Category Archives: Black Feminist Theories

Notes on texts on Black feminist theories

One Step Back, Two Steps Forward: Black Girls’ Memory and (Re)Vision as Agency

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Image of the Sankofa bird whose name in Twi translates to “Go back and get it” in English.

In my quest to deepen my understanding of the significance of Black girls’ memory, I am lingering over the notion of what it is to remember and its possibilities for creation and agency. I presently see it as a process of spiritual reconstitution of the mind, body, soul of self and community in the present for future and forward movement based on elements of the past. In her article, “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers,” Cynthia Dillard argued that (re)membering is an endarkened feminist praxis (Dillard 2016) and is important for Black teachers, researchers, and students to employ. For Dillard, an endarkened feminist epistemology (EFE) articulates an understanding of reality or truth grounded in the historical roots of global Black feminist thought, which is markedly different from that of mainstream and dominant cultural narratives and standpoints (Dillard 2016). The five parts to (re)membering, include: (re)searching, (re)visioning, (re)cognizing, (re)presenting, and (re)claiming (Dillard 2016:411). In her case study of university students traveling abroad from the United States to Ghana, Dillard sought to answer the following questions: 1) what happens when undergraduate and graduate students from the United States have encounters, dialogues, and interactions with African heritage knowledge, culture, and peoples in West Africa (Ghana)? 2) What does Ghana have to teach about African American education and personhood? (Dillard 2016:410-411). One of Dillard’s most significant conclusions is that for Black women, (re)membering can be a means of refuting white supremacist and patriarchal lies taught by dominant culture and education.

I feel hopeful about the potential efficacy of (re)membering for Black women and its potential uses. (Re)membering as a choice and internal process of connecting to and recreating Africa does not depend on external legislation, department meetings, town halls, or so-called allies. This is something that many Black women do intuitively, but there is power in naming and having a language to articulate the process of coming back to oneself and together with others of African descent. Jacqueline’s rebirth and internal liberation is tangible through Dillard’s storytelling.  

Black Girls Are Magic Image taken from Wikimedia Commons website.

(Re)membering and memory are epistemological and ontological. Through Dillard’s case study, I could see and feel the young American Black woman Jacqueline, who Dillard focused on, becoming or (re)coming the subjectivities of mother, auntie, and sister. Jacqueline was able to (re)vision/(re)member herself based on the how the Ghanaian people saw and named her along with her ability to accept, embrace, and take on those identities. According to Dillard, Jacqueline took up those identities during the study abroad experience and carried them forward afterward. Although Dillard and her students were able to physically travel overseas to the continent of Africa in order to (re)search and (re)member their cultural roots as members of the African diaspora, this endarkened feminist praxis does not require physical transit. Black women in the U.S. perform their identities in ways that mark and signal a (re)membering of Africa and other Black diasporic social locations that serve as homeplaces for them. These practices take place both offline and online. On social media spaces, Black women and girls (re)member and reconstitute community and kinship from across different geographic locations. Some examples of this include hashtags like #CarefreeBlackGirl, #BlackGirlMagic, and #DaughtersOf.

GirlTrek’s social media call to participation for Black History Bootcamp

The #DaughtersOf hashtag, started and circulated by co-founders of the international Black women’s organization GirlTrek, is perhaps the most recent and definitely one of the most salient movements and hashtags that encourage Black women and girls to (re)member who they are and who they are descended from. T. Morgan Dixon and Vanessa Garrison used the hashtag to launch the Daughters Of campaign which they describe on their website as: “a multi-media campaign [that] will examine the immediate and critical importance of self-care and healing for Black women through the lens of their matrilineal traditions.”[1] This examination of Black women through their maternal ancestry, or as Alice Walker might say, their mother’s gardens, is a contemporary example of (re)membering as endarkened feminist inquiry and praxis that is desperately needed in these times in which our general sense of time and truth seem to be in constant flux.

Me on my first day walking as a part of GirlTrek’s Black History Bootcamp.

While I had been a participant in GirlTrek campaigns in the past, it was GirlTrek’s 21-day walking meditation, Black History Bootcamp, inspired by the Daughters Of campaign that allowed me to more fully (re)member the strength, courage, and wisdom (India Arie been knowing) that I come from and that I can call on to come through in these difficult times of anti-black antagonism and violence and the COVID-19 pandemic as well as the social, political, economic,  and educational implications it will have for Black people in the weeks, months, and years to come. Journalist and scholar Sherri Williams began to recount the incalculable and rising toll of these intersecting crises for Black America in The Crisis last week. When Black women’s ways of being and knowing are consciously connected to those who we are the daughters of, we are able to (re)vision the futures we want and deserve. Perhaps the greatest contribution of transnational endarkened feminist inquiry is (re)membering that we deserve when everything outside of us tries to convince us that we do not. It is time to (re)create from this space. As our futuristic foremother Octavia Butler once wrote: “So Be It! See To It!”

Dillard, Cynthia B. “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re)Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers.” Educational Studies 52.5 (2016): 406-23. Print.

[1] https://www.daughtersof.com/

Sometimes I Feel Like a Motherless Child: A reflection on Black womanhood, cultural memory and connection during the reckoning of 2020

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In “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Hortense Spillers (re)membered (Dillard 2016, Morrison 1987) the history and making of African-American women and mothers as subjectivities in the United States as a result of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and the social, political, and economic workings of slavery in the U.S. Spillers highlighted that the legal and economic structures of white supremacy and patriarchy under slavery denied women of African descent the role of mother when they birthed children, and deprived them of traditional notions of family and lineage that typically accompany it. She argued that this history, or text as she described it, has been distorted to support false narratives about Black womanhood, motherhood, and those roles in the Black family as evidenced by the infamous Moynihan Report that characterized Black women as pathologically “dominant” and “strong” to the point of castrating Black men. The dominant culture, Spillers contended, has made a fatal flaw in projecting matriarchist value to African-American females because they were universally denied the right to lay claim to one’s child and lived in a society in which “motherhood” provided no legal path to cultural inheritance. Therefore, Spillers said that because the African American female falls outside of the traditional symbolics of female gender we have an opportunity to subvert and break free from traditional gender restrictions:

“…it is our task to make a place for this different social subject. In doing so, we are less interested in joining the ranks of gendered femaleness than gaining the insurgent ground as female social subject. Actually claiming the monstrosity (of a female with the potential to “name”), which her culture imposes in blindness, “Sapphire” might rewrite after all a radically different text for a female empowerment.” (Spillers 1987:80)

Reading the (re)membering and retelling of this history as a Black woman is painful still because as Spillers wrote, repetition does not rob these “well-known, oft-told events” of their power or sting. Nor should it, because to forget these horrors and that pain would disconnect us from an understanding of the ways in which that past continues to inform our present lived realities. The larger sting is that the distortions of Black womanhood, Black family and kinship have remained and continue to produce the very kinds of division that white supremacist, capitalistic patriarchy sowed so long ago; African American female flesh is still unprotected much as it was during the time of enslavement. Black women have had to stand face-to-face with this reality recently as we have mourned the murder of 27-year-old Breonna Taylor at the hands of Louisville, Kentucky police officers (who at the time of this post still have not been charged) even as we watch and participate in the rally cry for justice in the brutal murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis po-lice officers. At the same time, Black women are mollywomped by misogynoir with incidents like the attack against Iyanna Dior and sexual assault and murder of 19-year-old Black Lives Matter activist Oluwatoyin Salau. In the midst of collective grief, Black women have to be about the emotional, social, political, economic, and physical labor of ceaselessly bringing attention to these issues in order to have any hope for justice, like the example below calling for #JusticeForBreonnaTaylor.

What is particularly painful about Oluwatoyin’s murder is that while she was fighting for the safety of the Black community, someone from within the “community” violated her safety. On the day she went missing, she took to Twitter to describe her account of being preyed on and attacked by a Black man. To make matters worse, she was vulnerable to attack because she had reportedly been ostracized by her family. Oluwatoyin was Nigerian-American and did not have direct experience with, or direct memory of, the history of enslavement of African people in the U.S. that Spiller discussed; however, her story and life is particularly relevant to the discussion of cultural memory and (re)membering here in a couple of ways. First, Oluwatoyin’s connection with and dedication to fighting on behalf of all Black lives here in the U.S. illustrates the power of rememory (Morrison 1987), the bringing back and dealing with the repressed parts of anti-black trauma, and (re)membering, recalling and (re)visioning the collective “spirit and strength of Blackness” (Dillard 2016:418) that fosters solidarity and fictive kinship with those who share an African heritage despite every attempt to destroy it.

The story of Oluwatoyin’s murder also speaks to the significance of cultural memory and the compensatory measures that Black women in the U.S. have historically taken in order to foster family and community through “certain ethical and sentimental features that tied her and him, across the landscape to others, often sold from hand to hand, of the same and different blood in a common fabric of memory and inspiration” (Spillers 1987:75). Oluwatoyin understood and lived this out as praxis through her fight to protect all Black people regardless of nationality, sexuality, or gender. As Spillers asserted, we typically call this type of connectedness family, kin, community, or support structure, but its existence and purpose are quite different than the ways “family” and lineage have been used by those in power to maintain racial supremacy, or more specifically whiteness and its mores. Spillers called into question the social efficacy of such alternate constructs and formations, and today I wonder the same. It is not that I doubt the social efficacy of Black community and kinship formation; it is the one thing that I know we would not have survived without. It is what we need now more than ever during this time of national reckoning, global pandemic, and physical distancing measures. However, Oluwatoyin’s murder shows the need to (re)member and tighten up our kinship and community ties for safety and survival. Even if she could not count on her blood family, she should have had people she could call upon. She should not have been left alone seeking shelter. As we call for the defunding of police and the tearing down of white supremacy, which surely do not keep us safe, the question remains, what are we building and creating? Who will be included? Who will do the labor? Who will be loved, cared for and protected? Oluwatoyin’s life did not only matter, it was precious and to be treasured. She deserved better. She took the “insurgent ground as a female subject” (Spillers 1987). What ground are we willing to take?

I’m boppin to Noname tryna figure it out…

Dillard, Cynthia B. “Turning the Ships Around: A Case Study of (Re) Membering as Transnational Endarkened Feminist Inquiry and Praxis for Black Teachers.” Educational Studies 52.5 (2016): 406-23. Print.

Morrison, Toni. “Beloved. 1987.” New York: Plume 252 (1988)Print.

Spillers, Hortense J. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” Diacritics 17.2 (1987): 65-81. Print.

Feminist Rhetorical Practices Adds Representin and Recognizin to its 3 Rs

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Jones Royster, Jacqueline, and Gesa E. Kirsch. Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. Print.

Feminist Rhetorical Practices: New Horizons for Rhetoric, Composition, and Literacy Studies serves as a metaphoric Richter scale for the seismic shifts that have occurred in both Feminist Rhetorical Studies (FRS) and Composition and Rhetorical Studies over the last 30 years. Royster and Kirsch use the metaphor of tectonic plates to describe and document the shifts and shifting that has occurred and is still occurring within FRS in terms of theories, research agendas, and research methods and methodologies.

Recognizin/g and Representin/g

In this metaphor they emphasize that there is not a single fault line, but that scholars working within and across the lines of Feminist Rhetorical Studies have been disrupting and shaking the foundation of Rhetorical Studies which at its core has traditionally been centered of Greco-Roman and Western conceptions of rhetoric and androcentric. I appreciate this metaphor for the necessarily dynamic and fluid flow (or stream to mix metaphors) that Feminist Rhetorical Studies is and for also denoting a degree of physical energy and in-your-faceness or “wreck” as Pough (2004) might call it.

In doing so, Royster and Kirsch also add “recognizin/g” and “representin/g” to the three Rs of Feminist Rhetorical Studies – rescue, recovery, and (re)inscription. As Carmen Kynard (2010) states, in urban language “recognizing” is about “publicly acknowledging what is going on and who the central perpetrators are” (48). This text resonated with me in part because of both Royster and Kirsch’s efforts to make their audience “recognize” the oppression and challenges, the work that has been done, and the work that still remains. What was particularly logistically persuasive to me, and I imagine others in feminist and Black feminist studies, was the argument that it would/ will not be until the least valued in the field, those silenced and marginalized women such as those of African descent (10) were recognized and valued in the field that the field would grow and reach its full potential. In her narrative about how she began feminist rhetorical research and became involved with Feminist Rhetorical Practices she stated that Rhetorical Composition and Literacy Studies was in need of a reform.

Royster and Kirsch’s deliberate and careful efforts to recognize the efforts of so many scholars within Feminist Rhetorical Studies can also be seen as a way to “represent.” “Representin,” Elaine Richardson (2007) explains, is a Black discourse practice that enacts solidarity and a type of fictive kinship. In doing so they demonstrate their notion of strategic contemplation which foregrounds this recognition and they said shows “how [others] have enabled us to stand where we are today, and how their visions make it possible for us to imagine a future worth working for” (23).

Royster and Kirsch not only historicize and boldly present the collective (although not admittedly not comprehensive) work that has been done in FRS to the present date, but argue that these strides have not only benefited them and other scholars and teachers doing this work, but the field as a whole:

“…research and practice in rhetorical studies have changed – and to the benefit of the whole… We now see more about the nature , impact, and consequences of language use. We recognize the importance of contexts and conditions in performance. We understand more about how rhetorical actions function in the human enterprise.” (15)

The book represents an embodied argument for the value of Feminist Rhetorical Studies as a major component of Comp-rhet and a cornerstone in its advancement. As Patricia Bizzell states in the foreword, “anyone who wants to do research in rhetoric, composition, and literacy, in any subfield, from now on will need to read this book” (xii)

As Bizzell foreshadows, this text is likely to be a landmark text; in a sense it feels as though it is capping off one era and launching us into a new one. With that said, I wonder if this book and its recognition of FRS to this point will mark the end of a “first wave” of Feminist Rhetorical Studies and if so, how will the new “wave” or generation of feminist rhetorical scholars take up the mantle?

Questions of the horizon:

As has been noted by feminist scholars regarding the first, second, and third waves of feminism, the hard fought gains of one generation and the privileges of the up-and-coming generation always sparks new questions, challenges,
and responsibilities. What are some of these new concerns you see arising?

Royster and Kirsch name some possible challenges on the next horizon:

“…because of the broadening nature and scope of rhetorical subjects, sites, and scenes we have set in motion the need to renegotiate the terms by which visibility, credibility, value, and excellence are determined…in effect we are re-forming the discpline and re-endowing the vision of our rhetorical landscape as a globalized, multi-dimensional human asset and not just the exclusive possession of Western, elite, white males.” (133)

In the last month CCR 635 has read Cintron’s Angels’ Town and Berry, Hawisher, and Selfe’s Transnational Literate Lives in Digital Times both of which attempt to broaden the nature and scope of rhetorical subjects. What similarities do you see in their methodological approaches to Royster and Kirsch’s four methodological approaches of Feminist Rhetorical Studies, critical imagination, strategic contemplation, social circulation, and globalization, and how might they have employed them to more effectively broaden the scope?

Lorde – From “There is No Hierarchy of Oppressions”

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From Homophobia and Education (New York: Council on Interracial Books for
Children, 1983)

I simply do not believe that one aspect of myself can possibly profit from the oppression of any other part of my identity. I know that my people cannot possibly profit from the oppression of any other group which seeks the right to peaceful existence. Rather, we diminish ourselves by denying to others what we have shed blood to obtain for our children. And those children need to learn that they do not have to become like each other in order to work together for a future they will all share.

In this passage Audre Lorde spoke specifically to the social intersections in which she stood: Black, lesbian, feminist, socialist, poet, mother, and interracial lover. However, her message is so profound and timeless that it can be extended to apply to a multitude of social realities to account for differences in ethnicity, age, class, geography, ability, etc.

Lorde emphasized that oppression regardless of it’s particular discrimination stems from the same place. She said, “I have learned that sexism and heterosexism both arise from the same source as racism,” and therefore, argued that they were all equally detrimental and deserving of equal and simultaneous resistance. Oppression, Lorde implied, knows no boundaries; if oppression against one group is allowed to thrive, it will sooner or later spread to oppress others. Consequently, no one can afford to pick particular battles:

I cannot afford the luxury of fighting one form of oppression only. I cannot afford to believe that freedom from intolerance is the right of only one particular group. And I cannot afford to choose between the fronts upon which I must battle these forces of discrimination, .wherever they appear to destroy me. And when they appear to destroy me, it will not be long before they appear to destroy you.

This is particularly significant as it relates to Hip-hop feminism, Black girlhood, and recurring manifestations of the cult of respectability in this generation of women and girls in Hip-hop culture because I am Black, female/ a girl (Brown, 2009), and socialized in Hip-hop culture.