Black Media Studies

Abstract

For decades, feminist and critical scholars have spoken explicitly about the politics of citations. Sara Ahmed writes, “Citation is feminist memory,” then continues by “citing feminists of color who have contributed to the project of naming and dismantling the institutions of patriarchal whiteness.”1 In November 2017, thousands of feminists gathered at the National Women's Studies Association conference to celebrate the fortieth anniversary of the Combahee River Collective Statement, an often-cited Black feminist text that served as a roadmap for some and a sacred text for others.2 This statement and its regular citation together demonstrate feminist memory as well as two connected ways to think about Black feminist media studies scholarship as an area that connects media studies to the radical reimaginings of Black feminist/womanist theory. This area functions through its relentless challenge of the canon, which often excludes the contributions of Black women, and even the notion of the canon, and by challenging old, simplistic narratives about Blackness and Black womanhood. Naming, thus, is fundamental in these works. For instance, the tradition of “bringing out our dead” is well documented, including in the works of James Baldwin. Many Black feminist scholars, and women of color feminists more broadly, have …