The Industry of Silence: The Ongoing Nakba and the Racialization of Palestinians

This chapter uses Audre Lorde’s essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power” as an analytic framework to explore an account of gender violation experienced by Patricia Hill Collins. The intention is to demonstrate that the activism of Black feminist theory in general, and the activism of Lorde’s scholarship in particular are effective tools for confronting and teaching about ‘femicide.’ Drawing on bell hooks’ idea of ‘Teaching to Trangress’ this paper uses the activism of Black feminist “[t]heory as liberatory practice.” In the context of this paper reference is made to gender violence but the focus is on violence against Black women with specific reference to the function and production of the objectification of Black women. The use of the activism of Black feminist theory to examine the complex intersection of multiple complex vectors of oppression in the sexual denigration of Black women is quite deliberate. The point I am making here is that any hope of meaningful alliances across difference to combat gender violence will fail if Black feminist interventions, wisdom and experience continues to be marginalised. Furthermore, it will fail if any element in that alliance replicates the unequal power relations at work in gender violence through hegemonic thinking and positioning in that alliance thereby replicating the very problem it seeks to address. This paper uses the term ‘the activism of Black feminist theory’ to insist on the mutually constitutive relationship between theory and activism that emphasises the “…links between Black feminism as a social justice project and Black feminist thought as its intellectual centre.” It is a direct challenge to the binaries of activism or theory, and experience or scholarship, that questions what counts as theory and who counts as theorist. Indeed examination of the constituent elements of the activism of Black feminist theory demonstrates that it emerges out of the dialectical and the dialogical. The dialectical because it is formed out of the suppression of Black women’s voice, thinking and scholarship in order to articulate that suppression with the objective of confronting that suppression. The dialogical because of the interconnections with the activism of social justice. The dialogical relationship between experience, practice and scholarship produces the methodology of the activism of Black feminist theory, where the how to do, and the doing of, the project, intersect. Carole Boyce Davies asserts that, “Black feminist criticisms, then, perhaps more than many of the other feminisms, can be a praxis where the theoretical positions and the criticism interact with the lived experience.” The work of Audre Lorde continues to be instrumental in this process, and is evidence of the translation and relevance of her work to current feminist practice and experience.

This forum is occasioned by the publication of Vincent W. Lloyd’s Black Dignity, a provocative work of philosophy from a scholar whose intellectual efforts emerge from the intersections of race, religion, and politics. Lloyd develops the concept of Black dignity by placing the active struggle against domination at the center of his inquiry, specifically the struggle against anti-Blackness as a defining feature of life in the United States. This philosophical treatise will be of interest to scholars of rhetoric for the variety of reasons outlined in the reviews that follow.There is a dynamic of mutual exchange at work in these pages: scholars of rhetoric elucidate what our field can learn from a philosophical approach to the study of Black dignity and struggle, and they also show how these philosophical insights can be usefully extended. Karma R. Chávez attends to the material and sonic situation of her reading experience, addresses how Lloyd frames the question of domination and struggle, and invokes the work of the rhetoric scholar Josue David Cisneros. Coretta M. Pittman begins with a meditative approach that lingers on Lloyd’s conception of the ontic and the ontological. She then considers the ongoing work of struggle as the site of dignity, positing the convergence of Lloyd’s philosophical investigations and of rhetorical studies in the work of renewal—in finding fresh starts and inventing new paths. Tamika L. Carey closes this forum with advice about how to use fighting words, that is, how to use language in the cause of Black dignity: with precision, intentionality, wisdom, perspective, and a collaborative respect for different techniques of struggle. Positioning her line of thinking within a scholarly constellation shaped by Black feminist, womanist, and Black queer activist thought, she focuses on Lloyd’s conception of Black rage and its connections with rhetorical impatience.Together, these reviews take Lloyd’s work as a jumping-off point for thinking about the role rhetoric plays in the struggle that is Black dignity.T J Geiger IITexas Tech UniversityI settle into writing this while listening to blkbok’s Black Book. blkbok is a hip-hop artist and neoclassical pianist whose first album dropped in June 2021. While his name is a nod to Johann Sebastian Bach, his album is an homage to the Academy Award–winning film Green Book, about the Black pianist Don Shirley’s 1962 tour of the Deep South. The film’s title refers to The Negro Motorist Green-Book, a Jim Crow–era guide (first published in 1936) for Black road-trippers that let them know of friendly places to stop for gas, food, lodging, and the like. The Green Book was an attempt to ensure Black dignity; it was a small but meaningful tool in the struggle against anti-Blackness and domination. It was designed to enable Black folks’ unfettered mobility, whether for leisure or for work. blkbok’s music resonates with this effort. The fit and tattooed Black male artist’s music defies expectations, opens up new possibilities for Black living, and generates conversations. For example, the Black Book track “George Floyd and the Struggle for Equality” is as ragefully passionate as it is devastatingly haunting, and, while only one track among several, it is a reminder, as if one needed reminding, that the struggle is ongoing and that there are many ways to participate in it. Further, as Vincent Lloyd insists, through the many iterations of the struggle for Black lives, dignity is both named and found.Black Dignity is a remarkable work of philosophy. It is written from the vantage point of the radical Black tradition, but Lloyd intervenes in that tradition, often gently identifying its shortcomings and recentering it in Black feminisms. This turn is inherent and overt in his work as he theorizes from within the contours of contemporary Black political movements, the contemporary iteration of which is decidedly Black feminist and queer. Lloyd identifies Black dignity as “the broader philosophical project implicit” in those movements (6). He says simply: “[D]ignity means struggle against domination” (8). Here, he is careful to differentiate between dignity as some achievable status and dignity as “performance, activity” (9). Particularly, he is interested in collective activity. He also cautions his readers to be careful of the seduction of the ontic, the real and object oriented. Instead, he contends that “only ontological struggle, struggle aimed at domination, struggle against the master,” promises true freedom (10).Some contemporary theorizing about Black struggle deploys several catchwords designed to describe the predicament of Black people in the United States, and these words may include oppression, marginalization, suffering, and exploitation. Lloyd convincingly argues that these all miss the mark as they keep us from engaging in the primal relationship of domination, the relationship between master and slave. “Domination is defined by a capacity to act rather than by specific acts,” acts that may result in oppression, marginalization, suffering, or exploitation (10). In other words, when we begin with thinking about domination, we are able to reside in the realm of the ontological, the site of true freedom. Centering attention on the particular results of domination locates us in the ontic, and, from that standpoint, we can never understand the conditions that enable and sustain domination in their wholeness. It is worth noting—perhaps especially for some readers who might think primarily through and with vectors of power that are not Black—that Lloyd does not center Blackness because of some allergy to multiculturalism or from a refusal to accept that other kinds of domination matter. Blackness must be central because it is domination’s “chief paradigm” and, thereby, the best lens through which to understand domination and, more importantly, resist it (27).In laying out his case for the framework of Black dignity, Lloyd asks his readers to accept a difficult truth if we are to believe in what he is offering: “[T]he object of ontological struggle is, by definition, impossible to achieve.” Yet he is not on the side of pessimists, Afro- or otherwise. He goes on: “In the process of struggle, freedom can be dreamed, and such dreams call into question the absolute control of the master—motivating more struggle” (11).I rehearse Lloyd’s central thesis at length because I am persuaded by it, and I want readers of this journal—particularly those who, like me, have invested their lives in the study and practice of struggle—to be persuaded by it, too. His clarity about the conditions we face is born from decades of struggle against and study of domination. And, more than any book I have read recently, his offers us a lens through which to confront the conditions we face. He supplies for us a template for engaging in struggle, an invitation to participate in Black dignity, regardless of the identities we may, ourselves, possess.For scholars of rhetoric, Lloyd’s work resonates with that of Josue David Cisneros, who argues that the study of rhetoric “should be governed by a commitment to such an abolitionist telos” (2021, 95). Like Cisneros, Lloyd is indebted to abolitionist frameworks for his understanding of what the struggle against domination entails. While many reformers dismiss abolitionism as utopian, without a telos centered on the end of domination, reform will only strengthen the conditions of domination. Moreover, Lloyd notes an important role for those who study rhetoric in the project of Black dignity. He writes that philosophy and rhetoric take on a joint task “to narrate connections between primal scenes of domination and domination manifesting in the world”: “This requires telling stories in worldly terms, using words and images that will move readers to join the struggle. Domination tells its own stories that conceal and naturalize it. The task of the philosopher-rhetorician is to out-narrate domination” (163). Readers of this journal might cringe at the reduction of rhetoric to narrative, at the implication that philosophers do the work of thinking, and the fact that rhetoric is presented here as narrative practice. This might be especially hard to swallow given rhetoric’s vexed relationship with philosophy, often positioned as its mere handmaiden.However, if we read Lloyd alongside Cisneros, we can see that the role for scholars of rhetoric is more substantive. If a commitment to an abolitionist telos requires attending to the bordering practices at every stage of the work—from how we understand our object of study to who does and does not inform our thinking—then placing Black dignity at the center of our thinking provides the best possible lens for interpreting such practices. In other words, whatever the form of the intellectual labor, it is incumbent on us to make our scholarly practice part of the struggle against domination. It is necessary that we keep central the primal scene of domination, that we attend to the way in which the rhetorical practices that we perform and those that we critique are struggling against or participating in domination. From here, we begin to participate in the end of the world; we are part of the project of Black dignity.Karma R. ChávezUniversity of Texas at AustinVincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity sets out to examine the ways in which the Black Lives Matter movement’s founders, members, and youth activists reimagine Black dignity in the twenty-first century. Lloyd is quick to point out, however, that the struggle for Black dignity has long been a focal point for Black activists looking to help Black people gain control over their bodies and minds. From Frederick Douglass’s fight with Edward Covey to Martin Luther King Jr.’s active participation in the Montgomery bus boycott, the struggle for liberation and the fight against domination is, Lloyd suggests, Black dignity.Black dignity is an outgrowth of the struggle against domination, yet struggle must also yield other noteworthy ends. In short, Lloyd proposes that there are different kinds of struggles and different ends to be achieved from struggle. The ontic struggle yields a kind of quasi freedom, and the ontological struggle yields full freedom. Ontic struggle, according to Lloyd, means that one struggles against domination to acquire a specific object. The struggle to obtain the object could be the completion of a personal goal. To struggle ontically means that one’s struggle to obtain the specific object is determined by what those in power name as a valuable object. Simply put, Lloyd says: “Each object in our world, where our perception and action are shaped by interlocking systems of domination, is constituted by those regimes of domination” (10). In an ontic struggle, then, Black people’s struggle for liberation is directed by visible and invisible systems of domination, and that struggle may be successful but only insofar as one’s gains are momentary. In other words, Black people can struggle and sometimes win against a materialist domination that leaves them mired in quests for objects that result in personal gratification but not full freedom.Ontological struggle, on the other hand, is a struggle against “domination” itself (10). Lloyd describes the ontological struggle as one focused directly on challenging the oppressive conditions that keep one in bondage. He refers here to the master/slave relationship, which has contemporary corollaries. The slave struggles “against the master” not to acquire the master’s material goods but to demand full freedom (10). The freed person in an ontological struggle both in the past and contemporaneously recognizes that freedom is both an expressive and a physical condition and that the outcome of both is Black dignity.While Lloyd recognizes that the struggle for freedom as both an ontic exercise and an ontological exercise is Black dignity, he is quick to note that an ontological struggle against systems of domination is nearly “impossible to achieve” (11). Returning to the master/slave paradigm as the framework within which to understand how domination functions, he argues that, once the enslaved person dismantles one system of domination, another one replaces it. From enslaved person to emancipated person to quasi citizen to citizen, the systems of domination are arranged in such a way that the “symbols are impermanent” (12). This does not mean, however, that struggle against domination should not persist. The ontological struggle must be constant, particularly for the full liberation of Black people. Lloyd notes, however, that there are so many other forms of domination, including but not limited to “colonial, . . . patriarch[al], and capitali[st]” (14), but points out that anti-Black racism is by far the most acute form of domination and that it is also part of “interlocking systems of oppression” (14–15).How Black people access and acquire Black dignity in the face of domination is complicated by Lloyd’s belief that full freedom from domination is not completely obtainable, but there are theoretical and practical ways to work toward the aims of the ontological struggle. Black philosophy is one such way, and the Black Lives Matter movement’s founders and members provide the language to challenge ongoing systems of domination. Put succinctly: “They articulate a philosophy, a set of ideas about how the world is. This philosophy flows from the claim to Black dignity” (22). To be fair, there are, according to Lloyd, Black American predecessors who have been radical activists calling for the full liberation of Black people, such as Audre Lorde and bell hooks (there are also others unnamed in his book). Nonetheless, in a world where respectability politics is no longer the preeminent philosophy and strategy for contemporary young people and young adult movement leaders, particularly those in the Black Lives Matter movement, their movement strategies are, Lloyd suggests, constitutive rather than reductive. The opening up of the space for difference and an embrace of otherness missing in respectability politics leads Lloyd to argue that the Black philosophy that emerges from the Black Lives Matter platform is a way out of the master narrative and into multiplicity and Black dignity.If one imagines Lloyd’s Black Dignity as a twelve-inch ruler, the kind that secondary school teachers require for the purposes of math work and craft projects, then one might imagine his book as two halves of that twelve-inch ruler. The two halves proffer two kinds of reflection. The first half of the ruler, the theoretical half, explains how the struggle for true liberation in the face of domination is Black dignity. This, in turn, transforms into a philosophy of Black dignity. The second half of the ruler, that is, the second half of the book, outlines the specific structure of Black dignity as a philosophy that is outlined as follows: “Black rage, Black love, Black family, Black futures, Black magic” (21). There, the ontological struggle for full freedom is outlined in a series of chapters that explain how Black philosophy is theorized and practiced. For my purposes here, I focus on the first half of the ruler to propose why Lloyd’s book could prove helpful to rhetoric scholars interested in building on his work and/or supporting established claims that anti-Black racism continues to have real impacts in the lives of American citizens.Although Lloyd acknowledges that there are several kinds of domination at play globally (14), he argues passionately that anti-Blackness is the “preeminent mode of domination” and that “the preeminent struggle is the Black struggle” (32). The last three years—which have included a global pandemic, the high-profile murders of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor at the hands of White male vigilantes and White policemen, the summer of racial reckoning, and the ongoing anti-Blackness backlash as one result of the summer of racial reckoning—need continuing intellectual exploration from scholars invested in exposing rhetorics of hate, violence, and rage while also examining rhetorics of dignity, love, futures, and joy.If one is to believe that American democracy is currently teetering on the edge of oblivion, then Lloyd’s ideas about the philosophy of Black dignity remind all that domination is an ongoing enterprise and that the struggle against domination must also be ongoing. This means that scholarly efforts should consistently investigate language use suggesting that a danger point is not really dangerous but merely an inconvenience and show how such language use is indeed dangerous after all. Lloyd recognizes the danger of such obfuscating language use. At one point he suggests: “We come to recognize the ruses of domination, how it makes the bad appear good and the ugly appear beautiful” (31). This was one of Plato’s warnings about rhetoric in the Gorgias. The sophists would teach their students to manipulate language for personal gain, thereby helping them achieve an advantage over and above the good of the people. The counterpoint to Plato’s critique of rhetoric in modern times is the idea of renewal. Scholars of rhetoric have a chance actively to participate in acts of renewal, and Lloyd’s book offers both prescriptive and descriptive ways for scholarly work to build on his theoretical and practical road maps.Lloyd encourages everyone—but particularly Black public intellectuals—to reflect on what they do in their lives as writers and thinkers, on what renewal strategies they might use to get beyond the mundane in their scholarship, and to be true advocates and activists fighting against domination. Scholars have access to resources, particularly human resources—community activists, students, and each other. He suggests directly that scholarship needs to be conducted with the struggle for full freedom in mind and not so much focused on personal outcomes. He knows this is risky business but maintains: “With struggle comes a kind of flourishing that we can never achieve simply by inhabiting a culture well” (155). In the midst of that struggle is Black dignity and the chance for full freedom.Coretta M. PittmanBaylor UniversityThe lay terminologies I use to explain rhetoric to the folk I encounter in my everyday life probably seem rough by academic standards. In no way devoid of intellectual sophistication, these words and phrases simply rely on a form of Black cultural wisdom that is, at best, intuitive and perhaps even passed down among us through the generations. At the base of this pool of wisdom is our shared assumption that our words have weight. Our languages and voices matter. We can spin our words with sophistication, beauty, and joy. When need arises, we can contour our words to build community or to wield as weapons for battle. Our assumption reveals an adherence to the belief that both death and life reside in the “power of the tongue” (Prov. 18:21). To have the quality of life we deserve, we will have to fight.What can operate to counter this intuitive cultural system is a demand for authenticity and clarity among female Black intellectuals and womanists at the level of language. The charge is to practice, decipher, and require ethical communication. It is a traceable legacy. In the late nineteenth century, Ida B. Wells’s writing ethic mandated that she and others call lynching “by its true name” (Royster 1995). The processes of “coming to voice” or “speaking truth to power” that Patricia Hill Collins (1998, 2012) and others have deemed necessary to resisting oppression carry an expectation of praxis. When the time comes, you must speak boldly and truthfully, particularly in the face of threat. These standards are not only for times of conflict. I can still hear my late grandmother’s admonishment, “Say what you mean, and mean what you say.” But today it sounds more like a lesson about the importance of integrity regardless of my circumstance. To fight with words requires precision.Vincent Lloyd’s Black Dignity rests precisely in the spaces between intuition and and and praxis. The project emerges from his of a in political among young Black people, many of against the last of anti-Black Lloyd acknowledges that provides and for and he also recognizes the for Our how we struggle against domination because they can an or for action in struggle and the by struggle” ontological are of anti-Black Lloyd’s project is to oppressive their and how Black understand their relationship to them into In his book how we can understand Black liberation and struggle at a time when our collective about this work are to a that listening with and Lloyd outlines the of and or Black dignity, from the of contemporary movement leaders, the of their intellectual and and what he describes as the the philosophy these efforts To fight is to fight “Black is a of the kind of and toward which Lloyd’s philosophical contemporary Black studies Lloyd identifies the end of and the of contemporary of Black rage as the when George the of at the hands of a and the the assumption that Black was not The truth was that these murders a rage that can be when the collective is Lloyd the of the to rage to the of Black dignity, it from frameworks that it from its human and from that it in of of and In so he it among the that Audre and other Black and queer have to fight domination. his he the claim that “Black rage can build and that Black have been best to rage to truth from rage to To fight with wisdom requires of scholars who are to see in Lloyd’s about ontological a to the assumption that directly their of political that the claims about rage and he will be up by The question that for me, however, the space between Black rage and rhetorical which I have defined as of or and that reflect or for the of . . . the assumption that and for one’s Black and Black is and, requires and Lloyd does not take up the question of that places rhetorical into with scholarship on or the turn in rhetorical studies and does he how and and out of as I do But he how for the is a of Black rage He does not concept of as the condition of anti-Black that can Black rhetorical as I but he acknowledges the of within these struggles as I I as a that the activist to show her on the she should and the life she must Lloyd as the outcome of an a of and as than the and from into Black rage transforms the and into the While I have that is part of a project among Black the project that Lloyd’s book is necessary at this is everyday on Black rage is an inherent that can be for and, passed down as a legacy. The and of these are To fight is to respect for a that can a yet whether Lloyd’s book will be in one of those on the of rhetorical studies such as the but I believe that it should Black Dignity does not to teach us how to in freedom or liberation work at the level of with its of contemporary it still to on of L. of

Must I Be Womanist? Monica A. Coleman (bio) Early Influences: Black Feminist and Womanist I'm a black female religious scholar, but I'm not sure I'm a womanist. I was a black feminist before I heard of "womanist." I discovered black feminists in college when studying the black arts movements of the 1970s. I identified black feminism with the 1970s—black power, poetry, literature, and defiance. In my eyes, black feminists were radical, fire-eating, justice-loving, law-defying women. Later in my college career, I came to the term womanist through literature. While writing a paper on Their Eyes Were Watching God, I read Alice Walker's essays about recovering Zora Neale Hurston. I appreciated and related to Walker's quest for a role model: "I write all the things I should have been able to read."1 I later learned of the womanist movement in religious scholarship. While looking for religious themes in black women's writings, I came across Katie G. Cannon's Black Womanist Ethics (1988).2 It was the first time I read about black women's literature from the perspective of a religious scholar. As a result of Cannon's work and that of other womanists, I never once doubted that I could have a place in religious scholarship. I never felt the pain that no one was talking about my experience, my literature, or my role models. I know that the first [End Page 85] generation of womanist religious scholars worked hard to create a world where a young woman could have this kind of experience. They gave me the experience they wanted to have; the experience they should have been able to have. For this, I am grateful beyond words, and I think of them as my godmothers. They mothered me into the academic study of God. As I have met the women whose work I read, I know them as more than writers and scholars. They are passionate people of faith, dedicated teachers, gentle and encouraging mentors, and weary but joyful trailblazers. I can't imagine what kind of scholar I would be, what kind of woman I would be, if I had not encountered Walker, Cannon, and Renita Weems, and encountered them before William Faulkner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and Walter Brueggemann. I tell these stories as more than personal narrative. I believe that I am one of a number of black female scholars who do not know the world or the discipline of religious studies without the influence of feminist and womanist religious scholarship. I question my identity as womanist because I've also been shaped by black feminists, and I believe that I'm part of a generation of women who have grown up (intellectually) during a time that takes womanism as a given. Not a Womanist: Critiques and Black Feminist Leanings I'm not sure I'm a womanist. In her definition, Walker describes womanist as "a black feminist or feminist of color."3 But I've long sensed a difference between the two—or at least in the way the two movements have developed. There are those who identify specifically as "womanist": Cannon, Delores Williams, Emilie Townes, and Jacquelyn Grant. And there are some people who call themselves "black feminist" but not "womanist": Angela Davis, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, bell hooks, Audre Lorde, and Barbara Smith. I haven't been able to put my finger on the precise nature of this difference, but I have some intimations. When I read Walker's definition, I feel at home, but the trajectory of womanist religious scholarship has left me in a house without enough furniture. There are not enough chairs, couches, or beds for me or many of the black women I know and love. It isn't a place where we can be who we are in some of the most important ways we live—sexually, spiritually, or politically. I've been dissatisfied by the heteronormativity of womanist religious scholarship. Walker clearly states that a womanist "loves other women sexually and/or nonsexually." I think it no coincidence that Walker references sexual love before nonsexual love, and that this phrase falls before her reference to loving men. Walker...

Catherine Morris and Rujeko Hockley, eds., <i>We Wanted a Revolution: Black Radical Women, 1965–85</i>. New York: Brooklyn Museum, 2017. Pp. 320. $24.95 (paper).Terrion L. Williamson, <i>Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life</i>. New York: Fordham University Press, 2017. Pp. 128. $25.00 (paper).

The Black Radical Tradition has always captured the fluidity of life, death, and the afterlife of sustained modes of repression that propel Black bodies into hypervisible spectacles of existence. Using what Viviane Saleh-Hanna calls a “Black Feminist Hauntology,” this article draws from work on the temporality of white terrorism, necropolitical social movements, and Black violability to frame Black women’s biopolitical agency in ways that capture what our lives could be post-COVID and amid a resurgence of movements for Black lives. Bridging the poeticism of Black feminist writers such as Audre Lorde, bell hooks, and Sonya Renee Taylor, I argue that the movement for radical self-care, interpreted from a necropolitical discursive frame, offers the possibilities for what Saleh-Hanna calls “metamorphic liberation.” The article explores the movement’s foundations inside the Black feminist commons as an important site for support and healing during the multiple pandemics of 2020.

This article entitled Learning to Cherish focuses on analyze the five poems by Audre Lorde which are Who Said It Was Simple, For Each Of You, A Woman Speaks, A Litany For Survival, and Movement Song. The problem in this analysis how far the five poems by Audre Lorde expose the issue of learning to cherish of the Black Women. The aim of this analysis is to find out how far the five poems by Audre Lorde expose the issue of learning to cherish in the Black women. This analysis is involved poetic elements that are imagery, repetition, speaker, and tone to reveal the issue. The analysis is related to the concept of Feminism by Bell Hook (1984) and Naomi Wolf (2002). The result of this analysis shows the Black women have good attitude and behavior to care deeply for their identity.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

Reviewed by: Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, and: "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films, and: Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture Jessica Petocz (bio) Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class by Lisa B. Thompson. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009, 200 pp., $40.00 hardcover. "Baad Bitches" and Sassy Supermamas: Black Power Action Films by Stephane Dunn. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008, 192 pp., $50.00 hardcover, $20.00 paper. Mutha' Is Half a Word: Intersections of Folklore, Vernacular, Myth, and Queerness in Black Female Culture by L. H. Stallings. Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2007, 334 pp., $49.95 hardcover, $9.95 on CD. Some of the most astute, moving, and well-known work in the Black feminist tradition revolves around the "problems" of Black women's sexuality—namely, the problem that others use it to play out battles over race, class, gender, nation, and sexuality and the subsequent lack of attention to their actual sexual experiences, desires, and subjectivities. Their scholarship demands that we recognize this displacement and the machinations it hides, but that we also create spaces for the enunciation and appreciation of the diversity of Black women's sexualities. Audre Lorde, Hortense Spillers, Tricia Rose, Cheryl Clarke, E. Francis White, Barbara Christian, Angela Davis, Cathy Cohen, Patricia Hill Collins, Ann DuCille, Evelyn Hammonds, Darlene Clark Hine, bell hooks, … their names recall incisive intellect, beautiful words, and powerful stories. Drawing upon these rich sources, three new books by emerging scholars give a sense of the depth and breadth of a field that has grown into its own. In their work, Black feminist thought is anything but provincial—instead, their attention to the lives and work of Black women revises widely held ideas about race, gender, and sexuality and their relationship to our shared social context. Rather than revise theories that do not account for race and/or gender, these books begin with a sophisticated intersectional approach as developed with Black feminist thought. Through an analysis of representation and lived experience, each author dispels hegemonic conceptions of Black women and their sexualities. They employ nuanced argumentation, historical contextualization, interdisciplinary sources, and commitment to multiple politics in order to portray sexuality as a dynamic social and psychological force. Furthermore, they refuse to privilege theory, representation, or experience, opting instead to integrate these methods. In doing so, each author makes insightful claims without erasing the contradictions within the cultural representations and lived experiences of Black women. These texts present a needed opportunity to engage with popular cultural studies from politicized perspectives without denying the pleasure they provide. In these analyses, sexuality emerges as a transfer point between different axes of [End Page 274] power and demonstrates the inextricability of the material and the discursive. As teaching texts, these books provide challenging yet accessible intersectional analyses in interdisciplinary contexts that can be incorporated into courses as diverse as visual literacy, hip-hop, social movements, performance studies, historical studies, folklore, literature, action films, and queer theory. For readers within these fields, the books reinvigorate longstanding debates with new questions and fresh ideas. In Beyond the Black Lady: Sexuality and the New African American Middle Class, Lisa Thompson explores the powerful role that sexuality plays in contemporary African American middle-class women's lives. Thompson situates the Black lady in an environment of impossible and disempowering demands that demonstrate "how her sexuality stands in for a host of other concerns, anxieties, and fantasies in the minds of others" (7). Against this backdrop, Beyond the Black Lady presents an affirmative account of contemporary African American women's cultural texts that present new narratives of sexual agency. As Thompson explains in the introduction, several forces align so as to elide or diminish our attention to middle-class Black women's sexuality (6–11). Yet, Beyond the Black Lady is more than straightforward restoration of their voices, for it also aims to reconceptualize how race, class, and gender are represented, performed, and lived. The book shows that, stereotypes and social pressures notwithstanding, Black middle-class women's cultural production...

This article contends that present-day focus of Black feminist anger at white women obscures the old and ongoing Black feminist struggle to name and diagnose Black patriarchy. In effort to redirect attention to the sexual/gendered intramural struggles within Black social life, this article reads selected texts by the Combahee River Collective, Ntozake Shange, Audre Lorde, and bell hooks from the 1970s–1980s. Doing so illustrates the long tradition of Black feminist writing filled with rage –not at white women—but at Black men and with the expressed objective to eradicate patriarchy. Remembering these Black feminist analytic and activist efforts to challenge black women's sexual oppression reframes Black feminism as a singular project that calls out white women's racism to a broader liberatory one requiring confrontation with male power writ large and, in particular, Black male violence against Black women.

Alice Walker’s The Color Purple stands as a seminal work in African American literature, renowned for its unflinching portrayal of Black women’s struggles against multiple oppressions. While existing scholarship has extensively explored themes of race, gender, and resilience within the text, much of it has inadequately addressed the radical feminist underpinnings of protagonist Celie Johnson’s narrative arc. This thesis analyzes Alice Walker’s The Color Purple through radical feminism, examining how protagonist Celie Johnson’s journey from subjugation to empowerment critiques systemic patriarchy and embodies a intersectional resistance. By integrating theories of Shulamith Firestone, Andrea Dworkin, Mary Daly, and Black feminists like Bell Hooks and Audre Lorde, the study argues that Celie’s awakening redefines radical feminism as a communal, culturally rooted praxis. Chapter 2 explores Celie’s reproductive and domestic labor as a site of patriarchal exploitation, demonstrating how her communal care practices offer a Black feminist alternative to Firestone’s techno-centric solutions. Chapter 3 uses Dworkin’s critique of heterosexuality to analyze Celie’s sexual subjugation and her liberation through same-sex desire, aligning with Lorde’s concept of the erotic as power. Chapter 4 examines her linguistic journey from silence to self-narration, highlighting how Black Southern dialect and epistolary form create a feminist vernacular that subverts patriarchal language. This study contributes to literary criticism by offering a new reading of the novel’s radical feminist politics and intervenes in feminist theory by advocating for an inclusive, intersectional framework. Its significance lies in bridging the gap between radical feminism and Black feminist thought, providing insights for contemporary movements like #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

In the early stages of this project, I told a colleague that I had been asked to write an article about women and Malcolm X. She didn't directly respond to this news but her expression was a talking book which seemed to ask: Is there really anything more for a black feminist to say about Malcolm X ? I understand the premise of the question. After all, black feminists and womanists have already sculpted the dominant theoretical narrative on Malcolm X. For example, in the 1980s and 90s, black feminists wrote a series of essays generally praising his political insight and excoriating his misogyny. Michelle Wallace, Audre Lorde, bell hooks, Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Barbara Ransby, among others, depicted Malcolm X as a race leader who was either the precursor to the core of misogyny at the center of Black Power politics, a warrior among the various leaders of the civil rights and black nationalist organizations of the 1960s, or a religious figure whose ministerial vocation and penchant for truth-seeking may well have enabled him, had he lived, to become a champion for women's empowerment. Women writers in the Black Arts movement such as Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, and Sonia Sanchez saw Malcolm X as a black hero and praised his love for his people as well as his strength, courage, and intellectual integrity. More recently, scholars such as Tracye Williams and Farah Jasmine Griffin have argued that black women can love what Malcolm X stood for but they must still challenge the sexism reflected in his teachings and in the movements he inspired.

In this paper, we, three Black women academics, share some of our experiences navigating the euro-centered, hierarchical system in academia, which Patricia Hill Collins aptly identified as the eurocentric knowledge validation process This insidious process seeks to undermine the contributions of Black feminist thought and to discredit the knowledge and expertise of Black scholars. What began as anger over a journal reviewer's comments evolved into three letters detailing the intellectual harm we faced as students and faculty, and the significance of defending and centering our communities. Inspired by bell hooks’ “Killing Rage: Militant Resistance” and Audre Lorde's “The Uses of Anger,” which affirms anger as a powerful and appropriate response to oppression, these letters confront our rage against academia, and bear witness to its capacity to resist, and inspire courageous action. Through critical self-reflection, we highlight the inextricable link between the personal and the academic. By critiquing aspects of the academy, such as the peer review process and education, we aim to raise awareness about colonial frameworks that limit diverse epistemic possibilities in academia, and inflict institutional harm. In sharing our experiences, we advocate for diverse ways of thinking, knowing, and engaging in academia. Each individual letter includes practical suggestions, and we conclude with a joint letter offering a path forward for Black folks to create a home for themselves in academia.

The question of Self and memory is inextricably linked to the question of the representation and representability as well as to the uniqueness or iterability of the sense of the Self. Criticisms through the times suggest thinking of the sense of Self in terms of one's memory for it--not how faithfully you represent yourself, but rather how accurately you remember your past Self and how much you know about your present Self. Memory is the key element in determining the production of an autobiographical work, it is the author's memory and his sense of Self which determines how accurately he will transpose his life in front of us and correspondingly the one that decides whether autobiography will take the form of a memoir, a semi-fictional autobiography, or a completely fictionalized version of one's life. The relationship between Self and memory has initially been considered by John Locke in his "Essay Concerning Human Understanding"(1698). In his view, a person's identity comprises of whatever a person can remember from his or her past. Consequently, what the person does not remember is not part of his identity. Differing from the other critics, Locke believed that identity and selfhood have nothing to do with continuity of the body, they are rather an extension of memory. The paper delves into the postmodern autobiographical writings of three women-of -color including Audre Lorde, bell hooks and Rebecca Walker .The autobiographies in this study share the arrangement of events in the form of quilts made of accidentally stitched patches, the presentation of life as a fictional narrative and the treatment of the forgotten past as a remembrance and a revisiting. While Audre Lorde s and bell hooks accounts bring an emphasis on myth,(hooks on the construction of a dreamscape and Lorde on the arrangement of the psychological quilt of life), Rebecca Walker asserts that wishful forgetting and the conditioned amnesiac status contribute to the preservation of the fluid character of memory, its organization into dualities and the increased impermanence of the autobiographical account. The reliability of memory, together with the accuracy of life writing determines the classification of a narrative as memoir, autobiography or fictional autobiography. The autobiography criticism corpora are the ones to question the mnemonic truth and the reconciliation of the forces of signification.

This chapter explores how Black girls use TikTok despite the ways it can replicate racial violence. How do Black girls resist narratives of exploitation and create a space of joy and self-care? This chapter investigates the ways that Black joy is present in Black girls' TikToks and how they use TikTok to express that joy. Drawing from bell hooks' "Homeplace (a site of resistance)" and Audre Lorde's A Burst of Light, this chapter examines the role social media plays in how Black girls construct a safe place to express themselves freely. Combining these theoretical frameworks with interviews of Black girls and close readings of Ma'Khia Bryant's TikTok videos, this chapter demonstrates how Black girls' TikToks become spaces of resistance.

Promiscuous pedagogy is an embodied approach to learning that invites students to bring their whole-messy selves into conversation with their academic work. Drawing on bell hooks' Teaching to Transgress, Laura Rendón's Sentipensante (Sensing/Thinking) Pedagogy, and the corporeal and erotic dimensions of knowledge recognized by Adrienne Rich and Audre Lorde, the author asserts that promiscuous pedagogical interventions are needed more than ever at a time when connections between sexuality and systems of power are being exposed, denied, and contested in societies worldwide. Bringing sexuality and spirituality into dialogue, promiscuous pedagogy risks the chaos of not knowing what will happen when students are encouraged to think critically about their own embodied experiences, to explore the relevance of what they are learning for their everyday lives, and to consider its implications for an interdependent world. This approach welcomes students' embodied knowledge into the classroom, not because it is an unquestionable source of truth but because it is a rich resource for exploring how bodily desires become caught up in systems of power—including religious systems—whether or not we know or intend it and whether or not we are religious. The chapter presents several classroom strategies, illustrating this mode of transformative teaching about sexuality, religion, and power and encouraging instructors to stay attuned to different ways of knowing and different kinds of knowledge.