about the connection between the deliberate work of white nationalists, the suckering of students into believing that education exists for not other purpose than better wages, and the privatization and/or corporatization of the academy.

We live in dark times, and apparently it must get yet darker before the light.

The article elaborates an account of exploitation in romantic love relationships. As a starting point, I borrow Vrousalis’ analytical Marxist definition of economic exploitation under capitalism. Second, I briefly discuss Federici’s conception of capitalist exploitation of women labour in the family and in the romantic couple. I introduce and discuss, then, Jónasdóttir’s theory of “love power”, which currently counts as the most elaborated critique of exploitation affecting sexual love. I proceed sketching out my own account, according to which love power is not extracted or appropriated, as Jónasdóttir puts it, but rather suffocated as result of what I call “romantic exploitation”. In this view, lovers’ positions of vulnerability and power over, that may give rise to exploitation, are brought about by an intersection of norms defining and regulating notions of romance, gender, race, labour, etc.

Working within black (religious) studies and theorized against the backdrop of the horrific events of the white supremacist rally in Charlottesville, VA in the summer of 2017, this article considers the sacred as proximately black, where the sacred here signals that frenzied surplus whose sociopoetic force discloses another horizon of existence beyond the terms of order. This practice of a sacral blackness I here think about under the rubric of “black malpractice” as a poetics of the sacred. Among my interlocutors are Georges Bataille, Nathaniel Mackey, Dawn Lundy Martin, Fred Moten, Cedric Robinson, Denise Ferreira da Silva, and Sylvia Wynter.

Should I wear my Afro to my predominantly white workplace? Is one of the many questions Black Canadian women ask themselves due to the persisting anti-Black racist ideals that impede their livelihoods. This paper expands on Althea Prince’s foundational book The Politics of Black Women’s Hair (2009) by continuing discussions held with Black and mixed raced Canadian women about the societal perceptions of Black hair. The discriminatory practices demonstrated though case studies involving respectability politics in the workforce contradict Canadian values of multiculturalism. By highlighting Canadian contributions to the Natural Hair Movement, this paper identifies Black women’s self-led initiatives that challenge negative ideas surrounding their hair while encouraging Black women to claim space and exercise their right to be. Their complex views thus force a reconsideration of Canadian notions of Black presence. The Black women studied articulate this reassessment according to their own terms while concretizing their positions as valued Canadian citizens.

This article offers a close reading of The Order of Things by Michael Foucault and The Human Condition by Hannah Arendt, to argue that the positioning of the Human within scientific and political thought necessitates an underscoring of violence as it relates to blackness. This position interrogates how Arendt positions slavery in the Greek polis and the Roman res republica to establish her foci on modern political life. I offer an analysis of Prigg v. The Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, as complicating Arendt’s political dichotomy, by shifting focus to the legal history of American slavery. Prigg rewrites and establishes the demarcations of US Federal and State law. However, the majority opinion and dissents make fleeting reference to the fugitive slave in question, Margaret Morgan, and the possibility that she may have been sexually violated while being forcibly returned to slavery. I conclude that the contours of this case, specifically the erasure of sexual violence, demonstrate how racial slavery provides contexts to modern political life not explored by Arendt’s primary concern with slavery in antiquity.

This essay advances from Erica Edwards' theorization of “sex after the black normal” to understand the confined insurgency of Beyoncé's racial and gender lyricality. That is, Beyoncé is situated within the “Black normal,” but, while amid its tempered normality, she fissures its purported seamlessness. What this essay seeks to do is demonstrate Beyoncé's insurgency within the Black normal. Using her early solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), as a benchmark for her initial immersion in the tenets and “terms and conditions” of the Black normal, then juxtaposing the Beyoncé of Dangerously in Love to her latest album, Lemonade (2016), which captures her full-fledged insurgency and hostile takeover of the Black normal, this essay will make clear that Beyoncé has utterly fractured the continuity of the Black normal in order to incite revolutionary de- and reconstruction of (valid) racial and gender inhabitation.