Editors' Note

Abstract

Editors' Note Natalie Havlin and Jillian M. Báez In recent years, more light has been shed on the politics of citation in reinscribing power dynamics in the academy, especially in regard to gender and race. In a post on her academic blog feministkilljoys, Sara Ahmed argues that citational practices are a "rather successful reproductive technology, a way of reproducing the world around certain bodies" (2013). She goes on to observe that citational practices play a key role in creating hierarchies in the academy that delineate the contours of disciplines. These contours include what are considered canonical or germinal texts in the field, and define the center and periphery of a given discipline. Attending to the centrality of citation in maintaining white, cisheteromale privilege in the academy, the movement Cite Black Women works toward making Black women's scholarship more visible. In order to do so, Cite Black Women "engages with social media and aesthetic representation (t-shirts) in order to push people to critically rethink the politics of knowledge production by engaging in a radical praxis of citation that acknowledges and honors Black women's transnational intellectual production" (Cite Black Women 2018). Christen A. Smith began the campaign at the 2017 meeting of the National Women's Studies Association in Baltimore, Maryland, by selling T-shirts that read "Cite Black Women" as a way to fundraise for the Winnie Mandela School in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil. Soon after, Smith joined with other Black scholars to form a collective who published their Cite Black Women resolutions with the following goals: 1) Read Black women's work; 2) Integrate Black women into the CORE of your syllabus; [End Page 9] 3) Acknowledge Black women's intellectual production; 4) Make space for Black women to speak; and 5) Give Black women the space and time to breathe. (Cite Black Women 2018) These resolutions resulted in the creation of the hashtags #CiteBlackWomen and #CiteBlackWomenSunday. In 2018 the Times Higher Education of London published a feature story on Cite Black Women and, moving outside of the academy, Essence magazine listed the movement as one of the top ten issues in their April 2018 issue. We foreground the work of the Cite Black Women collective in our introduction to this special issue of WSQ Inheritance in order to recognize and acknowledge Christen A. Smith's and the collective's important labor in centering the foundational intellectual and political role of Black women in feminist movements as well as in gender and women's studies. The #CiteBlackWomen collective focalizes key concerns that this special issue of WSQ and we, as general editors of WSQ, share: How does the transference of feminist knowledge production occur? Whose feminist scholarship is preserved, acknowledged, and passed on? How might feminist scholars grapple with the power dynamics of whose work is recognized and built upon in order to transform our scholarship and political practices? Indeed, the forty-eight-year history of WSQ exemplifies both past and ongoing struggles to build a radical politics of citation and legacy of feminist of knowledge production. In 1972 Florence Howe and the Feminist Press launched the Women's Studies Newsletter to share information about new program developments, resources, and the emerging National Women's Studies Association. In 1981 the editorial board and Howe renamed the newsletter Women's Studies Quarterly and expanded the focus to feature scholarship and reviews of new publications. From 1975 to 1982, the National Women's Studies Association copublished the newsletter and subsequently Women's Studies Quarterly. From its beginnings, WSQ was committed to accessible writing for a larger audience (not just academics) and attending to the most urgent issues facing women. In particular, much space was devoted in the newsletter to pedagogy from preschool to the college classroom. The earliest issues of the Women's Studies Newsletter from 1972 to 1981 regularly featured bibliographies and reviews of U.S. and international women writers, as well as recent publications and [End Page 10] feminist media for newsletter readers to incorporate into their newly launched women's studies courses in both high schools and universities. These early issues also published occasional articles and letters by women of color about the need to recover...