Search Results

This chapter analyzes black feminist thought that grew out of civil rights-era activism. It highlights that while there is a broad scholarly understanding of black feminism, black feminists have often been hidden from public view. However, black women and black feminists have done much to alter what it means to be black and female in the United States. The chapter also specifically notes the origins of intersectionality in black feminist scholarship and the role that intersectionality continues to play in feminist discourses. It underlines not only the diversity of African American women's lived experiences—what it means to be simultaneously a racially minoritized individual but also a woman—but also the multiplicity of oppressions that black women experience, from racism to sexism and beyond.

This chapter examines Flo Kennedy’s leadership in creating a black feminist movement to challenge the critical linkages between all forms of oppression, especially racism and sexism. By 1972, while she was excited about the growth of the predominantly white feminist movement, she was also profoundly disappointed that the struggle still did not fully embrace a black feminist position and make challenging racism as well as sexism central to its political agenda. Thus, Kennedy worked to create interracial feminist organizations that emphasized a black feminist praxis. Her activism during this period was central to building a women’s movement that included women of all races as well as an independent black feminist movement. To Kennedy’s thinking, Shirley Chisholm’s quest for the presidential nomination was the perfect opportunity for white feminists to build an alliance and support a black feminist politics. In 1971 she created the Feminist Party in hopes of bringing together an inclusive group of feminists to support not simply the candidacy of the black congresswoman but black feminism more generally. Equally interested in advancing black feminist praxis, she worked to create the National Black Feminist Organization in 1973 and pushed black women to form their own autonomous black feminist movement.

This chapter meditates on how such a theory of queer reproduction might help one engage with the material and epistemological violences of the university, particularly as they manifest around the exclusion and extermination of Black feminist lives alongside the institutionalization of Black feminism. Following the lead of Barbara Christian, this chapter asks, what happens when academic generationality is interrupted by both cutting off of future generations of Black feminists through the abolishment of affirmative action and the premature death of Black feminists in the academy? This chapter examines the university itself as a biopolitical institution, and finds in Black feminism a vision for a different relationship of knowledge, futurity, and the political

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.

This essay argues that black cultural production responded to the progression-regression paradox of black politics—political progress on the one hand and obstructions to that progress on the other—by employing pragmatic political imaginative possibility (PPIP). In response to neoliberalism, black masculinist politics, slavery’s legacies, intraracial gender antagonisms, and anti-civil rights backlash, black cultural production uses PPIP to provide a radical solution to various obstructions to black freedom. The chapter foregrounds the black women’s literary renaissance as central to this artistic trend, demonstrating how it, alongside other modes of cultural expression, imagines how to make our world anew. The introduction insists that these artistic solutions require us to think outside of the existing sociopolitical order, using our imaginations to achieve freedom.

This chapter focuses on the strong influence of Black Power on the growth of women's liberation. “Black Power” refers to the winning of sufficient political power by poor black people. The chapter outlines the effect of Black Power on the liberation of black feminism. The chapter also tells about a different type of male chauvinism in the form of the black nationalist Left. The chapter states Black Power to be the basis for challenging male chauvinism. As stated in this chapter black feminism appears to have been produced by Black Power. Black Power also provided black women with training for organizing the Women's Liberation Movement. The chapter also discusses the effect of Black Power on white feminists.

This chapter focuses on the works of Amy Jacques Garvey and Jessie Fauset, women writers and activists of the New Negro movement in Harlem during the 1920s. This chapter provides an account of how these women's intellectual and practical endeavor contributed to internationalist black feminism. The chapter evaluates the position of these women in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Chapter 4 begins with an evaluation of how Amy Jacques Garvey carved a niche for herself within the movement including the manner with which she used her leadership role in the UNIA and her literary contribution in the Negro World in shaping black nationalism feminism. The chapter also discusses the works and contributions of Jessie Fauset in helping to shape feminist thought through her essays and novels. The chapter also discusses the fight of the black women to secure leadership roles in shaping a stand on racism and black nationalism wherein black women defined their roles in political and cultural issues wherein in the earlier times they were dominated by men who defined and diminish women within the domestic sphere.

This chapter gives an overview of the central arguments in Florynce “Flo” Kennedy as well as a brief synopsis of the chapters. Randolph demonstrates the central role of black feminists in post–World War II social and political movements. Many scholars, students, and people concerned with political issues assume black women did not engage in postwar feminist actions until after the development of the predominantly white second wave women’s movement. While scholars have begun challenging this historical inaccuracy, most works on postwar feminist radicalism still view black feminism as emerging largely in protest against exclusion by white feminists or in opposition to Black Power. This book demonstrates that black women were present at the creation of postwar feminist movements and articulated a black feminist agenda based on their position as African American women who experienced sexist and racist discrimination in forms that could not be pulled apart and fought separately.

Black women’s cultural production in the 1970s gained popular audience and critical acclaim for its frank disclosure of violence and inequity within black communities and by championing black feminist agency. This chapter situates black women’s literature and art in response to three intersecting sociopolitical movements roiling the nation: Black Power and Black Arts Movements, the emergence of second-wave feminism, and American involvement in Vietnam. The works in this chapter overturned long-standing expectations and stereotypes of respectability politics in depicting graphic, militarized violence; sexual openness; and skepticism about motherhood. In doing so, these works explored the attractions and shortcomings of militancy as a defense against domestic and national violence and promoted mutual respect between genders, sexual freedom, and the possibility of collaborative protest.

This chapter provides a history of Black internationalist feminism. It begins with the intertwinings of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the interwar years, with special attention to the Black Belt Nation Thesis, which produced political solidarities beyond the limited affiliations engendered and policed by U.S. liberal democracy. While putting the Black Belt Nation Thesis into practice entrenched Left masculinism more fully, several leading Black Communists transformed the meaning of self-determination to allow for intersectional analysis of race and gender and to address the “special oppressed status” of Black women. In doing so, African American Left women in particular paved the way for postwar Black feminism, which Claudia Jones definitively theorized. The chapter then demonstrates how the activism and analysis of African American women on the Old Left such as Maude White Katz and Louise Thompson Patterson laid grounds for postwar Black feminism.

This chapter examines the Africa American women who worked within the assumed interracial Young Women's Christian Association at both the local Colored Branch in New York City and the national Colored Committee levels. This chapter examines how the national YWCA leader and the YWCA workers of one of the most prominent Colored Branches operated within the context of relationships with black women, white women, and the YWCA including their involvement in the World War I relief programs. While working at purportedly interracial organization of the YWCA, black women often pursued policies in line with the thought of racial solidarity and the black leadership of black women. Their experience in segregated organizations such as the YWCA provided grounds for them to develop black feminist ways of thinking. The unending disputes between black women and white women in the early decades of the twentieth century also pushed black women to develop black nationalist feminism and black separatism. The chapter also discusses the impact of the pressure brought about by the proposal of the YMCA on the national level to merge with the YWCA in the 1920s.

Because reproductive respectability is such an important mode by which political and social legibility and value becomes sutured to literal physical life, this chapter extends this analysis to examine queer possibilities and futurities that might emerge from Black feminism’s theorization of reproduction and the queerness of what Orlando Patterson has called natal alienation. In particular, this chapter interrogates why a slew of texts from the 1980s and 1990s, including Gayl Jones’s novel Corregidora, Isaac Julien’s film Looking for Langston, Inge Blackman’s B.D. Women, and Rodney Evans’s Brother to Brother, look to the blues and jazz aesthetic of improvisation as a way of imagining a connection to foreclosed pasts and futures marked by contingency. Improvisation, which has been theorized as both invention and tradition, is an apt metaphor and method for describing the ways in which Blackness has been constituted through a simultaneously forced and foreclosed relationship to reproductive normativity. In this chapter, improvisation is the example of difference.

The Introduction lays out the goals of the project, elevating the importance of imagination in any efforts to resist stereotyped and homogeneous constructions of black masculinity. The author explains that the narratives she weaves of black men working to define themselves as thinking, feeling, human subjects are told against a backdrop of crisis. In setting up the relationship between grace and crisis in black men’s lives, the author, through several anecdotes, situates herself as a black woman scholar who frames her research on black masculinities through a black feminist lens. From her experiences raising three black sons to lessons learned from her maternal grandfather and father to pedagogical epiphanies, the author thinks critically about what are the stakes when rejecting crisis and imagining grace for black men and boys.

This chapter examines selections from Maya Angelou's autobiographies, identifying late-twentieth-century legacy of the post-World War II anticolonial Black Left. On one hand, Angelou's autobiographies contest the historiographic erasure of African Americans' internationalist identifications in the Bandung era, especially as they were animated by Black women. On the other hand, Angelou contributes to this erasure by emphasizing personal triumph and individual identity formation over sociohistorical narrative. Indeed, Angelou's remarkable popularity and cultural capital come at the expense of the revolutionary politics shared with comrades who have been exiled, persecuted, or otherwise banished from public memory. The chapter then considers how her writings and career provide an avenue for reclaiming Black feminism's postwar internationalist routes.

Thinking black held people together across their differences. This chapter explores how this holding-together worked, looking at how different groups articulated blackness as they spoke in its name, as well as looking at the materiality of black political cultures—how these operated within a wider expressive culture and how they were affectively charged. The chapter uses the case of the Soledad Brothers to study how Britons defined themselves and their politics as black. It shows their negotiation of Black Power’s often stark masculinity and its African American hegemony. It also draws attention to the processes and problems they encountered building up a political blackness premised on solidarity across differences of ethnicity and gender, making a case for the importance of the immersive and intimate dimensions of black political culture for such alliances.

This chapter examines Lorraine Hansberry's investments in existentialism in order to show that her play about African revolution, Les Blancs (1970), is a culmination of both her Black queer feminism and her internationalism. Hansberry framed Les Blancs as a response to Jean Genet's internationally acclaimed play, The Blacks—an absurdist meditation on power and race in the context of African decolonization; she attacked what she saw as the corrosive effects of The Blacks' existentialist despair and negation of revolutionary praxis. The chapter then argues that Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex provided theoretical scaffolding for Hansberry's Black internationalist feminism. As such, Beauvoir helped Hansberry interrogate dominant views of tragic lesbians, critique heteropatriarchal norms, and represent homosexuality as a political choice with implications for revolutionary movements.

This chapter argues that Audre Lorde's essays and poetry from the 1980s develop an overlooked yet significant strand of second-wave Black feminism that reveals continuities with postwar anticolonial internationalism. Lorde's poetry and prose from the mid-1980s on, after the invasion of Grenada, reveal that independent Black nationhood becomes an important political goal for her, one not yet superseded by “free” mobility or exilic diasporic communities. Moreover, it is in Lorde's post-invasion prose and poetry that she most explicitly and consistently explores a nationalist internationalism, positing that African Americans are morally and politically bound to support Third World and indigenous struggles for national sovereignty and that anticolonial struggles illuminate and impact African Americans' situation in the United States as an oppressed people.

This essay examines how the production, consumption, and adaptation of Shange’s play impacts black feminist collectivity as a response to communal violence. In For Colored Girls, an adaptation, filmmaker Tyler Perry commercializes Shange’s work, translating the radical form of the choreopoem into melodrama and normalizing the story of violence against women. In the decades between the premiere of the play (1974) and the debut of Perry’s film (2009), black feminists confront neoliberal assaults on collectivity. The adaptation of the play evidences the cultural impact of neoliberalism’s focus on individualism, transforming Shange’s play from a black feminist sacred object into a commercial one.