Academic literature on the topic 'Transnational Black Feminism'

Abstract In 1977 a collective of Black Lesbian Feminists published the Combahee River Collective Statement, a manifesto that defined and described the interlocking oppressions that they and other women of color were experiencing and the deleterious impact of these oppressions upon their lives. They committed themselves to a lifelong collective process and nonhierarchical distribution of power as they struggle(d) to envision and create a just society. Twenty-nine years after the appearance of the Combahee River Collective Statement, over one hundred African Feminists met in Accra, Ghana to formulate their own manifesto and ultimately adopt the Charter of Feminist Principles for African Feminists, which was first published in 2007 simultaneously in English and French. This paper reviews both statements and acknowledges their critical contributions to the evolution of Transnational Feminisms.

This essay collages theories (settler colonialism, transnational feminism, Black and Indigenous feminist thought, and critical theory) for the purpose of dialoguing together through land-based Black and Indigenous solidarities. In our dialogue, we invite readers to think about how choosing theories and identifying intentions is a methodology of coalition. We demonstrate how this might materialize in three coalition possibilities: faith communities, neoslavery for dispossession and erasure, and reimagining borders.

Western researchers often do not incorporate the voices of African women in their research endeavors; and a serious engagement in women’s health activism in Zimbabwe cannot happen without this preliminary step. Endarkened feminist epistemologies have theorized a social science that refuses to sidestep African women’s perspectives. As a corrective to conceptual quarantining of Black (African and African diasporic) feminist thought, the exciting body of literature in the field broadly characterized as Africana feminism has helped to legitimate the languages, discourses, challenges, unique perspectives, divergent experiences, and intersecting oppressions and privileges of African women’s and girls’ lives. In this article, we develop an emerging Africana feminist methodology to propose building a scholarship and activism database as well as guide an exploratory discussion of health activism in Zimbabwe.

This article aims to articulate a political formation that I term Indigenous internationalist feminism, which centers a critique of US imperialism and is premised on three intellectual and political traditions: radical Indigenous internationalism, Black left feminism, and queer Indigenous feminism. Indigenous internationalist feminism provides a framework for transnational Indigenous practices that seek to build counterhegemonic power with other anticolonial, anti-imperial, and anti-capitalist liberation struggles, both within and outside of the United States. At the center of these practices is an ethics of expansive relationality between humans, and between humans and our other-than-human kin.

<p><span><em>Um diálogo decolonial na colonial cidade de Cachoeira/BA</em> é um título apropriado para a entrevista que Ochy Curiel concedeu a Analba Brasão em julho de 2017. Ochy é uma das feministas mais conhecidas na América Latina. Ela transita/dialoga com/entre as teorias decoloniais, o feminismo negro e o feminismo lésbico e isso faz dela uma pesquisadora e ativista especialmente polêmica, pois, imbuída dessas teorias, ela propõe rupturas, releituras e ações políticas. Ochy esteve na Bahia como professora da primeira edição da <em>Internacional School of Transnational Decolonial Black Feminism</em>, ocorrida na Universidade Federal do Recôncavo da Bahia (UFRB) na cidade de Cacheira-BA.</span></p>

In this article, I provide the historical context for the reception of Audre Lorde’s biomythography Zami’s by Black women across the African diaspora as a backdrop for my own autoethnographic engagement of the book. I narrate my journey to claiming space within the field of autoethnography by anchoring my discussion in Zami and its themes. The goal of this work is to illustrate the crucial nature of autoethnographic work to transnational Black feminism, and its ongoing importance to women from and in marginalized communities.

Drawing on a yearlong qualitative research project with seven Black transnational women, this article employs a transnational Black feminist approach. It is guided by the following questions: What does it look like to conduct qualitative research rooted in a transnational Black feminist framework? What implications related to storytelling, reciprocity, and the relationships with participants emerge from this work? In exploring these questions, I consider some of the ways transnational Black feminist theory can be operationalized to counter re-inscriptions of dominant ideologies onto the research process with marginalized communities, particularly under consideration of contemporary national and transnational processes and discourses.

<p>The plays <em>Harlem duet </em>(1997) by African Canadian playwright Djanet Sears and <em>Desdemona </em>(2012) by Toni Morrison signify upon European texts aiming to carve out a new definition of what it means to be black in North America. Therefore both texts make for interesting reading in the study of (black) identity construction within US and Canadian contexts for, by revising Shakespeare’s <em>Othello</em>, they rethink and rewrite a social and racial reality unrelentingly disrupted by difference and hybridity. Sears’ play establishes a specific reading of Canadianness in dialogue with African America to erect a possibility of healing and inclusion, offering a feminist vision of the black self. Similarly, Morrison inscribes the voice of Africa within the US to conclude Sears’ account of a feminist and transnational subjectivity for blacks in North America. By reversing the manly ethos that characterized Shakespeare’s story and bringing the role of women to the front, both plays succeed in readjusting the Shakespearean story to render a feminist, transnational, cosmopolitan and democratic definition of the black female self.</p>

The purpose of this project was to examine how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten narrate, navigate and negotiate their girlhood experiences. As a Black woman from Sint Maarten, this project is important due to the lack of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls in the Dutch West Indies. This project utilized a qualitative approach that involved interview participant photography and semi-structured audio and video recorded interviews with 9 Afro-Caribbean girls who were 14-, 16- and 17-years old living in Sint Maarten. I analyzed the interview data and interpreted it using a combination of Black, Caribbean and transnational feminist frameworks which I named Afro-Caribbean transnational feminism. This framework specifically centers the lives and lived experiences of the girls. The findings show that Afro-Caribbean girls in Sint Maarten navigate their social worlds by negotiating different aspects of their lives, including their hair, appearance and food consumption to in various ways resist heteronormative ideas in Sint Maarten. This data serves as an important starting point and experiential reference to understand Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Caribbean broadly, and specifically in the Dutch West Indies.
Master of Science
The purpose of this project was to examine how Afro-Caribbean girls from the island of Sint Maarten narrate, navigate and negotiate their girlhood experiences. As a Black woman from Sint Maarten, this project is important due to the lack of sociological scholarship surrounding Black girls in the Dutch West Indies. This project utilized a qualitative approach that involved interview participant photography and audio and video recorded interviews guided by a set of questions. There were 9 Afro-Caribbean girls who were 14-, 16- and 17-years old living in Sint Maarten who participated in the project. I analyzed and interpreted their responses using a combination of Black, Caribbean and transnational feminist frameworks which I named Afro-Caribbean transnational feminism. This framework specifically centers the lives and lived experiences of the girls. The findings show that Afro-Caribbean girls in Sint Maarten navigate their social worlds by negotiating different aspects of their lives including, hair, appearance, and food consumption to in various ways resist heteronormative views, which aligns biological sex, sexuality, gender identity and gender roles, in Sint Maarten. This data serves as an important starting point and experiential reference to understand Afro-Caribbean girlhood in the Caribbean broadly, and specifically in the Dutch West Indies.

The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.
Doctor of Philosophy
The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.

The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.
Doctor of Philosophy
The United States and South Africa, exemplars of "archsegregation," have been constituted within an arc of historical racialized delineations which began with the centering, and subsequent overrepresentation, of European maleness and whiteness as the sole definition of Man. Globally present and persistent, these racialized delineations have been localized and spatially embedded through the tools of urban planning. This arc of racialized otherness, ineffectively erased, continues to inform the racially differentiated geospatial, health, social, and economic outcomes in contemporary urban form and functions for Black communities. It is within this historical arc, and against these differentiated outcomes, that contemporary urban discourse and contestation between individuals and institutions are situated. This historical othering provides not just a racialized geo-historical contextualization, but also works to preclude the recognition of the some of the most vulnerable urban community members. As urbanists and advocates strive to co-create urban space and place with municipalities, meeting the needs of these residents is imperative. In order to meet these needs, their lived experiences, and voices must be fully recognized and engaged in the processes and programs of urban co-creation, including in digital spaces and forums. Critical to achieving recognition acknowledging and situating contemporary digital discourses between local municipalities, Black residents, and Black networks within this historically racialized arc is necessary. In doing so, explore if, and how, race, specifically Blackness, is enacted in municipal digital discourse, whether these enactments serve to advance or impede resident recognition and participation, and how Black users, as residents and social network curators, engage and respond to these municipal discursive enactments. This exploratory research is a geographically and digitally multi-sited incorporated comparison of Chicago, Illinois, and Johannesburg South Africa. Using Twitter and ethnographic data collected between December 1, 2019, and March 31, 2020, this research layers digital ethnographic mixed methods and qualitive mixed methods, including traditional ethnographic, digital ethnographic, grounded theory, social change and discourse analysis, and frame analysis to explore three research goals. First, explore the digital discursive practices and frames employed by municipalities to inform, communicate with, and engage Black communities, and, if and how, these frames are situated within a historically racialized arc. Second, identify the ways in which Black residents, in dual discursive engagements with local municipalities and their own social networks, interact and engage with the municipal frames centering on Blackness. Third, through ethnographic narratives, acknowledge the marginalized residents of the Central Business District of Johannesburg, South Africa as "agents of knowledge," with critical and valuable knowledge claims which arise from their lived experiences anchored within racialized place and space. In doing so, support the efforts of these residents in recentering the validity of their knowledge claims in the co-creation of urban place and space. Additionally, in situating the city within a historically racialized arc develop novel frameworks, the racialized palimpsest city and syndemic segregation, through which to explore contemporary urban interactions and engagements.

In An Image of Africa, Chinua Achebe indicts Conrad’s Heart of Darkness for exemplifying the kind of purist rhetoric that has long benefited Western ontology while propagating reductive renderings of African experience. Edward Said refers to this dynamic as the way in which societies define themselves contextually against an imagined Other. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s fiction exposes how, by occupying cultural dominance, Western, white male values are normalized as universal. Nevertheless, these values are de-naturalized by their inconsistencies in the lived experiences of Adichie’s black, African women. Women who are at once aware of and participant in, the pretentions that underlie social interaction—pointing to the inevitability of performativity and disrupting the illusion of pure identity. These realizations interrupt Conrad’s essentialist conception of identity and reclaim diverse ontological possibilities for the Other.

The circumstance of mass incarceration in the U.S. has reached the point of social crisis. When the statistics on imprisonment are demographically disaggregated, they point to the overrepresentation of imprisoned men and women of color. Paying special attention to Black men and women, critical race, prison advocacy, and Black feminist research has been vital in theorizing the structural and ideological implications of this racial inequity. The insight that the U.S. prison system constitutes a prison industrial complex arose from such scholarship. More recently, transnational feminism has offered insight into the specific experience and socio-historical contextualization of raced women within a transnational prison industrial complex. Based on transnational and Black feminist precepts, this thesis will argue the need to reframe the discursive position of imprisoned Black women in liberatory discourse. Using the work of Homi K. Bhabha, I contend that Black women’s discursive positions should be understood as “culturally undecidable.” Dominant paradigms of mainstream feminism have assigned Black women the task of fulfilling the ideal of “true womanhood.” Black feminist scholars have argued that this model erases and marginalizes Black women’s resistance. I suggest the imposition of this ideal rhetorically fixes Black women as victims, pathologizes them, and ultimately pathologizes the Black community. In contrast, renaming Black women’s discursive position as “culturally undecidable” creates the possibility to decenter the transnational networks that underpin the transnational prison industrial complex. To proffer this argument, I will analyze performative resistances and reifications of criminalization within narratives of imprisoned Black women and suggest performance practices to encourage Black women’s sense of agency.
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Reflecting on recent gender law reform within international law, this book examines the nature of feminist interventions to consider what the next phase of feminist approaches to international law might include. To undertake analysis of existing gender law reform and future gender law reform, the book engages critical legal inquiries on international law on the foundations of international law. At the same time, the text looks beyond mainstream feminist accounts to consider the contributions, and tensions, across a broader range of feminist methodologies than has been adapted and incorporated into gender law reform including transnational and postcolonial feminisms. The text therefore develops dialogues across feminist approaches, beyond dominant Western liberal, radical, and cultural feminisms, to analyse the rise of expertise and the impact of fragmentation on global governance, to study sovereignty and international institutions, and to reflect on the construction of authority within international law. The book concludes that through feminist dialogues that incorporate intersectionality, and thus feminist dialogues with queer, crip, and race theories, that reflect on the politics of listening and which are actively attentive to the conditions of privilege from which dominant feminist approaches are articulated, opportunity for feminist dialogues to shape feminist futures on international law emerge. The book begins this process through analysis of the conditions in which the author speaks and the role histories of colonialism play out to define her own privilege, thus requiring attention to indigenous feminisms and, in the UK, the important interventions of Black British feminisms.

This book concerns young, class-privileged women in the Nigerian city of Lagos who dress in a “spectacularly feminine” style characterised by the extravagant use and combination of normatively feminine technologies of dress: cascading hair extensions, false eyelashes and nails, heavy and immaculate makeup, and so on. Based on interviews with such stylized women, the book offers a critical consideration of the kinds of feminine subjectivities that they are performing and desiring. Tracing the repertoires of individualist choice, pleasure, entitlement and “can do” that run through the women’s talk, it argues that they subscribe passionately to the notion, or what the book frames more specifically as the “postfeminist promise,” that immaculate and spectacularized feminine beauty now constitutes and signals feminine power. Seeing themselves as “already empowered,” then, what the women do not see is the need for cultural critique, nor for feminism in the form of collective political struggle. The first book on postfeminism both as a cultural formation in the global South and as it interpellates black women, the work offers a groundbreaking new understanding of the culture as performative and transnationally mobile, and a richly theorised account of how women live, embody, and to some extent suffer it, in the flesh.

In the 20^th century, black women in the French empire played crucial leadership roles in anticolonial movements. This book harnesses untapped archival documents to highlight the work of Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita and Eslanda Robeson, women who remain relatively understudied in scholarship that continues to privilege male politicians and writers. Examining the literary production and political activism of African, Antillean, Guyanese and African American women, this book argues that black women writers and thinkers articulated multi-layered forms of citizenship that emphasized plural cultural and racial identities in direct opposition to colonialism. Their decolonial citizenship expanded the possibilities of belonging beyond the borders of the nation state and even the French empire to imagine transnational Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices.

This volume is the first-ever collection devoted to teaching Beat literature in high school to graduate-level classes. Essays address teaching topics such as the history of the censorship of Beat writing, Beat spirituality, the small press revolution, Beat composition techniques and ELL, Beat multiculturalism/globalism and its legacies, techno-poetics, the road tale, Beat drug use, the Italian-American Beat heritage, Beats and the visual arts of the 1960s, the Beat and Black Mountain confluence, Beat comedy, Beat performance poetry, Beat creative non-fiction, West coast-East/coast Beat communities, and Beat representations of race, gender, class, and ethnicity. Individual essays focus on Gary Snyder’s ecopoetics, William S. Burroughs’s post- and transhumanism, Jack Kerouac’s On the Road (teaching it in the U.S. and abroad) and his Quebecois novels, Allen Ginsberg, Diane di Prima, ruth weiss, Joyce Johnson, Joanne Kyger, Bob Kaufman, and Anne Waldman. Many additional Beat-associated writers, such as Amiri Baraka Gregory Corso, are featured in the other essays. The collection opens with a comprehensive essay by Nancy M. Grace on a history of Beat literature, its reception in and out of academia, and contemporary approaches to teaching Beat literature in multidisciplinary contexts. Many of the essays highlight online resources and other materials proven useful in the classroom. Critical methods range from feminism/gender theory, to critical race theory, formalism, historiography, religious studies, and transnational theory to reception theory. The volume concludes with selected scholarly resources, both primary and secondary, including films, music, and other art forms; and a set of Beat-related classroom assignments recommended by active Beat scholars and teachers.