Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
L. H. Stallings
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Ralph Ellison ◽  
Black Literature ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Del Rio

This introductory chapter talks about sexual expressivity or explicitness in black literature and culture as a rejection of the Western will to truth, or the quest to produce a truth about sexuality, and underscores such truth as a joke. It describes how black cultural producers have strategized against the sexual con of white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy outside of politics. The chapter references novelist Ralph Ellison and former pornographic actress Vanessa del Rio as a way of underscoring lineages that have been ignored in the quest for a sexual politics, which includes pleasure and questions about agency. These questions need to be considered for black women, men, children, and transgender folk; and needs to begin in home fictions rather than home truths.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Regis M. Fox
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
American Art ◽  
African American Art ◽  
Sherley Anne Williams ◽  
Black Women Writers ◽  
Harriet Wilson ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Insight Into

The introduction examines processes by which nineteenth-century black women writers have been disassociated from legitimate forms of black struggle and defiance. Extending a definition of the liberal problematic, and situating liberal ideology critique as a viable mode of resistance, the introductory chapter specifies methodology and content. It also addresses the ways in which Harriet Wilson, Elizabeth Keckly, and Anna Julia Cooper undermine fundamental liberal and Enlightenment precepts including reason, individualism, and the foregrounding of a transcendental subject. Each of these mix-raced, working, widowed women relies on distinct tropes of embodiment in their writing to contest reigning prescriptions toward objectivity, while making visible the constraints of practices of inclusion. Charting a “becoming together” of earlier thinkers with contemporary African-American art in the vein of Sherley Anne Williams’ novel Dessa Rose, the introduction to Resistance Reimagined offers rich insight into literary perspectives of liberalism.

The Kinkiness of Turquoise

Groove Theory ◽  
2020 ◽  
pp. 182-223
Author(s):  
Tony Bolden
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Alice Walker ◽  
American Poetry ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Vocal Technique ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Bessie Smith ◽  
Critical Methods

This chapter showcases Betty Davis’s transposition of women’s blues into rock-inflected version of funk. Bolden advances two key arguments. First, Davis reprised the sexual politics and rebellious spirit exemplified by singers Bessie Smith and Ida Cox, for instance, and reinterpreted those principles in modern America. Second, Davis’s eroticism and sui generis style of funk, which she expressed in her recordings and onstage, reflected a sexual politics that served as a counterpart to those of black feminists writers such as Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and many others who were publishing coextensively. But whereas black feminist writers often wrote about black women in previous generations, Davis not only addressed contradictions that black women encountered in contemporary street culture; she also represented such X-rated sexual desires as sadomasochism in her songwriting. In addition, the chapter provides biographical information that contextualizes Davis’s route to the music industry, and Bolden uses critical methods from scholarship on African American poetry to illuminate Davis’s vocal technique. 

Black Women Remember Black Girls

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ruth Nicole Brown
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Sexual Politics ◽  
Black Girls ◽  
Black Girlhood ◽  
Material Conditions ◽  
Made In

This chapter shows how Black girlhood must be made—in SOLHOT the space of Black girlhood is made through time, a timing that is infused with the sacred and spirit. In SOLHOT, to “homegirl” means engaging Black girls in the name of Black girlhood as sacred work that implicates time. Sacred work acknowledges the ways spirit moves one to act, often beyond the material conditions of one's immediate circumstance. The chapter considers how homegirls remember SOLHOT as a sacred experience that makes Black girlhood possible. It then features a creative and collective memory constructed from the interview transcripts of eight SOLHOT homegirls and M. Jacqui Alexander's (2005) Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. The memory shows how homegirls' labor constructs SOLHOT as a methodology and cosmology that makes Black girlhood possible, affirms Black girls' lives, and enables personal and collective transformation.

scholarly journals Diane Abbott, misogynoir and the politics of Black British feminism’s anticolonial imperatives: ‘In Britain too, it’s as if we don’t exist’

2019 ◽  
Vol 68 (3) ◽  
pp. 508-523
Author(s):  
Lisa Amanda Palmer
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Social Theory ◽  
Body Politic ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Close Attention ◽  
Gendered Racism ◽  
Black British ◽  
English National Identity ◽  
Member Of Parliament

This article argues that it is remiss to understand the acute intensification of White supremacist politics in contemporary Britain without paying close attention to how this racism is inherently gendered and sexualised. This will be discussed in relation to the gendered racism of ‘misogynoir’ as experienced by the British Member of Parliament Diane Abbott. The article uses Shirley Anne Tate’s powerful analysis of the Sable-Saffron Venus in the English imaginary to argue that forms of British, and more explicitly English, national identity have been worked out on the back of systemic efforts to erase the material and epistemic presence of Black women in Britain from the British body politic. It further argues that the politics of erasure extends to the epistemic elision of Black British feminist theorising within the field of social theory. What then are the consequences and interplay of both the lived and epistemic acts of violence? I explore these issues by mapping Black British feminism’s anticolonial politics to argue that we should bring this tradition to bear in our analysis of this most recent iteration of racism in our contemporary times.

Motherhood, Anti-Apartheid, and Pan-African Politics

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Black Family ◽  
The United States ◽  
Domestic Sphere ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
A Site ◽  
Black Motherhood

This chapter examines how the gendered language of motherhood informed black international connections between South Africa and the United States. It argues that global black motherhood – defined as a form of transnational maternalist politics based around the shared experiences of black women in white supremacist societies – shaped racial politics on both sides of the Atlantic. It demonstrates how black women in the United States and South Africa transformed the domestic sphere into a site where citizenship claims could be made. By privileging their position within the home, as primary caregivers for the black family, they worked to stress the political significance of black motherhood in the global fight against white supremacy.

Black Internationalist Feminism

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Cheryl Higashida
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Economic Freedom ◽  
Third World ◽  
Black Belt ◽  
Self Determination ◽  
Economic Rights ◽  
The Third ◽  
The Third World

This introductory chapter describes Black internationalist feminism. Black internationalist feminism challenged heteronormative and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance, even centrality, of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. As a corollary of the Communist Party's Black Belt Nation Thesis—which prioritized African American struggles for equality, justice, and self-determination—women of the Black Left asserted that Black women had special problems that could not be deferred or subsumed within the rubrics of working-class or Black oppression and that in fact were integral to the universal struggle for human rights and economic freedom. Moreover, women of the Black Left understood that essential to the liberation of African Americans, the Third World, and the worldwide proletariat was the fight against heteropatriarchy, which exacerbated oppression within as well as between nations.

scholarly journals “It’s Not Just about Work and Living Conditions”: The Underestimation of the COVID-19 Pandemic for Black Canadian Women

2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (6) ◽  
pp. 210
Author(s):  
Melanie Knight ◽  
Renée Nichole Ferguson ◽  
Rai Reece
Keyword(s):  
Health Disparities ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Living Conditions ◽  
Black Communities ◽  
White Supremacist ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
News Stories ◽  
Black Canadian ◽  
Media Discourses ◽  
The Impact

The COVID-19 pandemic has increasingly been defined as the shecession for its disproportionate debilitating impact on women. Despite this gendered analysis, a number of health activists have called on governments to account for the experiences of Black communities as they are disproportionately suffering the effects of this pandemic. In the media’s address of the impact of the pandemic, we ask, what experiences are represented in news stories and are Black women present in these representations. Performing a content analysis of 108 news articles, a reading of media discourses through a racial lens reveals a homogenization of women’s experiences and an absence of the Black experience. In the small number of news stories that do focus on Black women, we see that the health disparities are not simply the result of precarious work and living conditions, but also the struggle against anti-Black racism on multiple fronts. In critiquing, however, we also bring forth the small number of news stories on the Black experience that speak to the desire and hope that can thrive outside of white supremacist structures.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document