Black Gathering

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Jane Cervenak
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Gayl Jones ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Black Aesthetics ◽  
Alternative Spaces ◽  
Ways Of Being

In Black Gathering Sarah Jane Cervenak engages with Black artists and writers who create alternative spaces for Black people to gather free from interruption or regulation. Drawing together Black feminist theory, critical theories of ecology and ecoaesthetics, and Black aesthetics, Cervenak shows how novelists, poets, and visual artists such as Gayl Jones, Toni Morrison, Clementine Hunter, Samiya Bashir, and Leonardo Drew advance an ecological imagination that unsettles Western philosophical ideas of the earth as given to humans. In their aestheticization and conceptualization of gathering, these artists investigate the relationships among art, the environment, home, and forms of Black togetherness. Cervenak argues that by offering a formal and conceptual praxis of gathering, Black artists imagine liberation and alternative ways of being in the world that exist beyond those Enlightenment philosophies that presume Black people and earth as given to enclosure and ownership.

scholarly journals Black feminist intersectionality is vital to group analysis: Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in?

2021 ◽  
pp. 053331642199776
Author(s):  
Suryia Nayak
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black People ◽  
Black Feminism ◽  
Group Analysis ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Online Platform ◽  
Large Group ◽  
Diversity And Inclusion ◽  
Analytical Structure ◽  
The Relationship

This is the transcript of a speech I gave at an Institute of Group Analysis (IGA) event on the 28th November 2020 about intersectionality and groups analysis. This was momentous for group analysis because it was the first IGA event to focus on black feminist intersectionality. Noteworthy, because it is so rare, the large group was convened by two black women, qualified members of the IGA—a deliberate intervention in keeping with my questioning of the relationship between group analysis and power, privilege, and position. This event took place during the Covid-19 pandemic via an online platform called ‘Zoom’. Whilst holding the event online had implications for the embodied visceral experience of the audience, it enabled an international attendance, including members of Group Analysis India. Invitation to the event: ‘Why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis’ Using black feminist intersectionality, this workshop explores two interconnected issues: • Group analysis is about integration of parts, but how do we do this across difference in power, privilege, and position? • Can group analysis allow outsider ideas in? This question goes to the heart of who/ what we include in group analytic practice—what about black feminism? If there ‘cannot possibly be one single version of the truth so we need to hear as many different versions of it as we can’ (Blackwell, 2003: 462), we need to include as many different situated standpoints as possible. Here is where and why the black feminist idea of intersectionality is vital to group analysis. On equality, diversity and inclusion, intersectionality says that the ‘problems of exclusion cannot be solved simply by including black [people] within an already established analytical structure’ (Crenshaw, 1989: 140). Can group analysis allow the outsider idea of intersectionality in?

Earthworks: Visual Artists for the Earth Group

Leonardo ◽  
1987 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 205
Author(s):  
Allison Butler
Keyword(s):  
Visual Artists ◽  
The Earth

Using a Feminist Paradigm (Intersectionality) to Study Conservative Women: The Case of Pro-life Activists in Italy

2019 ◽  
Vol 16 (2) ◽  
pp. 552-580 ◽  
Author(s):  
Martina Avanza
Keyword(s):  
Social Identities ◽  
Sexual Practices ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Intersectionality Theory ◽  
Singular Form ◽  
Monolithic Group ◽  
The Social ◽  
Conservative Women ◽  
Ways Of Being ◽  
Pro Life

AbstractThis article builds on ethnographic research concerning the Italian pro-life movement and argues for the use of intersectionality theory in studying conservative women. The article suggests, first, that understanding conservative movements necessitates linking their political claims to the social identities of their activists, as would be the case for any other social movement (e.g., feminism). These social identities are as complex and intersectional as any other: a white, upper-class pro-life activist is no less intersectional than a black feminist from a poor background. Concomitantly, there is no unique feminism, but rather a plurality of feminisms, a diversity that intersectionality facilitates the identification of. The same is true for pro-life movements, but scholars tend to use the singular form to talk about conservatism; in this article, I explore the use of the plural to show that pro-life women do not constitute a monolithic group. On the contrary, these women are diverse in terms of their reproductive stories, their working status, and their class, race, and sexual practices, and this diversity translates into different ways of being pro-life. Second, recognizing this complexity does not suggest a natural link between feminism and conservatism. Alternatively, I suggest that a better understanding of conservative women can only be reached if they are studied on their own terms.

“Sometimes It Seems You’re in Another World”

2020 ◽  
Vol 35 (2) ◽  
pp. 125-157
Author(s):  
Jamie Ann Rogers
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
The United States ◽  
Value Systems ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Social Death ◽  
Black Film ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Mise En Scene ◽  
Feminist Aesthetics ◽  
Ways Of Being

This article traces the development of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics within the LA Rebellion, a film movement made up primarily of Black film students at UCLA from 1970 to the late 1980s. It argues that these aesthetics are integral to the movement’s heterogeneous but radical politics, even as the filmmakers express them through widely different means. The article focuses primarily on three films that span the final decade in which Rebellion filmmakers were active at UCLA: Barbara McCullough’s Water Ritual #1: An Urban Rite of Purification (1979), Alile Sharon Larkin’s A Different Image (1982), and Zeinabu irene Davis’s Cycles (1989). Each of these films’ renderings of Afrocentric feminist aesthetics—through attention to African oral and mythical traditions, African and Pan-African-inflected mise-en-scène, rich col-oration and film stock, and play with nonlinear, nonteleological time—register at once the sedimented condition of patriarchal anti-Blackness in the United States and Black feminists’ ongoing projects of freedom that perdure within and despite that condition. In many ways, such representations anticipate contemporary Black feminist grapplings with recent Black studies scholarship that orbit around Afro-pessimist theories of Black ontology and social death. Through their expressions of Afrocentric feminist forms of communal, caring, and creative living, the films represent a form of Black social life that expresses value systems and ways of being that are incompatible with social death, even when they are inevitably moored within its ontological structure.

Be Here Now: The South is a Portal

2020 ◽  
pp. 152-160
Author(s):  
Sara Makeba Daise
Keyword(s):  
South Carolina ◽  
Lived Experiences ◽  
Ways Of Knowing ◽  
Cultural Continuity ◽  
The South ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Black Girl ◽  
Indigenous Identity ◽  
Convergence Point ◽  
Ways Of Being

A queer Black girl re-imagines the South Carolina lowcountry as a portal for the fusion of Africana (Gullah Geechee) and Indigenous identity, spirituality, resistance, and ways of knowing. An estimated 40-60% of enslaved Africans entered America through the Charleston, SC port; their descendants’ cultural continuity resulting in the evolution of Gullah Geechee culture. What wealth of knowledge can we uncover when we consider South Carolina -- the 2nd richest slave state in the nation, and the birthplace of the Secession -- as a portal, and convergence point of Africana and Indigenous knowledge, ways of being, magic, and possibility? Interpreting the lived experiences of Africana and Indigenous people in South Carolina, through Afrofuturist and Womanist/Black Feminist lenses transform ideas about The South, who we are, and what we are capable of.

THE INTERSECTIONAL FIFTH BLACK WOMAN

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 527-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
Devon W. Carbado ◽  
Mitu Gulati
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Black Men ◽  
Black Woman ◽  
White Women ◽  
Feminist Criticism ◽  
Social Categories ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Self Presentation ◽  
Men 2 ◽  
Ways Of Being

AbstractIn 1989, Kimberlé Crenshaw published Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics, an article that drew explicitly on Black feminist criticism, and challenged three prevailing frameworks: 1) the male-centered nature of antiracist politics, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual Black men; 2) the White-centered nature of feminist theorizing, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women; and 3) the “single-axis”/sex or race-centered nature of antidiscrimination regimes, which privileged the experiences of heterosexual White women and Black men. Crenshaw demonstrated how people within the same social group (e.g., African Americans) are differentially vulnerable to discrimination as a result of other intersecting axes of disadvantage, such as gender, class, or sexual orientation.This essay builds on that insight by articulating a performative conceptualization of race. It assumes that a judge is sympathetic to intersectionality and thus recognizes that Black women are often disadvantaged based on the intersection of their race and sex, among other social factors. This essay asks: How is that judge likely to respond to a case in which a firm promotes four Black women but not the fifth? The judge could conclude that there is no discrimination because the firm promoted four people (Black women) with the same intersectional identity as the fifth (a Black woman). We argue that this evidentiary backdrop should not preclude a finding of discrimination. It is plausible that our hypothetical firm utilized racially associated ways of being—performative criteria (self presentation, accent, demeanor, conformity, dress, and hair style)—to differentiate among and between the Black women. The firm might have drawn an intra-group, or intra-intersectional, line between the fifth Black women and the other four based on the view that the fifth Black woman is “too Black.” We describe the ease with which institutions can draw such lines and explain why doing so might constitute impermissible discrimination. Our aim is to broaden the conceptual terms upon which we frame both social categories and discrimination.

Post-Black Art and the Resurrection of African American Satire

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Derek Conrad Murray
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Subject Matter ◽  
Critical Survey ◽  
Visual Artists ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Black Art ◽  
Generational Shift ◽  
Glenn Ligon ◽  
Contemporary Artists

This chapter undertakes a critical survey of a number of the most prominent African American visual artists whose satirical work engages with the “Post-Black” designation coined by Thelma Golden and Glenn Ligon for the 2001 Freestyle show at the Studio Museum in Harlem. This chapter argues that “Post-Black” artists represent a generational shift in subject matter, style, and rhetoric, separating these artists from those of the Civil Rights period. Key to this generational shift are the frustrations that accompany notions of identity and belongingness that contemporary artists find to be stifling and exclusionary.

scholarly journals May They Reminisce Over You: On The Potential of Archives as Homespace

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robin Margolis
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Heritage ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Black People ◽  
Community Research ◽  
Bell Hooks ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Marginalized Groups ◽  
Feminist Scholar ◽  
Participatory Archives ◽  
A Site

For archives preserving the cultural heritage of artists and marginalized groups, community memories entangle with memories of community displacement . How can we as memory workers promote the potential of our collections to serve as hermeneutic aids in the transmission of cultural and social heritage? This paper weighs the turn toward participatory archives as form of liberation against the liberatory work located within Black Feminist scholar bell hooks conception of “homeplace as a site of resistance,” where “all black people [can] strive to be subjects, not objects.” (hooks, 1999) To investigate the potential of archives to act as homeplace, this paper explores the author’s design of a proposed community research project of a collection at La MaMa Archives. It argues for transforming the process of digitizing cultural heritage into an opportunity to reshape the collection in accordance with principles of participatory archiving. It theorizes methods of engaging and partnering with Jeannette Bastian’s “community of records” connected to different performances held by La MaMa, taking up the call by Anne Gilliland and Sue McKemmish to “reposition the subjects of records and all others involved or affected by the events documented in them as participatory agents.” (Bastian, 2003; Cox, 2015) By taking up the call for participatory archives, it advocates for the benefits of the practices of reminiscing and oral history to complement web-driven or more technologically oriented solutions often linked with participatory efforts. Anticipating the needs of the artists and community elders implicated within and involved as co-creators of these records, it integrates aspects of emerging models of continuum informatics and participatory appraisal with the professional practices of oral history and reminiscing work. It examines possibilities for integrating Leisa Gibbons Mediated Recordkeeping model with Jeffrey Dean Webster’s Heuristic Model of Reminiscing.

An Ethics of Discomfort

2019 ◽  
Vol 23 (3) ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Marina Magloire
Keyword(s):  
Cultural Difference ◽  
Black People ◽  
Imagined Community ◽  
Archival Research ◽  
Black Artists ◽  
Pan African

This essay traces the evolution of Katherine Dunham’s relationship with Haiti through archival research and a consideration of her 1969 ethnographic memoir, Island Possessed. It argues that primitivist discourses framing Vodou as an instinctive capacity latent in all people of African origins provided interwar black artists such as Dunham with a tantalizing possibility of Pan-African solidarity through which they could mobilize their desire for connection with an obscured past and an imagined community in the present. When Dunham found her 1930s fieldwork inevitably run aground on the wall of cultural difference, however, her initial feelings of discomfort in Haiti transformed her writing into an interrogation of the supposedly innate and homogeneous nature of blackness. The language and praxis of Vodou proved flexible enough to provide her with the vocabulary to articulate a more nuanced version of diasporic blackness beyond her preconceived notions of an easy or automatic alliance between all black people.

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