#CallforPapers: #Legacies of #BlackFeminisms @theAAG for #AAG2016 in #SanFran

by EES Social Media Fellow

Please respond by: October 26, 2015 to: latoya.eaves@gmail.com andpavithra@email.unc.edu

This paper session invites a discussion concerning the legacies, trajectories, and possibilities of Black feminist intellectual and political traditions. Following challenges by women of color to mainstream white-dominated feminist projects that have allied (at times uncomfortably) with U.S. imperialism abroad, the prison-industrial complex domestically and other racialized projects, we centralize Black feminist frameworks in a multivalent, multiscalar resurgence of interest in Women of Color and transnational feminisms. Scholarly critiques of multiracialism and ‘people of color’ models of anti-racism (eg. Sexton 2008, 2010; Wilderson 2010; Vargas 2012) alongside a series of social and political movements articulating the specificity of anti-Black violence (Black Lives Matter, Million Hoodies, Black Youth Project, Dream Defenders, etc.) have once again raised the question of how to analyze intersectional systems of oppression. Given the widespread use of Black feminist thought in and beyond geography, we are interested in capturing the relationship between Black feminisms and spatial knowledges. We desire to work against the commodification of Black feminist thought through raw engagement with the roots/routes of Black feminisms, physical materialities, and imaginative configurations. We draw attention to recent publications (Da Silva 2014; McKittrick 2014, ed.; Weheliye 2014) that revisit the critical scholarship of Black feminists, such as Angela Davis, Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, Audre Lorde and the Combahee River Collective, in order to posit what Black feminisms can offer for understanding the workings of racism and racial capitalism; for liberatory praxis and theory; and political and economic decolonization.

Paper Topics include:

  • Black feminist frameworks in geographic research and/or the use of Black feminist thought in challenging critical methods/epistemologies in geography

  • Gendered perspectives in racialized state violence, police brutality, and national acts of terror (prison industrial complex, the Charleston massacre)

  • Centralizing Black womanhood in geographic knowledge production

  • Black feminist utility in deconstructing social structures – racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, xenophobia – and largely perpetuated in/through patriarchy, imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism

  • Queer critiques of and contributions to Black feminist articulations of home, territory and space

  • African diasporic feminisms, Black internationalist feminisms, and/or postcolonial feminisms in geography

  • Empirical and theoretical linkages and disjunctures between/among Black feminist thought and women of color feminisms

aagCitations and Recommended Readings

  • Alexander, M. J.. 2006. Pedagogies of crossing: Meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory, and the sacred.

  • Collins, P. H.. 2008. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment.

  • Combahee River Collective. 1978. The Combahee River collective statement:Black feminist organizing in the seventies and eighties.

  • Da Silva, D. F.. 2014. “Toward a black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of blackness towards the end of the world”. The Black Scholar, 44 (2).

  • Davis, A.. 1983. Women, race, and class.

  • hooks, b. 1995. Killing rage: Ending racism.

  • ——–. 1999. Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism

  • Lorde, A. 1984. Sister outsider.

  • McKittrick, Katherine, ed.. 2014. Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis

  • ———. 2006. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle

  • Mirza, H. S., ed. 1997. Black British feminism: A reader.

  • Sexton, J. 2010. Racial theories in context

  • ———. 2008. Amalgamation schemes: Antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism.

  • Spillers, H. J. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.”Diacritics, 17(2), 64–81.

  • Spillers, H., Hartman, S., Griffin, F. J., Eversley, S., & Morgan, J. L. 2007. “Whatcha gonna do? Revisiting “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.”Women’s Studies Quarterly, 35 (1/2), 299–309.

  • Vargas, J. 2012.  “Gendered Antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging critical black Brazilian studies.” Cultural Dynamics 24(1),  3-11.

  • Wilderson, F. B. 2010. Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms.

  • Weheliye, A. G. 2014. Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human.

  • Wynter, S. 1990. “Beyond Miranda’s meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’.” Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature: 355-72.

For additional information, please contact the organizers:

LaToya Eaves, latoya.eaves@gmail.com

Pavithra Vasudevan, pavithra@email.unc.edu