How We Enter
Black Feminist Thought, a cross-listed course in African and Afro-American Studies and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, continues the intellectual work begun by my colleague Aliyyah Abdur-Rahman, who taught the class prior at Brandeis University.
Beginning with the institution of slavery and carrying on to the present day, Black Feminist Thought examines the political, social, and economic forces that shape black American women’s lives. As a class we’ve asked: How do black women’s lives, labor, and social location lay bare the limits of maleness and whiteness as dominant frames? Why and how do black women matter to us all?
We’ve rode the three waves of black feminism, engaging topics that range from political organizing to pornography, from the biblical preachings of Sojourner Truth to the truth-telling memoir of Janet Mock. Each author, informed by various intellectual trainings and everyday livings, center the stories of black women. They make pages dance with critical inquiry. They show us the consequentiality of black women to notions of Americanness, citizenship, belonging, and, and.
We’ve worked to trace the shape of Anna Julia Cooper’s oft-quoted assertion that “Only the black woman can say ‘when and where I enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing, or special patronage, then and there the whole…race enters with me.’”
This Medium Publication takes its cue from Cooper. It is a collection of student works: abbreviated iterations of longer analytical papers. In their own multidisciplinary way, all center black women. Like our syllabus, they range from the legal to the crunk, from the historical to the contemporary, from the material to the embodied.
You might ask why undergraduate material should be public in this way? So often in undergraduate courses students write papers engaged by an audience of one. Here, students work to put their work into the world — not as self-annointed experts of the field, but as students sharing writings meant to engage their peers. What might it do to reinvigorate the dreaded “final paper” by taking one tenet of black feminism seriously: that those working in field must be held accountable to broader black feminist communities? After all, black feminism is allergic to mediocrity, and a wider audience quickly raises the stakes.
Although they present a diversity of approaches and topics, at the bottom of each work lives this question: how does centering black women force us to face our world, our communities, and ourselves with rigorous analysis, fierce compassion, and critical accountability?
