The Occult of True Black Womanhood: Critical Demeanor and Black Feminist Studies

Signs ◽  
1994 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 591-629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ann duCille
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood

Black Woman's Gaze. Nomusa Makhubu Unearths the Colonial Archive

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Teresa Fazan
Keyword(s):  
Knowledge Production ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Archival Studies ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Colonial Archive ◽  
Colonial Violence ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

The paper proposes an analysis of Nomusa Makhubu’s 2014 artwork Umasifanisane I (Comparison I) within the context of critical black feminist studies (Sara Ahmed, Hortense J. Spillers, Sylvia Wynter) and archival studies (Ariella Azoulay, Tina M. Campt). The author's primary aim is to show how dominating historical narratives can be disrupted with the means of insightful archival research, artistic reappropriation, and montage, which actively alter postcolonial knowledge production. Makhubu’s project demonstrates that although history itself will not solve the problems arising from colonial violence, working with a visual archive and persisting in staying with the trouble may propose new ways of representing black womanhood.

Conjuring Caliban's Woman: Moving beyond Cinema's Memory of Man in Praise House (1991)

Hypatia ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Ayanna Dozier
Keyword(s):  
Short Film ◽  
Experimental Film ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Poetic Structure ◽  
Normative Order ◽  
Mass Accumulation ◽  
Sylvia Wynter

Abstract Julie Dash's experimental short film, Praise House (1991), situates conjuring as both a narrative and formal device to invent new memories around Black womanhood that exceed our representation within the epistemes of Man. I view Praise House as an example of conjure-cinema with which we can evaluate how Black feminist filmmakers, primarily working in experimental film, manipulate the poetic structure and aesthetics of film to affect audiences rather than rely on representational narrative alone. Following the scholarship of Sylvia Wynter, I use Man to refer to the representational body of the Western episteme that defines value through mass accumulation. It is through Wynter's scholarship that we find the ontological emancipation from Man that is Caliban's woman, who represents discourse beyond our normative, colonial mode of feeling/knowing/being. Through an analysis of Praise House that foregrounds film's ability to generate affect via its aesthetics, this article argues that aesthetics can similarly enact the same power of conjure as found in Praise House's narrative, and as such conjures an epistemological rupture to our normative order that is Caliban's woman.

scholarly journals Vibing with Blackness: Critical Considerations of Black Panther and Exceptional Black Positionings

Arts ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (4) ◽  
pp. 85
Author(s):  
Derilene (Dee) Marco
Keyword(s):  
Popular Culture ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Diaspora Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Panther

This article considers different ways in which Blackness is represented as exceptional in the 2018 film Black Panther. It also considers other iterations of Black visibility and legibility in the current popular culture context which appears to privilege Black narratives in interesting ways. The essay uses conceptual lenses from diaspora studies, Afro science fiction and Black feminist studies to critically engage the film and to critically question the notion of Black exceptionalism.

Black Feminist Studies: The Case of Anna Julia Cooper

2009 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 11-15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Beverly Guy-Sheftall
Keyword(s):  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Anna Julia Cooper

Genres of History and the Practice of Loss

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 167-174
Author(s):  
Marisa J. Fuentes
Keyword(s):  
British Empire ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
Final Section ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Coffee Plantation ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Family Stories ◽  
Critical Questions ◽  
Book Discussion ◽  
The Caribbean

This book discussion essay addresses critical questions concerning historical methodologies when working with the archives of Atlantic-world slavery. Thinking with Hazel V. Carby’s Imperial Intimacies: A Tale of Two Islands, the essay considers the power of historical memoir to narrate the violence of the British empire through family stories. The long-intertwined histories of England and the Caribbean inevitably lead to slavery’s archives, and in the final section of the book, Carby describes the lives of her earliest ancestors on a Jamaican coffee plantation. In response, the essay author revisits her hesitations regarding slavery’s archive and the stakes of approaching the silences of enslaved people in the records. Drawing on pivotal work in black feminist studies, this essay rearticulates the nuances of Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulation” to bring attention back to archival boundaries and the limits of historical methodologies that make certain imaginings most difficult.

scholarly journals Resistance and liberation discourse in Audre Lorde’s “Sister Outsider”

2020 ◽  
Vol 1 (14) ◽  
pp. 107-113
Author(s):  
I. Yakovenko
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Feminist Studies ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Feminist Ideology ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
Second Wave ◽  
Wide Usage

The article focuses on the essays of Audre Lorde — African American writer, Black feminist and activist. Through the lens of African American and Feminist Studies the essay collection “Sister Outsider” by Audre Lorde is analysed as a political manifesto which critiques the Second Wave feminism, and suggests a unique perspective on issues of racism, sexism, heterosexism, homophobia, women’s erotic and creativity. Although Lorde’s early poetry collections are characterised by the wide usage of authentic imagery and Afro-centric mythology, the later poetry, the 1982 biomythography “Zami: A New Spelling of My Name”, and the 1984 essay collection “Sister Outsider”, are politicised writings in sync with the Black / feminist consciousness. In the essays, Audre Lorde argues that institutionalised rejection of race / gender / class / sexual differences stems from the Western European patriarchal frame thus aggravating discriminating practices. The writer emphasises the role of the oppressed groups — ethnic minorities, women, the working class, in the destruction of the societal patriarchal ‘norms’. Audre Lorde’s essay collection has become instrumental in initiating the feminist discussion on intersectionality, which will later be theorized by Kimberle Crenshaw, and in articulation of the Black feminist ideology. Lorde’s critique of White feminists is triggered by their dismissal of the non-European women’s heritage, and by their unwillingness to acknowledge differences inside the gender group, which for the Black feminist Audre Lorde was an adoption of the patriarchal frame of reference. The poet’s timely theory of differences urges to break up silences concerning societal discriminating practices towards the oppressed groups, thus challenging the hierarchies of powers in the society.

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