New Event Series: Is There (Really) A Black Feminist Movement?
By Black Women Radicals
Join us for our new online event series, “Is There (Really) A Black Feminist Movement?”
About the series: “Is There (Really) A Black Feminist Movement?” is a four-part online series that serves as a political provocation to discuss the convergences and divergences of Black feminist movements and politics.
This series comes out of a question –– “Is there really a Black feminist movement?” –– that was posed by Black Women Radicals’ executive director and founder, Jaimee A. Swift, during our Black Feminism Lives! Summit in August of last year. The question was met with much conversation from panelists and audience members alike, with some believing that there is a movement and others vehemently expressing that there is not one.
Rooted in bell hooks’ critique of Black feminist essentialism in the chapter, “Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) and Audre Lorde’s essay, “Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” (1984), the mission of the series is to learn and embrace Black feminist difference; analyze the power of Black feminist organizing, both past and present; and to discuss the ruptures, silences, betrayals, hurt, and even harm that are perpetuated in our work to ensure the strength, sustainability, and possibilities of our Black feminist movement building.
Some questions this series engages:
How do we advance bell hooks’ refusal of “Black feminist essentialism” or “sameness” in our organizing and, like Audre Lorde, embrace differences of identities, genders, political, intellectual, and cultural strategies and theoretical frameworks for liberation and understandings of Black feminism(s) in our movements?
What are the ruptures, silences, betrayals, hurt, and even harm perpetuated in our organizing and how do we truly address and overcome these internalized and externalized oppressions within the Black feminist movement?
How do we challenge symbolic leadership, gestures, organizing and celebrity within our movements and praxes?
In the spirit of Sankofa, an Akan word that translates loosely to “it is not taboo to fetch what is at risk of being left behind”, what are the various ways we are garnering and archiving knowledges and wisdom from our Black feminist elders so that we can truly address the successes, failures, possibilities, and futurity of Black feminist movements?
What are historical and contemporary strategies, technologies, modalities, techniques, traditions, aspects, and more that need to be transformed, sustained, and/or even phased out and abolished in our movement building?
Readings to engage with for the series:
“Eye to Eye: Black Women, Hatred, and Anger” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches (1984)
“Revolutionary Black Women: Making Ourselves Subject” in Black Looks: Race and Representation (1992) by bell hooks
Part One of the Series will be held on Wednesday, February 28th at 6:30 PM EST via Zoom. Featured panelists include: Andrea Arrechea, Adwoa Owusu-Barnieh, Ameena Dayo, Bré Rivera & Brendane Tynes.
Register here: https://bit.ly/BlackFeministMovementPartOne
Promotional flier for new online series hosted by Black Women Radicals titled, “Is There Really a Black Feminist Movement?”