The Highs and the Lows of Black Feminist Criticism

Christian, Barbara

doi:10.1007/978-1-349-14428-0_4

Cited by 15 publications

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“…And some of us have shared a palaver with our writers/readers that prompts us all to re-vision ourselves. (Christian, 1990) True feminist theory and practice entails an understanding of imperialism and a critical engagement with challenging racism-elements which the current women's movement significantly lacks, but which are intrinsic to Black feminism. (Amos and Parmar, 1984) Black feminism is not white feminism in blackface.…”

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Activist-Mothers Maybe, Sisters Surely? Black British Feminism, Absence and Transformation

Anim-Addo¹

2014

Feminist Review

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This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual 'braiding' of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal-mothering our children-is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This 'gathering and re-using' privileges Black women's theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant 'braiding', I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence. keywords Black British; Black feminism; (other)mothering; kinship; history; care feminist review 108 2014 (44-60) © 2014 Feminist Review. 0141-7789/14 www.feminist-review.comGathering and re-using takes time, measurable in hours during a day certainly but also a sense of time having passed before, a sense of history and most importantly a sense of future, a knowledge of survival. (Himid, 1988) [W]e have moved to excavate the past and restore the words of many of our foremothers who were buried in the rumble of history … Using our stories and images, we have taught our daughters and sons about ourselves; our sisters, brothers and lovers about our desires. And some of us have shared a palaver with our writers/readers that prompts us all to re-vision ourselves. (Christian, 1990) True feminist theory and practice entails an understanding of imperialism and a critical engagement with challenging racism-elements which the current women's movem...

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Activist-Mothers Maybe, Sisters Surely? Black British Feminism, Absence and Transformation

Anim-Addo¹

2014

Feminist Review

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“…33Related here is Wittig's concern with the loss of a text's transformative potential through its reduction to classifications of difference—the textual reality that subverts through its claim to universality is destroyed by taking the part (homosexual, woman, and so on) for the whole. I have already mentioned Wittig in relation to Trinh Minh-ha, and Barbara Christian's work offers another point of comparison, particularly in exposing the ways that Wittig's theorization of difference (particularly expressed through writing) may or may not have the same force along divides of race as opposed to gender and sexuality (see Christian 2010). …”

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(Re)Reading Monique Wittig: Domination, Utopia, and Polysemy

Szymanski

2023

Hypatia

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This article offers a rereading of Monique Wittig's philosophical writing on sex, gender, and sexuality against some of the major criticisms that have led to limited engagement with her work. I argue that reorienting our understanding of Wittig's lesbian-feminism away from notions of sexuality per se enables us to read her in terms of a larger project that takes aim at the primacy of phallocentrism in how we understand subjectivity. In doing so, I establish and situate three themes in her feminism that have remained largely unremarked upon in contemporary philosophical treatments of her work: domination, utopianism, and polysemy. Part of this reorientation also involves taking seriously the place of language in her philosophy and examining the ways in which she textually expresses the “lesbian” in her literature—a facet similarly underexamined. Although the account of Wittig's philosophy given here is by no means definitive, I aim through this preliminary re-evaluation to provide a richer reading of Wittig's work against prevailing criticism, demonstrate her continuing relevance to feminist thought, and present further avenues of investigation.

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“…Todavia, estas mulheres perceberam que a tradição autobiográfica feminina não poderia simplesmente ser inserida nas lacunas deixadas pelos homens. Sua inserção somente seria possível pela redefinição dos termos "mulher" e "negra" na sociedade e, para que isso ocorresse, entre outras estratégias, seria necessária a rememoração, isto é, trazer à tona o passado autobiográfico das mulheres negras, restaurando as palavras ancestrais que estavam soterradas na história, como afirmou Barbara Christian (1990).…”

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Reflexos em um espelho de ébano: a autobiografia afro-americana feminina durante o movimento pelos direitos civis

Corrêa

2020

RevEducLings

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The Highs and the Lows of Black Feminist Criticism

Cited by 15 publications

References 0 publications

Activist-Mothers Maybe, Sisters Surely? Black British Feminism, Absence and Transformation

Activist-Mothers Maybe, Sisters Surely? Black British Feminism, Absence and Transformation

(Re)Reading Monique Wittig: Domination, Utopia, and Polysemy

Reflexos em um espelho de ébano: a autobiografia afro-americana feminina durante o movimento pelos direitos civis

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