Genealogies of Capture and Evasion: a Radical Black Feminist Meditation for Neoliberal Times by Lydia M. Kelow-Bennett B.A

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Genealogies of Capture and Evasion: A Radical Black Feminist Meditation for Neoliberal Times

By Lydia M. Kelow-Bennett

B.A., University of Puget Sound, 2002

M.A., Georgetown University, 2011

A.M., Brown University, 2016

A dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the

requirements for the Doctorate of Philosophy

in the Department of Africana Studies at Brown University

Providence, RI May 2018

This dissertation by Lydia M. Kelow-Bennett is accepted in its present form

by the Department of Africana Studies as satisfying the

dissertation requirement for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy

Date______Matthew Guterl, Advisor

Recommended to the Graduate Council

Date______Anthony Bogues, Reader

Date______Françoise Hamlin, Reader

Approved by the Graduate Council

Date______Andrew G. Campbell, Dean of the Graduate School

iii

[CURRICULUM VITAE]

Lydia M. Kelow-Bennett was born May 13, 1980 in Denver, Colorado, the first of four children to Jerry and Judy Kelow. She received a B.A. in Communication Studies with a minor in Psychology from the University of Puget Sound in 2002. Following several years working in education administration, she received a M.A. in Communication, Culture and Technology from Georgetown University in 2011. She received a A.M. in Africana Studies from Brown University in 2016. Lydia has been a committed advocate for students of color at Brown, and served as a Graduate Coordinator for the Sarah Doyle Women’s Center for a number of years. She was a 2017-2018 Pembroke Center Interdisciplinary Opportunity Fellow, and will begin as an Assistant Professor in the Department of Afroamerican and African Studies at the University of Michigan in Fall 2018.

Awards and Honors 2017-2018 Pembroke Center Interdisciplinary Opportunity Fellowship, Brown University Graduate School

2017 Alternate, Woodrow Wilson Dissertation Fellowship in Women’s Studies

2016-2017 Steinhaus/Zisson Research Grant, Pembroke Center, Brown University

2012 Honorable Mention, Ford Foundation Predoctoral Fellowship

2011 Master’s Thesis with Distinction, Georgetown University

Publications

Book Chapters 2019. “Black Gender Revolution: The Insurgent Ground of Black Feminist Rage,” in Unknowable: Geography and Black Feminisms, ed. LaToya E. Eaves. [Forthcoming]

Teaching Experience

Brown University Instructor, Black Women Thinkers: Alternative Genealogies of Black Radical Thought, (Spring 2016)

Academic Service

2015-2018 Graduate Student Coordinator, Sarah Doyle Women’s Center, Brown University

2016-2018 Co-organizer, This Bridge Called My Back Dissertation Writing Group, Brown University

2016-2018 Member, Advisory Board, Women of Color Leadership Project, National Women’s Studies Association

2016-2018 Member, Diversity Advisory Board, Brown University Graduate School

2016-2017 Graduate Community Fellow, Graduate School, Brown University

2016-2017 Departmental Graduate Representative, Africana Studies, Brown University

2013-2017 Member, Governing Council, National Women’s Studies Association

2013-2017 Co-Chair, Women of Color Caucus, National Women’s Studies Association

2015-2016 Co-organizer, “Pushing Borders: Imagining Difference and Belonging,” Mellon Graduate Workshop, Brown University

2013-2015 President, Nabrit Black Graduate Student Association, Brown University

2013-2014 Graduate Student Representative, Africana Studies, Brown Graduate Student Council, Brown University

2011-2013 Co-chair, Women of Color Leadership Project, National Women’s Studies Association

v [ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS]

This dissertation was written in early mornings, late nights, stolen moments, in notes, on note cards, on napkins, in a tape recorder, on my iPhone, and gazing into the eyes of my baby. This dissertation was written in defiance of people who thought I wasn’t a serious scholar. This dissertation was written in spite of, and because of, mom brain. This dissertation was written in spite of depression, and this dissertation is marked by depression, indelibly. This dissertation wears those scars with pride, even when I do not.

This dissertation was slow to start, quick to finish, and a pleasure in the middle because this dissertation was part of the reason I am here "doing what I came to do." This dissertation got me out of bed every morning when I was at my worst. This dissertation looked like me stepping into my power, finding out how powerful my voice is, breathing and writing every kind of love I can eke out of ink, addressed to Black people across our differences. This dissertation was written because I needed it in order to survive. Not because the academy lets me survive, but because I had time, and a mission, and words, so I wrote them and they constituted a dissertation—and I lived.

This dissertation was written because there is so much left to say, and so much love to still write, and so many words we still have yet to read and to hear and I wanted to be a drop in that ocean. This dissertation was written because I want us to live, and I still believe that we can, if we take these words, and those words, and your words, and my words, and all of our words, and build a world of words and actions and love that can withstand the destruction of this moment. This dissertation was written because people loved me into it. This dissertation was written because people loved me through it. This dissertation was written because I learned to love myself into it. This dissertation was written.

I thank Spirit and my ancestors for the paths they have laid before me in this program and beyond. I am grateful for your protection, for guiding me and working on my behalf to bring beauty and abundance into my life, for teaching me how to work in ways totally other than what we see each day. I am grateful for all of the sacrifices, hands that worked, bodies that broke and bled, and spirits that refused to be bowed. I carry you with me always.

I am the fruit of a family that values critical thinking and education. The oldest of four siblings, but by no means the smartest, I am indebted to my parents, Judy and Jerry Kelow, who instilled in me a love of reading, writing and learning at an early age. Your intentional care for my mind has paid dividends. I hope that you are proud of me, even if you don’t always agree with me J. Thank you for loving me. To my siblings, Andrew, Hannah and Simon. I am so proud of each of you, of the ways that you have manifested your talents in the world. It has been a pleasure to grow up with such smart (ass? J) siblings. You each challenge me to learn, think, grow, and be a better person. Thank you for loving me.

I am grateful to the many people who have walked with me through this journey called graduate school. To my committee, Matt Guterl, Anthony Bogues, and Françoise Hamlin,

vi thank you for seeing me through. A special thanks Matt Guterl, my advisor, for making roads of possibility for me to stay in school and to pursue this work. I am grateful for your patience along this road. And special thanks to Tony Bogues, you will forever be the teacher I aspire to be. Your care in pedagogy and your humanizing praxis is a precious gift and I am grateful for the time I have spent under your tutelage.

To Ms. Deborah in the Department of Africana Studies, thank you for always being a place of peace and love in a storm of something entirely other. Thank you for the chocolate, and the paperwork, and the hugs. They got me through.

To the amazing other-mothers who have watched and cared for my son through this process, this dissertation simply would not exist without you. Phoebe, Sage, Sani, and Hannah, you all have blessed me in ways that I am not able to put into words. Thank you for your loving, consistent care of Amir and of me, for exposing him to the wide and beautiful world around us, for nurturing his love of dogs and the outdoors, gardening and good food, movies, ice cream, soul music, all music, sun, rain and snow. You all taught me one of the hardest and most important lessons of mothering: to trust a community with your precious ones. Thank you for loving Amir, and therefore loving me.

To my community of love and light, thank you for seeing me, believing in me, and for not allowing me to give up. I am indebted to many, many people who gave me care and love along the way, including Majida Kargbo, Akoto Ofori-Atta, Mara Jones-Branch, Anne Gray-Fisher, Erika Alexander Brown, Caryl Nuñez, Desiree Bailey, Jazzmen Johnson, Prabhdeep Kehal, Jonathan Cortez, Anna Thomas, Lily Mengesha, Felicia Bevel, Linda Quiquivix, Suzanne Enzerink, Adé, Chris Zizzamia, Estebán Roncancio, Aimee Grause, Jessica Pineda, and Molly Smith among many others.

I am also deeply indebted to a community of magical mentors and sista-scholars through the National Women’s Studies Association that have encouraged my growth and survival in ways big and small, ever since 2009. All of my love and thanks go to Michele Berger, who started me on this path; Kaye Wise Whitehead, my favorite partner in social change; Nana Osei-Kofi, world traveler, speaker of truths and corrector-of-records J ; Yi-Chun Tricia Lin, who has taught me that mentoring is the survival of revolutionary change; Vivian Ng, whose wisdom overflows; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who makes mentoring look like a joy; Barbara Ransby, who reminds me that our work is community accountable; Aishah Shahidah Simmons, who reminds me that love is accountable. I am also indebted to a number of beautiful friends and colleagues I see each year at NWSA and other conferences, who have offered encouragement, love and care along the way: Stephanie Troutman, Shaeeda Mensah, Adela Licona, Mel Lewis, LaToya Eaves, Lisa Covington, Anya Wallace, Ashleigh Greene Wade, Jenn Jackson, Nikki Lane, and Courtney Marshall: seeing you each year lifts my spirit and reminds me that our work is wide, far, and fierce. Heidi Renée Lewis, thank you for the care and love you’ve poured into me this year, and for coming through in the 11th hour to help make miracles happen. We got us.

vii To Marlina Duncan, architect of the railroad of survival! Thank you for not giving up on me in my trauma and fear, and for seeing my potential. Thank you for taking up the advocacy work our community worked so hard to materialize, and turning it into realities. This work is already paying dividends, and I believe in your capacity to help us find our way through, and to heal ourselves.

To Je-Shawna Wholley, thank you for walking with me through a dark moment, and for insisting that love is also accountable. You have changed the way I understand Black feminist love forever, and I am grateful. I am eagerly awaiting your work. Thank you for loving me.

To Shay Collins, for the love and life you put into the world and into my days. For the freedom in your step and your refusal to be boxed in. You remind me that freedom is wild and gentle, loves the earth and the moon, and grows life. Thank you for loving me.

To Gail Cohee and Felicia Salinas-Moniz, who have been a haven for me as a mama- scholar. The SDWC was the one place I could be both mother and graduate student, where I could bring my full self and not feel out of place. You created a space for my wholeness when other spaces were asking me to split apart. You hosted me and Amir, literally, for two years and taught me what feminist praxis actually looks like—the daily action of making space for life in all of its diverse forms and manifestations. I would not have stayed had it not been for the space you provided for me to grow, to plan big things and dream big dreams, to be accountable, and to be whole. You have been enthusiastic cheerleaders, trusted advisors, and co-mothers. You both have mothered so much life in this world and at Brown. I see your labors and value your worth, your wisdom, and your visions for a world where all people are treated with love and dignity. Thank you for loving me.

To Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who helped me labor as my PhDoula for over a year. You got me writing when I couldn’t by reminding me who was really my audience—Amir and my sista-scholars. And you read me oracles to remind me what I am searching for. I am still searching for those answers—yes, even now. You remind me that self-determination is wild, and not easy, but possible. You live the accountability that I need in order to survive these strange places built to contain our brilliance, and you remind me that I can walk away whenever I wish. You were my guide on a transformative process, and though I didn’t end up where I thought I would, I am changed. And clear. Thank you for loving us.

To Allyson Braithewaite-Gardner, who was the first to tell me that Black women deserve to be with their children, even at a university. Thank you for giving me a new song to sing as I navigated my way through this place. Thank you for listening to my pain and my joys.

To the members of This Bridge Called My Dissertation writing group—Jonathan Cortez, Prabhdeep Kehal, Jamie Budnick, Felicia Bevel, Meghan Wilson, Lily Mengesha, Hadiya

viii Sewer, and Tina Park, thank you for getting me up in the morning and making this tedious work a joy. You all will never know how much light you gave me in a dark time.

To Felicia Bishop and Kristen Maye, thank you for the crepes, for being so damn smart, and for bringing me hope in future generations of scholars. I cannot wait until you unleash your brilliance on the world!

To Shamara Wylie-Alhassan, I will forever remain in awe of your brilliance, the paths you are trailblazing, and your fierce love of community. From a fellow mama scholar, stay strong and don’t let anybody put you off your path. Thank you for loving me.

To Warren Harding, thank you for the mani-pedis, the groundings, and teaching me what Scorpios are truly about. Your calm, strong presence is a constant reminder to me that knowing and trusting self is one of the greatest sources of our power. Thank you for sharing my love for Black feminist wisdom and shade, and thank you for loving me.

To Katsí Rodríguez Velásquez, thank you for all the ways you teach me about self-care, from the mystical and magical to the practical. Your quiet calm is a mighty force to be reckoned with. Stay the course. Thank you for loving me.

To Watu Poe, my fellow hater-of-all-things Providence, RI. I see so much of myself in you, and am grateful for your clear voice for justice and your intention in creating communities that are vibrant and deep and meaningful. I wish you the best as you move forward into years of fieldwork. May it refresh your soul!!

To Lakshmi Padmanabhan, we have walked all of graduate school together, in lock step, year to year. No matter how close or far we are day-to-day, know that I love you fiercely, am always in your corner, and believe in your capacity to be a life-changing force for good for the students, communities, and scholars you encounter. You still make me laugh. And cry. I value every moment we’ve spent together. You are stuck with me forever. Thank you for loving me.

To Amy Chin, my Joker’s Wild. Your consistent and thoughtful presence has blessed me in more ways than I am able to say. Thank you for your vulnerability, your intentionality, and your persistence. You teach me depth and carefulness. And you make me laugh, in ways entirely unexpected. Thank you for loving me.

To Patrice D’Agostino, my California Sunshine, The Fierce Theorist, The Blooming! I am sorry that I left your panel at George Mason in 2008(?) before you read your paper. But I am so grateful we found each other in that hallway outside. Your perseverance and strength, your refusal to take less than anything you deserve, your overwhelming brilliance are a treasure and a gift to me. Thank you for the West Coast light and sun you’ve shined on me over the years, the constant encouragement, and the recognition of my gifts and my humanity. Girl you killin’ ‘em. Thank you for loving me.

ix To Meghan Wilson, my most unlikely friend, but most treasured surprise. The Secret Weapon. The Unfettered One. Watching you grow and change has been a true gift. Growing and changing under your watchful eye has been a lesson in unconditional love. You are blessed with courage, bravery, and you are a warrior of unmatched determination. I am so grateful for the ways you pursue your freedom. You teach me every time we talk. Thank you for walking this hard ass path with me. Thank you for choosing you, for being a model of survival. Thank you for loving me.

To Elon Cook-Lee, Bearer of the Afro-Crown, Radical Priestess of Snatching Racists’ Wigs. The One Who Gets Us Together. Your beautiful face and beautiful soul are a constant reminder of how we can impact the world when we stay true to our calling, when we are accountable to our families and our communities and above all, our ancestors. Your work is changing the world, even when you can’t see it. I am so excited to see what you do as you step further into your calling and your power. Thank you for always being willing to comb my hair, for demanding I love myself at least as much as you love yourself. I am in awe of you. Thank you for loving me.

To Brandy Monk-Payton, MY Other-Mother, Auntie Shorty Shade, The Supreme Capricorn Fixer. You are HOME for my heart. You always call me back to myself when I wander too far. Your honesty, vulnerability, practicality, and above all your youthful and fun spirit have been one of the most nourishing relationships in my life. You are a gardener, tending hearts. You grow communities, and ideas. I am so proud of you and everything you are building as a life. You are always with me. Thank you for loving me.

To Tina Park, Wifey. You deserve every good and beautiful thing that comes to you, because you pour every good and beautiful thing into your communities. You are extraordinary, loving, and full of care! I am grateful for the time you spent scaffolding steps of possibility for me in the midst of my darkest days, when getting out of bed was too much. You cared for me and nursed me back to myself. Thank you for your tough and tender love, your logistical brilliance, your undying loyalty. Thank you for loving me.

To Hadiya Sewer. The Alchemist (of Liberation). Bruja of Revolution. Sage to the Sages. There aren’t really adequate words or pages for me to express how much your care and love over this time has meant to me. You have been a source of strength, love, and radical vision for six years, and you are stuck with me. It has been one of the greatest treasures of my journey to co-mother children and projects with you. To share those particular pains, joys, fears and laughs. I believe in what you have come to the earth to offer and to learn. And I am grateful for the time we’ve spent together birthing these projects. Thank you for teaching me, for letting me fail in your presence, for loving me and loving yourself unconditionally.

To Daniel, my Homie-Lover-Friend. I was so blessed to find you when I did, and am blessed for the generous partner you are. Thank you for loving me unconditionally even when I wasn’t able to understand or accept that love. This dissertation was possible because of all the time and effort and care you put into me and into our family over

x nearly ten years. Talking with you about the ideas here, about Black radical thought, about Black feminist beef, remains a challenge because you are my hardest audience! I know if I can convince YOU of something, I can convince anyone. Thank you for the time, care, effort and extra work you took on through the hard times. You are a perfectly delightful partner, and I am excited about what we’ve already built—and what we can continue to build in the future. Thank you for loving me.

And finally, to Amir. You were born right before I started writing this dissertation, and your arrival ushered in a new season in my life. You have challenged me to be a better human, and have challenged me with your constant defiance—even as an infant! I am proud of your defiance, I hope that you learn to aim it at those structures that most need breaking in this world, and not at those who love you. I hope to teach you this in time. I wrote this dissertation for you, even though you can’t really understand it right now. You were born in a difficult moment in the world, where it looks like we don’t have any chance at changing things, and where darkness is spreading. But our eyes can deceive us, and everything is not as it seems at first glance. Find the breaks, the cracks, the small spaces and run at them with all your might. Don’t ever trade your radical, defiant spirit for anything less than full freedom. Talk to your ancestors daily. Learn your magic. Play, run, laugh and love. I love you.

xi [TABLE OF CONTENTS] [INTRODUCTION] Capture and Evasion: Routes of Black Feminist Survival ...... 1 Inheritances and Investments: Black Feminist Genealogies ...... 1 Seen and Unseen: In/visible Black Feminist Genealogies ...... 7 The Capture of Black Feminism ...... 11 Inheriting Survival: Black Feminist Evasion ...... 15 Chapter Outline ...... 19 Methods and Methodologies ...... 22 [CHAPTER 1] Building Popular Neoliberal Black Feminism ...... 30 Introduction ...... 30 What Is Radical Black Feminism? ...... 31 Constructing Popular Neoliberal Black Feminism ...... 36 Killing the Killjoy ...... 44 A Note on Method: Black Feminist Prophetics ...... 57 [CHAPTER 2] Black Feminist Radicalism: A Genealogy and A Departure ...... 67 Introduction ...... 67 Pat Parker ...... 68 Combahee River Collective ...... 78 Brittney C. Cooper ...... 90 [CHAPTER 3] Tenure and/or Death: Black Feminist Labor in the U.S. Academy ...... 108 Introduction ...... 108 Genealogies of Black Feminism in the Academy: Gathering, Naming, and Home Truths ...... 114 Radical Black Feminist Accountability: Alexis Pauline Gumbs and the Lived Critique of the Academy ...... 136 For What and for Whom? Black Feminist(s’) Labor(s) in the Neoliberal Academy ...... 144 [CHAPTER 4] Matters of Style and Self: The Hip-Hop Feminist Turn ...... 149 The Political is (a) Personal (Problem) ...... 152 This One’s for the Boys: Black Feminism On Patriarchal Terms ...... 159 Not Your Foremother’s Feminism: Hip-Hop Feminism and Generational Beef ...... 164 [CHAPTER 5] Neoliberal Investments: Black Feminism and the Affective Economy of Beyoncé ...... 169 Introduction ...... 169 Context and Conjunctures: Post-racialism and the Rise of Beyoncé ...... 171 The Affective Economy of Beyoncé-As-Feminist ...... 179 Producing Radical Beyoncé ...... 189 The Misrecognition of Radicalism ...... 199 The Practice of Affective Investment: The Lemonade Syllabus ...... 207 Conclusion: Accountability and Divestment ...... 217 [CONCLUSION] “An Imagined Place Might Save Your Life:” Despair, Mourning, and World-Breaking ...... 220 [CODA] Poems on Capture ...... 232

xii [INTRODUCTION] Capture and Evasion: Routes of Black Feminist Survival

“I love the word survival, it always sounds to me like a promise.”—Audre Lorde

“I survive, not because I am barely alive, but because I am flagrantly alive in the sight of my ancestors. The universe loves us. And we sell ourselves cheap when we forget. Our ancestors are teaching us what we deserve. May we never sell our legacy for a mess of ego and scholar-styled swag. May we refuse to exploit our legacy in order to earn more exploitation. May we remember who we are.” –Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Inheritances and Investments: Black Feminist Genealogies

In 2013, Alicia Garza, an activist in Oakland, CA tweeted “Our lives matter,

Black lives matter” in response to the acquittal of George Zimmerman, who shot and killed unarmed Black teenager Trayvon Martin after following him around Martin’s apartment complex. “Our lives matter, Black lives matter” was retweeted by Patricia

Cullors, a queer activist and playwright in Los Angeles, and Garza’s friend, as the hashtag #BlackLivesMatter; they were joined by Opal Tometi, a third friend and activist based in New York and working on Black immigration rights. A year later, in September

2014, the women would mobilize the hashtag, this time in support of the uprisings in

Ferguson, Missouri, after the shooting death of unarmed, college-bound Black teenager

Michael Brown by police officer Darren Wilson. #BlackLivesMatter was the rallying cry they used to fund travel for activists around the country to converge on Ferguson in the aftermath of the shooting. And it would become the name of the “ideological and

1 political intervention” that has grown into the Black Lives Matter movement, which includes numerous local chapters and a national presence.1

Yet, despite this well understood origin story, in the short time between the release of the hashtag and these women’s tremendous organizing efforts, the hashtag became associated in mass media with a man named DeRay Mckesson, a Teach for

America alumni born in Baltimore, and working in Minneapolis. Within 18 months of the

Ferguson Uprising, Mckesson would appear on the Late Show with Stephen Colbert, becoming the most visible face of a movement created predominantly by queer Black women for very different purposes than Mckesson’s interview was serving.2 Mckesson, active on Twitter and utilizing the platform and his public association with

#BlackLivesMatter to increase his public persona (but not associated with either his local

#BlackLivesMatter chapter or with national organizing efforts) would later run for mayor in Baltimore on the platform.3 Mckesson’s activity has contributed to the narrative that

#BlackLivesMatter is a movement for, by, and about Black men, and the women creators of #BlackLivesMatter have been fighting to correct the historical record ever since.4

While the ensuing fight for recognition of Black women’s vulnerability before the state and their labor on behalf of social movements consumed Black feminists efforts to frame the narrative of this national social movement, another debate emerged at the end

1 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #BlackLivesMatter Movement by Alicia Garza,” The Feminist Wire, October 7, 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/10/blacklivesmatter-2/ 2 The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, “DeRay Mckesson Helps Stephen Address His Privilege,” YouTube (video), January 19, 2016, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qffCO1b-7Js. 3 See Rachel Cohen, “DeRay Mckesson Isn’t Baltimore’s Black Lives Matter Candidate,” Slate, February 12, 2016, http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/2016/02/deray_mckesson_won_t_be_ baltimore_s_black_lives_matter_candidate_he_ll_be.html; Greg Howard, “The Fight for the Soul of Black Lives Matter,” The Concourse, August 20, 2015, https://theconcourse.deadspin.com/the- fight-for-the-soul-of-black-lives-matter-1724803469 4 Garza, “A Herstory.”

2 of 2013, which would embroil Black feminists in battles within their own ranks. Beyoncé

Knowles Carter dropped her first visual album, Beyoncé, with no prior advertisement, just two weeks before Christmas 2013. The release, much like every mass media move

Beyoncé would make in the years to come, was celebrated as a feminist triumph by some feminists, and derided by others.5 Of particular interest to Black feminist academics was

Beyoncé’s sample of Chimamanda Adichie’s Tedx talk, “We Should All Be Feminists.”6

Brittney Cooper, a Black feminist professor at Rutgers and regular writer for Salon,

Cosmopolitan and other popular magazines, took less than 24 hours to publish “5

Reasons I Am Here for Beyoncé, the Feminist” on the Crunk Feminist Collective site7, under the moniker “crunktastic.” She followed this article four days later with a piece in

Salon entitled “The Beyoncé Wars: Should She Get to Be A Feminist?”8 Cooper’s articles were sites of debate for many Black feminists, and reactions to the already existing controversy Beyoncé‘s work invokes.

Nearly a year later, Beyoncé would perform at the MTV Video Music Awards, lighting up the stage with the word “Feminist” and sending feminists everywhere into an

5 A number of public Black feminist intellectuals have taken up Beyonce’s use of feminism in positive ways, including Brittney Cooper, Roxanne Gay, Omi’seke Tinsley, Jamila Lemieux, and Tamara Winfrey Harris. Black feminists who are critical of using Beyonce as a site for Black feminist knowledge production are harder to find, in part because of the furious reactions they receive for being critical. However, Black feminist bell hooks has spoken and written critically of Beyoncé, and Zaba Blay has written in defense of critiquing Beyoncé’s work. This topic will be more fully examined in Chapter Five. 6 Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, “We Should All Be Feminists,” Ted (video), December 1, 2012, https://www.ted.com/talks/chimamanda_ngozi_adichie_we_should_all_be_feminists. 7 Brittney Cooper [Crunktastic], “5 Reasons I Am Here for Beyoncé, the Feminist,” Crunk Feminist Collective (blog), December 13, 2013, http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2013/12/13/5-reasons-im-here-for-beyonce-the- feminist/. 8 Brittney Cooper, “The Beyoncé Wars: Should She Get to Be a Feminist?,” Salon, December 17, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/12/17/a_deeply_personal_beyonce_debate_should_she_get_to_be_a _feminist/

3 all-out frenzy over the quality and commitments of her feminism. Annie Lennox called

Beyoncé “feminism-lite” and decried her twerking, labeling her as tokenistic.9 Many

Black feminist academics took this opportunity to defend not just Beyoncé, but also

Black women similar to her against white feminism and what they label the “politics of respectability,” or the belief that respectable behavior can prevent sexual and racial violence.10 Their work, well-situated in a long tradition of differentiation between Black and white feminists dating all the way back to suffrage, has produced a wide-reaching archive broadly defending Beyoncé’s forms of feminism. In exhausting repetition,

Beyoncé’s work and relevance to feminism were again debated two years later with the release of the “Formation” video, the day before she performed the song at the Super

Bowl, amid protests of her “anti-police” politics, signaled by her sinking a police cruiser in symbolic flood-waters of a post-Katrina New Orleans. Using the Super Bowl performance to announce her Formation world tour, and later that year releasing her sixth

9 Chris Azzopardi, “Q&A: Annie Lennox on Her Legacy, Why Beyoncé is ‘Feminist Lite,’ ” Pride Source, September 25, 2014, http://www.pridesource.com/article.html?article=68228. See also NPR Morning Edition, “ ‘You Cannot Go Back’: Annie Lennox on ‘Nostalgia,’ ” NPR, October 21, 2014, http://www.npr.org/2014/10/20/357622310/you-cannot-go-back-annie-lennox- on-nostalgia. Ironically, Lennox was discussing an album in which she records covers of a number of songs performed by Black women during Jim Crow and the Civil Rights movement, including “Strange Fruit” and “God Bless the Child,” by Billie Holiday, as well as “I Put a Spell on You,” by Nina Simone. 10 Evelyn Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women’s Movement in the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994). Higginbotham’s framework for “The Politics of Respectability” comes from chapter 7 of this book, in which she describes the process of self-fashioning that Black Baptist women used as a form of dignity in the face of sexual violence. The term has taken on many different meanings in contemporary Black feminist usage, and is a site for much debate between Black feminists, including Brittney C. Cooper, Treva Lindsey, Janell Hobson, and Kaila Story. See Ralina L. Joseph and Jane Rhodes, “Black Women and the Politics of Respectability,” AAIHS, April 24, 2017, https://www.aaihs.org/black-women-and-the-politics-of-respectability-an-introduction/ for an excellent brief introduction to the history and current iterations of the term. Also see the special issue by Ralina L. Joseph and Jane Rhodes (eds.), “African American Representation and the Politics of Respectability,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 18, no. 2-4, (2016).

4 album (and second visual album) Lemonade, Beyoncé effectively cornered the conversation on “Black feminism” in academic and public circles for a full two years.

Each of the examples above speak to the broader concerns of this project, namely, understanding the historical inheritances and present-day investments of Black feminists as the Black feminist tradition they emerge from becomes a more visible ideological intervention in the political and social landscape of the U.S at the dawn of the 21st century.11 That is, I have set out here to map some of the intellectual ground covered between the 1970s, when radical Black feminism was a nascent but powerful movement, and the present day, when Black feminists disagree about the fundamental meaning of

“radical” Black feminism. For the purposes of this project, “Black feminist tradition” encompasses the ground laid by scholars such as Beverly Guy-Sheftall, who traces U.S.

Black feminism back to the nineteenth century with the work of women such as Anna

Julia Cooper and Sojourner Truth, and forward to the present day.12 While this project is limited to that particular trajectory, I would be remiss not to acknowledge that Black feminism itself is a broad umbrella, housing Black communities around the world, and far earlier than the nineteenth century, as recently demonstrated by Cheryl Higashida and

Mia E. Bay, Farrah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones.13

11 I use the term “Black feminist tradition,” following the practice of “queer Black feminist love evangelist” Alexis Pauline Gumbs, in an effort to signal that while Black feminist thought, and Black feminists themselves, are a diverse (and sometimes divergent) group of people, Black feminism comes from a tradition built by Black people who are concerned, at base, about the disempowerment occurring at the intersection of race, class and gender under white supremacist cisheteropatriarchy. I use this term in order to both make space for diverse voices within Black feminist thought, but also to indicate that the roots of “Black feminism” remain concerned with the specific positionality of Black women in Black diasporic social and political life. 12 Beverly Guy Sheftall (ed.), Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, (New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 1995). 13 Mia E. Bay, Farrah J. Griffin, and Martha S. Jones (eds.), Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2015); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Black Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1955-1995, (Urbana,

5 As Black feminist discourses gain visibility and traction in mass culture, and as

Black feminist academics gain legitimacy as individual writers, intellectuals and speakers, there are critical silences at the margins of these discourses central to the questions of liberation, self-determination and well-being that the Black feminist tradition addresses itself to. In other words, as individual Black feminists such as Roxanne Gay,

Melissa Harris-Perry, and Brittney C. Cooper become more visible, relevant and marketable contributors to public political narratives in the United States, the more radical, collective, and less digestible roots of the Black feminist tradition fade from public view.

While both assimilationist and radical interventions have informed the Black feminist tradition in the United States historically, the questions and crises that face Black freedom movements today require us to do some digging to uncover the collective, radical aspects of Black feminism that address themselves directly to questions of freedom under neoliberalism.14 Specifically, then, this project is concerned with understanding the reasons behind and processes by which Black feminist thinkers are

“captured” by neoliberal markets and institutions. And because the Black feminist

IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013). See also Brittney C. Cooper, Beyond Respectability: The Intellectual Thought of Race Women, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2017). 14 I understand assimilationist interventions in the Black feminist tradition to include work by Black club women, Talented Tenth narratives, and conservative Black Christian church involvement in electoral politics. I understand radical interventions to include armed forms of resistance against slavery (such as the Harriet Tubman-led Combahee River raid), the work of self-determination in the Black Panthers, and the development of the reproductive justice framework spearheaded by Black and women of color feminists in the 1970s. See Deborah Gray White, Too Heavy a Load: Black Women in Defense of Themselves, 1894-1994, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1999); Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005); Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom, (Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018);

6 tradition, exceeding any one Black feminist thinker, addresses itself to the liberation of all Black people, this project is also tasked with unearthing the practices, ideas and imperatives of the tradition necessary for evading capture and moving toward liberation.

Hence, this project utilizes capture and evasion as metaphors for degrees of un/freedom experienced by Black feminist intellectuals engaged in various forms of labor on behalf of neoliberal institutions, Black communities, liberation movements, and as representatives of a larger Black feminist tradition. By paying close attention to collective, radical roots of the Black feminist tradition, especially those roots embedded in Black women’s poetry, anthologies, speeches, and personal essays, this project seeks to unearth a radical genealogy of the Black feminist tradition that is less amenable to capture, and from which we might learn something about evasion, fugitivity, fight and flight that can inform our current practices and choices on the cusp of a renewed movement for Black liberation. This work follows closely the ground recently laid by scholar-activist Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who has renewed conversations about Black radicalism in light of the Black Lives Matter Movement, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who emphasizes radical, independent, community-accountable research as central to Black feminist scholarship.15

Seen and Unseen: In/visible Black Feminist Genealogies

The examples of #BlackLivesMatter and Beyoncé are tied together by critical questions about which Black women are seen, which are not, and what consequences

15 Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2016) and How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books, 2017); Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “We Have Always Known: Embodying Community Accountability,” The Feminist Wire, September 18, 2012, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/09/we-have-always-known-embodying-community- accountability/.

7 each of these states of in/visibility have for Black feminism as it is understood publicly in this moment. These questions are deeply related to what constitutes freedom, self- determination, accountability and wellness for Black women in the 21st century. The juxtaposition between the above examples is stunning. Beyoncé, a Black woman artist and cultural producer, is a highly visible figure in public culture, living much of her (cis- gender, heterosexual, married) life under tremendous scrutiny. The scrutiny does not just come from those that see her as a threat or a problem, but also from those who consider themselves among her biggest fans.16 In fact, Black feminist scholars—many of whom also consider themselves fans—have been at the forefront of building the Beyoncé-as- feminist archive in mass culture.17 Beyoncé, however, is not the first Black women to enjoy this level of visibility; Black celebrity women’s hypervisibility has historical precedent.18

Conversely, three Black women activists—Patrice Cullors, Opal Tometi, and

Alicia Garza—two of whom are queer, have had to fight just to tell the true story of how they created, organized, and catapulted the #BlackLivesMatter movement into national politics. While some Black feminist scholars have taken up this important story as well,

16 Beyoncé’s recent announcement of her (twin) pregnancy in February 2017 set an Instagram record for number of likes, and took the second spot with the picture announcement of their birth. See Taylor Weatherby, “Will Beyoncé Beat Her Own Instagram Record with New Twins Photo?”, Billboard, July 14, 2017, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip- hop/7866027/beyonce-twins-photo-instagram-record. 17 Melissa Harris-Perry, Daphne Brooks, Brittney Cooper, Omi’seke Tinsley and Regina Bradley are just a few scholars who have contributed work to this archive as both thinkers and fans, which is more fully examined in Chapter Five. 18 Historically, this visibility can have tremendous consequences for Black women, particularly Black women celebrities. For examples, see the lives of Dorothy Dandridge, Whitney Houston, Mariah Carey and Billie Holiday. See Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, (New York: Free Press, 2001); Angela Y. Davis, Blues Legacies and Black Feminism: Gertrude “Ma” Rainey, Bessie Smith, and Billie Holiday, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1998); Linda Lister. "Divafication: The Deification of Modern Female Pop Stars." Popular Music and Society 25, no. 3-4 (January 1, 2001): 1-10

8 the archive created by scholars committed to telling this story is not nearly as wide reaching as the one created for Beyoncé. The invisibility of the labor of the #BLM creators, and the invisibility of the lives they understand to be most vulnerable within

Black liberation movements, also has historical precedent within both social movements and intellectual history, with life-altering consequences.19 Even as the fruit of their labor is public in the most serious sense of the word, they and their labor remain largely invisible in the discourses constructed around Black Lives Matter.

These two instances are symptoms of a crisis of in/visibilityr Black feminism that speaks to both the inheritances and investments that Black feminist academics have taken on at the dawn of the 21st century. I understand in/visibility to be one way of representing the contradiction in “seen-ness” that white supremacist heteropatriarchy structures for

Black women. This unusual subject position, perhaps best articulated by the title of the book All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave, fluctuates between invisibility and hyper visibility based on the needs of power, as opposed to the needs and lives of Black women. Hence, when convenient as sites of public rhetoric, images of Black women are hypervisible—often as tropes of racialized,

19 See Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race and Class, (New York: Vintage Books, 1983); Paula Giddings, When and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women on Race and Sex in America, (New York: HarperCollins, 1984); Françoise N. Hamlin Crossroads at Clarksdale: The Black Freedom Struggle in the Mississippi Delta After World War II, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); Rosalind Rosenberg, Jane Crow: The Life of Pauli Murray, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2017); White, Too Heavy a Load; Springer, Living for Revolution; Bettye Colliar-Thomas and V.P. Franklin (eds.), Sisters in the Struggle: African American Women in the Civil Rights-Black Power Movement (New York: NYU Press, 2001); Danielle L. McGuire, At the Dark End of the Street: Black Women, Rape, and Resistance—A New History of the Civil Rights Movement from Rosa Parks to the Rise of Black Power, (New York: Vintage Books, 2011); Barbara Ransby, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Robyn C. Spencer, The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016); Cooper, Beyond Respectability, for just a small sample of the work scholars have done to address this erasure.

9 gendered meaning—or as Hortense Spillers suggests, “a national treasury of rhetorical wealth.”20 On the other hand, actual Black women suffer tremendous invisibility under the systems of white supremacist heteropatriarchy that still limits the category “woman” to white women and the category “Black” to men. This is most apparent, and perhaps most disappointing, in the ongoing relegation of Black women’s intellectual work to the margins of Africana Studies as a discipline.21

The in/visibility of Black feminism in public culture raises a number of questions, as we examine what Black liberation means in this moment. Most of these questions can be nested under three broad inquiries that guide this project: 1) What problematics does visibility create for Black feminist thought in the 21st century, given that the intellectual and activist traditions have long operated in places of relative invisibility? 2) What entanglements emerge from a Black feminism that is both preoccupied with the representative life of Black womanhood and deeply invested in neoliberal discourses of

“choice” and “rights” as the measure of freedom for Black women? 3) What resources have Black women inherited from Black feminist foremothers that allow us to imagine,

20 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 no 2 (1987): 65. Patricia Hill Collins names this phenomenon “controlling images” in Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 1999). 21 See Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982); Delores Aldridge and Carlene Young, Out of the Revolution: The Development of Africana Studies, (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2003); Carole Boyce-Davis, Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies, (Trenton, NJ: Africa World Press, 2003); Frances Smith Foster, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Stanlie M. James (eds.), Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, (New York: The Feminist Press, 2009); Rose Brewer, “Black Women’s Studies: From Theory to Transformative Practice,” Socialism and Democracy Online 55, no. 1, (March 2011), http://sdonline.org/55/black-womens-studies-from-theory-to-transformative- practice/.

10 advocate for, and pursue liberation for diverse Black people, and what are the current investments we are making that will affect our Black feminist progeny in the future?22

This dissertation is my attempt to answer these questions by tracing genealogies of U.S.

Black feminist thought from its radical activist spaces in the 1970s, through its mercurial relationship with the academy, and finally into the present day social media landscape. I argue that Black feminist thinkers must take stock of our investments in oppressive structures in the present day in order to imagine liberatory possibilities for the future that require our active disinvestment.

The Capture of Black Feminism

Like many vulnerable populations, Black women have forged routes of survival over centuries. These survival routes involve paths of both refusal and acquiescence that allow Black women to navigate oppressive structures. The lines between refusal and acquiescence in these routes can become murky, and the forms of oppression themselves can be obvious or subtle. And sometimes, “progress” within oppressive structures comes at the expense of self-determination that works outside of, or in spite of, oppressive structures. Routes that are visible to actors working on behalf of oppressive structure require significant acquiescence, and place Black women in much tighter strictures, than routes that are less visible to institutions. Black feminists as creators of an intellectual tradition and as active practitioners have forged countless routes to navigate oppressive structures. There is no one “right” route for Black women to take in navigating toward a larger share of freedom. There are, however, risks, vulnerabilities, and investments that

22 Throughout this project, I will use the term “we” to identify myself and Black feminists reading this work.

11 we must take into account for the different routes we take. We all navigate differing levels of visibility and invisibility along these routes.

Being visible makes oppressed communities more vulnerable to oppressive structures, at the same time that it provides invisibilized communities with the opportunity to be seen. Yet, just as visibility was a particular type of vulnerability for enslaved people escaping plantations to head North, in the present-day visibility is still fraught with the possibility of capture. Capture, in the context of this project, is understood as the processes by which Black feminist thinkers are “caught-up” as actors within oppressive structures, and processes by which the radical potential of the Black feminist tradition is blunted. Capture is hegemonic, and can be discursive and/or material.

Within the neoliberal academy for example, it is the process by which Black feminist academics make key concessions to oppressive structures that ultimately affect the quality of the collective liberation Black people wish to achieve, even as those concessions may constitute individual security or survival within the oppressive structure.

In order to understand the capture of Black feminist thought in the personal, public and academic spheres, we must do some work to understand the inheritances of invisibility that make this moment of public exposure feel like progress. While Black feminism in the popular imagination is enjoying a moment of relative visibility in the person of Beyoncé, and to a lesser extent other Black women celebrities and public figures, as well as the archive of knowledge Black feminist scholars and writers contribute to her work, much of the work Black feminist thought has accomplished historically has been invisible not just to the broader dominant culture, but even within

Black liberation movements themselves. In fact, frustration over the erasure and

12 invisibility of Black women’s intellectual labor has long been lamented by Black women activists and scholars alike, who believe Black feminist frameworks are the gold standard of liberation for Black people living within the U.S.23 It is understandable, then, why many Black feminist scholars have celebrated this opportunity to reach “the masses” through mass cultural figures that have such broad appeal. It is also understandable that being seen provides a level of social validation that Black women as an oppressed group have been deprived of for centuries. Writing about Beyoncé – a global superstar – seems like an easy fix, then, to so many problems.

But the new visibility of Black feminist thought earned by think pieces on pop culture does not come cheaply. There is a cost to exposure, and it involves certain restrictions that Black feminists navigate differently when working more fugitively. The cost of articulating Black feminist thought within the strictures of mass culture is nothing less than a silencing of its most radically imaginative and collective strains. In this, Black feminist scholars articulating Black feminist thought through mass cultural figures and within academic expectations sometimes trade the possibilities of radical imagination for relevance, accessibility, and stability within the current structures of domination. It is almost as if Black feminist scholars have been captured, despite their best intentions.

In addition to the popular culture conundrum, Black feminist scholars are wading through the consequences of academic neoliberalism on an intellectual and activist

23 See Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, ed. Beverly Guy-Sheftall (New York: The New Press, 1995); Collins, Black Feminist Thought; Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches by Audre Lorde, (Berkeley: Crossing Press, 2007); Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” in Feminist Legal Theory Foundations ed. D. Kelly Weisberg, (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1989).

13 tradition that did not start in the academy. Black feminism, though not always named as such, has roots dating at least back to the mid nineteenth century.24 As a named tradition it exploded in the 1970s alongside (and embedded within) the Black Power and women’s rights movements.25 Black feminist foremothers at this time were also part of the push to make the resources of the academy available to marginalized groups.26 These folks, many of them activists, writers, and educators, believed it was crucial for Black people to be able to create knowledge about themselves. But like all integrative processes, that incursion into the academy, as hard-fought and well-intentioned as it was, has meant that some of our most radical desires have become beholden to the rules of the academy in order for the space to continue to be available, a conversation I will take up more thoroughly in Chapter 3. The incursion into the academy has made the routes of Black feminist thought more visible, and therefore more vulnerable, to oppressive structures.

In the U.S. academic context, liberal individualism, the need for job security, and the flows of neoliberal capital have changed the paths Black women scholars navigate to succeed. That the academy has been swept up in the flows of neoliberalism has been

24 The work of Beverly Guy-Sheftall traces Black feminist thought back into the 19th century, while the Black feminist poetry and creative work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs imagines Black feminism as a form of survival for Black women and femmes throughout time and space. See Sheftall, Words of Fire; and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016). 25 See Springer, Living for the Revolution; Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (ed.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. (New York: Kitchen Table Woman of Color Press, 1981); Toni Cade Bambara (ed.) The Black Woman: An Anthology, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970); June Jordan, New Day: Poems of Exile and Return, (New York: Emerson Hall, 1974) and Things That I Do in the Dark, (New York: Random House, 1977); Audre Lorde, Cables to Rage, (London: Paul Breman, 1970) and The Black Unicorn, (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1978). 26Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983)

14 well-documented elsewhere.27 However, neoliberal education and the explosion of social media as a site for public intellectualism has affected both the objects and the tone of the debates among feminist thinkers in profound, and alarming, ways.28 Black feminism’s move into the academy has followed a necessarily integrative path, and Black women scholars have felt the constant push of tenure, publishing, and service that marks the U.S. scholarly life. This is the story of how black feminist thought began at the radical margins and moved into the mainstream center, how it did so with profound political consequences, and what that movement and those consequences tell us about the state of

Black intellectual life in the age of Black Lives Matter and Donald Trump.

Inheriting Survival: Black Feminist Evasion

Why not simply abandon Black feminism as an academic or mass media project?

It is possible that we may have to in order to renew and resuscitate the radical force that occurs when Black women are at the center of movements for social change. Just as the practice of Black feminisms long precedes the attempt to solidify it as an intellectual tradition, the ethic, intentions and effects of the Black feminist tradition also exceed the current technologies of capture surrounding it. In other words, there is much, much more to this Black feminist story that evades what scholars could ever produce on social media,

27 Stefano Harvey and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012). 28 Arit John and Allie Jones, “The Incomplete Guide to Feminist Infighting,” The Atlantic, January 29, 2014, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2014/01/incomplete-guide- feminist-infighting/357509/; Michelle Goldberg, “Feminism’s Toxic Twitter Wars,” The Nation, February 17, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/feminisms-toxic-twitter-wars/; Christa Bell and Mako Fitts Ward, “The Problem with Beyhive Bottom Bitch Feminism,” Real Colored Girls (blog), December 15, 2013, https://realcoloredgirls.wordpress.com/2013/12/15/the-problem-with- beyhive-bottom-bitch-feminism/.

15 or as part of the academic industrial complex, even as it is co-opted by neoliberalism.

Because one of the most important aspects of Black is communal accountability, we need to develop frameworks that make space for the important voices of dissent from the margins that can help Black feminists navigate the structures of neoliberalism in the present day.

There is much Black feminist knowledge production occurring in places that are less visible. Because Black feminist knowledge production comes from the experiences of Black women in their everyday, material lives, and is embedded in an ethic of communal care and accountability, Black feminist thought contains an epistemological practice of self-reflexivity.29 But in order for it to work, we must slow down and pay careful attention to what is happening—and what we are producing in word and deed—in this moment. We must make shifts in the archives we are using to build the Black feminist tradition in the present moment, and develop a collective, meaningful way to evaluate the quality of our words and deeds for the goal of collective liberation.

This moment requires from Black feminist thinkers a worldview that exceeds, or is illegible to, the logics of neoliberalism. It also requires Black feminist thinkers to become skilled in the art of evasion—or avoiding capture. Seeing a way through this crisis in Black feminist thought requires a reorientation, a re-minding, to what the Black feminist tradition is and does in the world. It means being honest about what concessions academic Black feminism has made in order to be acceptable within institutions, and redirecting our routes, in a move that likely seems illogical to outsiders, against the flow of neoliberalism. It means paying attention to alternative genealogies of Black feminism

29 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, Chapter 11.

16 that are sited in communal and individual wellness, account for capitalism, the state, and imperialism, and provide us with a different set of practices that have the potential to affect the lived conditions of our most vulnerable. Most of all, it means re-minding ourselves that the voices which initiated radical Black feminist thought come primarily from outside the academy, attend to questions of community and spirit, and have sophisticated and accessible anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, and queer critiques that are part and parcel of their understanding of freedom for Black women.

The Black feminist tradition is full of actors being where they are not expected to be for the goal of liberation.30 In addition to outlining ways that Black feminism has been captured in the present moment, this project constructs radical Black feminist genealogies that have escaped certain levels of public visibility; Black feminist work that acts fugitively and evades capture even as it is visible; and Black feminist work that is not attached to a flurry of public meaning making and branding, but works quietly, individually and collectively, toward a goal of self and communal liberation. These genealogies provide us with sets of tools, frameworks and practices that Black feminist thinkers, within and outside the academy, can use to reinvigorate the critical gaze of

Black feminist thought in our present crisis.

Many of these tools, frameworks and practices lie in important inheritances we’ve underutilized from radical Black women and queer folks. What they have left for us is crucial for reimagining what freedom could and should be for Black communities living

30 For books on subjectivity and the unexpected in Black feminist appearances, see Gumbs, Spill; Carole Boyce Davies, Caribbean Spaces: Escapes from Twilight Zone, (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013); Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001); See also Tina Campt, “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity” (video), Barnard Center for Research in Women, October 7, 2014, http://bcrw.barnard.edu/videos/tina-campt-black-feminist-futures-and-the-practice-of-fugitivity/.

17 in the United States. Some of the narratives have been passed over for their indigestibility to democratic reformism, including their stringent capitalist critiques, their fluid understandings of sexuality and gender, their refusal of U.S. imperialism, and their relentless focus on Black women as the primary site of revolutionary interventions.

Others are familiar at first sight, but have been misinterpreted, taken out of context, or repurposed to serve means other than what their authors originally intended. Some of these narratives have also been passed over for simpler reasons, such as the forms their authors chose to write or communicate in (essays, poetry, and memoirs, for example), their attention to questions of spirituality and psychic communality, and their illegibility to academic and mass cultural forms of knowledge production. Finally, these narratives are evasive because they are not always easily digestible by mass culture. That evasiveness, while it emerges from marginalization, gives us an important perspective from which to understand the crisis of capture that is currently reconfiguring the goals and methods of U.S. Black feminist liberation.

We live in a moment when we are quite clear about what ails us as a society, and what inequalities and injustices exist in the world. The "facts on the ground," we might say, have not changed significantly in decades. Racism, sexism, cisheteropatriarchy, ableism, wealth inequality, we have named all of these things, have outlined their contours. We have collected testimonies from those suffering the effects. We have examined how these systems are built structurally, carried out institutionally, justified narratively, and practiced interpersonally. But our inability to create a better world is not a political battle, but one that requires us to transform as people. As Layli Maparyan argues in The Womanist Idea: "Politics as it is understood and enacted today is incapable

18 of delivering humanity to its own potentiality."31 Whether we wish to acknowledge it or not, we are dependent in this moment on finding methods, stories, and practices by which we can transform, and have transformative relationships with those around us.

Finding that method means being reflective and honest about the in/visibility of our investments—an appropriate metaphor for living under neoliberal logics in the 21st century. It is about taking stock of where we are putting our energies—as an academic field, as Black feminists, and as Black people living in the U.S. Even in this moment, we fail to take seriously the less visible lives at the edges of Black freedom struggles—lives that come from people who have unique and critical optics on what liberation in the context of U.S. empire might look like. These Black lives literally see differently. Hence, this project is ultimately about the rich inheritance Black feminism hands down from generations of Black women and femmes past, many of who inhabit this space of in/visibility, work to evade capture and provide that crucial optic. And it is in fact their in/visibility that makes what we inherit from them all the more valuable, because even we must search to find them as we travel our own routes of survival.

Chapter Outline

What follows in this project are five chapters, divided into two parts, that address both a genealogy of radical Black feminism, as well as key places where we can observe the capture of U.S. Black feminist thought in the context of neoliberalism. In chapter 1,

“Building Popular Neoliberal Black Feminism,” I lay out the theoretical frameworks I utilize throughout this project. I use this chapter to define Black feminist radicalism as both a historical and theoretical framework with specific goals, as well as defining

31 Layli Maparyan, The Womanist Idea, (New York: Routledge, 2012), 4.

19 popular neoliberal Black feminism as I will utilize it throughout the project. The final part of the first chapter is dedicated to outlining Black feminist prophetics, a framework I use to create space in current Black feminist discourse for ethical disagreement and reorientation around radical Black feminist praxis and thought.

Chapter 2, “Black Feminist Radicalism: A Genealogy and A Departure,” examines the work of Pat Parker, and the Combahee River Collective in order to highlight some specific intellectual and practical commitments that U.S. Black feminists from the 1970s articulated at a critical point in the Black freedom struggle. I juxtapose their constructions of radical and revolutionary with the work of Black feminist scholar

Brittney Cooper in 2016, in order to trace how understandings of radical Black feminism have shifted. As both anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist critiques have taken a backseat in popular neoliberal Black feminist discourse, this chapter serves as a reorientation and reminding of what is necessary to energize the radical Black feminist imagination for the goal of liberation.

The second part of this project contains three chapters that grapple with questions of neoliberal capture in U.S. Black feminist discourse. Chapter 3, “Tenure and/or Death:

Black Feminist Labor in the U.S. Academy,” examines the terms of Black feminist labor and productivity in U.S. academic institutions as a site of capture for Black feminist thought. Engaging the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a self-proclaimed “queer Black feminist troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist,” this chapter questions how tenure and unbelonging have conscripted Black feminist’s labor within the academy toward deradicalized ends.

20 Chapter 4, “Matters of Style and Taste: The Hip Hop Feminist Turn,” examines hip hop feminism as a particular iteration of popular neoliberal Black feminism emerging at the turn of the century. Utilizing the work of Joan Morgan, most often credited as a founder of hip hop feminism, this chapter takes seriously her memoir When

Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, as a theoretical intervention into the landscape of U.S. Black feminist thought. Focusing on

Morgan’s claims about the inadequacy of academic U.S. Black feminism to meet the needs of a changing generation, this chapter examines the discursive construction of hip hop feminism as a site for constructing identity-as-politics. Within this construction, individualism, consumerism, and meritocracy are given precedence over material and structural Black feminist analysis, resulting in a form of Black feminism that is simultaneously more individually satisfying while being less radically oriented toward

U.S. capitalism and imperialism.

Chapter 5, “Neoliberal Investments: Black Feminism and the Affective Economy of

Beyoncé” examines U.S. Black feminist engagements with the work of Beyoncé

Knowles Carter as a definitional site of 21st century U.S. Black feminism. This chapter examines the market imperatives behind the production of knowledge about and in response to Beyoncé’s public work, including her 2016 Super Bowl performance, and the

Lemonade syllabus created in response to the release of the Lemonade film and album. In this chapter, I argue for an accounting of the creation of affective economies attached to

Beyoncé’s production of “feminist” imagery.

Methods and Methodologies

This project utilizes a variety of methods alongside a decolonial Black feminist methodology, and an Africana poetics tradition, in order to construct the arguments contained herein.32 The methods I engage include close readings of a variety of texts, including performances, social media posts, literature (to include personal essays, poetry, anthologies and memoirs), speeches, articles and blog posts, and academic publications; historiographical contextualization; social analysis; and the application of critical theories. I situate my arguments in this project historiographically, which is to say, I attempt to attend to the historical circumstances surrounding the emergence of what I believe are significant shifts in U.S. Black feminist intellectual history. This project is not, however, a history of Black feminist thought. Rather, the project is a critical intervention into the construction of present-day U.S. Black feminist discourses, with an attention to the processes by which neoliberal values and claims have become implicitly imbricated within the articulations of U.S. Black feminist identity.

Because I am utilizing a decolonial Black feminist methodology, I use the terms “I” and “we” throughout the project to indicate my own positionality as a Black feminist within the work. In this way, the critiques I have of U.S. Black feminist discourse are critiques I have of my own engagement with the objects of 21st century Black women’s representation and Black feminist social media. Indeed, as a student at an Ivy League

32 For examples of books that utilize a decolonial Black feminist methodology, see Gumbs, Spill, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, M Archive: After the End of the World, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018); bell hooks, Sisters of the Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 2005); M. Jacqui Alexander, Pedagogies of Crossing: Mediations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory and the Sacred, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).

22 university, I am equally implicated and imbricated within the structures of elite knowledge production premised on the conditions of oppression I examine. My methodological orientation to decolonial Black feminism is informed by the work of

Audre Lorde, who argued:

Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master's house as their only source of support.33

Understanding the master’s tools in the context of this project as the acceptable process of “objective” knowledge production within the academy, I aim to account for both my own subjective voice as I engage in a body of work that is important to me personally and intellectually, as well as methods that can constrict marginalized forms of knowledge production. I understand decolonial praxis in this context as a practice that intentionally aims to break down the oppressive structures of knowledge production within the academy. A decolonial Black feminist methodology, therefore, aims to center Black women’s knowledge and practice as a force against white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy as it manifests in the knowledge production of elite universities. In this way, I center my own and other Black feminist voices throughout this project, even as I may disagree with them or be implicated in the discourses I am calling attention to. This includes strong disagreements with Black feminist scholars and writers such as Brittney

C. Cooper, Roxanne Gay, and Joan Morgan in their use of popular culture figures to

33Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 112.

23 articulate current day Black feminism, as well as their articulations of a liberal Black feminism that emphasizes a more reformist approach to U.S. Black politics. To be clear, I believe that all of the Black feminists I discuss in this project are deeply committed to the wellbeing of Black women, and Black communities more broadly. I do not question the validity of their claims to Black feminism. Rather, where I disagree with this visible, popular vanguard of Black feminist scholars and writers is in their understandings of what constitutes potentially transformative visions of change in the context of Black feminist thought and praxis, as well as the role of popular culture in articulating the agendas and concerns of Black feminist political struggle. My disagreements here are offered not as a final word, but as a counterpoint.34

Throughout the Africana critical tradition, Black diasporic critical thinkers have utilized poetics as central to their construction of decolonial knowledges. Part of the purpose of poetics in the Africana critical tradition is to find ways to speak about the unspeakable, what Glissant labels the “unknown” in his Poetics of Relation:

“For us, and without exception, and no matter how much distance we may keep, the abyss is also a projection of and a perspective into the unknown. Beyond its chasm we gamble on the unknown. We take sides in this game of the world…We know ourselves as part and as crowd, in an unknown that does not terrify. We cry our cry of poetry. Our boats are open, and we sail them for everyone.”35

Audre Lorde similarly relates that:

“The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives. It is within this light that we form those ideas by which we pursue our magic and make it realized. This is poetry as illumination, for it is through poetry that

34 Roxanne Gay, Bad Feminist: Essays, (New York: HarperCollins Publishers, 2014); Brittney C. Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn, The Crunk Feminist Collection, (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017); Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999). 35 Edouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, (Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 8- 9.

24 we give name to those ideas which are, until the poem, nameless and formless-about to be birthed, but already felt….Poetry is the way we help give name to the nameless so it can be thought.”36

This project utilizes poetics as a methodology in writing, in part to account for both “the part and the crowd” that represents the diverse and varied tradition of U.S. Black feminist thought. In other words, the less formal presentation in the writing of this dissertation is intended both as a manner through which I can better illuminate what is nameless to myself and my readers, and a process through which I can “pursue our magic” and make it realized. Poetics emerges as a way to grapple with the diverse and varied arguments that present themselves in this project, while treating each one with the respect and dignity that Black women deserve, even as I may disagree with certain conclusions and points of view.

Finally, I use these poetics and these methodologies in order to write work that is accessible outside the U.S. academy to Black feminists who care about these issues on an everyday level. I aspire to no public profile beyond those that center Black feminist praxis and politics. bell hooks, a critical and cultural theorist who often utilizes Black feminist frameworks, discusses the need to engage in “humanizing speech, one that challenges and resists domination.”37 In my understanding of hooks’ Black feminist work, writing accessibly is both a statement of one’s political affiliations, as well as a practice in humanization for the self and for those who encounter our work. It is critically important to me that those outside the academy are able to read and understand the work I

36 Audre Lorde, “Poetry is Not a Luxury,” Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 36. 37 bell hooks, Talking Back: Thinking Feminist, Thinking Black, (Boston: South End Press, 1980), 131.

25 engage in this project, even as one of my primary audiences are Black feminists within the academy.

Patricia Hill Collins, in her groundbreaking work Black Feminist Thought, outlines the primary epistemology of Black feminism as “the interests and standpoint of its creators,” in this case, U.S. Black feminists.38 Black feminist epistemology, according to

Collins, includes centering the lived experiences of Black women as a form of legitimate knowledge, using dialogue as a method for evaluation, an ethic of caring, and an ethic of personal accountability in knowledge construction. In as much as I have been able, I have constructed this project with these epistemological goals at the center, including subjecting my own processes to rigorous evaluation and conversation with my own community of Black feminist scholars. I have also made every effort to document those conversations throughout the project and in my acknowledgements. Finally, I acknowledge that the project itself is very much an analysis of my own encounters with and experiences of present-day Black feminist discourse, particularly as a Black feminist with radical orientations who has found it increasingly difficult to enter the public conversation around Black feminist thought and praxis.

My own reticence to enter public discussions around U.S. Black feminism, particularly on social media, is anecdotally related to the stakes of this project. In the rush of Black feminist academics working to create a branded persona on social media that links up with their research, the social media streets of Black feminism have become, for lack of a better way to say it, mean. The overwhelming majority of Black feminist knowledge circulating in the broader public sphere is related to celebrity, cultural, and

38 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 251. Also see Chapter 11, “Black Feminist Epistemology.”

26 media figures, with much of the critical Black feminist work remaining within the space of the academy, in academic journals and books. Two notable exceptions to this trend is the recent work of Keeanga-Yemahtta Taylor, who has chosen an intentional path of non- academic presses and community accountable work as she works at Princeton University, and Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who has intentionally chosen to work as an independent scholar who publishes publicly accessible work through Duke University Press.

Still, apart from a few notable exceptions, a quick scroll through Twitter timelines using the hashtag #BlackGirlMagic reveals that many Black feminist academics are engaged in protracted debates around popular culture figures, mass cultural moments, and

Black women’s involvement in U.S. electoral politics. Precious little time and effort seem to be spent outlining issues such as Black women’s divestment from capitalist structures, or even cogent critiques of U.S. imperialism and its connection to the suffering of Black lives within the U.S. through the prison industrial complex and militarism. Radical Black feminist voices are increasingly quiet in the space of social media.

Yet, it is my belief that radical Black feminism remains the best hope of Black liberation struggles to provide a framework that attends to the wide range of oppressive forces impinging on the lives of Black communities. The question is less whether or not radical Black feminists still exist in the U.S. (they do), but rather how their messages are passed over in favor of more palatable and digestible work that appeals to those of us imbricated within capitalism and imperialism who also do not wish to address those imbrications with radical action. In other words, radical Black feminist voices continue to be pushed to the margins in part because we do not want to hear them. Radicalism is disruptive to the status quo by its very nature. Black feminist radicalism is particularly

27 disruptive because it centers the needs, desires, and voices of Black women, a group doubly devalued under the logics of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. At a moment in history when Black people, including Black women, have achieved significant levels of inclusion within many institutions and industries across U.S. corporate and public life, indeed on the heels of our first Black President, many people do not want to listen to disruptors, killjoys, and instigators.

This project, however, insists that disruption is a necessary part of the radical Black feminist imagination, precisely because it is the discontent with status quo that allows

Black feminist dreamers to envision different worlds, practices, and possibilities. For all the inclusion and accomplishments that some elite Black individuals have achieved, the overwhelming majority of Black people in the United States continue to suffer economic, political and social disenfranchisement that affects their life chances.39 Most recently, the maternal death rate of Black women—across classes—has alarmed both public health officials and Black feminists alike.40 The recent rollback of voting rights, redistricting in

Republican-controlled states, and welfare reform all loom large on the national political stage, to say nothing of the rapid rise in xenophobic anti-Black racism that is coloring the rhetoric of our most powerful politicians.

39 For studies on Black health, economic, and social precarity, see Dorothy Roberts, Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and the Meaning of Liberty, (New York: Vintage Books, 1998); George Lipsitz, The Possessive Investment in Whiteness: How White People Profit from Identity Politics, (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2006); Thomas Shapiro, The Hidden Cost of Being African American: How Wealth Perpetuates Inequality, (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004). 40 Nina Martin and Renee Montagne. “Black Mothers Keep Dying After Giving Birth. Sharon Irving’s Story Explains Why,” NPR, December 7, 2017, https://www.npr.org/2017/12/07/568948782/black-mothers-keep-dying-after-giving-birth-shalon- irvings-story-explains-why.

28 Times like these require disruptors. Radical voices, in addition to pointing out the structures of oppression that ail their people, also serve to remind us of the “piece of the oppressor” that is resides inside each of us.41 That part of the oppressor within us must be confronted head-on, lest it redirect our visions of liberation and freedom towards something more palatable for those already in power in an unequal society. The stakes of this project, then, are to make space for the precious and necessary voices of critique and radicalism that are necessary to cast visions of radical Black feminist future that could actually make a material difference in the lived experiences of Black women and their beloved communities. Without these radical voices, U.S. Black feminist thought risks becoming another mediocre flavor of the same narratives of meritocracy, individualism, and consumerism that undergird the myth of the American Dream. Instead, I argue throughout this project, what gives Black feminism its visionary potential is indeed its disruption of the status quo. This disruption is what we must presently learn to honor, make room for, and grapple with, if we are to honor the long tradition of U.S. Black feminism.

41 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 123.

[CHAPTER 1] Building Popular Neoliberal Black Feminism Introduction

This chapter situates a series of theoretical and methodological interventions that I make throughout this project as a whole. It begins with an analysis of how the terms liberal, radical and revolutionary will be used throughout the project, rooted in definitions given by Black feminist political theorist Joy James. This work is important because as I analyze the mobilization of the discursive formation “radical Black feminist” throughout this project, I am always referring back to an historically-situated, practice-based, critically-engaged understanding of “radicalism,” which is sometimes lost in present day narratives of what makes Black feminism “radical.”

After laying this necessary groundwork, the next part of this chapter takes up my definition of popular neoliberal Black feminism. It begins with a theoretical analysis of market-based logics in present day Black feminism. Using the work of Hortense Spillers to situate Black women within a genealogy of markets and commodities in the “rhetorical treasury” of U.S. nationalism, I trouble the too-easy associations made between Black feminism and social media markets as forms of accessibility and relevance. Next, I offer a definition of popular neoliberal Black feminism, along with an analysis of a 2016 roundtable convened by Black feminist writer Lori Adelman to respond to bell hooks’ critical reading of Beyoncé’s Lemonade film, in order to draw attention to the process of

“killing the killjoy” that reinforces critical silence in Black feminist discourse. I conclude the chapter with a framework for one method I use throughout the project, which I have labeled Black feminist prophetics. Black feminist prophetics is a way of calling on the

30 wisdom of past generations in order to bring accountability into the present, with the intention of projecting survival into the future.

What Is Radical Black Feminism?

In the final essay of The Black Feminist Reader, “Radicalizing Feminism,” Joy James argues that Black feminism is not inherently radical, and provides important distinctions for a variety of positions on the political left that add clarity to our current moment.1

Specifically, James identifies at least three positions in the left-of-center political life of the United States that are all inhabited by Black feminists. Those positions—liberal, radical, and revolutionary—are distinct in how they understand the core of what ails

Black women, and in how they deal with that core. For James, liberal Black feminists

“…accept the political legitimacy of corporate state institutional and police power, but posit the need for humanistic reform.”2 Radical Black feminists, on the other hand,

“…view (female and black) oppression as stemming from capitalism, neocolonialism, and the corporate state that enforces both.”3 Finally, revolutionary Black feminists

“…explicitly challenge state and corporate dominance and critique the privileged status of bourgeois elites among the ‘Left…’” and also “conne[ct] political theory for radical transformation with political acts to abolish corporate state and elite dominance.”4 For

James, while each of these positions “share an outsider status in a commercial culture,”

1 Joy James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” in The Black Feminist Reader, eds. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000), 239-258. 2 James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” 244. 3 James, 244. 4 James, 244

31 that outsider status “is not indicative of, but is often confused for, an intrinsic or inherent radicalism.”5

These distinctions between positions on the left are important for our understanding of what constitutes “Black feminism” at this moment in the 21st century, when Black women have achieved more mainstream acceptance at the very same moment that there is a return to overt displays of white nationalism. These distinctions are important precisely because, as James relates in her article, the frame we use to discuss Black feminism always leaves something covered at the margins6. What we cover at the margins has the potential to change how we define terms like “radical,” as we come to believe that what lies within the frame is the whole picture.

While James published this article at the turn of the century, her words are prophetic nearly two decades later as there is considerable argument between Black feminists over what constitutes “radicalism” in Black feminism, and whose voices should be given the power to define those terms. Indeed, as the United States as a country makes seismic shifts to the right in its mainstream political ideologies, any Black feminist that voices dissent today can sound radical. But sounding radical and being radical are two different things, and radicalism itself is not just a rhetorical tool. Rather, it is a word with a specific history, lived histories both within and outside of Black liberation struggles, and that history matters for how we frame Black feminist radicalism today.

5 James, 245. 6 James, 248. James writes an analogy of matting and framing a piece of art: “In matting or framing black feminists for public discourse and display, the extreme peripheries of the initial creation are often covered over. Placing a mat over the political vision of black feminism establishes newer (visually coordinated) borders that frequently blot out the fringes (revolutionaries and radical activists) to allow professional or bourgeois intellectuals and radicals to appear within borders as the only ‘insurgents.’”

32 It is, then, with these three distinctions in mind that I want to outline how “radical” and “revolutionary” will be used in the project moving forward. It is my hope that reiterating James’ distinctions will help Black feminists in the current day to be more careful about how they frame their own ideas and writings. My goal is not to proclaim which Black feminisms are “better” or “worse,” but rather to have accuracy in delineating those Black feminist ideas that are visionary and transformative from those that are simply a different flavor of the status quo. At the core of radicalism, across all liberation struggles, is a specific and intentional engagement with capitalism as an extractive economic system, and with state power, often demonstrated through military might, police power, and other forms of surveillance, discipline, and control.

For Black feminists, then, a radical engagement with the U.S. political system necessarily begins with a thorough understanding how capitalism—in all of its forms and manifestations—has served as an extractive economic system shaping the lives of Black women and their communities. It is not enough in this regard to simply acknowledge that capitalism has had a negative effect on the lives of Black women; rather, a radical Black feminist engagement with capitalism means understanding how capitalism structures the lives of Black women in such a way that they cannot thrive as long as capitalism thrives.

Examples include: the extractive relationship between Black creative production and corporate structures; the manner in which intellectual property rights have disrupted

Black communal expressive culture; the devaluation of Black labor found in the wage and gender pay gaps; the gentrification crisis in inner cities that extracts value from traditionally Black spaces while ousting Black people; and the general valuation of individualized competition over communal sharing that drives most of our lives. To

33 understand capitalism through a radical Black feminist lens means to understand that capitalism lies at the core of what ails Black women, and hold an intellectual posture of anti-capitalism across all of our critiques. So in my interpretation of James’ delineations of positions on the left, it is not possible to be either pro-capitalist or neutral on capitalism and be considered “radical.”

The same holds true with our understanding of state power as Black feminists, and this particular area of radical thought has been especially challenging for Black feminists to grapple with in the post-civil rights era. In part, this is due to the increased amount of electoral power that the Black electorate as a whole has gained through the agitations of the Southern Black freedom struggle and its attendant movements. The ability to vote can in many ways cloud the power that the state still wields over Black lives, specifically when we believe that voting could change our circumstances. But if anything has been thrown into radical relief in the past 5 years, it should be that even with the vote, Black communities remain profoundly disenfranchised, controlled, and surveilled by state power. Examples include the crisis in mass incarceration; the impunity of police power to determine life and death of Black people; both redistricting and voter ID laws that have greatly reduced our electoral power; local housing laws that have allowed gentrification to run rampant despite vociferous protest from urban Black communities; and the profound failure of state-run public education to meet the basic needs of Black children and families. To understand state power (or as James’ labels it, corporate state power) through a radical Black feminist lens means to understand how the state has organized, surveilled, controlled and managed Black lives since the dawn of colonialism through means such as police power, the law, educational institutions, and even the voting

34 electorate. So in my interpretation of James’ delineations of positions on the left, it is not possible to believe in U.S. democracy as a workable solution for Black political power and still be considered radical.

State power also has another important aspect, however, and that is the imperialist

(James labels this neocolonial) drive to expand internationally in order to secure resources, labor, and land viewed to be in the “interest” of the nation-state. In this regard, we can better understand how capitalism and state power are intimately connected. For

Black feminists who are not only concerned with how Black people within the U.S. are treated, but who also care about Black lives outside the borders of the U.S. (as well as other people of color), a posture of anti-imperialism is necessary to radical Black feminism.

In James’ reading of these positions, each of these intellectual postures must be combined with on-the-ground political/activist actions in order to be considered revolutionary. In this regard, we can understand the work of activist and Confederate flag disruptor Bree Newsome as revolutionary, the Black Feminist Statement by the

Combahee River Collective as radical, and the work of Black feminist academics such as

Melissa Harris-Perry and Brittney Cooper as liberal. These are not value-judgments about whether this work is good or bad, so much as a necessary recalibration in understanding the political positions of Black feminists today. This recalibration is necessary precisely because as some liberal Black feminists gain more mainstream coverage and use terms such as “radical” and “revolutionary” to describe their work, political positions, and the artifacts they examine, the room for actual radical and revolutionary Black feminist work becomes increasingly small.

35 My argument throughout this project is that popular neoliberal Black feminist work, which I will define in the next section, is not well-equipped to offer the kinds of visionary, transformative and destructive/creative potentialities that radical Black feminist work has offered abundantly throughout the Black feminist tradition. And within the current U.S. sociopolitical context, when neoliberal logics threaten to realign political stakes of Black struggle through narratives of individual choice, pleasure, and productivity, beginning from the assumption that U.S. democracy is workable, but flawed, opens the Black feminist tradition to render its most delectable and disruptive elements impotent. This impotency is evident in the rise of popular neoliberal Black feminist discourse that utilizes market-based logics.

Constructing Popular Neoliberal Black Feminism

“All anti-racist and anti-sexist politics, notwithstanding the rhetoric, are not equally ambitious or visionary in their demands and strategies for transforming society. […]…marginalization is not indicative of, but is often confused for, an intrinsic or inherent radicalism.”—Joy James

Theorizing about neoliberalism and Black feminism is difficult precisely because like all subjects under neoliberalism, the conversation requires us to discuss our own investments in the conditions that simultaneously create our suffering. Audre Lorde refers to this as the “piece of the oppressor which is planted deep within each of us,” and it is this piece that makes liberation so difficult under the logics of neoliberalism.7 While difficult, the conversation about U.S. Black feminist investments in the logics of neoliberalism is a necessary and unavoidable component for those seeking any measure

7 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class: Women Redefining Difference,” in Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, (New York: Crossing Press, 2007), 123.

36 of liberation within the current sociopolitical context. In order to experience a greater share of liberation from the oppressive structures that ail us, we must address how we are attached to, benefit from, and participate in practices and discourses that further entrench our own disenfranchisement—and that of our communities. The goal of this work is to be able to accurately delineate between interventions that feel good individually but do not advance collective liberation, and those interventions that feel uncomfortable or painful but contain possibilities for transformation. Any “piece of the oppressor planted within” us necessarily faces a painful excision.8 We are all invested in structures of oppression, and those investments are complicated. In order to theorize about neoliberalism and

Black feminism therefore, we must address this investment and practice divestment. Part of that practice of divestment is to understand how neoliberalism and Black feminism have become connected in the 21st century, particularly in the afterglow of the Obama presidency.

Black women in the United States have a complicated relationship with markets, beginning with our arrival in the U.S. as highly-valued commodities on the slave market.

Like all commodities on the market, Black women were on display, subject to inspection, and on sale to the highest bidder. And, like all commodities on the market, our value was determined arbitrarily by those investing in us—as physical laborers, and as reproductive portals for future commodities. This, then, is the context in which we must consider

Black feminism and markets, because Black women, try as we might, cannot come to a conversation about markets, branding, and exchange as blank slates.

8 Lorde, “Age, Race, Class,” 123.

37 As Hortense Spillers relates, Black women are already “…meeting ground[s] of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth,” that “…in the public place render an example of signifying property plus.”9 This timeless description of

Black women’s rhetorical meaning in American national imagination is an appropriate and necessary starting point, precisely because it attempts to reckon with how Black women are made to mean, publicly, in the afterlife of slavery.10 As a Black feminist theorist working in psychoanalysis with a deft eye toward the discursive meanings of the

Black body constructed in early America, Spillers remains one of the most important genealogical branches of radical Black feminist thought for us to draw on in the present.

This is due to her body of work outlining how chattel slavery, sexual abuse, and other formative practices in early American history construct the discursive possibilities of the present day for the meanings that Black women have in the public eye. A conversation about Black women and markets must, in the first instance, recognize the fraught ground of public visibility, just as Black women’s marketability in the practice and place of the slave market was predicated on their visibility.

Spillers reminds Black feminists that not only are publicly visible Black women an important site for American meaning-making, but that we also always signify “property plus.”11 In my reading of Spillers, the “plus” marks whatever value, anti-value, or meaning that is useful to those using images of Black women to communicate something discursively significant. While the “plus” can always change, in considering markets, I

9 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 17, no 2 (1987): 65. 10 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008). 11 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 65.

38 want to draw our attention to the “property” aspect of Black women’s public image.

Within any market, goods bought become the property of the buyer, and it is within this context that we must consider Black feminist engagements with the concept of “market.”

The term “market” has two definitions as a noun:

1. “a regular gathering of people for the purchase and sale of provisions, livestock, and other commodities,” 2. “an area or arena in which commercial dealings are conducted”12

In both of these definitions, the transactional nature of markets resonates. Markets exist for the purpose of exchange. They also exist in the context of economic and commercial transactions. It is this backdrop that I consider most important when we are thinking through a genealogy of Black feminist markets at the turn of the 21st century. The term

“Black feminist markets” resonates in two possible ways here: first, as an imaginary market whose transactions might be guided by the values and politics of varied Black feminisms, and second, as a marketplace in which various stakeholders could purchase a share, or piece, of Black feminists and their ideas, as they so desire. My point here is that the marketplace, whether we understand it in the first or second resonation I’ve outlined above, is fraught and complicated, particularly as we consider the long history of Black women in the U.S. and our peculiar history in (and on) the market.

The current iteration of markets in U.S. practice certainly have their roots in chattel slavery, settler colonialism, and property-as-right, three key aspects that built the U.S. as the country we understand it to be today. In this way, “markets” were and continue to be a tool of imperialist capitalist domination. Practically, markets serve as a discursive justification for the abstraction of lifeworlds that, while originally not necessarily for sale,

12 New Oxford American Dictionary, 2017 (apple).

39 can be given a value and “owned” by the highest bidder. This includes land, natural resources that lie under the land, animals, trees and plants, human beings, as well as more abstract goods such as services, loans, insurance, stocks, and even ideas. Creating a

“market” for something—be it a product or an idea—is the primary way through which capitalism as a predatory system is practiced in the physical world. Hence, when a company, person, or group creates a “market,” they are proclaiming some good, service, or idea as having a monetary value which people must pay in order to access or enjoy.

Markets serve as a literal or figurative meeting place in which ideas, goods, and property can be exchanged according to certain preset rules about valuation and exchange. Markets only work when they have a public, even if it is small, that gives them visibility and therefore value. Even dark markets, such as human trafficking markets, still have a level of public visibility that give them their potential value. How then, given the clear relationship between “markets” and capitalism, does Black feminism become imbricated within markets in the 21st century? Part of the answer to this question lies in the increasing embeddedness of Black feminist thought inside U.S. institutions of higher education, a topic I will take up at length in chapter three. As Black feminists increasingly produce their knowledge in the context of the academy, their work becomes more and more embedded in the logics of the neoliberal university.13

Another part of the answer to this question, however, lies in Black feminist engagement with popular culture, which in the 21st century is difficult to parse from mass-produced culture. Black feminist engagements with mass-produced Black cultural

13 For work on neoliberal university logics, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (London: Minor Compositions, 2013); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

40 artifacts can also conscript Black feminists’ work to a set of rules determined by the capitalist markets that govern mass-produced entertainment, including music, film, television, fashion, beauty, and other industries. Black feminism as an intellectual, activist, and creative tradition is not uniform across space and time. As Joy James reminds us, this also means that Black feminism is not inherently radical, but rather, takes on radicalism on the basis of how Black feminists choose to define and critique the core of what ails them.14 In this way, Black feminisms that are preoccupied with questions of mass-culture, to the neglect of strident capitalist and corporate state critiques, are at the forefront of a deradicalizing impetus in Black feminism in the 21st century, and are ultimately guided by market imperatives such as profitability, fame and celebrity, and branding.

Finally, Black feminist work becomes imbricated within markets in the 21st century in part because Black women and their work has always already been conscripted by markets in order to make stakeholders other than Black women profitable. The explosion of Black feminist writers using periodicals such as Cosmo, Slate, Jezebel, and other mainstream publications places Black feminists at the center of market-related questions of branding, audience, and profitability. Arguably, the fact that certain aspects of Black feminist thought and production have been captured by market logics should not surprise us. U.S. capitalism has long been built on the productive labor of Black people, including our reproductive, creative, emotional, and intellectual labor. However, there are moments we can trace in our recent history—and specific articulations of Black feminism—in which Black feminists have been complicit in shifting narratives of Black feminism

14 James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” 245.

41 thought into a profoundly accommodating stance in relation to capitalism and the corporate state.

Buttressed by a long and storied history of Black women activists fighting for

Black women to have control over their reproduction, sexuality, and their meaning in society, neoliberal articulations of Black feminism help to create a market for a Black feminism that is more palatable to a mainstream audience of Americans, a market which I label here as “popular neoliberal Black feminism.” Broadly understood, the discourses emerging around the articulation of “Black feminism” as the individual Black woman’s right to be, do, and choose whatever she (as an individual) wishes, especially in relation to labor, money and sex. Popular neoliberal Black feminism is an attempt to co-articulate

Black women within the U.S. as fundamentally belonging—economically, politically and socially—even as radical Black feminist thought depends on a fundamental disarticulation between the U.S. as an imagined society and Black women as its foil.15

Popular neoliberal Black feminist discourses are the articulation of Black feminism as the means by which individual Black women can (and arguably should) attain their own idea of their “best life,” by any means necessary. Yet, like all discourses that enjoy wide appeal within a broader oppressive society, the discourses of popular neoliberal Black feminism make key concessions that allow them to travel far and wide relatively unchallenged. What is silenced as popular liberal Black feminism comes to stand in for the whole of Black feminist thought in mainstream media, then, are the more radical and revolutionary elements of Black feminism and their historical lineages, including Black

15 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 65.

42 feminisms centered on anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, decolonial, and Black queer interventions.

The discourse of popular neoliberal Black feminism today is an articulation of the possibility of the Black woman as a U.S. citizen and a representational object, who also willingly participates in capitalism, and can belong within the framework of U.S. society by working hard and carving out her small piece of the American pie. She is largely aspirational, and requires significant resources of inspiration to cohere in the national imagination. By this I mean, the majority of Black women who espouse a belief in the ability for Black women to be successful in the context of U.S. capitalism spend significant emotional, mental, economic, and psychic resources to believe that they can achieve wealth and relative safety, even as the structures that rule their lives consistently land them in opposite conditions.

Popular neoliberal Black feminism resides in the defense of individual Black women’s right to choose whatever they wish in regards to their sexuality, labor, creative choices, and relationships, as long as those choices are consistent with a popular liberal

Black feminist articulation of what constitutes freedom. In this configuration, then,

“liberatory choices” are consistently aligned with public displays of feminine sexuality, clear articulations of “grind” as the ideal relationship between Black women and labor, a strong emphasis on materialism as a means of demonstrating value, and heterosexual relationships that focus on women’s pleasure—but still with an attendant male gaze.

Thus, Black women who might choose modesty or Black Muslim women who choose hijab; Black women who are concerned about the lasting effects of media oversexualization on young Black girls; Black women and people who do not identify

43 with Black femininity as their gender expression; and/or Black women whose relationship with labor and the “grind” does not (or structurally cannot) yield the material possibilities that representational figures suggest it should, are effectively silenced. This especially affects those Black feminisms explicitly committed to anti-capitalist, anti- heteropatriarchial, decolonial, queer, and trans critiques.

Popular neoliberal Black feminist work on mass cultural figures relies on a faulty equation that disguises the relationship between mass culture figures and the actual masses of everyday people. The slippage of this disguise becomes evident not only in the stated relationships between Black feminist scholars and their popular culture objects, but also from a fundamental error in understanding how representational power works in an oppressive society. Specifically, popular neoliberal Black feminist critique does not account for how representation works on and through subjects in order to reproduce the conditions of oppression which I will take up more fully in Chapter 5. Stated bluntly, popular neoliberal Black feminist critique fails at being critical of the way that power operates through mass media culture to perpetuate myths, salves, and other types of conditioning that allow for the lived realities on the ground to remain the same, while the subjects of this oppression feel better because of what they can observe and experience through Black mass cultural figures in the representational realm.

Killing the Killjoy

“And what we can’t have going down in Black feminism is Black women being violent with other Black women in the name of being radical. That’s that bullshit, and we should call it what it is, even if it means we have to implicate our elders. Elders ain’t gods to me.” —Brittney Cooper, “On bell, Beyoncé, and Bullshit,”

44 “I think that's fantasy. I think it's fantasy that we can recoup the violating image and use it. I used to get so tired of people quoting Audre Lorde, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house, but that was exactly what she meant, that you are not going to destroy this imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy by creating your own version of it. Even if it serves you to make lots and lots of money.”—bell hooks

In his article “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” political scientist Lester K.

Spence discusses neoliberal governmentality at length. This process, through which institutions, actors and agencies govern through collective mentalities, seems to be a key component of how neoliberal logics have affected Black feminist discourse and practice in the 21st century.16 Specifically, Spence discusses how expertise is mobilized in the service of governmentality, “because experts are best able to use ‘reason’ and ‘truth’ to determine the proper mode of long-distance governance.” More explicitly, Spence argues that we must pay attention to the “role black expertise plays in managing black populations, as well as the role technique plays in placing severe limits on black political imaginations.” While Spence is specifically concerned with how governmentality is utilized by government experts to manage populations, I am concerned with how governmentality can be carried out through the popular discourse of “cultural criticism” in mainstream and social media websites by Black intellectuals. Black public intellectuals are central to this process for Black audiences, in part because they can claim a credentialed “cultural critic” title, even if the cultural criticism they engage is not necessarily criticism that addresses transformative liberation in the context of U.S. empire.

16 Lester K. Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn in Black Politics,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture and Society 14, no. 3-4, (2012): 139-159.

45 Spence indicates that increasing intra-racial inequality is an important element in the neoliberal turn in Black politics, arguing: “…neoliberalization of black politics increasingly creates conditions in which racial inequality is managed through black elite- promoted techniques designed to get black people to act according to market principles, in which intra-racial inequality is increasingly posited as being the function of an inability to properly exercise self-governing capacity.”17 While the most obvious forms of this elite-promoted governance comes in the centuries-long practice of shaming Black poor communities and Black women, as well as the long history of charitable and non- profit organizations aimed at Black community and youth uplift, I suggest that more subtle forms of governance come in the form of “positive” messaging from the Black celebrity class, which are the most widely distributed artists and “meaning-makers” within Black cultural production. The symbolic worlds created by celebrity-class Black artists, be they musical, filmic or otherwise, serve as a sort of Trojan horse of Black governance, creating messages that are culturally relevant but that still rely on market principles, packaged as Black communal or cultural wisdom. Rather than encouraging

Black people to rebel, to be ungovernable, or to demand self-determination, Black celebrity-class cultural productions rely heavily on individualistic, market-based logics to encourage meritocracy, competition, and capitalistic achievement. They also articulate a sense of being “seen” or “understood” in the context of a white supremacist culture, meaning that Black subjects feel “accurately” represented by cultural productions, though not necessarily empowered to make transformative change. The result is a mass-

17 Spence, “The Neoliberal Turn,” 146.

46 produced, mass-distributed, culturally relevant form of governance that works on the level of affect and attachment.

In this way, Black economic, social and political “progress” in the context of belonging to the U.S. nation is mostly felt rather than lived, and specifically, felt vicariously through Black celebrity class elites. Seeing Black celebrities be successful causes us all to be proud, to believe that we, too, could be successful if we work as hard as they do. What neoliberal blackness sutures, therefore, is unbelonging, by creating narratives and a feeling of cultural belonging that comes to stand in for the material belonging of citizenship that cannot be lived day-to-day with any certainty. This suture does not hide material unbelonging, but rather offers promises of pleasure, potential, and workability that rely on individualized narratives of liberty and productivity which can ease individual suffering in the life of the empire. These promises offer a level of livability to the unbelonging of Black people in the United States, even as the limits of that unbelonging are demonstrated through life and death situations (e.g. police brutality,

Black maternal death rates, poverty).

Neoliberal blackness in the context of Black feminism emerges at the conjuncture of Black feminist cultural criticism within the academy, the rise of postracialism in the

Obama era, the proliferation of social media platforms, and the rise of new figures of

Black womanhood which give Black feminist thinkers plenty of material to analyze. As

Black celebrity-class elites produce artistic works that follow market logics, there also arises a Black intellectual-class whose energies are placed in the role of translators for

Black artistic productions. The reasons for this streamlining of Black feminist discourse around mass-produced Black artistic work are many, varied, and complicated, and is part

47 of what we will examine in the coming chapters. For now, however, it is important to note that much popular neoliberal Black feminist discourse arises in response to criticisms of Black celebrity-class elite figures, as a reaction to racist and sexist public discourses.

In her 2010 work The Promise of Happiness, feminist philosopher Sara Ahmed makes a compelling argument that those interested in transforming the current world should question happiness as a measure by which we can measure a life well-lived.18

Ahmed argues, “…happiness is used as a technology or instrument, which allows the reorientation of individual desire toward a common good.”19 Tied to this instrumentalization of happiness are our “aspiration[s] within everyday life,” that ultimately function to “creat[e] scripts for how to live well.”20 Central to these scripts is the sense of social cohesion and peace we experience as subjects who generally agree on the terms of how to be happy. As Ahmed proposes, “Going along with happiness scripts is how we get along: to get along is to be willing and able to express happiness in proximity to the right things.”21 Applied to this discussion of Black feminist critique and neoliberalism, I view Ahmed’s argument as a useful tool in discerning the manner in which “happiness” can be framed as a type of friendly coercion that silences radical critiques on the basis of their inability to hold “happiness” as defined by liberal Black feminist standards.

For example, in May 2016, Feministing writer Lori Adelman convened eleven scholars, writers and popular culture critics to give their views on the critique cultural

18 Sara Ahmed, The Promise of Happiness, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 2. 19 Ahmed, Promise of Happiness, 59. 20 Ahmed, 59. 21 Ahmed, 59.

48 theorist bell hooks had made of singer and superstar Beyoncé’s most recent (visual) album, Lemonade.22 The Lemonade album, released as both a 12-track album and an hour-long movie on HBO, chronicled the famed singer’s journey through betrayal, infidelity, and healing. Popular response to the album, from Black feminists and many others, was swift and overwhelmingly adulatory.23 Alternatively, cultural theorist bell

22 Lori Adelman, “A Black Feminist Roundtable on bell hooks, Beyoncé, and ‘Moving Beyond Pain,’” Feministing, May 11, 2016, para. 4. http://feministing.com/2016/05/11/a-feminist- roundtable-on-bell-hooks-beyonce-and-moving-beyond-pain/; bell hooks, “Moving Beyond Pain,” Bell Hooks Institute, May 9, 2016, http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain; 23For examples of the adulation of the Lemonade album by Black feminist writers, see Regina Bradley and Dream Hampton, “Close To Home: A Conversation About Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade,’” NPR The Record, April 26, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/26/475629479/close-to-home-a-conversation- about-beyonc-s-lemonade; Melissa Harris-Perry, “A Call and Response with Melissa Harris- Perry: The Pain and the Power of ‘Lemonade,’” Elle, April 26, 2016, http://www.elle.com/culture/music/a35903/lemonade-call-and-response/; https://www.vox.com/2016/4/23/11496234/beyonce-lemonade; Alex Abad-Santos, “Beyoncé’s Lemonade Is a Raw Personal, Political Statement—and A Great Album,” Huffington Post, April 24, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/beyonce-lemonade-black- women_us_571ccccde4b0d912d5fee4d2; Zandria F. Robinson, “How Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Exposes Inner Lives of Black Women,” Rolling Stone, April 28, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-beyonces-lemonade-exposes-inner-lives-of- black-women-20160428; http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year-2016-beyonce-runner-up/; Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Beyoncé’s Lemonade Is Black Woman Magic,” Time, April 25, 2016, http://time.com/4306316/beyonce-lemonade-black-woman-magic/; Miriam Bale, “Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Is a Revolutionary Work of Black Feminism: Critic’s Notebook,” Billboard, April 25, 2016, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7341839/beyonce-lemonade- black-feminism; Diamond Sharp, “Anthem for the Retribution of Black Women,” Vice, April 26, 2016, https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/vdx93y/beyonces-lemonade-is-an-anthem-for-the- retribution-of-black-women; Michael Arceneaux, “Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade Film Is Beautiful, Surprising, and Above All, for Black Women,” Complex, April 24, 2016, http://www.complex.com/music/2016/04/beyonce-lemonade-film-essay; Hanna Choi, “Not Ready to Stop Obsessing Over Beyoncé and ‘Formation?’ We Got You,” NPR Code Switch, February 9, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2016/02/09/466142526/not-ready-to- stop-obsessing-over-beyonc-and-formation-we-got-you; Janell Hobson, “Beyoncé as Conjure Woman: Reclaiming the Magic of Black Lives (That) Matter,” Ms. Magazine, February 8, 2016, http://msmagazine.com/blog/2016/02/08/beyonce-as-conjure-woman-reclaiming-the-magic-of- black-lives-that-matter/; Sheniece Ramsaroop, “Why Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Will Go Down in History,” The Odyssey Online, May 2, 2016, https://www.theodysseyonline.com/why-beyonces- lemonade-album-will-go-down-in-history; Brooke Obie, “The Recipe to Decolonized Love Is in Beyoncé’s Lemonade,” The Rumpus, May 12th, 2016, http://therumpus.net/2016/05/the-recipe-to- decolonized-love-is-in-beyonces-lemonade/; https://www.wnyc.org/story/beyonce-kendrick- lamar-power-black-protest-music/

49 hooks took nearly two weeks to produce her own critique of the piece, entitled “Moving

Beyond Pain,” written primarily from hooks’ socialist, decolonial and Black feminist point of view. Positioning Lemonade first and foremost as a commodity, hooks proclaimed:

“As a grown black woman who believes in the manifesto “Girl, get your money straight” my first response to Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, was WOW—this is the business of capitalist money making at its best. Viewers who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point. Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé’s audience is the world and that world of business and money-making has no color.”24 hooks then went on to offer a close reading of the film, situating the piece in the Black feminist genealogy of Daughters of the Dust, praising the visually stunning composition of the film, and attending to the narratives of Beyoncé as victim, destructor and healer. hooks also took the opportunity to challenge the broadly celebratory readings of

Lemonade, not as a piece of art, but as a definitional Black feminist composition:

“Concurrently, in the world of art-making, a black female creator as powerfully placed as Beyoncé can both create images and present viewers with her own interpretation of what those images mean. However, her interpretation cannot stand as truth. For example, Beyoncé uses her non-fictional voice and persona to claim feminism, even to claim, as she does in a recent issue of Elle magazine, ‘to give clarity to the true meaning’ of the term, but her construction of feminism cannot be trusted. Her vision of feminism does not call for an end to patriarchal domination.”25 hooks’ admonition to the adulatory readings of Lemonade was that Black feminist viewers must keep their eyes on the prize—the end of patriarchal domination. This goal, hooks argues, was not accomplished by the film—indeed could not be accomplished by any film or by one celebrity so fully imbricated within capitalist means of production—

24 hooks, “Moving Beyond Pain,” para. 1-2. 25 hooks, “Moving Beyond Pain,” para. 10.

50 but must be accomplished by Black feminists committed to the liberation of themselves and their communities worldwide.

My own reading of hooks’ critique of Lemonade was that it fell well within the boundaries of a scholarly, yet accessible, cultural studies reading attending to filmic, semiotic, Marxist, Black feminist, and critical Black studies traditions. hooks attended to the aesthetics of Lemonade while providing critical questions about production, reception, representation and the possible cultural meanings of the visual album. What is more, hooks pays necessary attention to the wide range of Black feminist popular culture critics who had taken to social media to praise Lemonade as “a metaphor for black women's relationship to modern systems of oppression.”26

According to Adelman, the roundtable response was convened as “our attempt at a fair, forward-looking response and dialogue on a topic that’s meaningful to us.”27 The eleven writers, however, largely took negative, and at times personally critical, shots at the Black feminist elder for her blog on Lemonade. In a foreshadowing of what was to come, Adelman wrote at the beginning of the article:

“One more note before we get to the good stuff: we are purposefully convening this conversation across genders and generations. We mean no disrespect to hooks and in fact recognize that our movement has a history of disrespect, and even matricide, towards our elders, a cycle we are trying to break.”28

Despite this disclaimer, what followed was largely a dismissal of the core of hooks’ critique, ranging from respectful disagreement to personally dismissive. Joy Ann Reid, journalist at MSNBC, respectfully disagreed with hooks’ reading, stating, “Despite it

26 Zandria F. Robinson, “How Beyoncé’s Lemonade Exposes Inner Lives of Black Women,” Huffington Post, April 28, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-beyonces- lemonade-exposes-inner-lives-of-black-women-20160428 27 Adelman, “A Black Feminist Roundtable,” para. 4. 28 Adelman, para. 4.

51 being, as bell hooks – and let me pause for a moment here, and take a knee, acknowledging hooks as the Mother Supreme of Black feminism – an extended reverie on a girl done wrong by her man, which is not exactly next level, I gently disagree that Lemonade is not a powerful Black feminist aesthetic in its own right.”29 Jamilah

Lemieux on the other hand, whose section was titled, “Not being petty, but I wish bell hooks could find her way to us,” lamented over hooks’ failure to become Lemieux’s personal friend, stating:

“I occupy a space of relative privilege in the Black feminist world, having been embraced by both scribes who helped to shape my gender politics. Michele Wallace entrusted me to write the forward to last year’s re-release of Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman. Folks like Joan Morgan, Mark Anthony Neal, Michaela Angela Davis and Melissa Harris Perry have warmly affirmed my space in the world of Black public intellectuals. Kierna Mayo is, quite possibly, the air I breathe….Quietly, I’d hoped for years that I/we would have this experience with bell hooks. Quietly, I’ve known for years that would not be the case.”30

Lemieux then drew a well-worn line between her “younger generation” of Black feminists, including Feminista Jones, Lori Adelman, Mikki Kendall, and herself, and the

“mother elder bell [who] is hugged up with Emma Watson’s participant ribbon ass brand of feminism and holding Beyoncé up to an impossible rubric of curious value.”31

Melissa Harris-Perry, Wake Forest University professor and former host of the

Melissa Harris-Perry Show on MSNBC, derided hooks for “an odd and wholly irrelevant question,” of whether viewers could trust the images of contrite rapper Jay Z reconciling with Beyoncé after his infidelity.32 “bell hooks should not lie to herself, to us, or to other feminists — feminism cannot save us from pain…Indeed, feminism reminds grown folks

29 Adelman, para. 36. 30 Adelman, para. 24, 27. 31 Adelman, para. 31. 32 Adelman, para. 16.

52 to work through pain with honesty and to find the freedom and pleasure hooks seems unwilling to acknowledge in Bey’s Lemonade.”33 Harris-Perry’s reading of hooks’ critique was misleading, in that hooks at no point suggested that feminism could save its adherents from pain. Rather, the core of hooks’ argument was that Black cultural productions—particularly those that address sexism—should begin to break new ground away from the heteronormative scripts of “betrayed lover reconciled.” What is more,

Harris-Perry ultimately views the purpose of working through pain to “find the freedom and pleasure” that she argues hooks “seems unwilling to acknowledge.”34 Harris-Perry frames hooks as a killjoy in this manner, as one who refuses the narratives of freedom and pleasure that suture the entire Adelman piece together.

Ahmed frames the killjoy, however, as a potentially liberatory figure:

Becoming a feminist can be an alienation from happiness (though not just that, not only that: oh the joy of being able to leave the place you were given!). When we feel happiness in proximity to the right objects, we are aligned; we are facing the right way. You become alienated—out of line with an affective community— when you do not experience happiness from the right things.35

A radical Black feminist praxis in the present day must begin to account for attachments to the "right objects" which mainstream U.S. culture encourages Black feminists to be attached to, and to provide a way to divest from affective communities that redirect the purpose and power of critical interventions into paths that are more easily coopted by

U.S. capitalism. We must interrogate those celebrity objects, as well as our own attachments to them, in order to illuminate the processes by which our articulations of

Black feminism are deradicalized through narratives of relevance and popularity. In the

33 Adelman, para. 17-18. 34 Adelman, para. 17-18. 35 Sara Ahmed, “Feminist Killjoys (And Other Willful Subjects),” The Scholar and Feminist Online 8, no. 3 (2010): para. 5 http://sfonline.barnard.edu/polyphonic/print_ahmed.htm

53 case of the Adelman piece, Lemonade is the “right” affective object for Black feminists to be attached to, and Adelman’s group of intellectuals converge in an affective community, defining for broader audiences the importance of experiencing happiness from the production. They expend significant effort to discredit hooks’ critiques and hooks herself, in order to rescue happiness from radical Black feminist critique.

In both Harris-Perry and Lemieux’s responses, we witness ad hominem attacks against hooks that are used to distract from cogent points that hooks argues in her reading. hooks is constructed by these respondents as not worthy of trust because she lacks credibility due to her failure to be attached to the right object—her failure to be happy about Lemonade. Rather than making space for diverse points of view in relation to Beyoncé’s cultural productions, the Adelman roundtable silences critical work by killing the killjoy (in this case hooks) discursively. This veritable Black feminist pile-on, written by Black feminists of varied generations against a Black feminist of an older generation, demonstrates well the practices that have led to this project—and the discursive formations underlying a crisis in Black feminist correspondence.

Yet, Ahmed's definition reminds us that alienation from objects desired by dominant culture means that we are "out of line" with the "affective community" of U.S. exceptionalism. It is, in the simplest terms, one way through which we can frame

"divestment" as a radical praxis of Black feminism (or any radical feminism). What

Ahmed's definition outlines in the context of what I have discussed in this chapter is how divesting from the “right” affective communities could make room for radical Black feminist praxis that addresses the material needs of Black women and communities. The process by which Black elite thinkers and scholars conscript critical work in the service

54 of reinforcing neoliberal world-making in Black culture is often obscured by liberal politics that focus on feeling good as a measure of the health of Black freedom. In contrast, hooks’ reading of Lemonade asks readers to think about how we as individuals and as communities are constructed through popular Black cultural productions that are connected to capitalist practices and that construct particular narratives of heteronormative patriarchy. In other words, hooks’ figure as a killjoy is exactly the interruption to affective affiliation that U.S. Black feminists should value as a decolonial process.

Neoliberal logics function to refocus attention away from collective, decolonial, non-profitable, and nonproductive forms of affiliation, critique, and care in order to maintain a hierarchy of individual choice, economic exploitation, happiness and productivity as necessary values for the continuation individual liberties. In the context of

Black feminist discourses that have taken up these logics, popular neoliberal Black feminism prioritizes narratives of marketability, relevance, individual choice, and productivity as central to “freedom” for Black women and girls. In the case of the

Adelman roundtable critique of hooks, neoliberal logics at play when participants de- emphasize hooks’ primary point of the need to decolonize our daily lives from patriarchal domination, and instead attack hooks’ radicalism as the problem. This discursive action forecloses the space for radical Black feminist critique by posing it as a form of violence, indeed as a problem, that causes harm equal to the violence of structural oppressions.

Hence, offering strident critique, radical critique, becomes a problem of violence, and the structural and psychic violence of representation becomes an individual right held by a celebrity as a form of “expression.”

55 If this logic sounds similar to the justifications used in defending white supremacist behavior, whereby individual white actors insist on their rights to engage in racist behavior while marking the label of “racist” as a form of violence from marginalized groups, that is because similar discursive formations emerge as a way to hide structural violence in service of individual liberties.36 This is not to say that popular neoliberal Black feminist discourses and white supremacist discourses are the same in terms of impact or intent, but rather, that both formations rely on a process by which material structural harm is deemphasized and the potential harm to individual actors is centralized as the measure of freedom. In this way, radicalism of any kind can be dismissed as a type of “violence” or as irrelevant, because it consistently targets structural forms of oppression and takes aim at deconstructing and decolonizing from the ruling logics of white supremacy, heteropatriarchy, and capitalism. In fact, in the case of neoliberal discourses, radicalism is the problem, precisely because radicalism requires forms of disinvestment, decolonization and a refusal to allow structures to remain as is.

If radicalism is understood as a destructive/creative process by which old systems are dismantled in order to make room to build something new, neoliberalism can be understood as a process by which the same old systems must always appear new in order to avoid being dismantled. It is within this context that popular neoliberal Black feminist narratives become central to creating affective communities that can serve as points of governmentality for Black communities. Hence, the impact of Black forms of dissent, divestment and resistance are lessened in the pursuit of individualized happiness,

36 This phenomenon is discussed at length by Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, (New York: Rowman & Littlefield, 2013).

56 pleasure, and freedom. By suppressing conversations about decolonization, by which

Black feminists can reduce or eliminate our affective attachments to objects

(commodities, personalities, harmful ideas, destructive institutions), practices that “kill the killjoy” recalibrate our valuation of dissent. If, as Adelman’s roundtable indicates, radical critiques of elite Black celebrities are unwelcome and targeted as “the” problem, then it may be that we have reached a point where our historical memory and understanding of what constitutes “radical” needs a recalibration. I take the increasing absence of radical Black feminist killjoys in popular public discourse not as a sign that the space for these figures has become increasingly small in the present discursive universe. In the next section I discuss a method to reopen some space for radical Black feminist work as a necessary and precious element of the broad and varied Black feminist tradition in the U.S. that is especially suited to respond to the challenges of neoliberalism.

A Note on Method: Black Feminist Prophetics

“The master’s tools cannot dismantle the master’s house.” —Audre Lorde

When I read through author, filmmaker and activist Toni Cade Bambara’s Preface to The Black Woman: An Anthology, I often feel like I am reading something written just for this time. Except Bambara wrote this introduction over 40 years ago. Realizing this gives me chills, because it seems like the work is somehow right on time for the present.

Listen to her description of market research on women:

“Commercial psychologists, market researchers, applied psychologists (who by any other name are still white, male) further say, on the subject of women and their liberation, that she must feel free to buy new products, to explore the new commodities, to change brands. So thousands of dollars are spent each year to

57 offer her a wide range of clothes, cosmetics, home furnishings, baby products so that she can realize herself and nourish her sense of identity.”37

Thirty-five years before critical geographer David Harvey would write A Brief History of

Neoliberalism, Bambara warned Black women that markets would attempt to buy and sell our identities in ways that would greatly interfere with our efforts toward liberation.

She reminded us that we have so much more to lose than our money as we travel a road toward increasing assimilation within capitalism. Indeed, she suggests, markets have the ability to capture the idea of “freedom” and circumscribe it differently, toward different ends.

Bambara wasn’t just prophetic about markets. Reading through her body of work is like reading through a book of one of the major prophets in the Bible. She predicts with amazing clarity the very situations we find ourselves in today, from activist movements plagued by interpersonal and sexual violence, to the necessity of divesting from identity markets in order to be clear about our goals for liberation as Black people, and even an insistence on moving away from the gender binary.38 And she tells the truth—often hard truths—about the state and health of Black social movements, as well as the oppressive society she lived within, according to what she observed in the daily actions and the intellectual investments of everyday people.

Prophets do two things particularly well. They tell hard truths about the current moment, and they predict the future. It is for these skills that prophets are often sought out for their future-telling abilities and simultaneously despised for their honesty. As

37 Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, ed. Toni Cade Bambara, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), 2. 38 See Bambara, “Preface,” and “On the Issue of Roles,” in The Black Woman: An Anthology, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970).

58 masterful storytellers, they tell the story of the survival of their people, whether that survival is current or projected into the future, and they tell the stories of how their people came to be in the difficult situations that make a storyteller like a prophet necessary. The accountability of a prophet is, always, to their communities of belonging.

Even when they are scorned by those communities for “airing dirty laundry,” prophets engage in important acts of love by calling a community to be its best possible self. And prophets never shy away from a fight with the oppressive structures that plague their beloved communities. Those conditions are always in the crosshairs of a prophet’s explanation of how the world was turned upside down.

Prophets also do a third thing well, which is why we know a prophet when we see them—or hear them. Prophets engage in a form of poetics that make even their most scathing criticisms a beautiful thing to behold. A prophet is convincing because of her ability to shape words and phrases that tug at our heartstrings. Prophets are masters of affect. They understand how to say something in a way that their communities of accountability, and those oppressive societies they are speaking to, are compelled to hear it and compelled to respond.

I believe this metaphor is a useful one for highlighting the words and work of particular Black feminist thinkers and writers, as we emerge in a new moment in world history. We are on the cusp (or perhaps well-into the throes), of a global political right uprising, something we have not witnessed the scale of since Nazi Germany, and in the

U.S., a political reality we have not witnessed since Redemption, the period following

Southern Reconstruction after the Civil War. Ecological disaster, genocide, and the possibility of mutually assured destruction through nuclear war are facts we live with

59 every single day. In times like these prophets emerge to give people hope, hold people and ideas accountable, predict the future, and recalibrate communities according to their long-held values. Prophets are axiological figures in communities. They call communities to pay close attention to the core principles and values that constitute who they long to be, and not necessarily who they are, or who they have become, as a result of oppression.

We are in need of such a recalibration across the broad community of Black feminist thinkers. That Black feminism is a diverse and varied tradition, with many different schools of thought and practice is certainly, and thankfully, true. But the challenges we face now as we move into a new moment in world history have more to do with our axiological commitments, with our values and ethics, than they do about our specific debates about specific ideas. And I suspect, and in this project present evidence, that certain values have crept into Black feminist discourse over the past thirty years that may not serve us well for the next thirty.

Hence, the methodology I aim to engage throughout this project is one of “Black feminist prophetics.” I define this method as a form of accountability and vision-casting, engaged by Black feminists who need to speak some hard truths in the present in order to ensure the survival of something precious in the future. Black feminist prophetics can be understood as the manner by which Black feminists stay accountable to future generations. It can also be understood as a way to keep the radical Black feminist imagination alive.

60 I imagine that if "Black feminist prophetics" were an entry in the Webster dictionary, its definition would look something like this, after the tradition of Alice

Walker's definition of womanism:39

Black Feminist Prophetics--def: 1) Truth telling regardless of popularity, toward the purpose of freeing “my people” 2) Abiding love for intergenerational struggles. Visionary understanding of what can happen in the future. Rooted in dreams and the wisdom of the elders. Attends to questions of spirituality within Black feminism. Understands the wisdom of its sister womanism 3) Accountable to the community, intergenerationally. Flows freely through and around. Preachy….

If Black feminist prophetics is a form of truth-telling in the present, in order to inspire hope and belief in the future, that relies on the wisdom of the past, then this project is a project concerned with imagining the possibility of liberation in the future by holding the present accountable to intergenerational Black feminist struggle. Black feminist prophetics is framework that makes room for unpopular dissent by centering discourses of capture and dreams of escape and evasion. It is a call for accountability, not to what we believe is possible, but to what we know is implausible and liberatory. Black feminist prophetics is an ethical way to evaluate the quality of Black feminisms for their ability to help us imagine liberation, rebellion, fugitivity, and escape.

Returning to the earlier example of Bambara’s prophetic writing as an example of Black feminist prophetics, we can see that her warning about market identities comes decades before anyone—including she—have really understood the full meaning of neoliberalism as a way to form and influence identity, as well a way to blunt the resistance that Black women are uniquely positioned to set in motion against white supremacist cisheteropatriarchal capitalism. Bambara’s foresight, while not a detailed

39 Alice Walker, “Womanist,” in In Search of Our Mother’s Gardens: Womanist Prose, (New York: Mariner Books, 2003), xi.

61 roadmap, does give Black feminists in the present a prophetic intervention into our current situation. And her intervention allows us to have a discussion about accountability as it pertains to market imperatives in our identity development, our labor, and our vision-casting as Black feminists.

It is this foresight, this momentary vision of what is to come, that is the beating heart of Black feminist prophetics. Black feminist prophetics are a word from the past, intervening in the present for the goal of engendering Black feminist resilience in the future. We know it is in operation at those moments when we find ourselves saying,

“How did they know that, then?” We can find ample evidence of Black feminist prophetics in the past. We see it in Bambara’s foreshadowing of the threat that neoliberalism would pose to Black women’s resistance. We can also find it in Audre

Lorde’s prediction that women choosing to fight at the “edge of each other’s battles” would be the greatest weapon against humanitarian and ecological disaster—two possibilities that are even more proximate thirty-seven years after she published Cables to

Rage. Black feminist prophetics live in the literature of Octavia Butler, whose Parable of the Sower is an eerily familiar story of governmental and moral collapse in the U.S. under a Trump-like presidential character. These works—these phrases, lines, paragraphs, and books—can provide us with the guidance, wisdom, and clarity we need in order to survive in this moment.

We should not eschew “survival” as a meaningless or empty gesture. Rather, taking a cue from present-day Black feminist prophet Alexis Pauline Gumbs, we can understand survival as a promise—as a way to take note of our impact.40 As Gumbs

40 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The Shape of My Impact,” The Feminist Wire, October 29, 2012, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/10/the-shape-of-my-impact/.

62 relays, we understand the meaning of survival when we understand the odds that are against that survival. What is it that is trying to keep us, as Black feminists and marginalized communities more broadly, from living—emotionally, physically, mentally and spiritually? When we understand this, we can understand the magnificence of our survival.

That Black feminist prophetics existed in the past means that we can also replicate them in the present time. Black feminists are time travelers, because we balance both the prophetic voices from the past that speak to us in this moment with great clarity and urgency, and we project some hopes, desires, and truths into the future, for our beloved communities to access in a different time. In this moment we currently inhabit, Black feminists can leave visions, foresight, and wisdom for future generations to draw upon in the service of Black survival and Black resilience. Hence, this project is concerned with genealogies. Just as prophets often place themselves in genealogies of their own, and recall the genealogies of those rulers around them, this project intends to place current articulations of U.S. Black feminist thought in a broader genealogy of both Black feminism and the “rulers,” or structures of oppression, that surround them. This genealogical work is central in liberation theorizing, because e it is in this work that we can understand—in multigenerational liberation struggles—where we have come from, where are, and where we are headed. That work—genealogical work—is critical in order to carry forward the goals of Black feminist liberation across generations. And indeed, within the Black feminist liberation struggle, we are carrying forward the goals of liberation of millions of people, in diaspora, and often at odds with one another.

63 As I have tried to craft this project, I’ve come to understand through practice that the tools we use to create knowledge in the U.S. intellectual context are not the same tools that Black people have used in order to survive that context. This truth was spoken most poignantly by Audre Lorde, in her aptly named prophecy, “The Master’s Tools Will

Not Dismantle the Master’s House:”

“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society's definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference—those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older—know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those others identified as outside the structures in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us to temporarily beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”41

I recognize this piece as a warning against mistaking the possibilities that can come from ways of knowing and making forged in the context of academic knowledge production.

Lorde alludes to the necessity of encountering difference in a way that does not immediately seek to erase it, but rather that honors difference as necessary for survival.

Lorde also points to the solitary figure of the killjoy, though she does not name the figure as such, when she argues that survival itself is “learning to stand, unpopular and sometimes reviled.”42 While Ahmed has used Lorde and hooks as examples of the “angry

Black woman” that inform her work on the killjoy in relation to how Black women interface with white feminist communities, here I understand these figures as killjoys

41 Audre Lorde, “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” in Sister Outsider: Speeches and Essays, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 112. 42 Lorde, “The Master’s Tools,” 112.

64 within Black feminist communities, calling attention to more radical ways of being in the world.

Indeed, part of the challenge this project grapples with is trying to create ways of being and knowing that honor the knowledge produced by Black women and Black queer persons, but in the impure context of surviving the most profoundly destructive forces of our time. Sometimes, that knowledge is forged with the master’s tools. The common refrain is that we, as survivors in an oppressive world, cannot create a pure revolution, or pure work. We have to build with the master’s tools—the refrain goes—because they are the only, or the best, tools available for us to use. Yet, we have to take seriously the possibility that as Black women achieve increasing success within the context of U.S. empire, we may forget other types of tools that do other kinds of work than the ones we are becoming more accustomed to using. Put another way, just because Black women have experienced a measure of material success using the tools that white supremacist, capitalist cisheteropatriarchy provides us, does not mean we are more liberated. It is possible that by using those tools, we are helping to craft the future terms of our own imprisonment.

This does not mean that we never use the master’s tools. Indeed, in the current moment we live in, what makes late capitalism so crushing is that we are all invested on so many levels in the pain and suffering of ourselves and other people. This is especially true for those of us living in the United States, which was, and continues to be, responsible for the suffering of millions of people worldwide, as well as earth itself, through both our wars and our capitalist ventures. This is a difficult truth to hold, and an even more difficult one to be accountable to. There is no pure revolution. But rather than

65 shrugging our shoulders and giving up, what would it mean for Black feminists to envision what a pure revolution might look like in the future? How can Black feminists begin to imagine a world where we are not forced to be complicit in one another’s suffering? What would have to change in order for our everyday actions to bring life instead of death to ourselves and those around us?

One way to ask this question is to begin to think about the consequences and advantages of the individual tools at our disposal. Another way is to imagine a world where the most painful aspects of our lives are no longer present. In this way, we reckon—prophetically—with both a present day accountability and a future vision to move toward. Black feminists have important things to say in this moment about how to survive what is coming thirty years down the road. And, we have a responsibility to account for the ways we damage ourselves and each other in this present moment. Black feminist prophetics is one way we can do both of those things.

Black feminist prophetics is, then, a call for radical accountability among the group of people that identify with the label “Black feminist.” It is a plea for us to take note of how we have changed—for better and for worse—through inclusion in the U.S. academy and broader representation within U.S. political life. It is a reminder that we did not always need the academy in order to produce the knowledge that has been so life- giving for many of us. Finally, it is a call to listen to the killjoy, the enraged Black feminist, and other radical voices from the margins of Black political life that serve as important forms of accountability by which we can measure our effectiveness in pursuing liberation for ourselves and our communities.

[CHAPTER 2] Black Feminist Radicalism: A Genealogy and A Departure

Introduction

Radical Black feminists writing in the 1970s and 1980s were, to a large extent, explicitly anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist, which is to say, understanding the structural realities of living in a capitalist system under U.S. empire was central to their own expression of Black feminist politics. Audre Lorde, Toni Cade Bambara, June Jordan and many other Black feminist writers of this time were grappling with the inadequate gains of the civil rights movement and, as Pat Parker related, “charged with the task of rebuilding and revitalizing the dreams of the 60’s and turning it into the realities of the

80’s.”1 That being said, Black feminist organizations during this period represented a wide range of ideological positions and political goals.2 “Black feminist organizations,” notes Kimberly Springer, “had to reconcile with the heterogeneity of member’s class and sexual orientation identities, which yielded significant diversity within the larger movement.”3

When radical Black feminists of the 1970s talked about “revolution,” they meant nothing short of the complete overthrow of U.S. empire. This included the overthrow of capitalism as an economic system, of capitalist markets which relied on the exploitation

1 Pat Parker, “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,” in The Complete Works of Pat Parker, ed. Julie R. Enszer, (Brookville, NY: A Midsummer Night’s Press, 2016): 258. This piece was originally given as a speech at BASTA Conference in Oakland, CA in August of 1980. I am indebted to scholar Nic Caldwell for calling my attention to Pat Parker as a central radical Black feminist foremother who is often overlooked. 2 See Kimberly Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). 3 Springer, Living for the Revolution, 17.

67 of working class and poor Black people and other people of color, and an overthrow of the militarism that led the United States to invade countries around the world in the interest of U.S. democracy.

Hence, I choose in this chapter to focus on what self-identified radical and revolutionary Black feminists articulate as their primary platforms, as demonstrated in key texts where they define those terms. I wish to contrast how “revolutionary” and

“radical” have been used in Black feminist writing in the 1970s and 1980s, with how the term “radical” traffics in present day popular neoliberal Black feminist discourse. To that end, I will examine key writings by self-identified revolutionary and radical Black feminists in order to delineate how these terms have shifted over time, and what that means for transformative Black feminist politics. First, I will provide a close reading of

Pat Parker’s “Revolution: It Ain’t Neat or Pretty or Quick,” a speech given in August

1980 in Oakland, California. Then, I will examine the Combahee River Collective’s

“Black Feminist Statement” in the context of capitalist markets. I will close this chapter with a close reading of an article by Black feminist writer Brittney C. Cooper, in which she identifies herself as a “radical Black feminist.” The purpose of this final section will be to call attention to how positions of the left of the political spectrum have become detached from a genealogy of radical Black feminism while maintaining the language of

“radical.”

Pat Parker

Like much Black feminist work from the 1970s and early 1980s, Pat Parker’s speech from the August 1980 ¡Basta! Conference in Oakland reads like a prophetic word for our moment. The conference, entitled “¡Basta! Women’s Conference on Imperialism

68 and Third World War” was held August 22-24, and was sponsored by a number of radical, transnational feminist of color organizations.4 Pat Parker, then the Executive

Director of the Oakland Feminist Women’s Health Center, was a prolific poet and Black lesbian activist.5 Parker’s tone was urgent, because in the chaos of the early 1980s, she believed that revolutionary movements had the opportunity to seize power and direct the future course of the world: “We are in a critical time…What we do here this weekend and what we take from this conference can be the difference, the deciding factor as to whether a group of women will ever again be able to meet not only in this country, but the entire world.” For Parker, the chaos of national liberation struggles around the world from the turbulent 1960s forward, provided momentum for concrete action toward the world she and her contemporaries wanted to see.6

Radical Black feminist thinkers of this time were in step with the other radical movements of their time. This includes movements like the Black Panthers, the Young

Lords, the American Indian Movement, Chicano social justice movements, and the

LGBT revolts of the 1970s.7 U.S. Black feminists of the 1970s were engaged in

4 See the poster for the ¡Basta! Conference on the Oakland Museum for California digital archives, at http://collections.museumca.org/?q=collection-item/201054612. 5 Ilene Alexander, “Voices from the Gaps: Pat Parker,” University of Minnesota Digital Conservancy, August 13, 1998, https://conservancy.umn.edu/bitstream/handle/11299/166299/Parker,%20Pat.pdf;sequence=1 6 Liberation struggles that were most proximate to the early 1980s included struggles in Angola, Mozambique, Guinea-Bissau, and Cape Verde (Portuguese colonies); the liberation struggles in Zimbabwe, South Africa, and Namibia; and St. Lucia, and St. Vincent and the Grenadines. For more on liberation struggles during this time, see Todd Shepard, Voices of Decolonization: A Brief History with Documents, (Boston: Bedford/St. Martin’s, 2015); Kate Quinn, ed. Black Power in the Caribbean. (Florida: University Press of Florida, 2014). M.E. Chamberlain, Decolonization: The Fall of the European Empires, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 1999); Prosser Gifford and William Roger Louis, Decolonization and African Independence: The Transfers of Power, 1960-1980. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988). 7 For more on the confluences between radical Black feminist and other radical social movements, see Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (ed.), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. (New York: Kitchen Table Woman of Color Press,

69 international politics and broadly engaged with the language and action of anti- imperialism. This meant being both visionary and granular with the actions of decolonization day in and day out. The disarray of the political and social upheaval of the

1960s and 1970s provided a window of opportunity for radical Black feminists and their co-revolutionaries to make significant changes in the political, economic and social conditions that had constructed their daily realities up until that point.8 Parker did not see the chaos as a bad thing. Rather, she recognized that the massive shifts caused by liberation struggles around the world threatened to upend the world order as it was known, and she imagined that those in power were “desperate,” because they were “no longer able to control the world with the threat of force.”9 This chaos provided a key moment, then, for revolutionary change in the status quo. It was the sign that the long, hard work of previous generations toward liberation had finally yielded a critical tipping point.

That tipping point, according to Parker, would determine whether Black feminists simply reformed the existing system, making more room for themselves but leaving the overall structures intact, or whether they would remake the world anew. For Parker, there was no question about what the transformative choice was in the context of U.S.

1981); Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo, and Lourdes Torres, Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991); Cheryl Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism: Black Woman Writers of the Black Left, 1955-1995 (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2013). 8For more on the political and social upheaval of the 1960s-1970s, see Maurice Isserman, and Michael Kazin, America Divided: The Civil War of the 1960s. (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Lance E. Hill, The Deacons for Defense: Armed Resistance and the Civil Rights Movement, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004); Joshua Bloom and Waldo E. Martin, Black Against Empire: The History and Politics of the Black Panther Party. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013); Rebecca De Schweinitz, If We Could Change the World: Young People and America's Long Struggle for Racial Equality. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2009). 9 Parker, “Revolution,” 254.

70 imperialism. Revolutionary feminists, in Parker’s understanding, had to take seriously the charge to undo the entire world and make it anew. She juxtaposes this goal with the goals of white middle-class feminists through an examination of a key concession in the Equal

Rights Amendment (ERA), and in examining what visibility did for mainstream white feminism in the 1970s. Parker understood revolution and reform to be two separate impetuses. Both the goals and the means to each impetus, as Parker juxtaposes them, are diametrically opposed to one another; therefore, they cannot live in the same place at the same time:

“It is unthinkable to me as a revolutionary feminist that some women’s liberationist would entertain the notion that women should be drafted in exchange for passage of the ERA. This is a clear example of not understanding imperialism and not basing one’s political line on its destruction.”10 In perhaps the most poignant example of the line Parker draws between reformist and revolutionary feminisms, Parker argues that a revolutionary feminist’s search for liberation must mean liberation from the systems of oppression that affect all people of color around the world. To Parker, a failure to understand imperialism, and a failure to enact that understanding in one’s politics, means that one is not a revolutionary feminist.

Being a revolutionary feminist, according to Parker, means “basing one’s political line” on the destruction of U.S. imperialism, because it is this system that causes so much suffering, death, and inequality both within and outside of the United States.11

It is not enough, in Parker’s view, to simply fight for freedom within a country that is enacting imperialist terror around the world by seeking broader inclusion in that country’s already-existing structures:

“If the passage of the ERA means that I am going to become an equal participant in the exploitation of the world; that I am going to bear arms against other Third

10 Parker, 257. 11 Parker, 257.

71 World people who are fighting to reclaim what is rightfully theirs – then I say Fuck the ERA.”12

Parker’s position is uncompromising. A revolutionary feminist, a radical feminist, fights to upend the systems that oppress people around the world precisely because those systems also constitute the oppressions faced by Black people within the United States. A revolutionary feminist, in Parker’s construction, does not compromise on the goals of liberation. Most importantly, a revolutionary feminist does not agree to concessions that make life worse for those most vulnerable in the world.

Imperialism is at the center of the structures of domination that have ailed us since colonialism, and it is deeply connected to capitalism, according to Parker, because “[t]he rest of the world is being exploited in order to maintain our standard of living.”13 To put it another way, imperialist efforts by the United States against other countries and peoples around the world are, and always have been, part and parcel of securing the resources necessary for capitalist markets to thrive.14 For revolutionary feminists like Parker, imperialism was a major part of the frameworks of oppression and liberation. While the

United States is not the only country that pursues the creation of markets for its own economic benefit, in the 20th century, the United States had reached a dominant military position in the world that had reverberating effects.15 Even as Parker delineates her own

12 Parker, 257. 13 Parker, 255. 14 Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. (Chapel Hill, N.C.: University of North Carolina Press, 2000). 15 See Mohanty, Chandra Talpade, Robin L. Riley, and Minnie Bruce Pratt. Feminism and War: Confronting US Imperialism. (London: Zed Books), 2008; Keenan, Jeremy. Dying Sahara : US Imperialism and Terror in Africa. (London: Pluto Press, 2013); Elora Halim Chowdhury and Liz Philipose. Dissident Friendships: Feminism, Imperialism, and Transnational Solidarity. (Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2016); Robin L Riley, and Naeem Inayatullah. Interrogating Imperialism: Conversations On Gender, Race, and War. (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006);

72 position as a working class Black woman—a position that is not privileged in U.S. society—she simultaneously recognizes that she (and others similarly positioned) benefits from U.S. militarism around the world.

So when Parker insists on “basing one’s political line” on an understanding of, and commitment to destroying, U.S. imperialism, she is drawing a revolutionary line in the sand that is deeply connected to the pervasiveness of U.S. militarism and to the capitalist economic system that provides both resources and justification for that militarism to continue. Parker refuses to allow the term revolutionary to mean anything except the complete destruction of “all imperialist governments,” and she recognizes that by doing so, the markets that we use to construct our lives will be dramatically impacted:

“As anti-imperialists we must be prepared to destroy all imperialist governments; and we must realize that by doing this we will drastically alter the standard of living that we now enjoy. We cannot talk on one hand about making revolution in this country, yet be unwilling to give up our video tape records and recreational vehicles.”16

For Parker, it is not possible to create a new world without letting go of the things we enjoy about the old world that are predicated on the suffering of others. Rather than trying to find ways to hold on to those things, however, Parker instead wants to prepare her listeners to lose them.

Parker relates the very real stakes of an anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist Black feminism, namely, that we will be required to alter our current standards of living in order to create a more just world. In Parker’s understanding of revolutionary feminism, the connections between capitalism, imperialism, racism, sexism, and heteronormativity are more than just theoretical or ideological. The possibility of a Black feminist

16 Parker, “Revolution,” 255.

73 revolution lies in our ability recognize our own investments in maintaining systems of power, and in our willingness to break those systems no matter what it costs us—because the systems of power we are fighting are always costing us more. For Parker, investment is not an excuse for avoiding capitalist critique.

It is necessary here to note that in order to be revolutionary—in order to advocate for a radical, anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist feminist revolution—Parker indicates that a basic understanding of capitalism is required. Rather than relying on convoluted forms of Marxist theory that have become the norm in academic spaces in the present day,

Parker translated the heart of Marxist analysis into terms her audience was able to understand: “An anti-imperialist understands the exploitation of the working class, understands that in order for capitalism to function, there must be a certain percentage that is unemployed.”17 For Parker, the inaccessibility of Marxist theory is not an excuse for avoiding a capitalist critique. Rather, Parker acts as translator that transcribes the basic underpinnings of Marxist analysis into language and action that those outside the university can understand.

The last contribution of Parker’s speech that I wish to highlight in this chapter is how these politics affected her understanding of community, nation, and belonging. “We must also define our friends and enemies based on their stand on imperialism,” Parker insists, suggesting that intimacy and politics are deeply tied together.18 Underlying

Parker’s argument is the assumption that who we surround ourselves with matters deeply for our politics. In Parker’s equation of politics and friendship, she suggests that we determine the nature of our relationships with others based on what they are fighting for

17 Parker, 255. 18 Parker, 255.

74 in the world. While the litmus test may seem harsh, for Parker, centering imperialism and capitalism as the structures that must be destroyed in revolutionary struggle means no one can plead ignorance or remain neutral in fighting for a better world. The revolutionary demand for choosing a side, for declaring one’s intentions and pursuing those intentions relentlessly within the context of community and friendship, is central to revolutionary struggle.

Parker takes this critique up to the level of nation by pointing out the cost of being a

“good American,” stating:

“And the message they bring is coming clear. Be a good American – Support registration for the draft. The equation is being laid out in front of us. Good American = Support imperialism and war. To this, I must declare – I am not a good American. I do not wish to have the world colonized, bombarded and plundered in order to eat steak.”19

Again connecting the wealth of the United States to the country’s imperialist origins,

Parker takes her audience through another exercise in drawing clear lines for revolutionary impact, with a different inflection—that of nationalism. Those who wish to see the world made anew must understand the relationship between U.S. imperialism and capitalism, and must be willing to be labeled as something other than a “good American” in the struggle for freedom. For Parker, a “good American” is so tied to their own standard of living under capitalist imperialism, that they are willing to be silent in the face of war and colonization, carried out in the name of U.S. interests. A revolutionary, in

Parker’s construction, is willing to forego nationalistic belonging in order to support what is right, which is freedom from domination for all people around the world. A

19 Parker, 256.

75 revolutionary, in Parker’s construction, is not guided by the markets available to her, but is instead guided solely by her struggle against capitalist imperialism.

Parker extends her analysis of U.S. nationalism to a more abstract analysis of belonging, stating:

“Our interest does not lie with being a part of this system, and our tendencies to be co-opted and diverted are lessened by the realization of our oppression. We know and understand that our oppression is not simply a question of nationality but that poor and working class people are oppressed throughout the world by imperialist powers.”20

For Parker, “belonging” to the United States as a national entity means that we align our interests with the country as an imperialist power. Rather, Parker argues, Black feminists should recognize that our interests do not, indeed cannot, align with the United States as a nation, and as such, we should draw our alliances with poor Black and brown people around the world who are similarly affected by the imperialism of the United States. In this way, Parker asks Black feminists to consider other forms of affiliation outside of nation for defining belonging. Parker’s sense of revolutionary belonging is diasporic and subversive in this regard.

In Parker’s understanding of imperialist capitalism, markets are the mechanism through which imperialist governments justify their militarism.21 What is more, Parker

20 Parker, 256. 21 For more on the relationship between U.S. militarism and economic markets, see Laura Briggs, Reproducing Empire: Race, Sex, Science, and U.S. Imperialism in Puerto Rico. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002); Amy Kaplan, and Donald E. Pease, Cultures of United States Imperialism, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1993).

76 understood markets as an everyday form of investment with the broader imperialist action of the United States. As such, in Parker’s understanding, revolutionary Black feminists center their own actions around disinvesting from imperialist capitalism and creating structures that allow them to do so long-term. Parker understands that this action could cost lives—even the lives of revolutionary Black feminists and their loved ones. But in her construction of the problem that faces Black feminists—that of an imperialist United

States—death and divestment are necessary components of a revolution that can remake the world.

There are many reasons why Parker’s words and her understanding of what constitutes “revolutionary” and “radical” struggle may feel difficult to engage in the present day, and we will examine additional shifts in the Black feminist genealogy of markets in the following chapters that might help explain why Parker’s position feels hard. At this moment, however, I think it sufficient to say that one genealogy of Black feminist markets is stridently anti-imperialist and anti-capitalist, and uncompromising in that position. When we invoke the term “radical Black feminism,” it is important that we remember Black feminists such as Pat Parker, who originally combined the terms

“revolutionary” and “radical” with the term “feminist” in order to indicate a very specific, and very uncompromising, form of anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist critique. For revolutionary Black feminists such as Pat Parker, “revolutionary” came with a clear understanding of imperialist capitalism, and the only option available for revolutionary feminists was to destroy that system and all traces of it, in as many ways possible.

77 Combahee River Collective

In 1977, the Combahee River Collective (CRC) published “A Black Feminist

Statement,” a manifesto that had been collectively written by the group since they first began meeting in 1974.22 The CRC was a radical group of U.S. Black feminist women— primarily lesbian and primarily working class—that formed in response to their dissatisfaction with the National Black Feminist Organization.23 Specifically, the

Combahee River Collective members wanted to address heterosexism and class issues that they felt were minimized in the “bourgeois-feminist stance” that the NBFO had taken during their first national conference.24 While the CRC originally began as the

Northeastern chapter of the NBFO, they formed into an independent group that outlasted the NBFO by five years, finally disbanding in 1980.

The Combahee River Collective’s statement is a well-read text in U.S. Black feminist education today. It is often lauded for its intersectional approach, articulated years before Kimberlé Crenshaw would coin the term in 1989. My purpose in including it here, however, is to use it as a sort of bridge between revolutionary U.S. Black feminism of the 1970s, represented by Pat Parker’s BASTA speech on revolution, and the emergence of more academic Black feminist scholarship in the 1980s. The CRC statement gives us an opportunity to examine both the radicalism of Black feminism, as well as insights into how Black feminism could come to be articulated as an individualist

22 The Combahee River Collective membership often shifted, but over the years that the statement was crafted, members included Barbara and Beverly Smith, Gloria Akasha Hull, Audre Lorde, Chirlane McCray, Cheryl Clarke, Demita Frazier, and Margo Okazawa-Rey, among others. 23 Springer, Living for the Revolution: Black Feminist Organizations, 1968-1980. 24 Combahee River Collective, “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, ed. Barbara Smith (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983), 271.

78 identity framework by the 1990s. This is not to say that the Combahee River Collective was anything but a radical political group. Indeed, their activism, writing, and their decision to leave the NBFO in 1975 demonstrates their own commitment to radical Black feminism.

Where the CRC statement and Pat Parker find the most common ground is in their shared understanding of both capitalism and imperialism as structures of oppression constricting Black women’s lives in the 1970s and 1980s. Similar to the way that Parker understands imperialist capitalism as the core of those structures, the Combahee River

Collective members connected imperialism and capitalism explicitly to racism, gender, and to heteronormativity (what they called heterosexism at the time):

“The most general statement of our politics at the present time would be that we are actively committed to struggling against racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression, and see as our particular task the development of integrated analysis and practice based upon the fact that the major systems of oppression are interlocking.”25

For the members of the Combahee River Collective, a Black feminist praxis and analysis centered the interlocking aspects of domination that served to cement the power of white, heterosexual, upper class men in all aspects of U.S. society.

Also similar to Parker, the CRC members saw the extended struggle they were in as a deadly serious one:

“…we find our origins in the historical reality of Afro-American women's continuous life-and-death struggle for survival and liberation. Black women's extremely negative relationship to the American political system (a system of white male rule) has always been determined by our membership in two oppressed racial and sexual castes.”26

25 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 264. 26 Combahee River Collective, 265.

79 For the CRC members, Black women had a particular and important position because of their lack of access to any vector of power or privilege in U.S. society. What is more, the

CRC indicates daily survival within the United States as a matter of life and death. The important distinction that they make between survival and liberation gives us the opportunity to analyze the daily life choices that Black women make—choices that can result in death and dispossession. In this way, the CRC gives us an intimate window into

Parker’s description of the internal conditions inside the United States that mirror those of countries outside the U.S.

Like Parker, the CRC statement indicates that destruction, not reformation, of the prevailing order is the transformative way for oppressed communities to achieve the liberation they desperately need: “We realize that the liberation of all oppressed peoples necessitates the destruction of the political-economic systems of capitalism and imperialism as well as patriarchy.”27 For the members of the CRC, economic and anti- war radicalism lies at the heart of their own impetus toward liberation, precisely because they witnessed what Black bourgeois political work yielded, and were deeply dissatisfied.

Hence, for them, reformism was not an option. What is more, the CRC members suggest that even though some of their members shifted to a higher economic class, or were included in certain areas of elite U.S. society such as the academy, they still recognized themselves as “doubly desirable tokens at white-collar and professional levels.”28 In this way, the CRC forecloses Black women’s inclusion in higher economic classes as signs of progress, and instead recognizes this economic achievement as tokenism:

“Although our [Black women’s] economic position is still at the very bottom of the American capitalistic economy, a handful of us have been able to gain certain tools

27 Combahee River Collective, 267-268. 28 Combahee River Collective, 268.

80 as a result of tokenism in education and employment which potentially enable us to more effectively fight our oppression.”

That the CRC members understand this economic movement primarily as tokenism, and that they see this tokenism as an opportunity to gain resources to more effectively fight oppression, is a centrally important deterrent to the narratives of uplift and progress that have marked Black political struggles since Emancipation.29

The CRC members leveraged the professional success of some of their members as a resource in disrupting the overall economic conditions that leave the majority of Black women at the bottom of imperialist capitalism. This does not mean that the CRC members were not proud of their accomplishments, but rather, that no one individual accomplishment of any member indicated a wider share of freedom for all members.

Instead, the “Black Feminist Statement” indicates an understanding that within imperialist capitalism, all pieces play an important part in keeping the system together. In order to maintain the majority of Black people in the lower classes, some singular Black people must be allowed to succeed. Individual Black success serves to buttress the narrative of meritocracy on which imperialist capitalism is founded. The CRC members recognized this, and named their individual progress within the academy and other employment as “tokenism” to mark their strident disagreement with meritocracy.

29 For examples of complications of uplift politics, see Jacqueline M. Moore, Booker T. Washington, W.E.B. Du Bois, and the Struggle for Racial Uplift. (Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003); Touré F. Reed, Not Alms but Opportunity: The Urban League & the Politics of Racial Uplift, 1910-1950. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008); Xiomara Santamarina, Belabored Professions : Narratives of African American Working Womanhood. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005); Cheryl D. Hicks, Talk with You Like a Woman: African American Women, Justice, and Reform In New York, 1890-1935. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2010); Kevin K. Gaines, Uplifting the Race: Black Leadership, Politics, and Culture in the Twentieth Century, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1996).

81 For the CRC members, then, success was still measured in their ability to confront, analyze, and destruct the systems of oppression that plague Black women communally. In addition to a wide range of activist work that they engaged in, the CRC members indicated that they wanted to provide a critical analysis of the way that imperialist capitalism worked in the context of racism and heteropatriarchy. They centered the poor and working classes in which many Black women were located, and included the economic gains of individual educated Black women as needing a broader analysis within the context of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. For these radical Black feminists, who identified explicitly as “socialists,” no single achievement by a Black woman negated the overall structural position of Black women “at the bottom…”.30

Like Pat Parker, the CRC members also understood that sacrifice was necessary in order for revolution to take place. They recognized it as a historical fact that made their current work possible: “Contemporary Black feminism is the outgrowth of countless generations of personal sacrifice, militancy, and work by our mothers and sisters.”31 They also recognized it as undergirding their own work, both in relation to their commitments to socialism, and in relation to the social stigma they experienced by identifying as feminists. The CRC members spend significant time discussing the challenges Black women experience as a result of their feminist commitments, quoting at length from

Michele Wallace’s piece on Black feminist sisterhood.32 They acknowledge “[t]he psychological toll of being a Black woman and the difficulties this presents in reaching political consciousness and doing political work,” because of the social isolation Black

30 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 270. 31 Combahee River Collective, 265. 32 Michele Wallace, “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood,” The Village Voice, July 28, 1975, 6-7.

82 women face within Black communities by insisting on addressing sexism alongside racism. Throughout the statement, it becomes clear that their understanding of being a

Black feminist means stepping into an historical struggle in which one will “have to fight the world.”33

The psychological toll of being devalued in broader society, as well as being penalized for struggling against the forces that devalue Black women cannot be underestimated.34 Understanding the psychological costs of Black gendered existence, as the CRC statement outlines it, provides important insight into how later generations of

Black feminist thinkers seek to address that suffering. By beginning with the premise that

Black women are both devalued in society and punished for struggling against that devaluation, the CRC members recognized a sort of double-bind unique to Black women caused by structural racism and by sexism within already-beset Black communities.

There are many possible reactions to and paths through this double-bind, and Black feminists before and since the Combahee River Collective have certainly demonstrated the infinite possibilities and creativity in healing, managing, and overcoming that bind.35

33 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 269. The “fight the world” quote comes from Michele Wallace, “A Black Feminist’s Search for Sisterhood.” 34 For work on the psychological toll of racial and gendered devaluation, see Diane Robinson- Brown, and Verna Keith, In and Out of Our Right Minds: The Mental Health of African American Women. (New York: Columbia University Press, 2003); hooks, Sisters of The Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984); Suryia Nayak, Race, Gender and the Activism of Black Feminist Theory: Working with Audre Lorde. (New York: Routledge, 2015). 35 For just a small sample of works that address Black women’s mental and emotional wellbeing, see: Evelyn C. White, The Black Women's Health Book: Speaking for Ourselves. (Seattle, WA: Seal Press, 1994); Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel. (New York: Knopf, 1987); Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God. (Greenwich, CT: Fawcett, 1969); Alice Walker, In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. (San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983); June Jordan, Directed by Desire: The Collected Poems of June Jordan, (Port Townsend, WA: Copper Canyon Press, 2005); Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters. (New York: Random House, 1980); Ntozake Shange, For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide, When the Rainbow Is Enuf: A Choreopoem (Toronto: Bantam Books, 1980).

83 Yet, it remains the case that Black women and girls, two decades into the 21st century, remain both devalued and punished for struggling against that devaluation.36

The CRC statement also has another important feature, which is their analysis around the phrase “the personal is political.” A significant portion of the “What We

Believe” section of the statement is committed to outlining how the CRC members understood personal identity as the site for their politics. It is necessary for me to quote parts of this section and part of the previous section at length, because it is here that I trace a Black feminist genealogy of markets (emphases mine):

“There is also undeniably a personal genesis for Black Feminism, that is, the political realization that comes from the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women's lives. Black feminists and many more Black women who do not define themselves as feminists have all experienced sexual oppression as a constant factor in our day-to-day existence. […]

[…] Above all else, our politics initially sprang from the shared belief that Black women are inherently valuable, that our liberation is a necessity not as an adjunct to somebody else's may because of our need as human persons for autonomy. This may seem so obvious as to sound simplistic, but it is apparent that no other ostensibly progressive movement has ever considered our specific oppression as a priority or worked seriously for the ending of that oppression. […] […]We realize that the only people who care enough about us to work consistently for our liberation are us. Our politics evolve from a healthy love for ourselves, our sisters and our community which allows us to continue our struggle and work.

36 For current examples, see Cliff Albright, “To Be Black and Female in America Is to Be Routinely and Systematically Devalued,” Atlanta Black Star, April 1, 2017, http://atlantablackstar.com/2017/04/01/beyond-maxine-april-blackwomenatwork/; African American Policy Forum, “Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women”, African American Policy Forum, July 2015 (update), http://static1.squarespace.com/static/53f20d90e4b0b80451158d8c/t/55a810d7e4b058f342f55873/ 1437077719984/AAPF_SMN_Brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf; Linda Meric and Charmaine Davis, “We Need to Value Black Women’s Labor,” Huffington Post, September 14, 2016, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/linda-meric/on-labor-day-2016-black-w_b_11836466.html; Rebecca Epstein, Jamilia J. Blake, and Thalia González, “Girlhood Interrupted: The Erasure of Black Girls’ Childhood,” Georgetown Center on Poverty and Inequality, June 2017, http://www.law.georgetown.edu/academics/centers-institutes/poverty-inequality/upload/girlhood- interrupted.pdf.

84 This focusing upon our own oppression is embodied in the concept of identity politics. We believe that the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression. In the case of Black women this is a particularly repugnant, dangerous, threatening, and therefore revolutionary concept because it is obvious from looking at all the political movements that have preceded us that anyone is more worthy of liberation than ourselves. […]

[…] A political contribution which we feel we have already made is the expansion of the feminist principle that the personal is political. In our consciousness-raising sessions, for example, we have in many ways gone beyond white women's revelations because we are dealing with the implications of race and class as well as sex….We have spent a great deal of energy delving into the cultural and experiential nature of our oppression out of necessity because none of these matters has ever been looked at before. No one before has ever examined the multilayered texture of Black women's lives.”37

The analysis emerging from the CRC statement around Black women and identity politics is fertile ground for political interventions of all kinds, and it is here that we might locate the seeds of market-based thinking, as well as the seeds of a radical anti- capitalist intervention. Central to Black feminist praxis and theory is what Patricia Hill

Collins has labeled standpoint theory, which is one way Black women have described the central epistemology of using their own personal experiences as an anchor for analyzing the world around them.38 In much U.S. Black feminist literature, grounding critical analyses in lived experiences is an act of resistance on two levels. It is both a move to center a profoundly marginalized subject position—that of Black women—and it also challenges what constitutes “knowledge” under the logics of positivism and “objectivity” that undergird white supremacist heteropatriarchy. By grounding analyses of society in diverse personal experiences, Black women have offered an important critique of how

37 Combahee River Collective, “Statement”, 265-266, 267, 268. 38 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment (New York: Routledge, 2000), Chapter 2, especially pages 22-24.

85 dominant society comes to know something, at the same time that we uncover an acutely hidden figure that can tell the secrets of a sick society.

The radical potential of Black feminist thought and praxis emerges precisely because Black women do not have access to either gender or racial privilege. Sylvia

Wynter understands this subject position as “demonic,” from which Black women can launch unexpected and subversive forms of resistance precisely because they are not accounted for in the structures of white supremacist heteropatriarchy.39 Hortense Spillers articulates this perplexing subject position as the place from which Black women might gain the “insurgent ground” against the very structures that preclude Black women from having a meaningful (or even relatable) gendered subject position.40 I understand this position as Black women’s greatest resource, our greatest tool in the bid to create a new world. While being unaccounted for can cause suffering and pain, it also provides a level of inscrutability from which Black women can enact radical and revolutionary interventions into the prevailing order.

Yet the term “personal” can slide easily into the concept of “the individual,” and the discourses of individual rights can obscure the structural causes of racial and gendered suffering. Just as “the personal” can have radical potential when centered around the structural realities of Black women’s lives, a failure to delineate between “the personal” and “the individual” can lead to reformist positions that serve to buttress— rather than interrupt—the structures that cause Black women so much suffering. It is

39 Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman,’” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), 122. 40 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, ed. Hortense J. Spillers (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 229.

86 clear from the CRC statement that the goal of situating Black feminist analysis at the site of the “seemingly personal experience of individual Black women’s lives,” was to be able to leverage the “potentially most radical politics” that emerged from their own experiences.41 Yet, there are key qualifications in this section that signal a certain caution that the authors had as they constructed their arguments. The first comes in the phrase

“the seemingly personal experiences of individual Black women.”42 Seemingly implies that Black women’s experiences appear singular, but are in fact collectively organized by underlying structures. I also read the inclusion of the word “seemingly” as a signpost for readers that we are treading on potentially slippery ground between “the individual” and

“the personal,” and that we should not lose sight of the collectivity underlying the personal circumstances of Black women’s lives. In other words, what seems “personal” in Black women’s lives is in fact created by structural inequities that carry across individual lives.

The other qualifier that the authors of the CRC statement provide is that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity.”43

The qualifier “potentially” signals to readers that radical politics could, or could not, come out of the identities of Black women, which connects with James’ critique that radicalism and feminism are not automatically connected.44 Whether the writers qualified the term radical to delineate between the radical and reformist possibilities of Black women’s politics, or whether they attempted to signal that radical potential lies in Black

41 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 267. 42 Combahee River Collective, 266. 43 Combahee River Collective, 267. 44 Joy James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000), 245.

87 women’s ability to harness their identities and turn them into meaningful radical political action, the important point here is that for the authors of the “Black Feminist Statement” radicalism is not a given. Rather, Black feminists must be aware that both reformist and radical potential lies in Black women’s structural positionality, and that we have choices about how we do, or do not, utilize Black women’s “position at the bottom,” to enact revolutionary changes in the world around us.45

How, then, does the Combahee River Collective contribute to an understanding of neoliberal markets? For one, it is clear from the statement that the CRC believed that U.S.

Black feminists had not finished the work of economic analysis in relation to Black women under U.S. capitalism and imperialism. While they identified as socialists, and believed that “the work must be organized for the collective benefit of those who do the work and create the products, and not for the profit of the bosses,” they also argued that there was a significant amount of work to be done in extending Marxist analysis to the specific situation of Black women, which would strengthen the power and revolutionary potential of socialism.46 We can take their call to fully understand the economic situation of Black women in U.S. society as one of many necessary steps toward revolutionary action. This includes providing an analysis of popular culture markets as sites of potential capture for the radical potential of Black feminist work.

Additionally, I understand the CRC statement’s careful qualifications of the concepts of “the personal” and “radical potential” as caution signs for the road ahead as

Black feminists navigate forms of capitalist extraction that require our investment and/or our enthusiasm in order to continue. Particularly for middle- and upper-class Black

45 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 270. 46 Combahee River Collective, 268.

88 women who have achieved what the CRC calls “tokenistic” forms of upwardly-mobile employment and education, it is important to recalibrate our understandings of concepts like buying power, consumerism for pleasure, and even consumeristic self-care in order to account for the realities of imperialist capitalism.47 This is not just a plea for a distant materialist analysis or a nod to recognizing the capitalist system that we are all invested in and affected by. Rather, I am asking popular Black feminist thinkers to use their many resources to provide consistent, accessible anti-capitalist analyses alongside their work on representation and aesthetics that can provide meaningful interventions into both the economic gains that a few of us have achieved, as well as the structures of dispossession that keep the majority of Black women in the same material relationships to capital, labor, and property.48

Having a popularly accessible, cogent and meaningful analysis of imperialist capitalism means, for example, understanding how some of our most cherished Black celebrities are invested in, and affected by, global capitalism.49 The unfinished work of the “Black Feminist Statement” is a call for U.S. Black feminists to account for our exclusions from and investments in the markets that form our structural position at the bottom of society, to imagine a world without those markets, and to take the necessary steps to destroy those markets and seek our liberation (and by extension, the liberation of

47 For an example of this analysis, see Josée Johnston and Judith Taylor, "Feminist Consumerism and Fat Activists: A Comparative Study of Grassroots Activism and the Dove Real Beauty Campaign," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 33, no. 4 (Summer 2008): 941-966. 48 For example, see Nadia E. Brown and Lisa Young, “Ratchet Politics: Moving Beyond Black Women’s Bodies to Indict Institutions and Structures,” in Michael Mitchell and David Covin, (eds.), Broadening the Contours in the Study of Black Politics: Citizenship and Popular Culture, (New York: Routledge), 2015. 49 “How Much It Sucks to Be a Sri Lankan Worker Making Beyoncé’s New Clothing Line,” Broadly, May 17, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/d7anay/beyonce-topshop-ivy-park- sweatshop-factory-labor.

89 the whole world).50 Looking at the CRC statement and Pat Parker’s BASTA speech helps us to understand how much popular Black feminist politics have shifted to the right, and toward conservatism, even as some liberal Black feminists in the 21st century might insist that their political positionality is radical.

Brittney C. Cooper

The mainstream writings of Professor Brittany C. Cooper have risen to prominence in popular Black feminist discourse in the past few years. Self-identified as a

Crunk Feminist and a formidable scholar of Black women’s intellectual history, Cooper has found a niche at the intersection of public intellectualism, social media, and Black feminist criticism.51 As a frequent guest on the Melissa Harris Perry Show, a former contributing writer at Salon and a contributing writer at Cosmopolitan, Cooper has burst onto the scene of popular culture criticism as an central representative of Black feminism.52 Self-described as a “Next Generation Black Intellectual,” Cooper rides for

Beyoncé, women in hip-hop, and Hillary Clinton.53

In an article written June 9, 2016, Cooper published “I Am a Radical Black

Feminist, and I Am Voting for Hillary Clinton,” an exhortation to her readers on the

50 Here I am playing off the Combahee River Collective’s phrasing, “We might use our position at the bottom, however, to make a clear leap into revolutionary action. If Black women were free, it would mean that everyone else would have to be free since our freedom would necessitate the destruction of all the systems of oppression.” Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 270. 51 Cooper blogs as “crunktastic” on The Crunk Feminist Collective. Also see http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/people/. 52 “Brittney Cooper,” Salon, https://www.salon.com/writer/brittney_cooper/; “Breaking Down Narratives of Racial Discourse,” Melissa Harris Perry Show [video], April 6, 2014, https://www.msnbc.com/melissa-harris-perry/watch/breaking-down-narratives-of-racial- discourse-218234435944; “Brittney Cooper,” Cosmopolitan, https://www.msnbc.com/melissa- harris-perry/watch/breaking-down-narratives-of-racial-discourse-218234435944. 53 See http://www.brittneycooper.com/.

90 reasons why Black women should vote for Hillary Clinton.54 The importance of this piece is not in the fact that Cooper makes a case for voting for Hillary Clinton. In 2016 Clinton ran the most diverse campaign in history, backed by the largest number of Black women ever to work on a presidential campaign.55 Certainly, from Michelle Obama to Shonda

Rhymes, Black public figures, Black professors, and everyday Black women chose to support Clinton.56 Doing so is not a question of dedication to Black feminism, but rather a question of the particular political position of one’s Black feminism. The particular political position of one’s Black feminism matters for those of us invested in delineating ideas that are potentially transformative (structural) from those that buttress the status quo with limited access for a few specific elites (neoliberal).

What I wish to trace here is Cooper’s use of the term “radical Black feminist,” her definition of that term, and her subsequent misrepresentation and dismissal of radical

Black feminist concerns in relation to the U.S. presidency. I preface this analysis with a reminder that Black feminists have always had significant differences in how they believe

54 Brittney Cooper, “Hillary Clinton Is the Most Qualified Candidate, but the Fact That She’s a Woman Matters Too,” Cosmopolitan, June 9, 2016, https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/news/a59640/hillary-clinton-radical-black-feminist/. This article was originally published with the title: “Why I am Voting for Hillary Clinton—I Am a Radical Black Feminist and I am Voting for Hillary Clinton,” but the title has changed. The original title is still reflected in the Google search and the website address. See https://www.google.com/search?ei=dRe8WtRljb6CB7qci9AK&q=brittney+cooper+hillary+clinto n+radical+feminist&oq=brittney+cooper+hillary+clinton+radical+feminist&gs_l=psy- ab.3...8315.10185.0.10267.17.9.0.0.0.0.350.1028.1j0j1j2.4.0....0...1c.1.64.psy- ab..13.1.94...0i22i30k1.0.7X1KdCtlF2U. 55Ashley Weatherford, “Hillary Clinton’s Campaign Has More Black Women Than Any Presidential Campaign in History,” The Cut, October 18, 2016, http://nymag.com/thecut/2016/10/meet-the-black-women-working-on-hillary-clintons- campaign.html. 56 Yanan Wang, “Shonda Rhimes and Her Leading Ladies Endorse Hillary Clinton,” Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2016, http://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/tv/ct-shonda-rhimes- stars-endorse-clinton-20160311-story.html; Julie Hirschfeld Davis, “Michelle Obama Makes Ardent Case for Hillary Clinton,” New York Times, September 16, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/17/us/politics/michelle-obama-hillary-clinton-campaign.html.

91 Black liberation, progress, and change can be achieved.57 Both assimilationist and revolutionary Black public intellectuals have been vilified, shunned, and labeled as too

“radical” for mainstream U.S. society.58 As such, it can be challenging to see how Cooper relegates radicalism to a smaller space than appropriate, even as she herself is often under attack for being an outspoken Black feminist voice.

Hence, my analysis is not a question of whether Cooper is entitled to her own opinion regarding the candidacy of Hillary Clinton. Nor is it a question of Cooper’s commitment to Black feminism. Brittney Cooper rides for Black women as a public intellectual, and brings much needed attention to the concerns of Black women within the

U.S. She uses her tremendous writing skills and her fierce presence in the service of bringing visibility to the needs and of Black girls and women.59 Instead, the consequential move I wish to examine in the article is the manner in which Cooper defines herself as a “radical Black feminist,” while simultaneously dismissing the valid concerns of radical Black feminists who focus on structural issues.

Here, I must quote Cooper’s article at some length, because analyzing her arguments, and in particular the rhetorical devices she uses to make her case, requires that we take in the whole of her logic for redefining Black feminist radicalism:

“I'm a black woman situated at the intersection of these two complicated histories. Because of the ways in which the American nation-state has oppressed and excluded black people and women from full democratic participation, I consider myself a radical black feminist, one who believes fundamentally that we need to structurally transform the way our democracy works. I believe the U.S. nation

57 See Springer, Living for the Revolution, especially Chapters 5 and 6. 58 See James, “Radicalizing Feminism.” 59 This is most recently evident in Cooper’s new memoir and the collection of essays she published with other members of the Crunk Feminist Collective. See Eloquent Rage: A Black Feminist Discovers Her Superpower, (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2017); and Brittney C. Cooper, Susanna M. Morris, and Robin M. Boylorn (eds.), The Crunk Feminist Collection, (New York: The Feminist Press, 2017).

92 state both creates and reinforces an unjust social structure that harms black people (and indigenous and Latino people too) through overpolicing and lack of access to safe housing, good schools, and secure and healthy food sources. I do not believe the passage of legislation or token inclusion of women and black folks is either sufficient or just.

Many radical feminists I know do not celebrate Clinton's victory because they argue that the American presidency is part of the problem. Thus, they suggest that we should not be seduced into thinking that Clinton's womanhood is consequential for social progress.

I disagree. The fact that it took nearly a century from the conferral of the right to vote on women to Clinton's nomination suggests that this American empire is no more invested in white women being at its helm than it is in protecting and securing black lives. White women's clear and consistent complicity in the project of white supremacy (and the endangerment of black lives) does not change this fact.”60

In her statement defining her own Black radical feminism, Cooper argues,

“Because of the ways in which the American nation-state has oppressed and excluded black people and women from full democratic participation, I consider myself a radical black feminist, one who believes fundamentally that we need to structurally transform the way our democracy works.”61

Cooper tucks her definition of radical Black feminism behind her definition of the primary ill that the U.S. nation-state has committed against Black people as citizen- subjects. Cooper’s definition casts radical Black feminism as reactionary within the context of a legitimate nation-state, rather than a position that recognizes the construction of the U.S. as an imperial and capitalist power with dubious claims to legitimacy in the first place. In positioning the definition of “radical Black feminist” as a primarily U.S.- centered intervention to improve the existing nation-state, Cooper effectively defangs the historical international and anti-imperialist legacy of radical work by Black women to

60 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 3-5. 61 Cooper, para. 3-5.

93 address the question of American empire.62 However, as demonstrated earlier in this chapter, radical Black feminist work has a long history of questioning the very legitimacy of the United States as an imperial power. In essence, Cooper captures the term “radical

Black feminist” using definitions that do not challenge U.S. imperialism.

Hence it becomes more apparent how Cooper’s definition sells radical Black feminism short. Cooper is not advocating for self-determination in this regard. Her definition assumes that U.S. democracy can work for Black people—and Black women in particular—if we take the right actions as citizens: “I consider myself a radical black feminist, one who believes fundamentally that we need to structurally transform the way our democracy works.”63 From Assata Shakur, who fled the U.S. as a political prisoner, to

Audre Lorde, who refused to capitalize the “a” in America as a decolonial praxis, to

Claudia Jones, who was deported for her political beliefs, these radical Black feminist foremothers have never conceded that U.S. democracy is a workable structure for Black lives.64

Cooper goes on to explain her diagnosis of what ails the United States, staying within the previously-framed definition of reformism as radical:

“I believe the U.S. nation state both creates and reinforces an unjust social structure that harms black people (and indigenous and Latino people too) through overpolicing and lack of access to safe housing, good schools, and secure and healthy food sources. I do not believe the passage of legislation or token inclusion of women and black folks is either sufficient or just.”65

62 This historical work has been examined in Higashida, Black Internationalist Feminism; and Erik S. McDuffie, Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011). 63 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 5 64 See Carole Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008); Assata Shakur, Assata: An Autobiography, (Chicago, IL: Lawrence Hill Books, 1987); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984). 65 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 3

Nothing that Cooper states here is untrue. Her diagnosis of the problems with the U.S. nation addresses all of the specific rights that a democracy traditionally protects for its citizens. However, Cooper leaves out two key components of the problem of U.S. democracy that have historically been addressed by radical Black feminists. First is the question of the operation of capitalism as it has been used to ensure a racialized gendered hierarchy within the United States, and an uneven playing field between the United

States, its territorial holdings, and other countries. Throughout Cooper’s article, she does not address capitalism as a foundational problem for Black feminists, or for Black people more broadly. Addressing the specific harm done by capitalist systems, and fighting for socialism or communism as better alternatives to capitalism have been cornerstones of

Black radical thought.66

The second significant difference between Cooper’s position and that of radical

Black feminists historically is that of U.S. imperialism. As we saw earlier in this chapter from Pat Parker’s BASTA speech, radical Black feminism has long been transnational in character, precisely because Black feminists living within the United States recognized the impact of U.S. militarism on Black and Brown people living outside the country’s borders, and drew their political alliances with those suffering outside the U.S. This

66 For examples of the centrality of anti-capitalism to Black radical thought, see Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition, (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2000); Robin D.G. Kelley, Freedom Dreams: The Black Radical Imagination, (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 2002); Angela Y. Davis, “Women and Capitalism: Dialectics of Oppression and Liberation,” in Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting (eds.) The Black Feminist Reader, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, 2000); Combahee River Collective, “Statement”; Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx.

95 commitment to anti-imperialism was so strong that some Black feminist women have been deported and imprisoned for speaking the truth about U.S. militarism abroad.67

Cooper addresses imperialism in her article as well, an issue she could not avoid given Hillary Clinton’s well-deserved reputation as a hawkish politician:

American imperialism is morally and intellectually indefensible. Globally, our rush to use military intervention to defend U.S. interests abroad often leaves poor people of color as collateral damage to those efforts. I am clear that a Clinton presidency would continue our existing militarist approach abroad, in ways that I find to be violent and morally repugnant.

In a domestic context, the policies of mass incarceration uniquely disadvantage black men and women. The violent surveillance and killing of black people by police who typically suffer no consequence is personally and politically devastating. I recognize that Hillary Clinton had a hand in creating some of these social conditions, not through her legislative choices, but rather through her advocacy on behalf of her husband's presidential agenda.

Can we be honest about the fact that ride-or-die approaches to supporting our male partners often cost us way more than it costs them?68

Here, Cooper recognizes the devastating effects of U.S. imperialism abroad, and recognizes devastating domestic policies that have plagued Black people within the

United States which are also connected to U.S. militarism. She also acknowledges both

Clinton’s tendency to stay that course, as well as Cooper’s own discomfort with that course. But rather than offer any structural, or radical, critique of these policies, Cooper attributes Clinton’s failings in these regards to her individual relationship with Bill

Clinton, concluding that “ride-or-die approaches to supporting our male partners often cost us way more than it costs them.”69 By taking the valid, radical critiques of Clinton’s approach to structural issues, and casting them as the result of the personal relationship

67 Claudia Jones and Assata Shakur are two examples. See Boyce-Davies, Left of Karl Marx, and Shakur, Assata. 68 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 7-9 69 Cooper, para. 7-9.

96 between Hillary and Bill, Cooper recasts structural issues into a mold of individualized choice. Cooper’s diagnosis is consistent with the neoliberal logics of individual choice, which obscures our understanding of systemic forms of oppression. In other words,

Cooper stays invested in Hillary Clinton as the appropriate option for Black feminist voters, despite her own acknowledgment of Clinton’s inadequacies on militarism.

As demonstrated by Pat Parker and the Combahee River Collective, radical Black feminism recognizes the harm of imperialism as a structure and insists on divestment.

While Cooper analyzes Clinton’s investments in the construction and execution of domestic and international policies that have resulted in profound consequences for Black people within the United States and Black and Brown people abroad, she stops at analyzing her investment or the investment of Black communities in relation to these policies. Furthermore, Cooper never makes the necessary critical move to divestment, and herein lies her redefinition of radicalism as reformism.

Divestment, the active turn away from the structures of oppression that shape the

U.S. nation, is the necessary practice that radical genealogies of Black feminism pass on to us in the present. Divestment is about the choices we make, individually and collectively, about whether or not we are “with” the project of the U.S. as an exploitative empire. It means challenging the notion that Black people can be “good Americans,” or, in the language of our present day, be truly counted as “American” at all.70 The idea of divestment is also summed up by the recent exhortation by Combahee River Collective member Demita Frazier in 2017: “You don’t need to be perfect. You do not have to be adept or on top of it all the time…But you do need to make a decision: are you in or

70 Parker, “Revolution,” 256.

97 out?”71 At the moment we determine that we wish to be “out” of the structures of oppression that shape the U.S. empire, that is when we make the turn toward divestment—and radicalism.

Divestment reminds us that the differences between reformism and radicalism in the context of Black liberation struggles have also been a question of the means by which we address what ails us. And it is clear that Cooper knows the difference between her own position and that of radical Black feminists:

“Many radical feminists I know do not celebrate Clinton's victory because they argue that the American presidency is part of the problem. Thus, they suggest that we should not be seduced into thinking that Clinton's womanhood is consequential for social progress.

I disagree.”72

Cooper acknowledges the difference between her own position and the position of radical

Black feminists with her acknowledgement of the meaning of the U.S. presidency in the broader construction of U.S. empire. For radical Black feminists, both historically and as

Cooper characterizes them here, all structures of the U.S. government are part of the structure that upholds imperialism. This includes the presidency itself. Quite literally, the position of the U.S. presidency has long been the seat of military power—and therefore the seat of power of the empire. The president ultimately makes decisions about where and how to use the deadly force of the United States military, sometimes with the

71 Kevin Gosztola, “Authors of Combahee River Statement, Which Profoundly Influenced Black Feminism, Mark 40th Anniversary,” Shadow Proof, July 10, 2017, para. 35, https://shadowproof.com/2017/07/10/authors-combahee-river-statement-profoundly-influenced- black-feminism-mark-40th-anniversary/ 72 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 4-5.

98 approval of Congress, but as we have seen recently with the Obama administration, the president can deal death without that approval, too.73

In fact, Obama’s presidency is an important example of how difference can inhabit the space of the U.S. presidency, and conditions on the ground for marginalized people can stagnate or worsen. In this, Cooper’s suggestion that Clinton’s ascendancy to the presidency is consequential for social progress is contradicted by what we witnessed under President Obama. In addition to deporting more undocumented persons than any other president in history (earning him the deserved title of deporter-in-chief), under

Obama’s administration drone attacks overseas increased significantly.74 Under Obama,

Black communities have been significantly slower to recover from the Great Recession.75

This is not to lay all of the problems of U.S. empire at his feet—indeed, all of these issues precede Obama’s ascendancy to the presidency and will remain long after he leaves. But it is this very fact that stands against Cooper’s argument that Hillary Clinton as president would matter for social progress in the U.S. What Black radical feminists

73 Charlie Savage, “Attack Renews Debate Over Congressional Consent,” NYTimes.com, March 21, 2011, https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/22/world/africa/22powers.html; Jacqueline Klimas, “Obama Launches 2,800 Strikes on Iraq, Syria Without Congressional Approval,” Washington Times, April 27, 2015, https://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/27/congress-still-not- specifically-authorizing-islami/ 74 Jessica Purkiss and Jack Serle, “Obama’s Covert Drone War in Numbers: Ten Times More Strikes Than Bush,” The Bureau of Investigative Journalism, January 17, 2017, https://www.thebureauinvestigates.com/stories/2017-01-17/obamas-covert-drone-war-in- numbers-ten-times-more-strikes-than-bush; Alejandra Marchevsky and Beth Baker, “Why Has President Obama Deported More Immigrants Than Any Other President in US History?” The Nation, March 31, 2014, https://www.thenation.com/article/why-has-president-obama-deported- more-immigrants-any-president-us-history/. 75 William A. Darity, Jr., “How Barack Obama Failed Black Americans,” The Atlantic, December 22, 2016, https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/12/how-barack-obama-failed-black- americans/511358/; Darrick Hamilton et. al., “Umbrellas Don’t Make It Rain: Why Studying and Working Hard Isn’t Enough for Black Americans,” Insight Center for Community Economic Development, April 2015, http://ww1.insightcced.org/uploads/CRWG/Umbrellas-Dont-Make-It- Rain8.pdf

99 have always understood is that the U.S. empire was built in such a way that it will always perpetuate itself, regardless of who is at the helm. This is why we can have a Black president who appears as a change from the status quo, but who is ultimately profoundly limited in shifting the gears of imperialism that makes the U.S. move. It is for this reason that Cooper’s dismissive position toward radical Black feminists in relation to a Clinton presidency is most troubling. Her dismissal precludes a broader, more transformative, and more comprehensive critique of the white supremacist, capitalist heteropatriarchy as it structures and is structured by U.S. empire. It also precludes an important conversation about divestment, and what that might actually look like when led by radical Black feminists.

Rather than offering space to radical Black feminists who might disagree with her to make their case, Cooper dismisses their concerns out of hand, and proceeds to refocus her case on the meanings of white womanhood to the nation-state:

“The fact that it took nearly a century from the conferral of the right to vote on women to Clinton's nomination suggests that this American empire is no more invested in white women being at its helm than it is in protecting and securing black lives. White women's clear and consistent complicity in the project of white supremacy (and the endangerment of black lives) does not change this fact.”76

Cooper uses a false equivalency to say two things that may be true, but that are not comparable in terms of how power works. She compares the protection and security of

Black lives with the symbolic power of a white woman sitting at the head of the U.S. empire, equating the workings of race and gender. Cooper abstracts Black death, pain, and suffering on the ground—an embodied and material fact—in order to compare it to the symbolism of a white woman leading the United States with very little change in the

76 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 5

100 daily practices that make the U.S. an empire. This is a false equivalency because white women’s lives do not hang in the balance in the same way that Black lives always do when the well-being of U.S. empire is at play.

The equivalency Cooper draws between white women and Black people extends to her analysis of liberal feminism, as she argues that “…white women were treated as the legal property of men similar to enslaved black people…” and that voting for a woman on the left “…amounts to putting our money where our mouth is.”77 But the comparisons between white women as excluded from political participation—but human, and Black people as chattel slavery in the construction of the United States are so significant that there is virtually no structural benefit to Black people when white women make political gains.78 This has been proven time and again throughout U.S. history, from suffrage, when white women achieved the vote in 1920 and Black women would have to wait until the 1960s, to the present day, when the majority of white women vote for

Republicans consistently (even before the election of Donald Trump).79

We might juxtapose Cooper’s argument here with the work of the Combahee

River Collective in their groundbreaking manifesto of 1977. The Combahee River

Collective insisted that Black women, structurally, must be at the center of any interventions to dismantle U.S. empire and create a new world. It was not good enough,

77 Cooper, para. 18 78 For an analysis of the differences between white and Black women under slavery, see Jennifer L. Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery, (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004); Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household, (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2008). 79 See Vron Ware, Beyond the Pale: White Women, Racism, and History, (New York: Verso Books, 1992); Angela Y. Davis, Women, Race & Class, (New York: Random House, 1983); Jennifer L. Merolla, “White Female Voters in the 2016 Election,” Journal of Race, Ethnicity and Politics 3, no. 1, (2018): 52-54, https://doi.org/10.1017/rep.2018.5; Jane Junn, “The Trump Majority: White Womanhood and the Making of Female Voters in the U.S.,” Politics, Groups, and Identities 5, no. 2 (2017): 343-352.

101 in their understanding, to engage in strategies with white women at the center, because white supremacy is articulated through white women, and white women benefit from white supremacy. Having a white woman at the helm of the U.S. empire might shift certain aspects of how the empire conducts its business, but it will not accomplish the goal of decolonization just by virtue of the symbolism of a woman at its helm. To the contrary, the Combahee River Collective understood that Black women are structurally positioned in such a way that “if Black women were free, everyone would be free.”80

Radically placing Black women at the center of an analysis about the 2017 election would mean taking stock of how Black women would fare with Hillary Clinton in the presidency. And Cooper does this work through parts of her article, but in the final instance de-centers Black women—and indeed her own lived experiences—in favor of coalition politics that center white womanhood:

“For instance, when in 1994, Hillary Clinton referred to black teenagers as ‘super- predators,’ I was 13 years old. When her husband marshaled through the crime bill later that year, I stood watch as two generations of men in my family did significant jail time, in part because of that legislation.

But I support Hillary Clinton because I think she is the best, most qualified candidate for the job.”81

In considering Black feminist epistemology, and its approach to Black women’s knowledge production, the lingering question is why Cooper de-centers her own lived experiences in favor of centering Clinton’s womanhood as consequential, not just for

American politics, but for Black people living within the U.S. empire? If Cooper were to center her own experiences of “two generations of men” being sentenced to excessive jail

80 Combahee River Collective, “Statement,” 270. 81 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para 5-6.

102 time under the Bill Clinton crime bill legacy, then she might draw our attention to the deep relationship between incarceration of Black people within the United States, and

U.S. military violence abroad.

Indeed, it is this connection of state violence, state containment, and state exploitation between Black people within the United States and Black and Brown people outside of the U.S. that constitutes the truly radical Black feminist critique of the Hillary

Rodham Clinton presidency. Perhaps the most profound shift in popular Black feminist critique has been a consistent failure on the part of so many well-known Black feminist writers to connect our structured suffering within the United States to the structured imperialist and capitalist policies that drive U.S. empire abroad. It is with this shift that we can trace the silencing of radical Black feminism, as it becomes more palatable to cast

Black feminist radicalism as Black feminist reformism.

The challenge is that reformism, the more “acceptable” intervention to Black disenfranchisement in the United States, has not yet yielded the types of structural transformation that would qualify as building freedom for Black people within the United

States. At least in the case of Black feminists invested in drawing coalitions with white liberal feminists, Black feminists become conscripted in the service of improving the political possibilities of white women under U.S. empire, but do not benefit from that labor themselves. In other words, the labor of Black feminists fighting for U.S. political reform belongs to white liberal feminists who need them to rally, vote, perform organizing tasks, write, and speak, but that same labor does not yield more belonging in the United States for Black women. Even as Cooper acknowledges white women’s complicity in the construction of Black death under U.S. empire, it does not lead her to a

103 more critical stance in thinking through the effects of a Hillary Clinton presidency. This is coalition politics at its worst, because it relies on the faulty assumption that what helps white women can, in some way, also help Black people—or at least, help Black women by virtue of our gendered connections. But radical Black feminists have, for decades now, decried the failures of feminist coalitions which often fall apart exactly at the boundary of whiteness and white womanhood. As Audre Lorde relates: “Some problems we share as women, some we do not. You fear your children will grow up to join the patriarchy and testify against you, we fear our children will be dragged from a car and shot down in the street, and you will turn your backs upon the reasons they are dying.”82 It is this historically situated difference in structural positionalities that Cooper ignores in making her case for Black women to vote for Hillary Clinton.

For radical Black feminists, the self-determination of Black women—and especially poor and lesbian/queer Black women—is both the purpose and the method of their interventions into the present day.83 This fact makes Cooper’s articulation of a

Hillary Clinton presidency a reasonable action for radical Black feminist positionality untenable. There is nothing radical in Cooper’s acquiescence to liberal white feminism.

Cooper fails to center Black women—and indeed, even herself—in thinking through a

Clinton presidency. Cooper acknowledges that policies Clinton supported in relation to mass incarceration have personally affected her own family, in ways that are still lasting:

“For instance, when in 1994, Hillary Clinton referred to black teenagers as ‘super- predators,’ I was 13 years old. When her husband marshaled through the crime

82 Audre Lorde, “Age, Race, Class, and Sex,” Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984), 119. 83 Pat Parker, “Revolution,”; Combahee River Collective, “Statement,”; Assata Shakur, Assata; Angela Y. Davis, Freedom Is a Constant Struggle, (Chicago, IL: Haymarket Books), 2016.

104 bill later that year, I stood watch as two generations of men in my family did significant jail time, in part because of that legislation.”84

According to the tenets of Black feminist epistemology, as laid out by Patricia Hill

Collins, “As critical social theory, U.S. Black feminist thought reflects the interests and standpoint of its creators.”85 She goes on to state that “Black feminist thought’s core themes…rely on paradigms that emphasize the importance of intersecting oppressions in shaping the U.S. matrix of domination.”86 From Collins’ definition, then, a Black feminist epistemology applied to the candidacy of Hillary Rodham Clinton would center the experiences that Cooper recalls, precisely because it at this intersection of white supremacy, sexism, and the state that Black women’s structural positionality becomes most illuminating. A radical Black feminist standpoint would not only center Cooper’s own experiences in the question of Clinton’s candidacy, but would also center those experiences within the context of U.S. imperialist capitalism as a structure that benefits white people economically, socially and politically both within and outside of the United

States.

It is this critically important move to center the needs and lives of Black women that Cooper fails to engage in this article, in addition to not centering anti-capitalist and anti-imperialist politics in her analysis. Rather, she invests in analyzing what she believes will be made possible through placing a white woman in the presidency. Is it tenable to call ourselves “radical” Black feminists while we advocate voting for a candidate we know will hurt women of color around the world through the empire’s military machine,

84 Cooper, “Hillary Clinton,” para. 5. 85 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 251. 86 Collins, 251.

105 as well as Black communities at home through continued imprisonment? The radical position is to insist on divestment.

Cooper could have written an article in favor of voting for Hillary Clinton, laying out her justifications as a strategic political choice, without the extra work of (re)defining

“radical” Black feminism. She could have talked about the strategy of voting for Clinton under the threat of white supremacist violence that Black people would face under a

Trump presidency. However, the language of radicalism, especially in the present day in popular Black feminism, is at a premium. This reflects the disruptive nature of Black women’s agency in the context of white supremacist capitalist heteropatriarchy. In this sense, Black women speaking up for themselves is indeed disruptive, troublesome, and unmanageable. But is it radical?

It is important for the health of Black liberation struggles that there be space— particularly discursive space—for radical voices to come to the forefront in the most pressing debates of the day. Radicalism, including Black feminist radicalism, has a concrete material history connected to anti-imperialism and anti-capitalism. Radical

Black feminists, as scholars who have worked in recent years to recuperate their narratives and life-work remind us, have generally paid a heavy price for their refusal to legitimate the United States as a possible place of belonging for Black women and Black people more broadly. This refusal does not make these radical Black feminists less strategic, but rather, gives us all an opportunity to be clear about what we are fighting for, and who, and what the stakes of this fight truly are. In order to move through this difficult moment in U.S. history, we must not lose access to our most important, most imaginative,

106 most potentially transformative political genealogies by redefining radicalism as reformism. We must keep the radical Black feminist imagination alive.

107 [CHAPTER 3] Tenure and/or Death: Black Feminist Labor in the U.S. Academy

Introduction

Luckily for me, academia eats poison. It’s addicted to critique, including the critique of its own existence. ~Alexis Pauline Gumbs

Black feminist thought owes much to Black feminists who made, and continue to make, the choice to work within the context—and the confines—of the academy. Indeed,

Black feminist scholars working within the expectations of publication and teaching in postsecondary education have produced everything from Barbara Christian’s Black

Feminist Criticism, to Hortense Spillers’ groundbreaking set of essays on race, gender and psychoanalysis, up to the exciting present-day work of scholars like Katherine

McKittrick, and Terrion L. Williamson.1 These important contributions to Black feminist thought and so many other fields are certainly more visible as intellectual traditions under the organizing institutionalization of the academy. These scholars receive PhDs, then book contracts, and, ideally, tenure—and then the opportunity to produce whatever work suits their fancy thereafter. With book contracts and conference presentations—the latter of which is generally funded by university work for full-time, tenured and tenure-track employees—these scholars enjoy the circulation of their work in places and contexts that

1 Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, (New York: Teachers College Press, 1985); Hortense Spillers, Black, White and In Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture, (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2003); Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006); Terrion L. Wiliamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017).

108 otherwise may not exist. This circulation often results in increased networks and communities that are also building outside the context of the academy.2

The possibility of academic space for Black feminist scholars seems ripe at this moment. As evidenced by a 2016 session at the National Women’s Studies Association

(NWSA), entitled: "Women of Color Caucus Sponsored Session: Exploring Black

Feminist Activism in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter," Black feminist scholars have made a palpable impression, and obvious space, in the academy.3 The session was a rare and amazing chance to understand the cumulative effects of Black feminist scholars in the academy, because organizer and Black feminist scholar Karsonya Wise Whitehead

(Loyola University) used the time to honor four Black feminist scholars: Paula Giddings

(Smith College), Beverly Guy-Sheftall (Spelman College), Cheryl Wall (Rutgers

University), and Barbara Ransby (University of Illinois—Chicago).

Whitehead arranged for younger generations of women of color feminists to present tributes to each of these individual scholars, testifying to the impact of Black feminist labor in their personal, professional, and intellectual lives. The session was so packed that attendees, predominantly Black women and women of color, sat on the floor, stood in the back, and even hovered at the door outside.4 As each scholar was honored, the room erupted into applause, tears, and shouts of appreciation. Each scholar was also given the opportunity to respond to the tributes, and each one affirmed that she felt she

2 For example, scholar Barbara Ransby organized a large contingent of senior Black and women of color feminist scholars to visit Palestine, in order to better understand the possible activist and political affiliations between Black liberation in the United States and the liberation struggle in Palestine. This trip continues to yield fresh and exciting activist and intellectual work among scholars such as Ransby, Angela Davis, Chandra Mohanty and others. 3 I moderated and attended this panel in November 2016. The descriptions of the event are my own observations. 4 Even Angela Davis and Gina Dent found spots in the back of the room on the floor!

109 had made an important choice to work in the academy as a scholar, as evidenced by the outpouring of love and appreciation at the session.

"Women of Color Caucus Sponsored Session: Exploring Black Feminist Activism in the Age of #BlackLivesMatter" honorees and presenters. Top left, Karsonya Wise Whitehead, Kia Hall, Janelle Hobson, Illeana Jiménez, Stephanie Troutman, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Bottom Left, Cheryl Wall, Paula Giddings, Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Barbara Ransby. Photo courtesy of the author.

This scene is made possible, literally, by the labor of Black feminists in the academy. Without the circulation provided by the academy, both the reach of these women’s work and their individual commitments to mentoring and teaching may not have been possible. The result is that much of their work has become widely accessible to generations of students, including generations of Black feminists. It is a testament to the perseverance of Black feminist scholars that the room at this NWSA session was packed with predominantly Black and women of color attendees, in Montreal, Canada.5

5 While NWSA has made significant changes in the past decade that have allowed for a more visionary enactment of anti-oppressive politics, the organization itself faced the same challenges in the past that predominantly white universities in the U.S. face in relation to racism. For a more

110 Yet, among the women pictured above are a variety of stories of both the possibilities and the hazards of working in the academy. Three of the presenters do not work in the academy by choice—two are private school teachers and one is an independent scholar. All of these women have stories of difficulty and/or trauma incurred in the university context, of the challenges of arriving at a place where their stories were not represented, and having to prove that those very stories were in fact of value in the context of the university. What has made a picture like this possible is a persistent action and belief, despite the barriers, that Black feminist scholars have the right and the responsibility to produce the work they believe is most important.

Black feminist academics have a complicated relationship with the U.S. university. On one hand, academia provides a unique space where we can engage work that addresses some of the questions and social ills that affect us and our loved ones with fewer barriers than other places. Many Black feminist academics treasure the opportunity to write, research and teach, because these pursuits matter deeply to the production and reproduction of Black feminist knowledge. Black people have historically been excluded from the resources provided in the hallowed halls of knowledge production, and for this reason, having the privilege of working at an academic institution can often feel like progress in the broad picture of societal achievement.

On the other hand, some Black feminists experience the academy as a space of restriction, fear, and even death.6 Black feminists pay a particularly heavy price for access to these specific resources of knowledge production. This contradiction is

complete history, see the 2017 NWSA Annual Conference Book, p. 35 https://www.nwsa.org/Files/Website/NWSA_2017_Program_Book_WEB.pdf 6 Lois Benjamin (ed.), Black Women in the Academy: Promises and Perils, (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 1997).

111 beautifully summed up by Black feminist scholar Ann duCille in her important essay,

“Feminism, Black and Blue:”

Some years ago, I wrote [in “The Occult of True Black Womanhood” (1994)] of what I called the crisis of black female intellectuals: the hyper-visibility, super- isolation, emotional quarantine, and psychic violence of our precarious positions in academia. I noted that black feminist scholars had played a pivotal role in bringing the work of generations of African American women from the depths of obscurity into the ranks of the academy, but I also suggested that we had paid a heavy price for this labor—in exhaustion, depression, loneliness, and a higher incidence of cancer and other killing diseases.7

Written in 2011, duCille noted that there had been little change in the circumstances she described in the 1990s. While the stories are many, the deaths of June Jordan, Audre

Lorde, and many other Black feminists resonate throughout the academy.8 In other words, the academy is a place that, among other things, has supported Black women working themselves to death.

Some Black feminists are afraid to write and produce the scholarship they feel most attached or accountable to producing, because of the political implications of their work. As bell hooks relates:

“Work by women of color and marginalized groups of white women (for example, lesbians, sex radicals), especially if written in a manner that renders it accessible to a broad reading public, even if that work enables and promotes feminist practice, is often de-legitimized in academic settings.”9

It is impossible to account for the number of brilliant, beautiful ideas that have met their death at the point of a Black woman deciding that she cannot afford, economically or

7 Ann duCille, “Feminism, Black and Blue,” in Susan Gubar (ed.), True Confessions: Feminist Professors Tell Stories Out of School, (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 150. 8 Grace Kyungwon Hong. "“The Future of Our Worlds”: Black Feminism and the Politics of Knowledge in the University under Globalization." Meridians: Feminism, Race, Transnationalism 8, no. 2 (2008): 95-115. 9 bell hooks, "Theory as Liberatory Practice," Yale Journal of Law & Feminism 4, no. 1, (1991): 4, http://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/yjlf/vol4/iss1/2.

112 politically, to write, research, or publish a particular piece of work because it would not count towards tenure or promotion, or would stand as a mark against those same processes. In addition to receiving tenure less often than their other counterparts, despite meeting or exceeding the expectations of tenure, Black women in the academy suffer significant health challenges.10

Whether it is the death of our ideas, or the literal death of our bodies, the academy is a space fully imbricated in the life-snatching realities of late capitalism. And while many Black women have created spaces of possibility within the confines of the academy, it would do us well to take note of the effects of this space on Black feminist knowledge production. How has the academy affected Black feminists and their knowledge production? Another way to ask this question is: what is the difference between “Black feminist labor” (labor that is guided by the values and goals of the Black feminist tradition), and “Black feminist’s labor” (labor enacted by those who identify as

Black feminists) in the context of the U.S. academy, and what do these distinctions tell us about what is possible for radical Black feminist knowledge production within the confines of the U.S. academy?

In this chapter, I will first provide a brief genealogy of radical Black feminist work in the context of the academy, in order to trace some of the resources that radical

Black feminists have left within the academy. Next, I will engage with some of the work

10 See Norma L. Burgess, “Tenure and Promotion Among African American Women in the Academy,” in Benjamin (ed.), Black Women in the Academy, 227–234; Carolyn J. Thompson, and Eric L. Dey. "Pushed to the Margins: Sources of Stress for African American College and University Faculty," The Journal of Higher Education 69, no. 3 (1998): 324-45, doi:10.2307/2649191.

113 of radical queer Black feminist Alexis Pauline Gumbs, who has launched a sustained critique—in writing and praxis—of the violence of the university on Black feminist scholars, in order to think through possible routes of fugitivity for radical Black feminist thinkers. Finally, I will distinguish between “Black feminist labor” as a type of radical labor engaged by Black feminists toward the goal of Black liberation, and “Black feminist’s labor,” which is labor captured by the university and redirected toward institutional ends.

Genealogies of Black Feminism in the Academy: Gathering, Naming, and Home Truths

The intellectual history of Black feminisms exceeds the space of academic institutions both chronologically and in practice—and this fact cannot be emphasized enough as we examine how Black feminist thought evolves as an academically recognized category.11 It is, perhaps, misunderstandings about how much Black feminist thought exceeds the academy that has made academic Black feminism—Black feminist thought that has come to fruition within the confines of academic knowledge production—a useful scapegoat for some mainstream and popular Black feminist thinkers seeking to define their own praxes of Black feminisms.12 Black feminist thought within the academy has also at times carried a label of being inaccessible or irrelevant, even though a cursory review of any college-level syllabus for Black feminist thought is filled with the works of authors like Audre Lorde, Joan Morgan, bell hooks, and other Black

11 Beverly Guy-Sheftall, Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought, (New York: The New Press, 1995), Introduction. 12 See Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, (New York: Simon and Schuster Paperbacks, 1999). I will examine Morgan’s narratives about academic Black feminism in Chapter 4.

114 feminist thinkers for whom accessibility and relevance are central values.13 In order to understand better how inclusion within the academy affects how Black feminist knowledge is produced, we should first examine how Black feminism came to be in the academy.

Recognizing that there were so many Black women scholars who attended to issues of race, class and gender through scholarly works that precede my timeline, I am choosing to focus on the emergence of Black feminism as a specifically named critical intervention within academic institutions during the post-civil rights era. This timeframe first recognizes the emergence of “Black feminist thought” as a specific school of thought which Black women scholars located within the academy named as such. The scholars I include in this tradition were—and continue to be—explicit that Black feminism was/is the critical lens they use to analyze texts. Marking the history of Black feminisms in this way is important precisely because it is only with the emergence of a thing called “Black feminist thought” in the academy that questions of reputation, legitimacy, authenticity and accessibility begin to dominate discourse around Black feminist scholars.

Similarly, I am attempting to trace the emergence of Black feminist intellectuals as they are produced by the university context. I follow the logic of Nick Mitchell in

“(Critical Ethnic Studies) Intellectual,” whereby:

“…attending to the intellectual as a specific social formation offers us an occasion to reﬂect on the less-acknowledged political trajectories that make possible the work that we do… Once it becomes apparent that ethnic studies intellectuals have class interests as intellectuals that can and do diverge from the peoples for whom

13 The term “intersectionality” has come under fire as being “too academic.” See David Smith, “Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on Transgender Row: ‘I Have Nothing to Apologise For,” The Guardian, June 21, 2017, https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/mar/21/chimamanda-ngozi- adichie-nothing-to-apologise-for-transgender-women; Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett and Holly Baxter, “In Defence of Caitlin Moran and Populist Feminism,” New Statesman, October 22, 2012, https://www.newstatesman.com/lifestyle/2012/10/defence-caitlin-moran-and-populist-feminism

115 they might want justice, the intellectual becomes a touchy subject, the domain of a knowledge that we may not want to know.”14

While Mitchell situates this discussion of the intellectual within a conversation of the currently emergent field of Critical Ethnic Studies, Mitchell’s broader work on Black

Studies, Women’s Studies, and other politically-engaged area studies illustrates a larger process by which the university, as an institution of crisis management, grapples with intellectuals whose subject areas threaten crises. Mitchell argues:

“Black studies offers an instructive example for ethnic studies more broadly because the pressures that have borne on the former’s postsegregation-era institutionalization meant that the intellectual, interpellated at once as a representative of the university and a representative of organized resistance to it, could not not emerge as a paradoxical figure. Through this paradoxical positioning, the intellectual was situated at the heart of a division internal to the institutional project of Black studies in which the latter has functioned both to bring the university to crisis and to supply the university with an instrument of crisis management. So even as it remains necessary and important to acknowledge and to honor the centrality of student activism in creating the language and the organizational capacities that made Black and ethnic studies possible, to narrate the origins of these fields in left activism alone is to risk confusing family romance for history.”15

Mitchell goes on to argue that while the student activism of the 1960s certainly impacted the university structure through the creation of Black Studies and Women’s Studies programs, reducing our understanding of the genesis of these programs to a purely activist moment misses the emergence of a intellectual labor class with complicated politics.16 As Mitchell asks in an interview with Zack Swartz-Weinstein, “…rather than making pronouncements about the social world at the level of abstraction…how do we

14 Nick Mitchell, “(Critical Ethnic Studies) Intellectual, Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (2015): 87. 15 Mitchell, “Intellectual,” 88. 16 Mitchell, 88.

116 make sense of the actual practitioner?”17 It is in this spirit, then, that I wish to trace specific practitioners of Black feminist thought in the university context at the moment that “Black feminist thought” and “Black Women’s Studies” became recognizable formations with university sanction in the 1970s to the early 1980s.

We can see the emergence of Black feminist thought in the academy as a story of legibility and resources, but also a story about multiplicities and consolidations. In the late 1960s, Black writers, playwrights, and poets began to make inroads into college-level teaching, library, and administrative jobs on the heels of both the Black Arts Movement and the civil rights movement.18 As Robert L. Harris, Jr. relates: “The civil rights revolution, the Black power drive, and the Black consciousness movement initiated a third stage of Africana studies.”19 Similarly, Sylvia Wynter, in her critical essay on the emergence and co-optation of Black studies, suggests that: “The emergence of the Black

Studies Movement in its original thrust…was inseparable from the parallel emergence of the Black Aesthetic and Black Arts Movements and the central reinforcing relationship that had come to exist between them.”20 True to this analysis, many of the earliest Black feminist professors were prolific creative writers and practitioners who also taught as adjuncts in order to make ends meet. Audre Lorde, Barbara Smith, June Jordan, Toni

17 Nick Mitchell and Zach Schwartz-Weinstein, “The Fantasy and Fate of Ethnic Studies in an Age of Uprising: An Interview with Nick Mitchell,” Undercommoning [podcast and transcript], para. 14, http://undercommoning.org/nick-mitchell-interview/. 18 See Robert L. Harris, Jr., “The Intellectual and Institutional Development of Africana Studies,” in The Black Studies Reader, eds. Jacqueline Bobo, Cynthia Hudley, and, Claudine Michel, (London: Routledge, 2004), 15-20; Sylvia Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Re-Imprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, or Désêrte: Black Studies Toward the Human Project,” in Not Only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, (Boulder, CO: Paradigm Publishers, 2006). 19 Harris, “Development of Africana Studies,” 17. 20 Wynter, “On How We Mistook the Map,”108.

117 Cade Bambara, Cheryl Clarke and many others fought for the creation of women’s studies and/or Black studies departments by leveraging their work as administrators and professors in colleges.

For many of these foundational Black feminist thinkers, the university setting was a place of resources, and not necessarily a goal in and of itself. As Nick Mitchell relates:

“By the mid to late 60s the adjunct was still, not uniformly, but generally, kind of an honorific term. It was a term that acknowledged someone who had a form of expertise that the university desired, but who was employed elsewhere – who had a kind of full time employment elsewhere. But the university was acknowledging their specialization within a field, and therefore wanted to employ them and to use that expertise to benefit the student population, generally speaking. But the category of the adjunct becomes productive differently, in the context of trying to staff these emerging black studies, and, by the end of the 60s, women’s studies programs, where, by the turn of the seventies, there’s a full-fledged form of casualization that is being articulated through the adjuncts when university administrators realize it’s useful, particularly to be able to en masse hire people to be in these programs.”21

In other words, the labor formation of “adjunct” within the university context has its emergence at the same moment that Black feminist intellectuals, among others, are making their way into universities as recognized “experts.” While these Black feminist thinkers used the academy as part of a constellation of spaces from which they could gather necessary resources to sustain their life-work, whether that work be community organizing, writing, or other creative pursuits, their movement into the academy opened up space for “Black feminist intellectuals” to be a recognizable resource for universities.22

21 Mitchell, “The Fantasy and Fate,” para. 18. 22 June Jordan established the Poetry for the People Program. See Lauren Muller and The Blueprint Collective, June Jordan’s Poetry for the People: A Revolutionary Blueprint, (New York: Routledge, 1995); Toni Cade Bambara taught in community based arts programs in Philadelphia. See Abby Goodnough, “Toni Cade Bambara, a Writer and a Documentary Maker, 56” New York Times, December 11, 1995, https://www.nytimes.com/1995/12/11/nyregion/toni- cade-bambara-a-writer-and-documentary-maker-56.html;

118 While predominantly white institutions did not necessarily grant departmental status to the Black and Women’s Studies programs emerging in this moment, there was a process by which universities gave resources and legitimacy to these programs as a site for knowledge production about marginalized peoples. As Harris relates, “The third stage of Africana studies, from about the mid-1960s to the mid-1980s, was a period of legitimization and institutionalization.”23 In a similar way, according to James, Foster, and Guy-Sheftall, “During the 1970s Phase I of the evolution of Women’s Studies in the academy focused on the establishment of the field as a separate discipline. The 1980s ushered in Phase II, which could be considered the coming-of-age of the Women’s

Studies movement as programs and eventually departments became acknowledged and even respected units within more colleges and universities.”24 Black feminist intellectuals, of course, were engaged with both Women’s Studies and Black Studies programs as possible homes for their work, but had critiques of each.

This appearance of Black feminist writers in the university is important to note, precisely because Black feminisms were not contained to, or even necessarily associated with, the university as the primary place of knowledge production in the 1970s. This is especially evident as one of the most influential pieces of Black feminist writing, The

Black Woman: An Anthology, was published by Toni Cade Bambara in 1970.25 This collection of writings about and by Black women, still often assigned today as a core

Black feminist text, preceded the appearance of Black women’s studies and Black

23 Harris, “Development of Africana Studies,”18. 24 Stanlie M. James, Frances Smith Foster, and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, “Introduction” in Still Brave: The Evolution of Black Women’s Studies, (New York: The Feminist Press, 2009, xi. 25 Toni Cade Bambara (ed.), The Black Woman: An Anthology, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970).

119 feminism as university-sanctioned fields of study. Bambara created the anthology in community with other Black women poets, writers, community activists and journalists as a response to the “expertise” being offered by white male researchers about Black women, including the Moynihan Report. For Bambara, the project grew out of an

“impatience” with everyone except Black women writing and creating knowledge about what was best for Black women.26 Throughout the Preface of the anthology, Bambara indicates that she was especially concerned because these knowledge producers were creating misunderstandings and silences around Black women's experiences. Anticipating the title of the first Black women’s studies book that would be published over a decade later, Bambara noted that neither Black men nor white women were creating knowledge that spoke to the lived experiences of Black women.27 Bambara's response, then, was to create an anthology that she believed would begin a conversation about what Black women themselves knew about their hopes for liberation, their experiences of oppression, and their lived experiences day-to-day. The Black Woman serves as a critical starting point to think about how Black feminists were creating their work through the use of anthologies as a collective and collaborative form of Black feminist knowledge production.

The “front matter” of a book is a curious formation, but here I wish to think through introductions and prefaces as some first sites of genealogical inquiry. The

“Preface” to Bambara’s edited collection, as well as the “Introduction” to the 2005 reprint version written by Eleanor W. Traylor give us important clues about the construction of

26 Toni Cade Bambara, “Preface,” The Black Woman, 4. 27 This is of course All the Women Are White, All the Men Are Black, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies.

120 the anthology as an early form of radical Black feminist knowledge creation that exceeded (indeed, perhaps avoided!) the formal academy, and that constructed radical

Black feminist thought in terms much more flexible, multiple, and grassroots than we might today recognize. Bambara states:

“This then is a beginning—a collection of poems, stories, essays, formal, informal, reminiscent, that seems best to reflect the preoccupations of the contemporary Black woman in this country. Some items were written especially for the collections. Some were discovered tucked away in notebooks. Many of the contributors are professional writers. Some have never before put pen to paper with publication in mind. Some are mothers. Others are students. Some are both. All are alive, are Black, are women. And that, I should think, is credentials enough to address themselves to issues that seem to be relevant to the sisterhood.”28

From the beginning of Bambara’s construction of the anthology, she projects “the Black woman” as a multiplicity of identities and possibilities. Within this multiplicity, Bambara asserts that Black feminists can create tools for liberation from scratch, through the practice of “turning to each other.”29 She goes on to indicate that “Black women have been forming work-study groups, discussion clubs, cooperative nurseries, cooperative businesses, consumer education groups, women’s workshops on the campuses, women’s caucuses within existing organizations, Afro-American women’s magazines.”30 These different formations of knowledge production span economic, political, social and community well-being, and indicate a vibrant practice of radical Black feminist knowledge production in the late 1960s that has not always made its way into present day genealogies of Black feminist thought. This, perhaps, is because the emphasis for

28 Bambara, “Preface,” 6-7. 29 Bambara, 4. 30 Bambara, 4. In addition to the specific groups she lists here, Bambara goes on to indicate the transnational engagement of U.S. Black women with liberation struggles in Vietnam, Guatemala, Algeria, and Ghana, as well as the engagement U.S. Black women have with internationally with Black women in Europe.

121 Bambara, and for the formations she references, is on the praxis of Black feminism as a knowledge production enterprise undertaken in heterogeneous contexts toward a common goal that might not be readily identified as “Black feminist issues” in the context of today’s academic conscription of “Black feminist thought.” Barbara Smith relates a similar sentiment in the preface to the Rutgers university press edition of Homegirls— which I will take up later—when she states, “Some of the things I think of today as Black feminist issues are universal access to quality health care; universal accessibility for people with disabiites, quality public education for all; a humane and nonpunitive system of support for poor women and children, i.e., genuine welfare reform; job training and placement in real jobs that have a future; decent, affordable housing; and the eradication of violence of all kinds, including police brutality.”31

For Bambara, the work of heterogeneous community is central to knowledge production, and the act of writing what we have learned is in some ways secondary—a

“reporting out” to those beyond the community of what a group has forged in their praxis together. Eleanor W. Traylor names this practice “gathering.”32 Recognizing it as a practice that Toni Cade Bambara utilized across her community work and across written genres, Traylor argues that “Toni Cade Bambara leaves a legacy of gathering congregations of the unlikely...”33 We should take note that the congregation of the unlikely Traylor refers to here are first Black women in all of their multiplicities, then

31 Barbara Smith, “Preface to the Rutgers University Press Edition,” Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000). See also Terrion L. Wiliamson, Scandalize My Name: Black Feminist Practice and the Making of Black Social Life, (New York: Fordham University Press, 2017). 32 Eleanor W. Traylor, “Introduction,” in Toni Cade Bambara (ed.) The Black Woman: An Anthology, (New York: Washington Square Press, 1970), xv. 33 Traylor, xvi.

122 Black communities more broadly, then women of color and Third World liberation movements. In other words, Bambara’s construction of “The Black Woman” is in the first instance multiple, rather than essentialist:

“Who is the Black Woman

She is a college graduate. A drop-out. A student. A wife. A divorcee. A mother. A lover. A child of the ghetto. A product of the bourgeoisie. A professional writer. A person who never dreamed of publication. A solitary individual. A member of the Movement. A gentle humanist. A violent revolutionary. She is angry and tender, loving and hating. She is all these things—and more. And she is represented in a collection that for the first time truly lets her bare her soul and speak her mind.”34

What allows Bambara to understand Black women in this multiplicity is, in part, the practice of gathering necessary for bringing this anthology into being. Bambara was attentive to the gatherings of Black women and communities in the pursuit of knowledge production, and she was equally attentive to gathering those stories in a single place in order to replicate (however imperfectly) the chorus of voices, issues, problems and solutions wishing to be spoken as valid knowledge—Black feminist knowledge.

The Black Woman Anthology can be understood as one of the first formal collections of radical Black feminist knowledge production, and in this way, we can trouble genealogies and timelines that place the genesis of Black feminist thought within the U.S. academy itself. Rather, Bambara’s work stands as testament that Black feminist knowledge production begins at gathering multiplicities across gender, sexuality and class, suggesting that Black liberation itself is always already a manifold undertaking.

Indeed, Bambara asserts:

“We are involved in a struggle for liberation: liberation from the exploitative and dehumanizing system of racism, from the manipulative control of a corporate

34 Toni Cade Bambara as quoted in Traylor, “Introduction,” xviii.

123 society; liberation from the constrictive norms of “mainstream” culture, from the synthetic myths that encourage us to fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation).35

Bambara’s final exhortation not to “fashion ourselves rashly from without (reaction) rather than from within (creation)” then becomes an invitation to Black feminist self- creation not as an undifferentiated whole or as an individualistic pursuit, but rather as a dialectic, vibrant, and abundant formation of possibilities within community.

Finally, it is significant to note—as does Traylor—that The Black Woman

Anthology was published in good company (indeed, in deep community) with other literary, memoir, and poetry works that have come to mark important points in contemporary U.S. Black feminist thought. These include poetry by Audre Lorde (Cables to Rage), Gwendolyn Brooks (Riot, Family Pictures), Sonia Sanchez (We a Baddddd

People), and Mari Evans (I Am a Black Woman); literature by Toni Morrison and Alice

Walker (The Bluest Eye and The Third Life of Grange Copeland); and Maya Angelou’s first memoir (I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings). Angela Davis’ If They Come in the

Morning would be published the following year, in 1971. This bounty of publications would mark a Black feminist abundance in written word throughout the 70s, which would include more works by the above authors as well as works by Octavia Butler, Gayl Jones,

June Jordan, Ntozake Shange, and many, many others. These works would constitute the literary platform upon which Black feminist criticism would build in the context of the

U.S. academy.

Since many of the Black feminists making their way into the academy in the early to mid 70s were independent writers, poets and playwrights, and given the bounty of

35 Bambara, “Preface,” 1.

124 publications just listed, U.S. Black feminist thought in the academy developed its literary applications early on. As Black feminist writers taught in the university, the first wave of

Black feminist doctoral students also graduated and began to produce their own work for the academy. The earliest of these, Barbara Christian’s Black Women Novelists, was published in 1980 by Greenwood Press.36 Author bell hooks’ Ain’t I A Woman, written for when hooks was an undergraduate student, was published by Pluto Press, an independent British press.37 That early Black feminist writers utilized small independent presses for their work is critical because it foregrounds important questions about accessibility, circulation, legitimacy and creative control that are differently configured under academic publishing in the present day. Publication—and the expectations that university presses bring to scholars in the current academic landscape—is at its core a question of knowledge production and circulation. The central question these early Black feminist writers force us to ask is: Who has control over how, for whom, and why we write, publish and circulate our scholarship?

It is at this point that we must also note the importance of Barbara Smith’s

Kitchen Table Press, which was an independent press created by Smith and her sister to publish the written works of women of color feminists, at a time when those writings were not published with the frequency or prominence that they deserved.38 Kitchen Table

Press, which was founded in 1980, published both This Bridge Called My Back, as well as Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, in addition to dozens of other books and

36 Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1980). 37 bell hooks, Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom, (New York, Routledge, 1994), 52. 38Barbara Smith, “A Press of Our Own Kitchen Table: Women of Color Press,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women’s Studies, Women and Words 10, no. 3, (1989): 11-13.

125 pamphlets written by feminists of color. The press was a lone oasis for radical women of color writers in a bleak landscape of publishers—academic and literary—that did not see the value of women of color writings. And yet, the press existed as an alternative institution for knowledge production that rivaled academic forms of publication for those early feminist writers of color who found themselves straddling the university and their community activist work. It is an important part of our consideration of the history of

Black feminism within the academy precisely because it emerges as an alternative, self- determined and fugitive process of knowledge production alongside of Black feminists’ more formal foray into the academy. It is important for us to track the wide variety of ways that Black feminist knowledge production was occurring within the context of community accountability and self-determination, in order to also understand how these values changed as Black feminists began to use the structures of the university for their work.39

Early Black feminist scholars in literature endeavored to create theoretical and literary frameworks that could better account for the works of Black women novelists, and that could better grasp the metaphorical and symbolic meanings of Black women in the U.S. landscape. Profoundly unsatisfied with the manner of analysis that white men scholars were using to explain Black women’s work—or conversely, the complete ignorance of their work—Black women literary scholars created an entire body of work we now know as Black feminist criticism. Central to this cluster of academic Black feminists is the work of Barbara Christian, Barbara Smith, Cheryl Wall, Hortense

39 Smith, “A Press of Our Own,” 11-13.

126 Spillers, and bell hooks.40 Many of these authors published their first works during the decade between 1980-1990, constituting a veritable explosion of Black feminist literary work that spanned institutions and methods. This critical work, read alongside the essays, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction of writers such as Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Cheryl

Clarke, Toni Cade Bambara and others gives us a sense of Black feminist literature as a

“field” with discrete objects, debates and contributions legible to the U.S. academy.41

While the first cluster of academic books to be published in Black feminist thought in the academy were primarily related to Black women's literature and literary theory, work of Black women in history was also blossoming during this time, though its explosion would happen later in the 1980s through the 1990s. Scholars such as Darlene

Clark Hine, Paula Giddings, Deborah Gray White, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Angela

Davis, many others were some of the first scholars to examine a wide variety of Black women’s histories with the goal of correcting what they understood as racial and gender biases on the part of white and Black male scholars.42 These women sought to correct

40 Barbara Christian, Black Women Novelists: The Development of a Tradition, 1892-1976, (Westport, CT.: Greenwood Press, 1980); Cheryl A. Wall, Changing Our Own Words: Essays On Criticism, Theory, and Writing by Black Women, (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 1989); Barbara Smith, Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New York: Kitchen Table Press, 1983); Hortense J. Spillers, "Moving on Down the Line," American Quarterly no. 1 (1988): 83-109; Hortense J. Spillers, "Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book," Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 65-81; bell hooks, Ain't I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism, (Boston: South End Press, 1981); bell hooks, Feminist Theory from Margin to Center, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1984). 41 Audre Lorde, A Burst of Light: Essays, (Ithaca, N.Y.: Firebrand Books, 1988); Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (Trumansburg, NY: Crossing Press, 1984); Audre Lorde, Zami: A New Spelling of My Name, (Trumansburg, N.Y.: Crossing Press, 1982); Audre Lorde, The Cancer Journals, 2nd ed. (San Francisco: Aunt Lute Books, 1980); Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters. (New York: Random House, 1980); Toni Morrison, Beloved: A Novel, (1st Vintage International ed. New York: Vintage International, 2004); June Jordan, Naming Our Destiny: New and Selected Poems, (New York, N.Y.: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1989); June Jordan, Living Room: New Poems, (New York: Thunder's Mouth Press, 1985). 42 Darlene Clark Hine, Black Women in White: Racial Conflict and Cooperation In the Nursing Profession, 1890-1950, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989); Paula Giddings, When

127 certain misunderstandings or silences in the historical record with a specific eye toward the experiences and history of Black women.43 Their work ranged from examination of enslaved women in the U.S., to the contributions of Black club women through the

1930s, Black women's activism in voting, and biographical treatments of long-neglected

Black women activists and thinkers.

This first collection of Black feminist scholars was uniquely positioned both within and outside of the academy because they served as a kind of vanguard. Their collective and intentional foray into the academy as a site for gathering resources

(economic, political and social) was not subject to all of the same rules and expectations that present-day Black feminist scholars are subject to, precisely because these scholars were not always inside of the academy. Their work was not necessarily conscripted by being career academics, but rather, they were teachers, activists, and writers who also taught in university contexts. Barbara Christian and Audre Lorde fought to create Black studies departments at UC-Berkeley and John Jay College of Criminal Justice, respectively.44 Barbara Smith, as discussed earlier, created the Kitchen Table Press while working as an activist and as a professor at various universities.45 This collection of early

and Where I Enter: The Impact of Black Women On Race and Sex In America, (New York: Bantam Books, 1985); Deborah Gray White, Ar'n't I a Woman?: Female Slaves In the Plantation South, (New York: Norton, 1987); Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Righteous Discontent: The Women's Movement In the Black Baptist Church, 1880-1920, (Cambridge, MA.: Harvard University Press, 1993); Davis, Angela Y. Women, Race & Class, (New York: Vintage Books, 1983). 43 Deborah G. White, Telling Histories: Black Women Historians in the Ivory Tower, (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2008). 44 Patricia McBroom, “Barbara Christian, UC Berkeley Professor and Pioneer of Contemporary American Literary Feminism, Dies at Age 56,” Berkeley Campus News, June 27, 2000, https://www.berkeley.edu/news/media/releases/2000/06/27_christian.html; No Author, “Biography,” Women and Gender Studies Department, Hunter College, http://www.hunter.cuny.edu/wgs/women-and-gender-studies-staff; 45 Smith, “A Press of Our Own.”

128 Black feminist thinkers in the academy had a different clarity about their accountability, goals, and what constituted “the work,” but the important point is that their example is part of the broader Black feminist genealogy in the academy. We can draw on that genealogy’s commitment to self-determination, community accountability, and writing for liberation at any moment.

The 1980s was also a significant moment in the history of Black feminism within the academy because of the publication of All the Men Are Blacks, All the Women Are

White, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, edited by Gloria T. Hull,

Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith.46 Published in 1982 by the Feminist Press at

CUNY, this groundbreaking work was the first attempt by Black feminist academics to make a case for “Black women’s studies” as an explicit and legible field of study for formally trained scholars in the social sciences and the humanities. The book, which is an edited collection of foundational theoretical works, bibliographies, research guides, and syllabi, spans multiple disciplines and draws from scholarly works published both within and outside of the university. The book is an important turning point for thinking through the formalization of Black feminism in the academy, precisely because the book makes a case for Black women’s studies as a legitimate field of study in the academy. The book does important work in collecting writings by Black women that demonstrate a clear object of study and approach to intersectional research.

What is perhaps most stunning about the collection is its interdisciplinary depth.

The works in this volume range from literature, to social sciences, health, critical theory,

46 Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith, All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women’s Studies, (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982).

129 Black studies, history, and gender studies, and beyond. The bibliographies that Some of

Us Are Brave cover include articles and books on Black women and education, economics, history, literature, relationships and health. Additionally, the text includes foundational writings by Michele Wallace, the Combahee River Collective, and Barbara

Smith as central organizing texts in Black women's studies.

What Some of Us Are Brave made legible to the academy were specific sets of questions, methods, and logics guiding the work that Black women had produced on themselves for the past century. The book also identified the urgent need for Black women to be in control of the knowledge produced about them in the context of the academy, and argued that creating a field such as Black Women's Studies: "means taking the stance that Black women exist--and exist positively--a stance that is in direct opposition to most of what passes for culture and thought on the North American continent."47 For the editors of this book, considered a founding text for Black feminist thought in the academy, "Black women's studies" as a field had a necessary politics, emerging from the structural and discursive invisibility that Black women suffer under

Western hegemony.

The "process of naming" is the central praxis of Black women's studies according to Hull and Smith. What is more, Black women's studies as a field, even within the academy, has a politics that should consider:

“...(1) the general political situation of Afro-American women and the bearing this has had upon the implementation of Black women's studies; (2) the relationship of Black women's studies to Black feminist politics and the Black feminist movement; (3) the necessity for Black women's studies to be feminist, radical, and analytical; and (4) the need for teachers of Black women's studies to

47 Hull, Scott, and Smith, “Introduction,” xvii.

130 be aware of our problematic positions in the academy and of the potentially antagonistic conditions under which we must work."48

It is clear that the editors of this collection made an explicit connection between radical politics and Black women's intellectual work within the academy. Even in 1982, Black feminist thinkers had already created a framework for Black feminist scholars' engagement with the academy, prefiguring the very real problematics that being committed to the work of Black liberation would create for those situated within institutions that had been (and still are) antagonistic to the existence of Black women.

From the beginning, Black women's studies was conceived as a political project by those Black feminist thinkers who first collected the resources to make the field visible to the academy. This fact has profound implications for our present day practices which I will take up later in this chapter, but for now it is sufficient to note that "activist research" is sometimes a pejorative term used to describe Black women scholars who chose to work in the Black feminist tradition and/or work on Black women as their central subjects of study with a social justice lens.49 For the editors of Some of Us Are

Brave, this framing was anticipated, expected, and would stand as the sign that the political considerations of Black women's studies was actually accomplishing its goals of naming Black women's experiences in a way that addresses the power differentials between dominant society and marginalized peoples.50 Put more simply, the editors of

Some of Us Are Brave might ask Black feminist scholars today to take the accusation of

48 Hull, Scott, and Smith, xvii. 49 See Francesca M. Cancian, “Conflicts between Activist Research and Academic Success: Participatory Research and Alternative Strategies." The American Sociologist 24, no. 1 (1993): 92-106. 50 Hull, Smith, and Scott, “Introduction,” xvii: “politics is used here in its widest sense to mean any situation/relationship of differential power between groups or individuals.”

131 “activist research” as a sign that our work is actually doing "the work" of Black liberation.

The final anthology I wish to examine here is Barbara Smith’s Home Girls: A

Black Feminist Anthology.51 Previously published as the fifth issue of the lesbian literary magazine Conditions, the 1979 anthology was entitled “The Black Women’s Issue.”52

Later, in 1983, Barbara Smith re-published the anthology as Home Girls under Kitchen

Table: Woman of Color Press. In 2000, the anthology was republished under Rutgers

University Press, with a new Preface from Smith. This final version provides a unique opportunity to examine how Smith framed the original Home Girls, as well as her reflections two decades later after Black feminism was well-established in the academy.

In the Introduction to the 1983 version of Home Girls, Smith writes of Black feminism:

Whatever issues we have committed ourselves to, we have approached them with a comprehensiveness and pragmatism which exemplify the concept ‘grassroots.’ If nothing else, Black feminism deals in home truths, both in analysis and in action. Far from being irrelevant or peripheral to Black people, the issues we have focused on touch the basic core of our community’s survival.”53

Smith’s framework for Black feminist writing in Home Girls reveals a profound community accountability that is focused on the “core of our community’s survival.”

This articulation of “home truths,” what I interpret to be a set of community accountable

51 Barbara Smith ed., Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1983, reprint 2000). 52 Julie R. Enszer, “‘Fighting to Create and Maintain Our Own Black Women’s Culture:’ Conditions Magazine, 1977–1990," American Periodicals: A Journal of History & Criticism 25, no. 2 (2015): 160-176. 53 Barbara Smith, “Introduction,” to Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology ed. Barbara Smith, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000 reprint), xxxvii.

132 priorities that are evident in our everyday lives, can recalibrate how Black feminist scholars engage our work—if we allow it to do so.

The framework of home truths is a resource from a precious Black feminist foremother whose experiences moving between community, activism, and the academy as a Black lesbian provided her with a critical optic about writing and accountability.

Smith’s framework of home truths grounds Black feminist knowledge production in the structural and daily lived experiences of Black communities. We can use this resource as one way to center Black feminist work in the academy around the needs, pains, and challenges of our communities.

For Smith, her first teachers were Black women from home:

“I learned about Black feminism from the women in my family—not just their strengths, but from their failings, from witnessing daily how they were humiliated and crushed because they had made the ‘mistake’ of being born Black and female in a white man’s country.”54

Here, Smith situates Black feminism as a sensibility of survival that contains triumph, failure, and accounts for the structural conditions that “humilat[e] and crus[h]” Black women and their families. Smith does not suggest that the way Black feminists survive these circumstances is to assimilate into the “white man’s country,” however. Rather, she argues that “…Black feminism provides the theory that clarifies the nature of Black women’s experience, makes possible positive support from other Black women, and encourages political action that will change the very system that has put us down.”55 Like the other radical Black feminists I have outlined in this project, Smith demonstrates a

54 Smith, “Introduction,” xxiv. 55 Smith, xxxvii.

133 particular commitment to dismantling the systemic conditions that devalue difference and devalue Black life.

The picture of “home truths” that Smith paints is one that holds the contradiction of pain and possibility, stating that she “inherited fear and shame from them [her family], as well as hope…It is this conflict…that makes my commitment real.”56 Smith’s radical commitment to Black feminist practice makes space for both how she experiences and observes the devaluation of Black life, as well as her belief in the potential for something entirely different. Sitting with the discomfort of this contradiction—the conflict between possibility and reality—is what drives Smith’s commitment to making a difference in the lives of those similarly situated.

Smith’s work as a Black feminist organizer and intellectual is an important example for Black feminist scholars today, and she is one of a few Black feminists of her generation that are still with us. In this way, she provides us with the benefit of present day reflections on the movement and intellectual tradition they have built. Smith does exactly this in the Preface to the Rutgers University Press version, where she reflects on

Black feminism since the 1980s:

“…the primary question I want to examine is how effective have Black women been in establishing Black feminism. The answer depends on where one looks. Black feminism has probably been most successful in its impact on the academy, in its opening a space for courses, research and publications about Black women.”57

Smith reaffirms what is evident when we look at academic aspects of the Black feminist tradition presently: Black feminist scholars have been hard at work building a body of

56 Smith, xxxvii. 57 Barbara Smith, “Preface to the Rutgers University Press Edition,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xiii.

134 knowledge in the academy. This work has come at great cost, but it is also a tradition to be proud of given the serious barriers Black women have and continue to face in academia.

Still, this is not the entire story that Smith wishes to reflect on, nearly twenty years ago:

“When we search for Black feminism outside the academy and ask how successful have we been in building a visble Black feminist movement, the answer is not as clear…Twenty years ago I would have expected there to be at least a handful of nationally visible Black feminist organizations and institutions by now. The cutbacks, right-wing repression, and virulent racism of this period have been devastating for the growth of our movement, but we must also look at our own practice. What if more of us had decided to build multi-issued grass-roots organizations in our own communiteis that dealth with Black women’s basic survival issues and at the same time did not backaway from raising issues of sexual politics?58

In Smith’s understanding of radical Black feminist practice, grassroots organizing is central, and indeed perhaps more important, than the intellectual work Black scholars engage in the academy. Smith’s disappointment is palpable, but written at the turn of the century, we can evaluate whether we have made significant progress in Black feminist grassroots organizing as Black feminist scholars currently. For Smith, the intellectual work of Black feminism was always connected to, and in many ways came from, her primary work as a community organizer. Radical Black feminism, with Smith as part of that genealogy, calls Black feminist scholars to evaluate not only the purpose of our scholarship, but also the ways we do and do not engage with grassroots organizing.

Juxtaposed with the expectations of tenure and promotion, Smith’s questions about Black feminist practice and grassroots organizing provide an opportunity to ask a hard but necessary question: How have expectations of tenure and promotion changed the

58 Smith, “Preface,” xiii, xv.

135 radical, grassroots potential of Black feminist knowledge production? This question, and a broad lived and intellectual critique of the academy, has been a core theme of the work of Alexis Pauline Gumbs. Gumbs, who graduated with a Ph.D from Duke University and turned down tenure-track job offers in order to pursue grassroots, community accountable work as a writer and independent scholar, has been consistently vocal in her criticism of the academy as a site for Black feminist knowledge production.59 In the next section, I will engage Gumbs’ work as a practiced, sustained critique of the costs of Black feminist labor in the academy, and use this critique as a basis for a framework that can help Black feminists in the academy evaluate their labors according to community accountability.

Radical Black Feminist Accountability: Alexis Pauline Gumbs and the Lived Critique of the Academy

To begin answering the question of accountability in relation to radical Black feminist labor in the academy, we must first begin with a definition of the academy.

While this may seem self-evident—the academy is a place of higher learning for postsecondary education and cutting edge research—the goals, motivations, and driving forces of the academy do not exist outside of the society it is embedded within. Many scholars have launched cogent critiques on how the academy has been affected by capitalism, and more specifically, by neoliberalism as a specific iteration of capitalism.60

59 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “The Shape of My Impact,” The Feminist Wire, October 29, 2012, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/10/the-shape-of-my-impact/. 60 Chandra Talpade Mohanty, "Transnational Feminist Crossings: On Neoliberalism and Radical Critique," Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 38, no. 4 (Summer 2013): 967-999; Brenda R. Weber. "Teaching Popular Culture through Gender Studies: Feminist Pedagogy in a Postfeminist and Neoliberal Academy?" Feminist Teacher 20, no. 2 (2010): 124-138; Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study, (London: Minor Compositions, 2013); Sara Ahmed, On Being Included: Racism and Diversity in Institutional Life, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2012).

136 While I generally agree with the diagnoses that these academics have made of the neoliberal university, given my specific interest in the effects of the academy on radical

Black feminist thought, I want to turn to radical Black feminist definitions of the university in order to more fully understand how it has shifted Black feminist knowledge production.

Alexis Pauline Gumbs, a self-described “queer Black feminist troublemaker” and

“Black feminist love evangelist,” recounts her relationship with Black feminist knowledge production in a post for The Feminist Wire in 2012.61 “The Shape of My

Impact” was part of a series The Feminist Wire produced in the fall of 2012, entitled “The

Black (Academic) Women’s Health Forum,” organized by Aimee Meredith Cox, Aishah

Shahidah Simmons, and Tamura A. Lomax.62 The series featured 26 posts by Black feminist intellectuals, some who were in the academy, some who had left the academy.

Gumbs, in her article “Shape of My Impact,” recalled her experiences in the archives of

Audre Lorde, June Jordan, and Barbara Christian, all Black feminist intellectuals who not only died working in the academy, but who were also denied necessary time off by those institutions in order to heal.63 Gumbs, in reckoning with these archives as a doctoral student at Duke, asks herself a series of questions:

“Should I take a tenure track job anywhere in the world among any manner of quiet or loud racists just to have the security of a health care plan that will become more useful every year because of the stress and ideological violence I suffer on the job? Does it honor my ancestors for me to uproot myself from the communities that have nurtured me that are my realest sources of sustenance and

61 Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Bio,” AlexisPauline.com, n.d., http://www.alexispauline.com/brillianceremastered/bio/. 62 Aimee Meredith Cox, Aishah Shahida Simmons, and Tamura A. Lomax, “Take Care: Notes on the Black (Academic) Women’s Health Forum,” The Feminist Wire, November 12, 2012, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2012/11/take-care-notes-on-the-black-academic-womens-health- forum/. All of the pieces from the forum are linked at the bottom of this post. 63 Gumbs, “Shape of My Impact,” para. 8-10.

137 that I must also sustain with my presence and my love? Did Audre Lorde and June Jordan teach in prisons, coffee shops, living rooms and subways so that I could pretend that the university has all the real classrooms and everything else must be a side hustle?”64

Gumbs’ questions echo the account from duCille at the beginning of this chapter, of the tremendous cost paid by Black feminist scholars working within the academy. For

Gumbs, the costs are literally a matter of life and death, and the accountability that she chooses is to the Black feminist ancestors who paid that high price: “The shape of Audre

Lorde’s impact includes her achievements, her words, her losses and everything she went through that we should not repeat as if we did not know.”65 For Gumbs, radical Black feminist intellectualism exceeds the space of the academy because, similar to Barbara

Smith’s understanding of home truths, radical Black feminists create classrooms wherever their communities reside. It is in this context, then, and Gumbs’ choice to be an independent scholar, that her frameworks for accountability and radical Black feminist scholarship in relation to the academy are useful for this investigation into Black feminist labor in the academy.

Gumbs defines the academy in one way as:

“…a particular kind of economy in which knowledge is a product for sale within a self-reproducing hierarchy of ideas inside a corporation where particular offerings of accountability to particularly situated communities (say departments, undergraduate students, academic publishers) are counted and rewarded as loyalty.”66

64 Gumbs, “Impact,” para. 14. 65 Gumbs, para. 17. 66Alexis Pauline Gumbs, “Extra,” AlexisPauline.com, n.d., para. 2. http://www.alexispauline.com/brillianceremastered/blog/ . This blog is under the heading “Extra” and compose Gumbs’ comments for the Panel on “Extra-academic work” in the Duke University English Department Graduate Students Professional Development Series.

138 Gumbs’ definition does a number of things for this exploration of Black feminist labor in the academy. First, her definition avoids idealizing the academy as primarily a space of higher learning or personal development. Instead, she centers the workings of capitalism at the heart of the academic project. Specifically, Gumbs understands the knowledge produced within the framework of the academy as “a product for sale.” Hence, Black feminists in the academy are engaged in a process of creating a marketable product, constituted of their own knowledge, about their specific experiences of marginalization in

U.S. society.

Second, Gumbs reminds her readers that the context within which Black feminists are producing these products is not a blank slate, but rather “a self-reproducing hierarchy of ideas inside a corporation.”67 The academy is here understood as a place that reproduces the same ideas that allowed it come to fruition in the first place. Some of these ideas, based on the history of the academy, include those that inform U.S. systems of power including white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. But they also include ideas such as positivism, rationalism, and objectivism. Using Gumbs’ definition, it becomes easier to frame universities’ intractability in creating effective responses to

Black feminist activism around inclusion and anti-oppression. If universities are in the business (literally) of reproducing themselves in the context of white supremacy, patriarchy, and heteronormativity, among other things, then they cannot survive by failing to reproduce the conditions that make them difficult places for Black feminists.

Gumbs indicates that these self-reproducing ideas are found inside a corporation.

Her definition highlights the motivation of university knowledge production—namely,

67 Gumbs, “Extra,” para. 2.

139 profit. What is important here are the conditions of possibility that the university allows within the context of its commitments to profit. Black feminist knowledge produced within the context of the academy is produced within a corporation—meaning that these products are expected to follow corporate rules, are expected to be profitable, and are expected to reproduce the conditions of possibility that buttress the university in the first place. Given most universities’ non-profit status, university-as-corporation might seem like a contradiction. But there are many ways for a university to be profitable. Patents, research grants, and corporate-educational partnerships are all forms of profit for a university, as is the social capital gained from professors that make public appearances as experts. All of these investments raise the profile and reputation of a university, which in turn increases chances that students will attend—and pay hefty tuitions in order to do so.

In the context of Black feminist knowledge production, Black feminists are expected to produce marketable knowledge that will be profitable to the university either by raising the university’s profile, securing research grants, or through other means.

At the heart of Gumbs’ definition of the academy is a determination about who scholars are ultimately accountable to, and what they are accountable for. According to

Gumbs, all scholars in the academy, Black feminist scholars included, are accountable to smaller units of the academy-as-corporation: “departments, students, and publishing companies.”68 We are all also accountable to reproduce the predetermined “hierarchy of ideas” as they have come to be practiced within the academy-as-corporation model.69

This accountability is ultimately measured, Gumbs argues, as “loyalty,” in a similar way

68 Gumbs, “Extra,” para. 2 69 Gumbs, para. 2.

140 that any employee of a corporation is considered loyal for furthering the brand or aim of a company.

As such, Gumbs’ definition allows us to center questions of “for whom?” as we consider Black feminist labor within the academic context. If Black feminist labor is performed with accountability to specific “situated communities” within the academy, then Black feminists’ academic products are ultimately accountable to these communities as well. If the broader context of these smaller communities is the academy-as- corporation, there are significant conflicts of interest for radical Black feminists who choose the academy as their primary way of producing Black feminist knowledge.

Indeed, in order to make progress within the academy-as-corporation, Black feminists must be about the literal business of promoting the university and its “self-reproducing hierarchy of ideas” as a sign of their own loyalty to the university’s predetermined communities of accountability.70 There is little overlap between these predetermined communities of accountability and the Black communities of accountability that Black feminist scholars believe they are—and fight to be—accountable to.

Yet, for Black feminist scholars employed by universities, especially those in tenure-track positions who are seeking the level of job security that tenure offers them, a failure to demonstrate loyalty to the university can very well translate into a failure to earn tenure. Radical Black feminist scholars are therefore placed in the precarious position of proving loyalty to universities above their loyalty to Black communities of accountability in order to secure their employment. In response to this constrained space of trying to earn tenure in the academy while maintaining a sense of extra-academic

70 Gumbs, para. 2.

141 accountability and accountability to self, Black feminists have developed wide-ranging strategies and narratives to cope. Some Black feminists rely on the narratives of progress, hard work, and uplift to justify the death-dealing level of labor required to meet tenure requirements, and they perform that work to the end of their ability (and sometimes to the end of their mental and physical wellbeing). Some Black feminists expand the places they labor to ensure that if they don’t meet tenure, they have a landing spot. And some Black feminists leave the academy altogether in order to pursue their work on their own terms.

Gumbs made that third choice, justifying it this way:

The university was not created to save my life. The university is not about the preservation of a bright brown body. The university will use me alive and use me dead. The university does not intend to love me. The university does not know how to love me. The university in fact, does not love me. But the universe does.71

For Gumbs, the choice to leave the university manifested in her work as an independent, community-accountable scholar. It has meant that she makes ends meet primarily through running workshops, speaking fees, consulting with graduate students who want to be community accountable, and relying on her communities of accountability to donate time, resources and money to support her independent work.72 Most recently, this model of independent, fugitive Black feminist knowledge production resulted in a two-year residency at the University of Minnesota, as the Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts.73

While Gumbs uses the resources of the university in this capacity, unlike a tenure-track job, she has wide discretion in how she spends her time and the university’s resources as a resident artist.

71 Gumbs, “Shape of My Impact,” para. 12. 72 See AlexisPauline.com. 73 See “Winton Chair in the Liberal Arts,” https://cla.umn.edu/research-creative-work/faculty- research-creative-work/winton-chair-liberal-arts.

142 Gumbs’ flight from the formal strictures of the academy has yielded a fascinating set of research as well. In addition to being able to write the poetry and articles that are most interesting to her, Gumbs recently published two books which demonstrate a new method she is developing to delve into Black feminist knowledge production. Spill:

Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity and M Archive: After the End of the World are difficult to describe, but are both part poetry, part non-fiction, part theoretical, and all

Black feminist in their construction. What is perhaps most curious about these books is that Gumbs chose to publish them through Duke University Press, an academic press.

Their appeal and accessibility, however, reach far beyond the university audience.

In each book Gumbs engages with the work of one theorist. Spill takes up the extensive work of Black feminist psychoanalyst Hortense Spillers, while M Archive examines the formidable work of Caribbean Black feminist M. Jacqui Alexander. A third book, tentatively called Dub, will take up the paradigm shifting work of theorist Sylvia

Wynter. In each of these books, the only citations throughout the books come from the work of the author that Gumbs is engaged with.

It is difficult to say whether these books would be possible under the usual conditions of academic knowledge production. What is certain is that Gumbs did not have to manage the expectations of a department, students, or faculty colleagues as she went about conceiving and proposing these books. She was also able to write them on her own timeline, rather than producing them according to an expectation of tenure. Finally,

Gumbs has discussed the process of writing these books as “…my daily practice of allowing myself to go where that work takes me, in a way that I am fugitive from having

143 to explain the work of black feminists or seeking to use it in a project that colonizes it.”74

It is from this marginal figure of independent Black feminist scholar, then, that I offer reflections on Black feminist labors and Black feminists’ labor in the next section.

For What and for Whom? Black Feminist(s’) Labor(s) in the Neoliberal Academy

The genealogy I have laid out in this chapter speaks to a level of community accountability that makes profound transformation possible. All of the Black feminist scholars outlined in this chapter engage in labor on behalf of their communities, and all of them had or have relationships with academic labor. How, then do we differentiate between “Black feminist labors” as a site of transgressive possibility, and “Black feminists’ labor” that has been captured as an operation of neoliberalism as the reigning logic of the university?

As Gumbs related, academic institutions are not able to value Black feminist scholars, and therefore are unable to love Black feminist scholars. Yet, much Black feminist intervention into the landscape of the academy are indeed labors of love. In my construction, Black feminist labors are labors that brings forth a better world and potential transformation for Black communities. Black feminist labors can also be understood as labors of love, or love-labors. In the picture that began this chapter, the generation of scholars that committed to the production of Black feminist thought within the academy did so as radical acts of self-love, and acts of love to generations of Black feminists coming after them, as well as acts of love toward those Black women whose

74 Zaina Alsous, “Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ Groundbreaking Poetic Trilogy Engaging with Black Feminist Scholars Continues in M Archive: After the End of the World,” Indy Week, March 28, 2018, https://www.indyweek.com/indyweek/alexis-pauline-gumbss-groundbreaking-poetic- trilogy-engaging-with-black-feminist-scholars-continues-in-m-archive-after-the-end-of-the- world/Content?oid=12767366.

144 work they highlighted, documented, uncovered, and engaged. Each of the scholars in that picture are guided by their communities of accountability outside the university, as well as by a vision of Black feminist labors—labor that could result in a transformed world.

Black feminist labors, however, are different from Black feminists’ labor, which I define as labor that Black feminist scholars engage within the context of the academy. All

Black feminists are engaged in labor in the context of the university, whether it is their own intellectual work, or the work they do on behalf of university committees, class preparation, administrative work, and the many other types of labor that support the ongoing functions of the university space. The distinction between Black feminist labors

(labor in the service of Black liberation) and Black feminists’ labor is the accountability of that labor and potential for liberation.

Black feminist scholars in the academy are deeply engaged in the process of creation—sometimes literally producing something out of nothing. Apart from only just recently having the access to resources in order to build fields relevant to Black feminist thought, Black feminist scholars in the academy continue to fight for the space and the legitimacy of Black women’s intellectual history, studies of Black women’s social problems and activism, Black women’s history, Black women’s health, and Black feminism as a critical lens. In a context where Black women are not considered valuable or credible sources of knowledge, the Combahee River Collective’s insistence that freedom for Black women would mean freedom for all people remains the rallying cry at the center of Black feminist love-labors.

It is critical to examine how much Black women stand to lose while engaging

Black feminist labors and/or Black feminists’ labor, inside the context of the university.

145 Love is not a university value, but love is necessary for all oppressed groups to survive in a world that deems them worthless. Love is also central to Black feminist labors, or labor in the service of Black liberation. And while the academy has its own hierarchy of ideas that its actors expect Black feminist scholars to reproduce, Black feminist scholars themselves have an accountability that is certainly outside, and sometimes hostile to, knowledge reproduction within the academy. Black feminist labors lose their radical potential when they are captured by the university in order to bring Black feminists’ productivity in line with the hierarchy of ideas that academia espouses.

Capturing the labor of Black feminist scholars for the purpose of aligning that effort with university values provides the university with the productivity, creativity, and vision of Black women, while preserving the values of the university. This capture happens primarily through the redirection of Black feminist intellectual and political work toward the goals of tenure and promotion. When Black feminist scholars are fearful about their job security, health insurance benefits, and their scholarly reputations, the university has succeeded in creating conditions of precarity that redirect how Black feminists operate in the academy.

How does this affect Black feminists, then? We would be amiss in thinking that

Black feminist scholars are able to transcend these dynamics, or that we are not marked by these dynamics as we move through the university. Indeed, just as the university relies on reputation in order to compete in the capitalist market, so too must Black feminist scholars reliant on the university find ways to manage their own reputations. Black feminist scholars, the very scholars that might have a transformative effect on the university, are required to reproduce the competitive and unhealthy environment that

146 makes the university successful if they themselves wish to “get ahead.” For those Black feminist scholars who choose to organize their own actions around the life-giving practices of care, accountability, nurturing and community building, this love-labor may count against them in the context of the academy.

Still, as the genealogy in this chapter shows, Black feminist scholarship is a scholarship dedicated to loving Black women. What does it mean, therefore, to be a

Black feminist scholar in the academy who is ultimately accountable to loving Black women? It means as Black feminist scholars we must decide if we can continue within the confines of an academy that challenges the core of our accountability to loving Black women. This struggle between doing what we might feel in our hearts or believe in our souls to be the reason why we are in the academy, and the expectations that the academy places on us to stay is not an abstract struggle. This struggle shifts both what we choose to produce and how we become—or do not become—legible to the academy. Not being legible to the academy, and failing to agree to the academy’s structures of accountability, can exact a severe price from Black feminist scholars, ranging from losing jobs or not

“earning” tenure, to any number of internal struggles, depression, anxiety, physical ailments, and finally, death.

If the conversations that Black feminist scholars are having about their work, practice, and being in the university begin with conversations about tenure-track jobs, earning tenure, and being promoted, we have shifted the grounds of accountability to the very place that is often making us sick. Asking ourselves as Black feminist scholars about whether we want to go into, and continue in, the academy is reflective of Toni Cade

Bambara’s question in The Salt Eaters: “Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be

147 well?…Just so’s you’re sure, sweetheart, and ready to be healed, cause wholeness is no trifling matter. A lot of weight when you’re well.”75 Instead of asking what we need to do to gain a tenure-track job, earn tenure, or be promoted, a radical Black feminist approach to the university begins with asking ourselves, and our loved ones, “do you want to be well?”

75 Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters. (New York: Random House, 1980), p. 1, 3.

148

[CHAPTER 4] Matters of Style and Self: The Hip-Hop Feminist Turn

Joan Morgan burst onto the scene in 1989 as a journalist for the Village Voice, with an article about the Central Park jogger case, in which five Black and Latino youth were accused and later wrongfully convicted of the assault and rape of Trisha Meili, a white woman.1 This introduction to the public sphere of feminist public debate was an intense one, and set the stage for a long relationship with controversy and argument in relation to questions of race and gender in Black communities. Morgan relates the story of this article in her book, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop

Feminist Breaks it Down, as the manner in which she earned her “cojones” as a writer and a thought leader.2 While Morgan may have guessed that the ideas in her book would court some controversy—as work on gender and race often does—she may not have been prepared for the impact that her essays would have on articulations of Black feminism at the turn of the century. Morgan’s collection of essays coined a branch of Black feminist thought—hip hop feminism—that is a major part of the genealogy of U.S. Black feminism.

In this chapter, I will closely read selections from the first four essays in

Morgan’s Chickenheads in order to illuminate how her construction of hip-hop feminism was indicative of cultural and structural shifts in middle-class Black consciousness at the turn of the century. These shifts were, at the time, articulated as a sign of a generational

1 Joan Morgan, “We Live in a Pro-Rape Culture,” Village Voice, May 9, 1989. 2 Joan Morgan, When Chickenheads Come Home to Roost: A Hip-Hop Feminist Breaks It Down, (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1999), 45.

149 shift in U.S. Black feminist thought by academic Black feminists, based largely on

Morgan’s work.3 However, I am interested in dissecting Morgan’s essays for the purpose of tracing a deradicalization of Black feminist politics that was posited as progress based on the cultural and aesthetic rebelliousness of hip hop. Specifically, I will examine key deradicalizing narratives in Morgan’s work, including the rearticulation of systemic gender and racial oppression as problems of personal responsibility; the construction of a heteronormative Black feminism that evacuates the queer roots of radical Black feminism in favor of centering patriarchy; and a generational demonization of academic Black feminist work that misrecognizes the radical and grassroots origins of Black feminist work.

Hip-hop feminism has been a source of significant conversation and debate in academic U.S. Black feminism, and has built a significant body of work over the past two decades. Additionally, Joan Morgan’s work in Chickenheads was identified early on by academic Black feminists as an important work that articulated young Black women’s identity at the turn of the century, within the context of hip hop, the loss of certain civil rights era gains, and increasing police and drug-related violence in inner cities.4 Along with Lisa Jones’ Bulletproof Diva: Tales of Race, Sex and Hair, and Veronica Chamber’s

Mama’s Girl, Kimberly Springer identified Morgan’s work as “explicitly from or about young Black feminist perspectives in the 1990s.”5 Beverly Guy-Sheftall and Sheila

3 Kimberly Springer, "Third Wave Black Feminism?," Signs 27, no. 4 (2002): 1059-1082; Sheila Radford-Hill, "Keepin' It Real: A Generational Commentary on Kimberly Springer's 'Third Wave Black Feminism?,'" Signs 27, no. 4 (2002): 1083-1089; Beverly Guy-Sheftall, "Response from a 'Second Waver' to Kimberly Springer's 'Third Wave Black Feminism?'", Signs 27, no. 4 (2002): 1091-1094. 4 Kimberly Springer, "Third Wave Black Feminism?". 5 Kimberly Springer, "Third Wave Black Feminism?", 1060.

150 Radford Hill both provided responses to Springer’s 2002 article, in which they acknowledged generational differences between hip-hop generation Black feminists and their own.6 In a comprehensive article on the development and debates of hip-hop feminism, Whitney A. Peoples lays out the historical, generational, and political and economic stakes of hip hop a decade after it had first been coined by Morgan.7

While some of these articles take up some specific moments in Morgan’s

Chickenheads, my reading here goes much further than these articles in examining

Morgan’s discursive constructions of concepts such as “Black feminism,” “sexism,” and her understandings of what constitutes the crisis in Black feminism that prompted her to write this book. My critical reading here is intended as a way to understand the conjuncture of hip-hop, popular Black feminism, and aspirations of middle-class Black uplift that prime a public conversation for the emergence of popular neoliberal Black feminism a decade later. Hence, I am examining Morgan’s assertions closely and taking her at her word as she describes her world. I take Morgan’s intervention seriously, as should all scholars of Black feminist genealogies. Hip-hop feminism remains a significant branch of Black feminist thought into the present day, carried forward by scholars such as Brittney Cooper, Susana M. Morris, and Aisha Durham, among others, who use hip-hop feminism as an organizing framework for both the method of their engagements and the core values of their inquiries.8 Hence, Morgan’s work deserves

6 Sheila Radford-Hill, "Keepin' It Real.”; Guy-Sheftall, "Response from a 'Second Waver.’” 7 Whitney A. Peoples, “‘Under Construction’: Identifying Foundations of Hip-Hop Feminism and Exploring Bridges between Black Second-Wave and Hip-Hop Feminisms," Meridians 8, no. 1 (2008): 19-52. 8 Aisha Durham, Brittney C. Cooper, and Susana M. Morris, "The Stage Hip-Hop Feminism Built: A New Directions Essay." Signs 38, no. 3 (2013): 721-737.

151 careful examination as we look at the genealogy of popular neoliberal Black feminism and the emergence of Beyoncé feminism, as I will examine in the next chapter.

In the first four essays of Chickenheads, Joan Morgan lays out the ground she hopes to cover in the book more broadly. The introduction, “Dress Up” relays her childhood memories of Ntozake Shange’s for colored girls, and her own mother’s challenges raising a child in the late 1970s in the South Bronx. The second essay, “The F-

Word,” examines Morgan’s initial experiences with feminism in college, and relates the story of when she earned her “cojones” as a writer. The third essay in the book, “Hip Hop

Feminist,” portrays Morgan’s frustrations with feminism in the context of a post-Civil

Rights, postfeminist, and postsoul society, and grapples with the failures she believes an inaccessible feminism has created for young Black women. Finally, “From Fly-Girls to

Bitches and Ho’s” examines her relationship to hip-hop as both a fan and a feminist.

Because each of these essays contain elements of the three issues I wish to highlight in this chapter, I will move between the essays in my analysis.

The Political is (a) Personal (Problem)

“I am down, however, for a feminism that demands we assume responsibility for our

lives.” ~Joan Morgan

Throughout the first four essays in Chickenheads, Morgan describes herself as a member of a “post” generation: “One that claimed the powerful richness and delicious complexities inherent in being black girls now—sistas of the post–Civil Rights, postfeminist, post soul, hip-hop generation.”9 This configuration for Morgan is a signal of the progress made by civil rights and women’s movement activists, making the generation

9 Morgan, Chickenheads, 57.

152 following this time:

“…the daughters of feminist privilege. The gains of the Feminist Movement (the efforts of black, white, Latin, Asian, and Native American women) had a tremendous impact on our lives—so much we often take it for granted. We walk through the world with a sense of entitlement that women of our mothers’ generation could not begin to fathom. Most of us can’t imagine our lives without access to birth control, legalized abortions, the right to vote, or many of the same educational and job opportunities available to men. Sexism may be a very real part of my life but so is the unwavering belief that there is no dream I can’t pursue and achieve simply because ‘I’m a woman.’”10

Here, Morgan casts her generation as one of privilege—a generation for whom struggle against overt forms of racism, sexism and class disenfranchisement was unfamiliar. In

Morgan’s description above, the civil rights and women’s movement activism of the

1970s yielded the results that its most strident activists worked for. In this way, Morgan frames herself not just as post-Civil Rights, post-feminist, and post soul” subject, but as a post struggle subject living in the possibilities of the 1990s

Yet, Morgan also indicates throughout the first four essays that the work is not finished for Black women looking for a measure of freedom in their lives. While Morgan doesn’t define in these essays what liberation or freedom looks like for her, she does indicate that everything is not well living Black in America. She alludes to a number of challenges facing Black communities at the turn of the century, including single-mother homes, the AIDS epidemic, domestic violence, drug addiction, and gun violence, among other issues.11 Morgan argues:

“We have come to a point in our history, however, when black-on-black love—a love that’s survived slavery, lynching, segregation, poverty, and racism—is in serious danger. The stats usher in this reality like taps before the death march: According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the number of black two-parent households has decreased from 74 percent to 48 percent since 1960. The leading cause of death

10 Morgan, 59. 11 Morgan, 23, 54, 70-71.

153 among black men ages fifteen to twenty-four is homicide. The majority of them will die at the hands of other black men.”12

For Morgan, however, these issues are less an issue of structural or systemic forms of power or violence, and more a question of individual and personal empowerment.

Following her first articulations of being a child of post struggle in “Dress Up,” Morgan states:

“But only when we’ve told the truth about ourselves—when we’ve faced the fact that we are often complicit in our oppression—will we be able to take full responsibility for our lives. The only way we’ll ever know what to do about 70 percent of our children being born to single mothers, the state of mutual disrespect that plagues our intimate relationships, the bitches and hos that live among us, or the chickenhead that lurks inside us all is to ‘keep it real’—without compromise.”13

In Morgan’s construction here, “taking responsibility” for Black lives means doing something about the single mother “problem,” as well as other “problem” figures that were circulating through the 1990s. Specifically, Morgan casts single motherhood as an issue of complicity with oppression, rather than as an effect of a larger set of structural issues such as unemployment and overpolicing in Black communities.

Morgan’s construction of racism and sexism as personal issues, as opposed to systemic, resonate throughout the first four essays in her book. In discussing the experiences of sexual violence that Black women face, and comparing them to the narratives of enslavement that Black communities must grapple with, Morgan suggests that previous generations of Black feminists are stuck in a victim mentality:

“Ironically, reaping the benefits of our foremothers’ struggle is precisely what makes their brand of feminism so hard to embrace. The “victim” (read women) “oppressor” (read men) model that seems to dominate so much of contemporary discourse (both black and white), denies the very essence of who we are.”14

12 Morgan, 70-71. 13 Morgan, 23. 14 Morgan, 59.

154 To Morgan, Black women have choices about how they frame the issues of sexism and racism, and those choices are articulated in a sense of personal empowerment: “My feminism simply refuses to give sexism or racism that much power. Holding on to that protective mantle of victimization requires a hypocrisy and self-censorship I’m no longer willing to give.”15

Within these various examples, we can see Morgan constructing a narrative of personal responsibility and empowerment that she views as the natural and necessary result of living in a post struggle world. While Morgan certainly acknowledges specific challenges that Black communities face at the turn of the century, her particular examples and the emphasis she places on empowerment indicate that the solution to these issues is individual effort on behalf of Black people who are in a position to be empowered.

Morgan argues: ““I honestly believe that the only way sistas can begin to experience empowerment on all levels—spiritual, emotional, financial, and political—is to understand who we are. We have to be willing to take an honest look at ourselves—and then tell the truth about it.”16

For Morgan, telling the truth includes acknowledging the manner in which Black women participate in forms of misogyny and sexism. Rather than being an analysis of complicity, however, Morgan frames these failures of empowerment as failures of self- esteem. In discussing Black feminist responses to a Sir-Mix-a-Lot rap video, Morgan opines:

“It might’ve been more convenient to direct our sistafied rage attention to ‘the sexist representation of women’ in those now infamous Sir Mix-A-Lot videos, to fuss over one sexist rapper, but wouldn’t it have been more productive to address the failing self-esteem of the 150 or so half-naked young women who were willing,

15 Morgan, 60. 16 Morgan, 23.

155 unpaid participants?”17 This is not the only time Morgan would call attention to the behavior of Black women in relation to rappers:

“Sad as it may be, it’s time to stop ignoring the fact that rappers meet ‘bitches’ and ‘hos’ daily—women who reaffirm their depiction of us on vinyl. Backstage, the road, and the ‘hood are populated with women who would do anything to be with a rapper sexually for an hour if not a night.”18

These frameworks profoundly fail to address the systemic economic, gendered, and racial structures that affect women working in the entertainment industry as video vixens and actresses. Morgan’s explanations here fall firmly in the space of “self-esteem.” For

Morgan, women making these choices are not driven by economic need or cultural expectations, but rather have failed to cultivate a sense of indivdiaul worth. What is more, in Morgan’s construction, the failure to cultivate this worth is not a result of the systemic forms of misogyny and racism that make Black women feel worthless. Rather, Morgan hides the systemic forces shaping Black women’s behavior behind a veneer of fan culture. Morgan’s construction here also shames Black women for their sexual choices.

In my reading of Morgan’s constructions of the problems facing Black communities in the late 1990s, I see her constructing a unique form of uplift politics that run counter to how hip-hop feminism has been articulated in the time since she wrote this book. In Morgan’s form of uplift, personal empowerment is the answer to what ails Black communities, because as beneficiaries of the post struggle era, self-actualization is the final goal to achieve. Morgan’s construction is profoundly individual, and relies on a consistent deemphasis on communal forms of empowerment and communal articulations of systemic oppression in order to forward her arguments for a post struggle Black

17 Morgan, 78. 18 Morgan, 77.

156 feminist sensibility.

This desire to “move beyond” the radical 1970s articulations of systemic oppression is well demonstrated when she states:

“Just once, I didn’t want to have to talk about ‘the brothers,’ ‘male domination,’ or ‘the patriarchy.’ I wanted a feminism that would allow me to explore who we are as women—not victims. One that claimed the powerful richness and delicious complexities inherent in being black girls now—sistas of the post–Civil Rights, post-feminist, post soul, hip-hop generation.”19

For Morgan, systemic explanations of patriarchy are outmoded and boring. She wishes for a feminism that does remind her of what it means to be in a structural position of oppression, but rather that articulates empowerment as her own self-actualization through telling herself “the truth” about her complexities and complicities.

While Morgan frames the “problem” ailing Black communities as one of individual empowerment, she simultaneously suggests that her generation represents progress from generations past. In this way, Morgan frames the narrative of individual empowerment and post struggle uplift as an “improvement” from past generations of Black liberation struggle. Because Morgan is using hip-hop—and defends hip-hop as a potentially liberatory art form—as the site for her intervention, the style of Morgan’s empowerment uplift appears radical. It appears radical precisely because it makes room for the angst, anger and pain of a post struggle generation:

“The seemingly impenetrable wall of sexism in rap music is really the complex mask African-Americans often wear both to hide and express the pain. At the close of this millennium, hip-hop is still one of the few forums in which young black men, even surreptitiously, are allowed to express their pain.”20

For Morgan, hip-hop does not reflect systemic misogyny aimed against Black women,

19 Morgan, 55-56. 20 Morgan, 74.

157 but reveals the individual pain that Black youth are unable to express in other places.

Although Morgan acknowledges that the hatred aimed at Black women through some rap music is misplaced, she insists that Black women weather this storm for the good of Black men:

“So, sista friends, we gotta do what any rational, survivalist-minded person would do after finding herself in a relationship with someone whose pain makes him abusive. We’ve gotta continue to give up the love but from a distance that’s safe. Emotional distance is a great enabler of unconditional love and support because it allows us to recognize that the attack, the “bitch, ho” bullshit—isn’t personal but part of the illness.”21

In this description of misogyny in Black communities as communicated through hip-hop,

Morgan suggests that Black men are the primary ones suffering from an unspoken illness of racism. In Morgan’s construction here, Black women are to be longsuffering caretakers, and even emotional punching bags, in order to help heal the men in their communities. She insists:

“I need to know why they are so angry at me. Why is disrespecting me one of the few things that make them feel like men? What’s the haps, what are you going through on the daily that’s got you acting so foul?”22

In this quote, Morgan connects misogyny to racism, but not related structural or systemic forms of oppression. Rather, she frames misogyny within Black communities as a sort of

“acting out” against Black women that must be endured so that Black men can heal. This framework of enduring harmful behavior for the good of a broader community also has roots in discourses of Black uplift, and in this way, Morgan is consistent in framing racism and sexism as personal issues to be overcome through healing as individuals.

I read this emphasis on personal and individual responsibility as a deradicalization

21 Morgan, 75-76. 22 Morgan, 72.

158 of Black feminist politics occurring at the turn of the century. Compared to the many collective articulations of Black liberation and systemic oppression we have encountered in this project thus far, Morgan’s work feels out of place. However, her work represents a fissure between the appearance of radicalism, which was housed in the aesthetics of hip- hop culture at the turn of the century, and practiced radicalism, which was evident in the anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist and systemic analysis of radical Black feminists in the

1970s. By making a case for hip-hop as a potentially liberatory art form for Black communities to utilize in healing, Morgan mobilized the rebelliousness of a generation’s art form as a stylistic tool in framing Black oppression and liberation. This aesthetic rebelliousness, however, does not translate into actual radicalism. Rather, in Morgan’s framework, personal responsibility becomes a central organizing feature of hip-hop feminism, based on Morgan’s own understandings of post struggle, middle-class Black uplift.

This One’s for the Boys: Black Feminism On Patriarchal Terms Perhaps one of the most perplexing aspects of Morgan’s hip-hop feminist framework is the manner in which she constructs heteronormativity in her articulation of hip-hop feminism. Kimberly Springer also takes note of this tendency in Morgan’s work in an article examining the divergences and confluences between the so-called “second” and “third” wave Black feminisms.23 Still, it is important to understand how Morgan implicitly constructs heteronormativity as a central tenant in hip-hop feminism, precisely because a major component of radical Black feminist work has been the necessary role played Black lesbian women. Queer articulations of radical Black feminism are necessary

23 Springer, "Third Wave Black Feminism?".

159 precisely because of the critique they launch against ideas of normativity, as well as questions they raise about capitalism, reproduction, and marriage.

The first indication Morgan gives that her construction of hip-hop feminism is focused around heteronormative Black women is her description of white feminists she encountered in college:

“The most visible were the braless, butch-cut, anti-babes, who seemed to think the solution to sexism was reviling all things male (except, oddly enough, their clothing and mannerisms) and sleeping with each other. They used made up words like “womyn,” “femynists,” and threw mad shade if you asked them directions to the “Ladies’ Room.”24

In Morgan’s description of the feminists she encountered in college, she constructs lesbianism as the purview of white women, and describes them as masculine-of-center in their gender presentation. Particularly as Morgan goes to great lengths to describe how she revels in femininity as a form of gender expression, her description of butch lesbians in this moment is a juxtaposition against herself. Morgan minimizes the potentially radical applications of lesbianism as a political act, or a form of consciousness that has the potential to disrupt patriarchy.25

Morgan continues to construct a curious narrative about lesbianism through her recollection of the night she got her “cojónes.”26 Morgan recounts being invited to a photographer’s house to defend her decision to write an article about rape culture. In a discussion with one of the Black men present, Morgan recalls that he insinuates that she

24 Morgan, Chickenheads, 35. 25 For writings on the radical potential of Black lesbianism, see Cheryl Clarke “Lesbianism: An Act of Resistance,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, eds. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa (New York: Kitchen Table Woman of Color Press, 1981); Karla Hammond, "An Interview with Audre Lorde," American Poetry Review (March/April 1980): 18-21. 26 Morgan, Chickenheads, 45.

160 must be a lesbian to have written the article. Morgan says:

“…as if I’d consider being mistaken for a lesbian an insult instead of an inaccuracy. For a second I couldn’t tell what pissed me off more, the assumption that any woman who is willing to call a black man out on his shit must be eating pussy or his depiction of me as a brainwashed Sappho, waving the American flag in one hand and a castrated black male penis in the other.”27

While Morgan suggests that the misidentification of her sexual orientation was “an inaccuracy” as opposed to an insult, she goes on to describe the homophobia that underlies the man’s accusation without problematizing it or placing lesbian existence in the context of feminist struggle. Morgan’s construction of herself as a “woman who is willing to call a black man out on his shit” is distanced from the woman “eating pussy.”

For Morgan, it is the assumption that she must be a lesbian that “pissed [her] off,” indicating that she has an investment in heterosexuality that her feminism threatens. For

Morgan, while she wants to be read as feminist, she also wants to be read as a straight feminist, attached to and interested in men without question.

Morgan centers patriarchal articulations of dominance in her description of fighting to defend herself. In Morgan’s construction of hip-hop feminism, masculinist obsessions with women’s sexuality is never deconstructed as problematic. Rather, a patriarchal possession of Black women’s sexuality is reinforced through Morgan’s refusal to acknowledge lesbianism as a reasonable and politically meaningful positionality in light of misogyny. Morgan does not address the homophobia of her aggressor’s words. In much the same way that she dismisses the lived experiences and wisdom of the lesbian women she went to college with, Morgan refuses a full personhood to lesbians in her construction of hip-hop feminism.

27 Morgan, 42-43.

161 The story ends with an interesting reflection on earning her “cojónes.” After getting into a cab with her host, she asks him how she did defending herself with his guests”

“Tonight was about getting your cojónes.”28 The host goes further, explaining: “Baby, you gonna be just fine. You got a bigger dick than most niggas I know.” And with that I said good night and tucked my friend’s departing words safely away in my treasure chest of talismans.”29 Morgan’s description of earning a phallus in defense of her feminism decenters women’s experiences and reconstructs hip-hop feminism as a masculinist form of women’s empowerment. Morgan “treasures” this achievement that places her in clear competition with—and positioned above—other men in relation to their ferocity and performances of masculinity. Not only does Morgan not ally herself with a lesbian consciousness, she goes a step further to identify herself with the patriarchy through earning a phallus. This articulation reinforces heteronormativity by both rescuing Morgan from the accusations of lesbianism and by repositioning Morgan as a carrier of patriarchal privilege through her performance of masculinity.

Morgan continues to construct heteronormativity in her description of how Black women must come to terms with Black men not loving them: “Accepting that black men do not always reciprocate our need to love and protect is a terrifying thing, because it means that we are truly out there, assed out in a world rife with sexism and racism. And who the hell wants to deal with that?”30 In Morgan’s construction of reciprocal love, reciprocity necessarily happens between Black men and women. If Black men do not reciprocate, in Morgan’s construction, then Black women are left alone and

28 Morgan, 45. 29 Morgan, 46. 30 Morgan, 55.

162 unprotected—or in Morgan’s words, “assed out.” Morgan constructs a world in which sexism and racism are primarily encountered outside the confines of heterosexual relationships, and it is a heterosexual relationship that is reciprocal that can protect Black women from pain and suffering.

In the third essay of the book, Morgan ponders a long list of questions about the limits of feminism. While most of the questions are related to Morgan’s desire to rescue certain aspects of patriarchy from a feminist revolution (“Can you be a good feminist and admit out loud that there are things you kinda dig about patriarchy?”), Morgan also constructs another implicitly heteronormative narrative in this list:31

“Are we no longer good feminists, not to mention nineties supersistas, if the A.M.’s wee hours sometimes leave us tearful and frightened that achieving all our mothers wanted us to—great educations, careers, financial and emotional independence— has made us wholly undesirable to the men who are supposed to be our counterparts? Men whose fascination with chickenheads leave us convinced they have no interest in dating, let alone marrying, their equals?”32

This is perhaps the most explicit construction of heteronormativity in Morgan’s essays, because she juxtaposes loneliness with heterosexual marital bliss. Specifically, Morgan constructs successful Black women as undesirable for Black men “who are supposed to be our counterparts,” adding a sense of inevitability to Black heterosexual relationships.33

Indeed, in Morgan’s construction, feminism risks deviating Black women from compulsory heterosexuality and makes Black women unfit for marriage. Rather than seizing on the potentially disruptive power of this construction, Morgan constructs Black women as “tearful and frightened” despite significant life achievements at the prospect of not achieving marriage as the final form of self-empowerment.

31 Morgan, 57. 32 Morgan, 58. 33 Morgan, 58.

163 The lesbian presence in Black feminism is as central to its history as any other vector of identity. Within the genealogy I have drawn in this project, Toni Cade

Bambara, Audre Lorde, Pat Parker, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Barbara Smith and many of the women in the Combahee River Collective identify as lesbian, bisexual, or something other than straight. The coherence and radicalism of Black feminist interventions rely on not only on cogent critiques of heteronormativity, but on the radical act of women loving women. “But the true feminist deals out of a lesbian consciousness whether or not she ever sleeps with women,” Audre Lorde relates.34 Naming this consciousness as “women- identified,” Lorde insists that power between women has the potential to transform.35

Not Your Foremother’s Feminism: Hip-Hop Feminism and Generational Beef

Throughout the first four chapters of Chickenheads, Morgan juxtaposes her own understandings of feminism with those of an earlier generation. In Morgan’s construction, the earlier generation of Black feminists is both academic and “black and white” in their construction of Black feminist politics:

“I was eternally grateful, but I was not a feminist.

When I thought about feminism—women who were living and breathing it daily—I thought of white women or black female intellectuals. Academics. Historians. Authors. Women who had little to do with my everyday life. ”36

In this construction of Black feminist lineage, Morgan associates Black feminist thinkers with white womanhood. Citing her exposure to writers such as “Alice Walker, Angela

Davis, Audre Lorde, Paula Giddings, and bell hooks—black women who claimed the f-

34 Hammond and Lorde, "An Interview with Audre Lorde,” 21. 35 Hammond and Lorde, 21. 36 Morgan, Chickenheads, 37.

164 word boldly,” Morgan associates these writers primarily with her college classrooms. 37

Although she admit that these writers “…not only enabled me to understand the complex and often complicit relationship between both isms; [they] empowered me with language to express the unique oppression that comes with being colored and a woman,” the articulation of a Black feminist politics remains inadequate for Morgan.38

Morgan positions Black feminist work in the past not as part of an intergenerational struggle, but as an iteration of Black feminism that has done its part and must be moved beyond by feminists of her generation:

“Mad love and respect to black foremothers (like Angela Davis, bell hooks, Pearl Cleage, Ntozake Shange, and Audre Lorde, to name a few) who passionately articulated their struggles and suggested agendas (imperfect or not) for black female empowerment, but these sistas did their due. The enormous task of saving our lives falls on nobody else’s shoulders but ours. Consider our foremothers’ contributions a bad-ass bolt of cloth. We’ve got to fashion the gear to our own liking.”39

Morgan dismisses the generation of Black feminist thinkers that precede her as having done “their due,” suggesting that there is a time limit to Black feminist interventions.

Unlike many of the Black feminists she named here (as well as Alice Walker whom she names elsewhere) Morgan does not articulate a sense of connection to previous generations of Black feminists. Rather, she states: “Black feminists were some dope sistas, respected elders most def, but they were not my contemporaries. They were not crew. And for most of my twenties, crew was what mattered.”40 While Morgan does express a sense of care and connection for her peers, her positioning of Black feminists that came before as “not crew” constructs a gulf that is unnecessary.

37 Morgan, 37. 38 Morgan, 37. 39 Morgan, 22-23. 40 Morgan, 38.

165 This gulf, in my reading, reveals a teleological assumption that Morgan sits in the position of progressivism, and Black feminists from the past inhabit a position that has expired. Rather than connecting her own feminism to Black feminists of the past, Morgan appears to dismiss their feminism out of hand as both too connected to academia and too strict in its consideration of Black women’s lives at the turn of the century:

“In short, I needed a feminism brave enough to fuck with the grays. And this was not my foremothers’ feminism.”

Ironically, reaping the benefits of our foremothers’ struggle is precisely what makes their brand of feminism so hard to embrace. The “victim” (read women) “oppressor” (read men) model that seems to dominate so much of contemporary discourse (both black and white), denies the very essence of who we are.”41

In one of the most often quoted lines of the book, Morgan positions Black feminist foremothers’ work as a “brand” that does not work for her, while redefining her own

Black feminism as one that is “willing to fuck with the grays.” This phrase has come to stand in for complexity in Black feminist engagements, but is constructed her as a dismissal of past Black feminist work by casting it as too rigid. Morgan argues that the older generation of Black feminists have a limited “brand” of feminism that places Black women primarily in the role of “victim.”

Yet as we have seen in this genealogy, the actual archive of Black feminist work up until this point is rich, varied, and multivalent. The genealogies of Black women fighting for gender and racial liberation does not only belong to the academy, and a s a journalist, Morgan could have done a more thorough job of researching the topic of her essays. At the turn of the 20th century, there was enough historical work, activist legacies,

41 Morgan, 59.

166 and meaningful public engagement with Black women discussing gender and racial rights that could have made their way into Morgan’s book.

Still, an honest accounting of Black feminist genealogies is not Morgan’s goal.

Rather, Morgan is trying to make room for some personal preferences within the framework of Black feminism. We live in the legacy of those very individual, very specific preferences. Morgan, through her consistent devaluation of the Black feminism in the academy, misidentifies the source of the problem with Black feminism. Morgan misidentifies the “problem” as the way that Black feminists say the important things that they say, instead of recognizing the importance and relevance of their work, even if the form is sometimes difficult. In this way, Morgan disappears the structural analysis of racism and sexism, and turns the political intervention of Black feminism into a generational matter of style.

This is not to say that academic Black feminism has been the most accessible form of

Black feminism through the latter half of the 20th century. Indeed, as Barbara Smith related in the Homegirls, while Black feminist thought flourished in the academy, there was decidedly less movement and organizing work.42 This fact, however, can be acknowledged in a manner that does not position Black woman intellectuals as wholly irrelevant to Morgan’s generation of Black feminists. What is more, the value in what

Black feminists have to say, even when the form is difficult, still remains a central tenet of Black feminist praxis. It is for this reason that Alexis Pauline Gumbs is publishing

42 Barbara Smith, “Preface to the Rutgers University Press Edition,” in Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology, (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000), xiii.

167 works like Spill, and is reflected in Alice Walker’s recuperation of Zora Neale Hurston’s work.

Morgan’s construction of a Black feminism that deemphasizes intergenerational contributions, centers heteronormativity and patriarchy, and articulates a middle-class

Black politics of uplift through self-empowerment and self-responsibility represents a deradicalization in the construction of Black feminist thought at the turn of the 21st century. This deradicalization, rather than being Morgan’s “fault,” is reflective of the narratives most present in hip-hop and wider U.S. culture at the time that Morgan wrote her work. If Morgan had been more attentive to the genealogy of radical Black feminism that she distances herself from, it is possible that she could have gleaned tools that would have been useful for articulating a radical Black feminism for the twenty-first century.

Instead, Morgan’s construction of hip-hop feminism emphasizes individualism in such a way that paves the way for the advent of popular neoliberal Black feminism a decade later. Most importantly, Morgan’s reliance on hip hop itself as a rebellious and “real” form of expression trades radical politics for the appearance of radicalism through aesthetics. In this way, hip-hop feminism appears to be a more radical, more relevant articulation of Black feminist thought and praxis in the twenty-first century; however,

Morgan’s construction of hip-hop feminism reveals deradicalizing positions that make the space for radical Black feminism smaller.

168

[CHAPTER 5] Neoliberal Investments: Black Feminism and the Affective Economy of Beyoncé

Introduction

Beyoncé’s cultural productions have become the site for a powerful affective economy, what I label in this chapter as Beyoncé-as-feminist. This affective economy, which is emblematic of neoliberal absorption of Black intellectual and cultural labor, has captured and been preserved by contemporary Black feminist thinkers. Using this affective economy as a definitional site for Black feminism, contemporary Black feminists have articulated themes of desire, pleasure, and choice with lessening attention to the materialist, anti-imperialist, and queer critiques that form the basis of radical Black feminist interventions. This affective economy, arising at the conjuncture of Black feminist visibility with neoliberalism, post-racialism and Black elitism, threatens to shift radical Black feminist visions of future liberation toward a Black feminism co-articulated with individualism, consumerism, and valorized labor. As a result, contemporary Black feminist work on Beyoncé risks losing radical Black feminist articulations of accountability, communality, and anti-capitalism that are central to transforming the future.

Yet in the process of considering popular neoliberal Black feminism as I outlined in Chapter 1, I am not just concerned with examining the use of Beyoncé in creating

Black feminist thought, but with troubling the all-too-easy paths that emerge in using public, branded and marketed/marketable figures as definitional sites of Black feminism.

It is a challenge that is vexing indeed; if Black women have suffered from relative invisibility in mainstream culture, and when visible, suffer overwhelmingly negative

169 representation, then the appearance of Beyoncé at this moment can be interpreted as a sign of progress and possibility. I am interested in brushing this teleological argument against the grain of history, however, and understanding the rise of Beyoncé as a definitional figure in popular neoliberal Black feminism as a sign of the effects of neoliberal and intellectual market endeavors on Black feminist thinkers generally, and

Black feminist scholars specifically.

Put another way, I want to have a heart-to-heart about why Beyoncé seems so important as a site for Black feminist definition in the 21st century. To say Black feminist activists and intellectuals are embroiled in a protracted, heated, debate about her claims to, and usefulness for, understanding feminism is an understatement. Black feminists have beef over Beyoncé. So it is incumbent upon us as Black feminists to understand the context in which these debates arise; to critically examine what she does, and does not, do for Black feminist thought as an intervention into the imperial-capitalist structures that ail Black women today; and to understand some of the reasons why we may, or may not be, attached to Beyoncé as a definitional figure for Black feminism.

It is useful to brush the affective attachment to Beyoncé in the past decade against more recent calls to describe Beyoncé's work as "radical" and "unapologetically Black."

What do we mean when we say Beyoncé's work is radical, in the context of so much about her that is not in fact radical? How do we hold the disruptiveness of examples such as her Super Bowl 50 Halftime performance alongside the capitalist investment of her message and the ad for her Formation Tour emerging the moment the halftime performance ended? How do radical Black feminists account for our investments in U.S.

170 mainstream culture, and still construct a radical praxis of divestment that ensures the survival of Black feminist futures?

Towards that end, in this chapter I will examine the affective economy created by

Beyoncé’s cultural productions and buttressed by Black feminist scholars’ writing about her utility to feminism. Building on the work of Sara Ahmed and Joy James, I will examine the contours of affective attachment and investment in Beyoncé, and how disruptiveness is misrecognized for radicalism. Next, I will attend to the production of

“radical” Beyoncé, calling attention to practices behind and performances of her image that are decidedly capitalist. Then, I will examine how a Black feminist production emerging from the affective economy of Beyoncé-as-feminist—The Lemonade

Syllabus—belies a U.S. Black feminist investment in U.S. capitalism that needs to be examined and dismantled. Finally, I end this chapter with a reflection on divestment as a radical Black feminist praxis from the prophetic words of Pat Parker.

Context and Conjunctures: Post-racialism and the Rise of Beyoncé

Beyoncé Knowles Carter, born Beyoncé Giselle Knowles to Mathew and Tina

Knowles and raised in Houston, Texas, has risen to a profound level of celebrity in the past ten years. Aspiring to be a singer since early in her childhood, Beyoncé was a member of Destiny’s Child and eventually the lead singer of the group from the late

1990s until 2006, when the group broke up. Destiny’s Child produced four studio albums and is widely considered one of the elite R&B girl groups of the early 2000s, with over

60 million in record sales worldwide.1 Between the release of their third (Survivor, 2001)

1 Nolan Feeney, “How Beyoncé Came to Run the World,” Time, April 24, 2014, http://time.com/68329/time-100-evolution-beyonce/.

171 and fourth (Destiny Fulfilled, 2004) studio albums, Beyoncé would release her first solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), and was featured in a full-length film as the female lead in Austin Powers in Goldmember. The year Destiny’s Child amiably disbanded would also mark the Beyonce’s second solo album, B’Day (2006). The record was followed by more filmic appearances in The Pink Panther (2006), Dreamgirls (2006), and Cadillac Records (2008), which in turn led to her third solo album, I Am…Sasha

Fierce (2008).

Beyoncé’s third solo album was her most successful up to that point, earning her a stunning six Grammy awards and ushering in many iconic moments in pop culture that would cement her position as dominant pop diva for the decade to come. These moments include her Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It) video, the Kanye West interruption of Taylor

Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video award at the MTV Video Music

Awards, her 2009 performance at President Barack Obama’s Inaugural Ball, and the I

Am…World Tour, which grossed 119.5 million worldwide.2 Beyoncé also married her longtime boyfriend and hip hop mogul Jay-Z in April of 2008. After a brief hiatus,

Beyoncé released 4 (2011), which did not match the success of Sasha Fierce, but did demonstrate Beyoncé’s “return” to her R&B roots. The album preceded the birth of her daughter, Blue Ivy, in January 2013, as well as her national anthem performance in the second inauguration of President Barack Obama in 2013.

Following that performance, Beyoncé would break the internet and the stadium lights at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome with her Super Bowl XLVII halftime show,

2 Meghan Casserly, “Beyoncé’s $50 Million Pepsi Deal Takes Creative Cues from Jay Z,” Forbes, December 10, 2012, https://www.forbes.com/sites/meghancasserly/2012/12/10/beyonce- knowles-50-million-pepsi-deal-takes-creative-cues-from-jay-z/#2daa15004346.

172 complete with a much anticipated reunion of Destiny’s Child.3 Just a few months later, in

April 2013, Beyoncé would embark on the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour, her fourth world tour. This tour would dwarf her previous tour, grossing almost 215 million dollars over 132 concert dates.4 While this year was busy enough, the pop diva would release her fifth album, Beyoncé, with no prior announcement or promotion on December 13, 2013.

This fifth solo album, digitally available on iTunes, came complete with music videos accompanying each musical track, changing the experience that Beyoncé consumers had of her music for the foreseeable future. The album, the most intimate look into Beyoncé’s life and relationship with husband Jay-Z until that point, shocked the industry by debuting at the top of the Billboard charts at number one, breaking a record for number one debut albums (5) for any female artist. What is more, Beyoncé’s album became the highest selling album by a female artist for the year of 2013, outselling all of her competition in the final two weeks of the year, and broke iTunes records for sales, selling over a million copies in under a week.

By the time that Beyoncé was released, Beyoncé had cemented her own reputation as a pop culture icon, a self-proclaimed feminist, and an elusive and carefully managed celebrity persona. Between the release of Beyoncé and her latest work, Lemonade,

Beyoncé toured once again, this time with her husband Jay-Z in their On The Run World

3 While Beyoncé didn’t actually break the lights at the stadium, her performance was followed by a significant delay due to electrical problems with the stadium’s lighting. This coincidence has fueled a popular myth that it was Beyoncé’s powerful performance that shut the lights down for nearly 30 minutes. See Meredith Blake, “Did Beyoncé Cause the Super Bowl Blackout?,” LA Times, February 4, 2013, http://articles.latimes.com/2013/feb/04/entertainment/la-et-st-super- bowl-blackout-beyonce-20130203. 4 Ray Waddell, “Beyoncé, Blowing Up Box Offices Before Formation Stadium Tour, Looks to Be the Queen of Touring,” Billboard, February 22, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/articles/business/6882943/beyonce-box-office-formation-stadium-tour- queen-of-touring.

173 Tour, and reissued her Beyoncé album through a variety of editions. Most of Beyoncé’s significant popular culture moments in this period were related to performances, such as her 2014 VMA performance in which she lit up the stage with the word FEMINIST as she performed.

Beyoncé’s relatively quiet 2015 was spent producing what would become her crowning achievement to date, Lemonade. The hour-long movie, which would premiere on HBO as a special, was first teased out to audiences with the video release of

“Formation,” the day before Super Bowl 50. Beyoncé’s release of “Formation” the day before the Super Bowl foreshadowed both her next album and a change in the political tone of the artist’s work. 12. The video and Super Bowl performance were used as teasers for Beyoncé’s next tour, The Formation World Tour, as well as whetting her fans’ appetites for Lemonade, which aired in April 2016 on HBO as a film, and was available exclusively through Tidal for a number of months. As an album, Lemonade charted number one on the Billboard 200, in addition to all 12 songs from the album individually charting in the Top 100.5 While Lemonade received a lukewarm reception at the

Grammy’s, Beyoncé won eight awards at the VMAs for Lemonade, as well as a concession speech from Adele at the Grammy’s, whose record won Album of the Year.6

While Beyoncé is generally very private with her personal life, the couple’s most previous albums (Lemonade and 4:44) deal explicitly with issues of infidelity they have

5Amaya Mendizabal, “All 12 of Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Tracks Debut on Hot 100,” Billboard, May 2, 2016, https://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/chart-beat/7350443/beyonce- lemonade-tracks-debut-hot-100. 6Adele conceded that Beyoncé should have won Album of the Year in her acceptance speech in 2017. See Erin Jensen, “Adele Says Beyoncé Should Have Won Album of the Year: ‘It was her time to win’,” USA Today, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2017/02/13/adele- record-of-the-year-grammys-beyonce-lemonade/97839992/.

174 encountered in their marriage. They welcomed their twins, Rumi and Sir Carter, in June

2017.

While Beyoncé’s career spans more than two decades, her rise to dominant diva status can be marked by the 2008 release of I Am…Sasha Fierce, which also marks the election of Barack Obama, the first Black president of the United States. While the singer’s career predates Obama’s 2008 rise to presidential power, her most famous moments occur in the political context of the United States with a Black head of state.

This confluence of events is important precisely because of the way that Beyoncé reflects a level of national belonging that may not have been possible without Barack and

Michelle Obama in the White House. This presidency then sets the stage for a series of discursive possibilities that were not in play before the symbolic meaning of a Black man in the highest seat of U.S. empire.

Obama’s presidency also marks a particular narrative of post-racialism that would come to color public discussions of race for the duration of his 8 years in office. “He is post-racial, by all appearances. I forgot he was black tonight for an hour,” proclaimed

Chris Matthews, liberal host of MSNBC’s Hardball on the night of Obama’s first State of the Union address.7 Post-racialism, a racial ideology or social structure, depending on what literature we are consulting, is a direct offshoot of colorblind racism, in which the facticity of racial difference and racial inequities are willfully ignored in favor of hopeful narratives about the progress of U.S. race relations.8 As Obama was the first president

7 MSNBC, State of the Union Address Coverage (television), January 27, 2010. 8 Much work has been done on postracialism. Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, in his book Racism Without Racists, comprehensively outlines colorblind racism. Bonnette, Gershon, and Hall (2012) have a particularly useful article in Ethnic Studies Review that examines the various perspectives and approaches to postracialism. See Eduardo Bonilla-Silva, Racism Without Racists: Color-Blind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in the United States, (Lanham, MD: Rowman

175 that historically large numbers of whites voted for in a presidential election, this data was used to simultaneously proclaim that Obama himself had “transcended” race, and that whites who voted for him were no longer bound to racism, but had also “transcended” the racial sins of the American past. While the Obama presidency prompted increasing racial animus and a rise in overt white supremacist and neo-Nazi activity in the United States, post-racialist ideology continues to have a significant effect on both left and right politics.9 The rise of Beyoncé’s popularity must be considered in the context of a post- racialist U.S., in which “race,” most specifically blackness, is a trait to be transcended and simultaneously ignored.

Beyoncé’s popular music crossover also registered as a sign of post-racialism, which was certainly buttressed by the Eurocentric beauty standards that the celebrity adopted in the form of a long blonde wig and the perception of lightened skin on some of her magazine covers.10 Eurocentric beauty standards in media have been shown to have an overwhelmingly negative effect on African American viewers and even affect economic possibilities.11 Perhaps culminating in the May 2014 Time magazine “100 Most

and Littlefield, 2009); Lakeyta M. Bonnette, Sarah M. Gershon, and Precious D. Hall, “Free Your Mind: Contemporary Racial Attitudes and Post Racial Theory,” Ethnic Studies Review 35, no. 1, (2012): 71-87. 9 Recent calls for post-identitarian politics on the left, as well as an insistence that Donald Trump’s white nationalist rhetoric is not racist, are two examples of how postracialism has expanded into the 21st century as a racial ideology not attached to a particular political party. See Mark Lilla, “The End of Identity Liberalism,” New York Times, November 18, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/11/20/opinion/sunday/the-end-of-identity-liberalism.html.; Matt Richardson, “Herman Cain: Trump’s Critics Can’t Make ‘Racism’ Claim Stick,” Fox News, August 16th, 2017, http://www.foxnews.com/politics/2017/08/16/herman-cain-trumps-critics- cant-make-racism-claim-stick.html. 10 Mark Sweney, “L’Oreal Accused of ‘Whitening’ Singer in Cosmetic Ads,” The Guardian, August 8, 2008, https://www.theguardian.com/media/2008/aug/08/advertising.usa. 11 Maya K. Gordon, “Media Contributions to African American Girls’ Focus on Beauty and Appearance: Exploring the Consequences of Sexual Objectification,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 32, no. 3 (2008): 245-256; Tiffany G. Townsend, Anita Jones Thomas, Torsten B. Neilands, and Tiffany R. Jackson, “I’m No Jezebel; I Am Young, Gifted, and Black: Identity,

176 Influential People” cover, in which Beyoncé was depicted as a Twiggy-like model,

Beyoncé’s Eurocentric aesthetic caused Black feminist foremother bell hooks to label her a “terrorist” for the way her images “assaul[t]” young girls of color and perpetuate

“imperialist, white supremacist, capitalist patriarchy.”12 Again, there is much debate as to what Beyoncé’s aesthetics mean in the present day, including whether or not her look should be labeled as “Eurocentric.” I tend to fall on the side of those who see Beyoncé’s progressively lighter skin and straightening hair as a sign of that Eurocentric aesthetics are still preferable to African features, even for Black artists.

The argument that Beyoncé’s aesthetic and crossover success was in part attributable to her Eurocentric aesthetic is supported by the sudden shift in how whites viewed Beyoncé after the release of her “Formation” video and her Super Bowl 50 appearance. Beyoncé’s shift from post-racial artist to Black artist was humorously depicted by a Saturday Night Live skit in which the release of the “Formation” video caused white people across the U.S. to suddenly “realize” that Beyoncé is Black.13 It is worth noting that “Formation” was the most pro-Black political statement Beyoncé had made in a music video in her career to that date, a video in which she sinks a New

Orleans police car and makes multiple references to the overwhelming police force used

Sexuality, and Black Girls,” Psychology of Women Quarterly 34, no. 3, (2010): 273-285; Cynthia L. Robinson-Moore, “Beauty Standards Reflect Eurocentric Paradigms-So What? Skin Color, Identity, and Black Female Beauty,” Journal of Race and Policy 4, no. 1, (2008): 66-85; Patricia Raskin, Stephanie Irby Coard, and Alfiee M. Breland, Perceptions of and Preferences for Skin Color, Black Racial Identity, and Self-Esteem Among African Americans, Journal of Applied Social Psychology 31, no. 11, (2001): 2256-2274.

12 bell hooks, “Are You Still a Slave? Liberating the Black Female Body” (video), YouTube, May 7, 2014 (Panel at the New School, May 6, 2014) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rJk0hNROvzs. 13 Saturday Night Live, “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black” (video), YouTube, February 14, 2016, https://youtu.be/ociMBfkDG1w.

177 against Black Lives Matter protesters, while celebrating her own Black cultural heritage and African physical features.

Public popular liberal Black feminist adulation of Beyonce’s body of work and representations of agency also emerge at the conjuncture of post-racialism and the Barack

Obama presidency, with social media as the primary way individuals stay informed about the world, marking a shift away from both print and television news. The explosion of particular forms of social media, including Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, as well as more sophisticated blogging platforms that allow any internet user the ability to create content and branding related to their persona remains the primary means through which

Black feminists create meaning and content around Beyoncé’s performances and persona.14 It also contributes to both the ritual and cult-like behavior among Beyoncé fans, referred to as the “Beyhive,” precisely because these social media platforms can be shared quickly across time and space, contributing to the feeling that a Beyoncé “event” is shared by more than just those close to the artist.15

These contexts matter precisely because the rise of “Beyoncé feminism” does not occur in a vacuum, but rather, occurs at a particular moment in the history of late capitalism. Beyoncé emerges not so much as a unique example of Black excellence, but rather as a new prototype figure of Black womanhood in a post-Obama, post-racialist, social media landscape in the post-Civil Rights era. In other words, Beyoncé is the logical emergence of U.S. Black womanhood at the turn of the 21st century, when Black elite

14 Jamilah Lemieux, “Black Feminism Goes Viral,” Ebony, March 3, 2014, http://www.ebony.com/news-views/black-feminism-goes-viral-045. 15 Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, “How Sweet It Is to Be Loved by You: The BeyHive,” NPR, March 17, 2014, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2014/03/17/258155902/how-sweet-it-is-to-beloved-by-you-the-beyhive.

178 achievement and inclusion within both capitalism and the U.S. political system are at their height. Black elite achievement and inclusion have created necessary conflict for the national imagination that uses Black women as a rhetorical sandbox. Beyoncé, then, gains public notoriety at the moment when a narrative of Black female “inclusion” in the nation most needs to be demonstrated and normalized as a possibility, and/or as something for Black women to strive for. More specifically, the worship of and rhetorical machinations surrounding Beyoncé serve as a way to capture Black womanhood—and

Black feminist discourse broadly speaking—in the service of capitalist, imperialist, white supremacist patriarchy within the U.S. empire. While certain Beyoncé events have certainly disrupted aspects of the national imagination, overall Beyoncé’s continuing fame and influence indicate that her presence is less disruptive and subversive than it is a way to build capacity for a grand project of including Black elites within the project of

U.S. citizenship.

The Affective Economy of Beyoncé-As-Feminist

“That’s got to be such an amazing feeling, a scary feeling, to be an artist knowing if someone says something about you, there are a million people who are going to shut shit down,” he said. “She probably can’t even process it.” 16 Cody L.,--co-founder of TheBeyHive.com

In considering how Black feminist scholars are using Beyoncé as a site for Black feminist theorizing and pedagogy, it is incumbent upon us to ask what work Beyoncé’s visual representation doing on us, and how are we accounting for that work when we use her as a site for Black feminist theorizing? Beyoncé’s representation is not simply a blank

16 Alyssa Bereznek, “Inside the Beyhive: How Beyoncé’s worker bees—the most committed fans on the internet—organize,” The Ringer, June 3, 2016 https://www.theringer.com/2016/6/3/16042806/beyonce-beyhive-online-fan-forum-b7c7226ac16d

179 site for Black feminist theorists to come forth and create meaning around. Rather, while

Black feminists do indeed use Beyoncé as a site for meaning-making, her productions also do their own work despite, over, and above the narratives that writers might produce about her. It is this work—the work Beyoncé’s imagery does in constructing the subjectivities of Black women and femmes—that remains the most ignored, but most impactful, aspect of Beyoncé’s iconicity.

Part of the answer to these questions lies in the willingness of Black feminist theories to move beyond the call to define Beyoncé's work as "feminist" or not, and beyond the desire to label her work as "radical" or not, and instead begin to account for the construction of Beyoncé, as both an image and a product. In addition, it is necessary for radical Black feminist critique to begin to account for Beyoncé's status as an affective object, in addition to her being as an imagined person, and finally as a real person that we in fact know very little about. It is the slippage between these various states of

Beyoncé's being that leads to the misrecognitions and investments in Black feminist encounters with Beyoncé.

We must also begin to account for how fandom has driven academic writing on

Beyoncé in Black feminist mainstream writing. This is sensitive territory, yet we must face it, precisely because the Black feminist call to accountability demands that we account for where we stand as we produce knowledge about Beyoncé. The images of

Beyoncé—both those of the star and those the artist produces—“do work" on those who encounter those images, especially those hailed as fans.17 Specifically, Beyoncé's images

17Louis Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses,” in Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, (London: New Left Books, 1971).

180 do ideological work through both hegemonic and disruptive visuals that create affective narratives which both acquiesce to and challenge hierarchies of gender, class and race. In a similar way, Beyoncé as "product" works on behalf of Beyoncé the real person to gather capital in the form of tours, endorsements, and merchandise. Beyoncé as an

"affective object" works on all people encountering her images, establishing a common gathering point around which many different people can create a sense of community and common language through adulation, apathy or disgust. Finally, Beyoncé as imagined person, which is a combination of her image, status as an affective object, and the narratives that consumers and fans bring to the encounters, may or may not be reflective of Beyoncé as a real person. However, the belief that fans and consumers can have access to Beyoncé's "real" being is part of what drives the consumption and investment in her work as an artist, celebrity, and cultural icon.

Returning to Ahmed's work, but this time with her definition of affective economies, we might understand the complicated encounter between Black feminist thinkers and Beyoncé as such:

"…emotions play a crucial role in the "surfacing" of individual and collective bodies through the way in which emotions circulate between bodies and signs. Such an argument clearly challenges any assumption that emotions are a private matter, that they simply belong to individuals, or even that they come from within and then move outward toward others. It suggests that emotions are not simply "within" or "without" but that they create the very effect of the surfaces or boundaries of bodies and worlds."18

Using this work on bodies and signs, we might understand the Black feminist work on

Beyoncé as its own affective economy, in which Black feminist emotions about Beyoncé

(in this context serving as a "sign"), rather than being private and contained within

18 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2, (2004): 117.

181 specific Black feminist writers, actually reflect a communal praxis and investment in

Beyoncé as a type of aspirational Black feminist figure. Beyoncé becomes an affective object, and an affective economy of Beyoncé is created, precisely and only at the moment that Black feminist scholars and writers invest (together) emotional effort into her productions and proclaim them (and her) to be meaningful to their own understandings of feminism. The powerful emotions emerging from the collective process of fandom serve to buttress particular investments in Beyoncé as an affective object, about which feminist knowledge demands to be created so as to avoid inconsistency between radical Black feminist praxis, and the fact of affective attachment to Beyoncé as affective object. It is at this intersection that the Black feminist market of Beyoncé (the "affective economy" in

Ahmed's language) emerges.

This affective economy, then, functions to consolidate an account about the encounter between "Black feminism" and "Beyoncé," creating a hegemonic ideological narrative about "Beyoncé-as-feminist." This affective economy allows both social and economic rewards to accrue to Black feminist writers and scholars whose affective attachments to Beyoncé, including (but not limited to) fandom, frame their critical public engagements with the celebrity in the name of Black feminism. In part, it means that some Black feminists are situating their understandings of Black feminism in the realm of representation, which comes with hazards outside of Beyoncé as a specific example.

Representation as the primary site of meaning-making for oppositional thought comes with particular dangers as a site of Black feminist theorizing, and those dangers are less about the specific positive or negative images any celebrity creates, and more about how we as consumers—both capitalist and psychic—are made into particular types

182 of subjects as we witness her work, regardless of our intentions. Certainly, some powerful

Black feminist thought comes from a space of engagement with representation. For example, the written works of Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, Ann Petry, and other Black women literary authors shaped the visions of Black feminist scholars in the 1980s, and specifically, allowed them to create Black feminist frameworks for examining literature and power.19 Yet, how we understand the text of Toni Morrison’s Beloved as written representation, versus how we understand the work of the visual representations of

Beyoncé are different. Even when adapted for film, literary works “work” differently on us as viewing subjects—particularly if we have already encountered the work in its written form.

While there is much debate about the meanings of Beyoncé's body of work, the voices that circulate most easily in the mainstream media are those that write about

Beyoncé as a 21st century feminist within the affective economy of Beyoncé-as- feminist.20 This is the case, in part, because Beyoncé as product is not in fact disruptive to the capitalist logics that keep celebrity and fandom intact in the United States. What is more, Beyoncé as image, while at times disruptive, does not disrupt heteronormativity or

19 See Barbara Christian, Black Feminist Criticism: Perspectives on Black Women Writers, (New York: Teacher’s College Press, 1985). 20 Miriam Bale, “Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Is a Revolutionary Work of Black Feminism: Critic’s Notebook,” Billboard, April 25, 2016, https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7341839/beyonce-lemonade-black-feminism; Destinee Jackson, “Beyoncé, BEYONCE, Lemonade: Symbols of Black Feminism,” Medium, November 3, 2018, https://medium.com/@Destinee_Jackson/beyonc%C3%A9-beyonc%C3%A9-lemonade- symbols-of-black-feminism-a4dc4b4d97eb; Mabinty Quarshie, “Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Album but a Sip of Her Evolving Feminist Story,” USA Today, February 20, 2017, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/nation-now/2017/02/20/beyoncs-lemonade-album-but-sip- her-evolving-feminist-story/96472706/; Kadeen Griffiths, “This Is What Beyonce’s ‘Lemonade’ Meant to Me As a Black Woman, and This is Why It Needed To Win Album of The Year,” Bustle, February 13, 2017, https://www.bustle.com/p/this-is-what-beyonces-lemonade-meant-to- me-as-a-black-woman-this-is-why-it-needed-to-win-album-of-the-year-37653.

183 gender in a way that would threaten her public consumption at large. Hence, Black feminist scholars and writers who offer praise and adulation of the celebrity, while also offering various frameworks to interpret her work, gain the most circulation. But in the overwhelming wave of Black feminist scholars and writers seeking to define Beyoncé as meaningful to (Black) feminism, radical Black feminist voices that do not engage in the affective economy of Beyoncé-as-feminist are effectively drowned out. In other words, there is a silencing effect that proceeds from so much public praise of Beyoncé as a definitional site for feminism—particularly as that praise emerges from Black feminist scholars and writers.

It makes no sense to split hairs here, and insist that Black feminists writing about

Beyoncé are simply trying to stay relevant, or are defending what they believe to be an important space in Black cultural production, without acknowledging that this action is, too, Black feminist theorizing at the level of phenomenology and epistemology. Indeed, the affective economy surrounding Beyoncé and her cultural productions, particularly those elements residing in the words and work of Black feminist writers and scholars, can be understood as the traditional work of describing Black women's experience, being, and ways of knowing. Arguing that Black feminists are simply defending Beyoncé's right to

“call herself a feminist,” when so much effort and work is put into creating frameworks for her particular style, process, and brand of meaning-making, does not negate the fact that Black feminists are creating knowledge about Black women's experiences through the lens of Beyoncé.21 Hence, the knowledge that these Black feminist thinkers create becomes limited by the uses to which Beyoncé--as image, product, affective object,

21Caitlin Gibson, “Beyoncé and ‘Lemonade’ Are Giving These Feminist Scholars So Much to Debate,” The Washington Post, May 11, 2016, https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-

184 imagined person, and real person--can provide.

What gets silenced in these affective economies, then, are the radical elements of

Black feminism that would lead to anti-capitalist, anti-imperialist, culture industry, and queer critiques of Beyoncé’s work. They are silenced because the adoring writing on

Beyoncé takes up so much space in the public sphere, so quickly, that no critical word is able to then be spoken outside the framing of “hater,” or outside of a framing of misogyny.22 For example, in 2013, framing the Black feminist response to Beyoncé’s

Beyoncé album in the week after it was released, Professor Brittney Cooper argued, “But actually I really wanted to stage a written takedown of all the [Beyoncé] haters. No

Vaseline.”23

By eliding critical and radical evaluations of the work that Beyoncé’s representations do, or the manner in which she hails viewers and fans, some Black

entertainment/wp/2016/05/11/beyonce-and-lemonade-are-giving-these-feminist-scholars-so- much-to-debate/?utm_term=.db3df08129c0; Melissa Harris-Perry, “Beyoncé: Her Creative Opus Turned the Pop Star Into a Political Force,” Time, n.d., http://time.com/time-person-of-the-year- 2016-beyonce-runner-up/; Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley, “Beyoncé’s Lemonade Is Black Woman Magic,” Time, April 25, 2016, http://time.com/4306316/beyonce-lemonade-black-woman-magic/; Zandria F. Robinson, “How Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Exposes Inner Lives of Black Women,” Rolling Stone, April 28, 2016, https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/how-beyonces- lemonade-exposes-inner-lives-of-black-women-20160428; Regina Bradley and Dream Hampton, “Close To Home: A Conversation About Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade,’” NPR The Record, April 26, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/26/475629479/close-to-home-a- conversation-about-beyonc-s-lemonade; Brittney Cooper, “The Beyoncé Wars: Should She Get to Be a Feminist?” Salon, December 17, 2013, https://www.salon.com/2013/12/17/a_deeply_personal_beyonce_debate_should_she_get_to_be_a _feminist/. 22Gabbi Tarpley Byrd, “I Don’t Trust Girls Who Don’t Like Beyoncé + Free Printable,” Linen And Salt (blog), February 2, 2017, http://linenandsalt.com/2017/02/girls-beyonce-free-printable/; Michael Cragg, “One to Watch: Seinabo Sey,” The Guardian, September 20, 2014, https://www.theguardian.com/music/2014/sep/21/one-to-watch-seinabo-sey-swedish-singer- gambia; Amirah Bey, “Why You Need to Stop Dating Guys that Hate Beyoncé: No Love for Beytrarians,” Blavity, https://blavity.com/stop-dating-guys-that-hate-beyonce; Michael Arceneaux, “I Would Never Date A Man Who Hates Beyoncé,” The Guardian, August 25, 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/aug/25/never-date-a-man-who-hates-beyonce. 23Cooper, “Beyoncé Wars,” para. 5.

185 feminist writers recast forms of critique and discomfort with Beyoncé’s work as a sign of pain or avoidance on the part of critics. Returning to Cooper, what underlies the Beyoncé debate is not legitimate quarrels over Beyoncé’s power and practice, but the manner in which Beyoncé opens Black women’s wounds: “And in comes Beyoncé, ripping off the band-aids to wounds that we have become conditioned to avoid rather than to confront and to heal. When she invites us to say FTW, ‘I woke up like this’ she invites black female vulnerability into the picture.”24 In Cooper’s framing, “haters” of Beyoncé’s work

(those who have critical or radical critiques of the work or of Beyoncé’s practices), are driven primarily by unaddressed internal pain. The implication is that by working through this pain, Black women who are Beyoncé critics will come to love her work as an expression of self-love, in the same way that her fans do. In this way, the affective economy surrounding Beyoncé-as-feminist constructs the very meaning of criticism about Beyoncé as self-hatred projected as misogyny. As Black feminist frameworks emphasize self-love and self-care as a road to healing, then, within the affective economy of Beyoncé-as-feminist, the road to healing for critics of Beyoncé is necessarily through examining their own deficiencies, healing from those, and coming to “love” Beyoncé as a demonstration of their Black feminist wellness.25 In this way, the affective economy of

Beyoncé-as-feminist distorts the intentions and possibilities of Black feminist self-love by funneling that love through the persona of Beyoncé. It is this affective coercion that pushes out the space for radical critiques of Beyoncé’s body of work.

24 Cooper, “Beyoncé Wars,” para. 14. 25 For examples of Black feminist narratives of healing and self-love that are not attached to Beyoncé, see Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters, (New York: Vintage Books, 1980); bell hooks, Sisters of The Yam: Black Women and Self-Recovery, (Boston, MA: South End Press, 1994); Audre Lorde, “Poetry Is Not a Luxury,” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches, (New York: Crossing Press, 1984).

186 It is difficult for Black feminist writers and scholars to criticize a strong affective economy like Beyoncé-as-feminist, because so much energy and emotion is invested in her production, and in the discourse surrounding her production. Indeed, we are examining a level of attachment that has the ability to affect our behavior towards one another, in the real world. The rapid proliferation of social media adds speed to how this affective community of "Beyoncé-as-feminist" gets built, as well as an ideal environment for snide and dismissive comments, rants, and Tweets aimed at silencing critical words spoken about Beyoncé's work, even when those words are spoken by Black feminists.

Some of the evidence for this comes from the social media pages of Black feminist scholars and writers, which I cannot reproduce here. But additional evidence for the potentially destructive force of the affective economy of Beyoncé-as-feminist comes from the years-long online bullying of Keri Hilson, a Grammy-nominated R&B songstress who criticized Beyoncé for not writing her own lyrics on Hilson’s “Turnin’ Me

On” song.26 Hilson has since endured verbal and emotional abuse through Twitter and other online formats, from self-identified “Beyhive” members who take it as their personal work to shame the star in public in retaliation for not worshipping Beyoncé in the manner they feel appropriate. While this sounds like a scene out of a teen drama, it is in fact part of the evidence that the affective economy surrounding Beyoncé has powerful potential to mobilize the behavior of everyday people. Black feminist writers and scholars who center her work in their articulations of Black feminism are strengthening

26No Author, “Keri Hilson Breaks Down On Twitter After ‘Years of Verbal Abuse’ from Beyoncé Fans,” Huffington Post, March 5, 2013, https://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/03/05/keri-hilson-beyonce-fans_n_2811946.html; C. Shardae Jobson, “Don’t Mess with the Beyhive: All the Times They Came Out Stinging for Beyoncé,” Hello Beautiful, n.d., https://hellobeautiful.com/2787614/beyonce-beyhive-attacks/.

187 and legitimizing that economy by offering explanations, legitimacy, and expertise to the already-existing fervor around her work.

As Black feminist scholars use public platforms to participate in what can only be understood at this point as rituals around Beyoncé’s work, the rituals serve to create overwhelmingly positive affect toward Beyoncé and her work. They also serve to reinforce for those participating that they are “part of something bigger” than themselves, specifically, they are part of the reception of Lemonade and other Beyoncé productions as an adoring and expectant crowd. But that sense of something bigger comes at a particular cost. These ritualistic events do not allow for complex analysis of Beyoncé’s work because they are designed, practiced, and later recollected as pleasurable moments in an otherwise sad world. Pleasure in this case becomes both the reason and the justification for why a Beyoncé ritual can exist in a space of uncritical adulation.

The space available for radical Black feminist work is made increasingly smaller when Beyoncé is the definitional character at the center of our debates. This includes debates occurring in favor of her brand of feminism, as well as those debates centered on critiquing her forms of feminism. Beyoncé-as-feminist traps the conversation around 21st century Black feminism into a space of visibility and celebrity that predetermine the measures of “success,” “failure,” and even community in a manner that aligns with U.S. empire, including heteropatriarchy, white supremacy, and capitalism. Under Beyoncé,

Black feminism becomes hyper-focused on Black women’s (hetero)sexuality, questions of pleasure, and the occlusion of capitalist means of production under super high femme aesthetics.

188 The fantastical use of Beyoncé as Black feminist icon, healer, and speaker on behalf of “Black women” was particularly on display after the release of “Formation” and

Lemonade. The sheer number of articles produced in the aftermath of the video and movie releases conscripted the possible dialogue around Beyoncé’s work into a narrow, and at times uncritical, celebration of the work as a definitive work on behalf of Black women in the United States.27 Beyoncé’s Lemonade became a way in which to stage

Black feminism as an individual journey of Black heteronormative betrayal and liberation. It was primarily Black feminist scholars that shaped this debate in such a way that foreclosed rigorous critical work centering the radical Black feminist frameworks that stand to impact the lived experiences of everyday Black people.

Producing Radical Beyoncé

Beyoncé’s “Formation” video and Super Bowl performance emerged at a particularly difficult tipping point in police brutality against Black and brown people, and in the midst of the 2016 presidential campaign, which would eventually result in a

Donald Trump victory. Hence, Beyoncé entered a highly charged conversation around race, police power, and politics that the celebrity had previously avoided in either music or public statements. Perhaps more than any other time in the celebrity’s history,

“Formation” marked a specific shift from a popular crossover artist to a Black artist with left politics in relation to police power. The other moment Beyoncé made these politics clear was when she and Jay-Z participated in the New Yorkers for Trayvon Martin March

27 Syreeta McFadden, “Beyoncé’s Formation Reclaims Black America’s Narrative from the Margins,” The Guardian, February 8, 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/08/beyonce-formation-black-american- narrative-the-margins.

189 in July of 2013.28 By the time of her 2016 “Formation” video and Super Bowl performance, however, the national public narrative around police brutality and Black

Lives Matter was reaching a fever point, only to tip into a full-on meltdown in the summer of 2016, when the deaths of Alton Sterling in Louisiana and Philando Castile in

Minnesota, the Pulse Nightclub shooting, as well as the shooting deaths of Dallas police officers polarized the national conversation on violence against marginalized groups.29 In response to the Castile and Sterling murders, Beyoncé released a full statement urging her followers to call their legislators to “demand social and judicial changes.” It was the most overt political statement the star has made in her career.30 Given this context, it is understandable that Beyoncé’s “Formation” video and Super Bowl performance have been interpreted as “radical” by many popular liberal Black feminist writers and scholars, due in no small part to her symbolic nods to the Black Panther Party and Malcolm X during Black history month.

On February 7, 2016, Coldplay, the featured artist for Super Bowl 50, invited

Beyoncé and Bruno Mars as guests in their halftime show. Just the day before, Beyoncé

28 Miriam Coleman, “Jay Z and Beyoncé Attend Rally for Trayvon Martin,” Rolling Stone, July 21, 2013, http://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/jay-z-and-beyonce-attend-rally-for-trayvon- martin-20130721. 29 Democracy Now!, “Alton Sterling, Father of Five, Murdered by Police Two Months after ‘Blue Lives Matter’ Bill Signed,” Democracy Now, July 7, 2016, https://www.democracynow.org/2016/7/7/alton_sterling_father_of_five_murdered; Camila Domonoske and Bill Chappell, “Minnesota Gov. Calls Traffic Stop Shooting ‘Absolutely Appalling at All Levels,’” NPR, July 7, 2016, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo- way/2016/07/07/485066807/police-stop-ends-in-black-mans-death-aftermath-is-livestreamed- online-video; Lizette Alvarez and Richard Pérez-Peña, “Orlando Gunman Attacks Gay Nightclub, Leaving 50 Dead” New York Times, June 12, 2016, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/06/13/us/orlando-nightclub-shooting.html. 30 Matthew Dessem, “Watch Beyoncé Perform ‘Freedom’ for Those Killed by Police; Read Her Statement Urging Action,” Slate, July 8, 2016, http://www.slate.com/blogs/browbeat/2016/07/08/read_beyonc_s_statement_on_police_killings.h tml.

190 released the video “Formation,” in which she sank a New Orleans police car with the weight of her body, bragged about her “Negro nose” and her daughter’s nappy hair, and rep’d the Black Southern culture of Houston, TX, her hometown. As a result, there was much anticipation about Beyoncé’s halftime appearance, including questions about whether she would drop a new album, would make a political statement during the performance, or should be boycotted for what was interpreted as “anti-police” sentiments.31 While critics decried Beyonce’s “Formation” video as anti-police, and threatened to boycott the Super Bowl halftime show if she were to perform, Beyoncé and her dancers showed up dressed in costumes reminiscent of the Black Panther Party, complete with berets and belts resembling bullets.

Beginning with a shortened version of Bruno Mars’ “Uptown Funk,” Coldplay provided the musical background while Mars and his dancers offered up an enthusiastic

James Brown-esque dance routine. A minute and a half into his performance, on the cue from the song “Stop! Wait a minute!” we hear a drum interlude, and Mars and his singers begin to repeat, “Wait a minute.” The camera screens left of the stage, where we see

Beyoncé’s all female band, the Sugar Mamas, forming a drum line and taking over the musical cue. The Sugar Mamas are in formation and dressed in all black, with dark sunglasses, berets, leather jackets, and natural hair styles. Behind them we see an explosion of lights and fireworks. As the drum line takes over the beat from the stage, they shift the music into the “Formation” beat. As the camera pans up close on the drum line, they part to reveal Beyoncé standing in a long-sleeved black leather body suit,

31Chelsea Brasted, “Beyoncé Super Bowl Halftime Show Leads to Protests, Boycotts, Conversations, The Times-Picayune, February 10, 2016, http://www.nola.com/music/index.ssf/2016/02/beyonce_boycott_racist_protest.html.

191 complete with two golden sashes crossing her chest, reminiscent of the bullet belts worn by Black Panther members. She also wears a single black stocking on her right leg, which comes to her upper thigh. Her blonde hair is down and free flowing, and she is flanked by two long lines of Black women dancers, all wearing similar long-sleeved black leather midriff shirts, leather shorts with berets, natural hair and combat boots. The look is reminiscent of both the Black Panther Party aesthetic, and of Michael Jackson’s “Bad” video.

As Beyoncé lifts the mic, she begins chanting, “Ok Ladies, now let’s get in

Formation,” the hook from the “Formation” video. It is at this point that audiences familiar with the video release from the day before realize she is going to perform

“Formation.” As Beyoncé steps forward, we see a third line of dancers emerge from behind her, who were previously so perfectly in line that they were fully hidden from the view of the camera. The dancers all move into a configuration of five lines, hitting their marks perfectly as Beyoncé chants “Prove to me you’ve got some coordination,” in which she and the dancers all twerk on the beat of the drum line. This is followed by

Beyoncé chanting the line, “You just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making!”, as she and the dancers all lift their left hands in Black power fists straight up in the air, then assume a parade rest position as the music transitions into the chorus. At the same time, lighting behind the group explodes.

The group moves from parade rest into a modified version of the chorus dance from the “Formation” video, complete with kicks, punches, and Beyoncé’s characteristic ass- twirl that made the “Formation” video famous (corresponding of course with the lines, “I work hard, I grind till I own it. I twirl on my haters,”). As Beyoncé sings “Sometimes I go

192 off, I go hard, take what’s mine, I’m a star,” her dancers move into three lines with

Beyoncé as the meeting point of each. The dancers create a wave effect toward and away from Beyoncé on each of the lines, until she reaches the final line of the chorus, “Cuz’ I slay!” As the background track repeats the line “I slay” in the same cadence as the video,

Beyoncé’s dancers move into an X formation using the same choreography from the video. After holding this X for the last bars of the chorus, Beyoncé directs her dancers once again: “OK ladies now let’s get in formation,” and the music transitions back to

“Uptown Funk,” while Beyoncé and a small dispatch of dancers make their way up onto the stage for an epic dance off with Bruno Mars and his dancers. The dance-off is reminiscent of Michael Jackson choreography, and the two groups dance into the center of the stage, where Beyoncé and Bruno Mars meet in the middle for words and posturing.

This part of the performance is concluded with Beyoncé, Bruno Mars, and Chris Martin of Coldplay walking down the center stage singing the chorus of “Uptown Funk,” ending when Beyoncé pushes the camera filming them to the right so it films the crowd on the field.

Coldplay then finishes their set for the halftime show with a film and music homage to past Super Bowl performances, and a song that mixes lyrics from some of the most famous performances with the lyrics to the Coldplay song “Up & Up.” Beyoncé and

Bruno Mars rejoin Chris Martin to sing the chorus of “Up & Up” at the end of the set, concluding the performance. As television screens went dark around the country after the

193 performance, the commercial immediately following the halftime show was a fifteen second short announcing ticket sales for Beyoncé’s Formation World Tour.32

Still from the Beyoncé Formation World Tour Commercial that aired immediately after the Super Bowl 50 Halftime show

How do we understand this significant moment in mass culture history as instructive for the redefinitions of Black womanhood and Black feminist politics that

Beyoncé’s performance provide us? For one, it is notable that the line Beyoncé’ sings as she and her dancers perform the Black Power salute is “You just might be a Black Bill

Gates in the making!”. This line, perhaps the most important line in both the performance and the video, stage capitalist achievement as the central aspiration of Black elite political dissent. This line places Bill Gates at the top of a desirable hierarchy, one which Beyoncé is suggesting Black people should attempt to emulate—not by becoming themselves, but by becoming “Black Bill Gates,” meaning members of the capitalist ruling class, but

Black.

32 No author, “Beyoncé Announces 2016 Formation World Tour” (video), ABC News, February 7, 2016, http://abcnews.go.com/GMA/video/beyonce-announces-2016-formation-world-tour- 36779886.

194 Beyoncé’s call to attach our aspirational desires to Bill Gates flies in the face of the wisdom of radical Black feminist resistance, precisely because radical Black feminist work positions capitalism as a structure co-articulated with white supremacy and patriarchy, and this structure has harmed Black women and Black people more broadly over the long arc of U.S. history. While individual Black women may have measures of material success under capitalism, what allows capitalism to thrive in the United States is in fact the death and disenfranchisement of the Black masses. Hence, when Beyoncé places Bill Gates at the top of the achievement pyramid she wishes to climb, she is valorizing the structures that have caused tremendous death and destruction for African diasporic peoples over the last 500 years. What is more, placing herself metaphorically at the top of that pyramid, the singer signals to her fans that it is possible for Black women to inhabit the top position of the structure that has caused so much of their generational pain and suffering.

Beyoncé’s call to be “a Black Bill Gates in the making” is not a call to fundamentally change the terms of oppression that ail Black women. It is, instead, a call to don the tactics that built those terms in the first place. In this way, Beyoncé’s narrative suggests that Black people can achieve the same capitalist success as Bill Gates has.

What is left unsaid in Beyoncé’s glittering and beautiful call to capitalistic achievement are the terms of violence and dispossession that we would all be required to engage in to gain that particular level of capitalist achievement.

In fact, the entire “Formation” narrative is couched in the terms of neoliberal capitalist achievement, where Beyoncé’s choice to labor is the determining factor in

195 whether she is successful in gaining “ownership” over the things she desires. As she relates during the Super Bowl performance:

I see it, I want it I stunt, yeah, yellow bone it I dream it, I work hard I grind 'til I own it

This narrative dismisses the structural, institutional, and systemic facts of capitalistic accomplishment, and replaces them with an ideological, fantasy-based, meritocratic aspiration in which Black people can accomplish material success solely through their hard work. Yet, the history of Black labor in the United States does not bear out this fantasy. In fact, under the terms of chattel slavery, Black people were profoundly alienated from the fruits of their labor, at the same time as they were considered as property. This relationship has changed very little in the afterlife of slavery.33

Some Black feminist writers have attempted to dismiss the importance of

Beyoncé’s capitalist investments as a sort of necessary evil, or, as a “privilege” that allows Beyoncé a broader platform to bring Black feminist concerns to the public. As

Bitch writer Tamara Winfrey Harris relates:

“An astonishingly rich star like Beyoncé benefits from capitalism. But she can use her privilege to employ women as dancers, musicians, and photographers, and she can use her power to lift up the creative work of women poets and writers. A world-class athlete willing to swing her weave and shake her ass in a pop video (as Serena Williams did in Lemonade) can challenge the racist and sexist denial of her beauty and femininity. Conversely, the Creole star who owes part of her success to having the “right” skin, hair, and body, can help women without her privilege be seen. This is just as the corporate sister, weave-wearing diva, and club twerker can practice their own feminism amid contradiction.”34

33 Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2008), 6. 34 Tamara Winfrey Harris, “Beyoncé is Fighting the Patriarchy though Pop Culture,” Bitch, May 16, 2016, para. 16, https://www.bitchmedia.org/article/beyonc%C3%A9-fighting-patriarchy- through-pop-culture.

196 While Harris is right to point out that Black feminism is not a monolith, and that Black women are diverse individuals, Harris’ justifications of Beyoncé’s narrative are problematic precisely because they are couched in the individualism of consumeristic choice. For Harris, Black feminism is positioned as an individual practice that welcomes the “contradiction” of Black women’s lives, with capitalist labor and meritocracy anchoring our chances for life and more importantly recognition under a corporate state.

This contradiction is posited as complexity, when it would be more accurately identified as complicity. What is more, Harris’ critique implicitly maintains the very hierarchy of beauty and aesthetics that she insists Beyoncé can help to break down: “Conversely, the

Creole star who owes part of her success to having the “right” skin, hair, and body, can help women without her privilege be seen.”35 Suggesting that Beyoncé “can use her privilege to employ women…” and “use her power to lift up the creative work of women poets and writers,” demonstrates an acceptance of the capitalist power structure as both necessary and workable. The consolidation of power and wealth within the individual person of Beyoncé is exactly what makes her untenable as a Black feminist icon. It is not that Beyoncé should be faulted for being successful according to the terms of white supremacist heteropatriarchy. Rather, Beyoncé’s clear commitment to the narratives of capitalist accumulation, including individualism, consumer choice, and value proved through labor are not the values or narratives that can free Black women—or Black people more generally—in the long term.

This does not mean that Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance and her “Formation” video were not disruptive, particularly to those with white supremacist investments in the

35 Harris, “Beyoncé Is Fighting,” para. 16.

197 construction of the U.S. nation. In particular, her choice to wear two bullet sashes during the Super Bowl performance is a significant nod to the doctrine of self-defense that the

Black Panther Party was built on. And certainly, the Black Power fist in the beginning of the set was performative of the defiance and confidence that the Black Panther Party has come to represent in popular U.S. imagination. What is more, there were concrete reactions to Beyoncé’s performance that indicated it fell outside of what “normal”

Americans imagine is appropriate for a nationally-viewed halftime show.

Certainly there are a number of contextual clues that give some sense of the political significance of the moment in the national imaginary. By February 22nd, 2017, the Miami Fraternal Order of Police had called for a nationwide boycott of Beyoncé’s

Formation World Tour dates across the United States. They were joined by representatives from The National Sheriff’s Association, the Sergeants Benevolent

Association in New York City, the National Association of Police Organization and others who indicated their support for the boycott.36 Specifically, police organizations voiced concern that the Black Lives Matter themes in “Formation” were anti-police, and took specific issue with the Black Panther themed costumes in the Super Bowl 50 performance. At a meeting of the National Sheriffs’ Association held in Washington,

D.C. during the Super Bowl, members “turned off the volume and the video” during

Beyoncé’s portion of the performance.37 A “Boycott Beyoncé” Facebook page also

36 Carma Hassan, Gregory Krieg and Melonyce McAfee, “Police Union Calls for Law Enforcement Labor to Boycott Beyoncé’s World Tour,” CNN, February 20, 2016, http://www.cnn.com/2016/02/19/us/beyonce-police-boycott/index.html; Jessica McKinney, “People Actually Want to Boycott Beyoncé After Her ‘Formation’ Super Bowl Performance,” Vibe, February 8, 2016, https://www.vibe.com/2016/02/beyonce-boycott-formation-super-bowl/ 37Paul Bedard, “America’s Sheriffs Turn Back on Beyoncé Super Bowl ‘Formation’ Performance,” Washington Examiner, February 8, 2016,

198 emerged to support the cause, which has garnered 27,000 likes since February of 2016.

The page’s owner, Patrick D. Hampton, identifies as an African-American man and began the All Lives Matter Foundation, which has raised about $3000 since February 20,

2016. Hampton maintains the page into the present, posting primarily conservative political memes and inflammatory racial messages, such as equating the KKK with

Beyoncé’s background dancers. 38

In response, Beyoncé sold “Boycott Beyoncé” shirts for $45 and phone covers for

$25 at her Formation Tour concerts.39 The boycotts never gained enough momentum to interrupt the Formation World Tour, as the tour topped Beyoncé’s previous Mrs. Carter

Tour at a whopping $256 million gross worldwide, and there were no reported issues with the tour securing the security personnel necessary for the concerts. Despite the failure of the boycott to gather much steam, the narratives of Beyoncé’s “anti-police” stance remained in the public narrative on social media for the duration of her tour.

The Misrecognition of Radicalism

Despite the contested points of Beyoncé’s performance, the specific message she chose to lead with—“You just might be a Black Bill Gates in the making,”—is central for

Black feminist work as we navigate the 21st century U.S., particularly under the first business-president, Donald Trump. Keeping in mind Joy James’ prophetic reminder

http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/americas-sheriffs-turn-back-on-beyonce-super-bowl- formation-performance/article/2582705. 38 See “Boycott Beyoncé,” Facebook, https://www.facebook.com/boycottbeyonceblacklivesmatter/ ; “All Lives Matter Foundation,” Go Fund Me, https://www.gofundme.com/b7qffx9q. 39 Beyoncé premiered the Boycott Beyoncé shirts at the Miami concert date. The Miami police order had been the most vocal about boycotting her. Maeve McDermott, “You Can Now Buy ‘Boycott Beyoncé’ Shirts at the Formation Tour,” USA Today, April 28, 2016, https://www.usatoday.com/story/life/entertainthis/2016/04/28/boycott-beyonce-shirts-formation- tour-miami-police-protest/83637346/.

199 nearly two decades ago that marginalized positionality “…is not indicative of, but is often confused for, an intrinsic or inherent radicalism,” we can understand Beyoncé’s performance and the attendant flurry around the work as a fundamental mis-recognition of Black feminist radicalism.40 This mis-recognition happens in at least two places—first, in the performance of Black radical aesthetics as a stand-in for revolutionary action that has the potential to affect change in the current order. Beyoncé’s performance choices, while disruptive to the national imagination that is currently moving right of center, do not constitute significant challenges to either state or military power, precisely because these actions are couched within the context of an entertainment performance. What is more, Beyoncé’s actions led to significant wealth transfer, not from white people to

Black people, or from rich to poor, but largely from poor and middle class people to

Beyoncé. Tracing the money resulting from Beyoncé’s “radical” actions matters for accurately labeling the political thrust of her work.

The second misrecognition occurs in the scholarly and written interpretations of

Beyoncé’s performance of Black radical aesthetics as a site of radical action.41 In a

Chicago Tribune article, Dr. Kinitra D. Brooks suggested:

“For black women, (‘Lemonade') was very radical from the very beginning, and it was received that way. Black women discussing its revolutionary aspects changed

40 Joy James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” in The Black Feminist Reader, ed. Joy James and T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishers, Inc., 2000), p. 245. 41Brentin Mock, “Beyoncé’s Simple but Radical Porch-Front Politics,” City Lab, April 27, 2016, https://www.citylab.com/equity/2016/04/beyonces-simple-but-radical-porch-front- politics/480006/; Priscilla Ward, “Beyoncé’s Radical Invitation: In ‘Lemonade,’ A Blueprint for Black Women Working Through Pain, Salon, April 25, 2016, https://www.salon.com/2016/04/25/beyonces_radical_invitation_in_lemonade_a_blueprint_for_b lack_women_working_through_pain/; August Brown, “Beyonce’s Radical Gift May Help Nation Heal,” Chicago Tribute Digital Edition, http://digitaledition.chicagotribune.com/tribune/article_popover.aspx?guid=ebfa1754-6164-453f- 8ee5-f6b2b61d0bd0; Myles E. Johnson, “What Beyoncé Won Was Bigger Than a Grammy,” New York Times, February 14, 2017, https://www.nytimes.com/2017/02/14/opinion/what- beyonce-won-was-bigger-than-a-grammy.html.

200 the conversation about it…Black women's acts of caring and healing are political acts, and those things have never been separated. What's revolutionary about (Beyoncé) is that she can make it popular.”42

While Beyoncé’s performance certainly provided a moment of psychic and emotional release for Black subjects living within the context of anti-Black violence in the United

States, and also reflects that Beyoncé herself has achieved a level of economic and political independence that allows her a level of control over her work that is profoundly her own, we should not mistake either of these facts for actual revolutionary action that interrupts the function of the corporate state.

Part of what makes engagement with Beyoncé’s most recent body of work complicated for Black feminists who are trying to characterize the political meaning of her work is precisely a misrecognition of disruptiveness as radicalism. In each case of misrecognition, the performance of Black radical aesthetics is disruptive to the white supremacist vision of the U.S. nation. But disruption does not equal radicalism, which in this case would be a performance that “view[s] (female and black) oppression as stemming from capitalism, neocolonialism, and the corporate state that enforces both43.”

In Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance, these elements are missing. It is in this moment, then, that returning to concrete theoretical work already laid by previous Black feminists and historical work on Black radicalism is a necessary component of mapping out what radicalism in the present might possibly look like, and what “radical” means when we use that term.

Framing Beyoncé’s imagery in the context of Patricia Hill Collins’ work on controlling images is helpful for considering the “ideological dimension of U.S. Black

42Brown, “Beyoncé’s Radical Gift,” para. 7-9. 43 James, “Radicalizing Feminism,” 245.

201 women’s oppression.”44 Although Beyoncé’s images are produced by her own creative team, and feature Beyoncé herself as the centerpiece, this does not mean that her images are devoid of ideological or hegemonic elements. While Collins’ work primarily relates to negative stereotypes of Black women, it is useful to consider how neoliberal markets can achieve the purpose of “forms of control” through images we may consider positive.45 Framed as a form of control, Beyoncé’s may not be as transgressive as some

Black feminist writers portray her to be, even as she also may not fit nicely into the pre- existing negative prototypes we have come to recognize in Black feminist criticism. In addition, how Beyoncé creates her narratives, the actual material process by which she produces her work, and how that work circulates in mass culture matters as part of the framework of the means of production.46 Oppressive systems, ideas, practices, and narratives are reproduced in part through a series of implicit and explicit permissions from the various institutions that support those same systems, ideas, practices, and narratives. In other words, there are key compromises made at the site of Beyoncé’s production that condition what Black feminist thinkers will have to work with on the other side of that production.

One such example comes from the visual production of Beyoncé’s “Formation” video, in which Beyoncé and director Melina Matsoukas used significant portions of a documentary entitled “That B.E.A.T.” by filmmakers Chris Black and Abteem Bhagari47.

44 Patricia Hill Collins, Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment, (New York: Routledge, 2000), 5. 45 Collins, Black Feminist Thought, 72. 46 Althusser, “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” 47Beatrice Verhoeven, “Beyoncé Accused of Ripping Clips from Documentary for ‘Formation’ Music Video,” The Wrap, February 8, 2016, https://www.thewrap.com/beyonce-accused-of- ripping-clips-from-documentary-for-formation-music-video/.

202 According to tweets by film producer Black, he and director Bhagari did not give permission for Beyoncé and Matsoukas to use the images from their documentary, although Beyoncé’s team did approach the filmmakers in an attempt to garner the permission. “They [Beyoncé’s lawyers] sent an NDA, I saw Beyoncé’s name in it. And I just never signed it. And that was it. They never said, ‘Hey, we talked to this person and it’s all good.’ It just kind of ended there. They had reached out to Abteen and he told them no.”48 Nonetheless, Beyoncé’s team garnered permission from Sundance, Somesuch

& Co., and Nokia Music, and as such was on solid ground legally to use the footage. But as Black expresses, "I don't own the rights to it, also I never signed a contract with Nokia or Sundance. If in fact they did get the proper permission, why still use the footage? You had a big budget! Doesn't make sense to me.”49 Black’s comments strike at the heart of questions about artistic ownership, copyright permissions, and capitalist operations within the entertainment industry. Beyoncé, using her legal team and her influence as a capitalist producer, was able to circumvent the wishes of the artists who created the footage she used in her Formation video, footage that is now inextricably associated with her video, rather than with the original creation of “That B.E.A.T.”

What the above example speaks to are practices on the part of Beyoncé, and her creative and legal teams, that support capitalist forms of dispossession in the pursuit of profit. While legally Beyoncé’s team may have procured the images from the media company which owned them, this legal maneuvering does not speak to the actual labor

48 Eric Diep, “Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ Video Takes Scenes Directly from ‘That B.E.A.T.’ Documentary,” Complex, February 6, 2016, para. 3, http://www.complex.com/music/2016/02/beyonce-formation-video-takes-scenes-directly-from- that-beat-documentary. Para. 3 is found after the video clips. 49 Diep, “Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ Video,” para. 6.

203 that the directors of “That B.E.A.T” put into their own work, nor to the very real feelings of disempowerment they felt at seeing their work in the video of a megastar. This, after each artist had clearly stated they did not give Beyoncé permission to use the images. The actual desires of those producing this work were disregarded in favor of allowing

Beyoncé and Matsoukas to utilize the images, which then paid Beyoncé and Matsoukas dividends. And yet, when Beyoncé was questioned about the use of these images, her legal team stated:

“The documentary footage was used with permission and licensed from the owner of the footage. They were given proper compensation. The footage was provided to us by the filmmaker’s production company. The filmmaker is listed in the credits for additional photography direction. We are thankful that they granted us permission.”50

This statement obscures the terms of consent, ownership and agreement between filmmakers, the media companies which own the images, and Beyoncé’s creative team.

What is certain, is that the corporate ownership of the media images does not account for the actual labor of Bhagari, Black and others on the documentary film crew that went into producing the images. In this way, the filmmakers are alienated from their work in such a way that makes its use in Beyoncé’s film particularly painful and frustrating. That

Beyoncé and her team circumvented the artists themselves in order to pursue the permission to use their creative work is capitalist dispossession at its best.

This example would not be so poignant, except that Beyoncé herself insists that she is an artist. “I’m an artist, and I think the most powerful art is usually

50 Diep, “Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ Video,” update 2/6/16 11:03PM. After this article was originally published, Beyoncé’s representative reached out with the quoted statement, which appears in an update.

204 misunderstood.”51 As an artist—as one who creates based on a vision in their mind—

Beyoncé should be held accountable to the standards that artists (particularly from marginalized communities) themselves hold in relation to the production, co-optation, and crediting of their creative work. And yet, in this case and many others, Beyoncé has used the work of other artists in ways that are ethically questionable, and relied largely on a well-paid legal team to provide her the permissions necessary on the back end. Beyoncé has been accused of stealing work throughout the long duration of her career, including the videos for “Countdown,” “Single Ladies,” “Deja Vu,” and “Get Me Bodied,” as well as her 2011 Billboard Music Awards performance of “Run the World.” 52 Artist Azealia

Banks has been particularly critical of Beyoncé’s artistic process, stating: “She’s not an artist, she’s a poacher.”53 While Banks’ criticism may be overstated, it is worth asking why Black feminist writers have not paid more attention to Banks’ sentiments in their own treatments of Beyoncé’s work, especially as they hold up that work as an ideal of

Black feminist art.54 The key question to ask here is, does the production of Black feminist art require a praxis different from what we see in mainstream capitalist society?

51Tamar Gottesman, “Exclusive: Beyoncé Wants to Change the Conversation,” Elle, April 4, 2016, http://www.elle.com/fashion/a35286/beyonce-elle-cover-photos/, para. 25. 52Erika Ramirez, “Op-Ed: When Beyoncé’s Inspiration Turns Into Imitation,” Billboard, May 1, 2013, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/the-juice/1560092/op-ed-when-beyonces- inspiration-turns-into-imitation; Bossip Staff, “Swagger Jacker: 14 Ideas Beyoncé Allegedly Stole,” Bossip, February 19, 2015, https://bossip.com/1106290/swagger-jacker-14-ideas-beyonce- allegedly-stole/; Rachel McGrath, “Beyoncé Sued by Independent Filmmaker Who Claims She ‘Copied’ His Ideas for the ‘Lemonade’ Trailer…and He Wants Share of Her Album Sales,” Daily Mail, June 8, 2016, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-3632296/Beyonce-sued- independent-filmmaker-claims-copied-ideas-Lemonade-trailer-wants-share-album-sales.html 53Mitchell Peters, “Azealia Banks Continues Trashing Beyoncé: ‘She’s Not an Artist, She’s a Poacher,’” Billboard, May 1, 2016, http://www.billboard.com/articles/columns/hip- hop/7350371/azealia-banks-continues-trashing-beyonce-lemonade-shes-not-an-artist 54Trudy Hamilton, “5 Inspiring Quotes From Beyoncé On Art, Creative Process, and Vision,” The Trudz, April 5, 2016, http://www.thetrudz.com/blog/2016/4/5/beyonce-elle-magazine-formation- music-feminism-womanism-quotes; Miriam Bale, “Critic’s Notebook: Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ Is a Revolutionary Work of Black Feminism,” Hollywood Reporter, April 25, 2016,

205 My point here is that in the process of lifting up Beyoncé’s artistic productions as resonant with, or indicative of, Black feminist ideals, Black feminist writers and scholars often elide the means of production that anchor Beyoncé in exploitative capitalist practices. There is a consistent failure to deal, in material terms, with Beyoncé’s complicated relationship with capitalist means of production, that include taking (without credit) images, music, credit and creative ideas as well as questions of fair labor in producing her clothing line.55 There is a contradiction between how some Black feminist writers take up Beyoncé’s work as Black feminist representation, yet simultaneously avoid critical evaluation of the contradictions in the production of her work. For example,

Brittney Cooper, a robust voice in the Beyoncé-as-feminist affective economy, has long argued that Beyoncé is “…a work in progress, as are we all.”56 While some Black feminist writers have dismissed this as either an issue of growth, or as an issue of general imperfection, neither of these reasons justifies an avoidance of analyzing Beyoncé’s actual power. It is in this tension—the refusal to analyze Beyoncé’s access to power while celebrating her as a Black feminist icon to be imitated—that Black feminists must begin to look in the mirror and ask why we are not asking the difficult questions about

Beyoncé. To rescue Beyoncé for the purpose of Black feminist theorizing and pedagogy,

http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/critics-notebook-beyonces-lemonade-is-a-masterpiece- black-feminism-887240. 55Lizzie Crocker, “The Un-PC Truth About Beyoncé’s ‘Sweatshop,’” The Daily Beast, May 21, 2016, https://www.thedailybeast.com/the-un-pc-truth-about-beyonces-sweatshop; Sirin Kale, “How Much It Sucks to Be a Sri Lankan Worker Making Beyoncé’s New Clothing Line,” Broadly, May 17, 2016, https://broadly.vice.com/en_us/article/d7anay/beyonce-topshop-ivy-park- sweatshop-factory-labor; Maya Oppenheim, “Beyoncé’s Ivy Park Sportswear Line Denies Claims Its Clothes Were Produced by ‘Sweatshop Workers Paid 4.30 a Day,” The Independent,, May 18, 2016,http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/beyonces-ivy-park-sportswear-line-denies- claims-its-clothes-were-produced-by-sweatshop-workers-a7035926.html. 56 Brittney Cooper, “5 Reasons I’m Here for Beyoncé, the Feminist,” Crunk Feminist Collective, December 13, 2013, para. 14 http://www.crunkfeministcollective.com/2013/12/13/5-reasons-im- here-for-beyonce-the-feminist/.

206 while dismissing what makes her most problematic through narratives of “imperfection,” is to miss the critical intervention that Black feminist thinkers need to be making in this moment.

In one sense, Beyoncé gives us permission to be complicated, to be both wealthy and marginalized, to be “in progress,” and to be neoliberal subjects and disruptive. Yet, in light of Beyoncé’s proximity to power, the affective economy surrounding her work, and the misrecognition of radicalism in her productions, it seems that Beyoncé also gives

Black feminists permission to be invested in U.S capitalism—to live the materiality of our lives within the U.S. somewhat above the analysis that anti-capitalism and anti- imperialism demands of all radical critical traditions. All of Black life within the empire is complicated, which is to say, capitalism, anti-Black racism, imperialism, misogyny and heteronormativity all structure possibilities and foreclosures for Black people. In this way, we all live contradictory lives in which we have to make choices that often result in someone else's dispossession and even death. Investing in neoliberal narratives of desire, happiness, and choice provide Black elites with a justification to adopt the narratives of the American Dream. For Black feminist activists and writers who have some level of protection from the worst consequences of the U.S. empire due to class, Beyoncé gives permission to be invested and content, or invested and happy, or even invested and not needing or having to name our investment as such.

The Practice of Affective Investment: The Lemonade Syllabus

One recent and useful example of the investment in the affective economy of

Beyoncé-as-feminist comes from the creation of the “Lemonade Syllabus.” The

“Lemonade Syllabus,” published on May 6, 2016, was the creative brainchild of Candice

207 Marie Benbow, a Black feminist writer and doctoral student at Princeton University.57

The project began collectively as a Twitter conversation, when Lemonade viewers began to tweet works of Black feminist writers that they saw reflected in Beyoncé’s Lemonade using the hashtag #lemonadesyllabus. Benbow began to curate the suggestions starting around April 27th, first using a graphic highlighting specific scholars and their suggestions about what to read in order to understand the themes in Lemonade.58 By May

6th, Benbow had published the final version of the “Lemonade Syllabus,” which is a 36- page, full-color Issuu publication that can be downloaded for free.59

The “Lemonade Syllabus” uses full color graphics from the Lemonade film, including the Lemonade album cover for the front page with the title “Lemonade

Syllabus,” and the subtitle, “A Collection of Works Celebrating Black Womanhood.” The back page is a full body shot of Beyoncé in a colorful dress from her performance of the song “All Night Long” at the end of the Lemonade film. The first two pages in the document are an introduction written by Benbow (which I will return to later), and a table of contents that helps orient readers to the over 200 resources listed in the document. The categories in the Table of Contents include: “Fiction & Literature,” “Non-Fiction &

Autobiography,” “Black Feminist Studies,” “English & Critical Theory,” “Historical &

Cultural Studies,” “Inspirational & Self-Care,” “Religion & Womanist Theology,”

“Youth,” “Poetry & Photography,” “Music,” “Theatre, Film & Documentary,” and

57 Candice Marie Benbow, “Lemonade Syllabus,” Issuu, May 6, 2016, https://issuu.com/candicebenbow/docs/lemonade_syllabus_2016; Candice Marie Benbow, “About Candice,” CandiceBenbow.com, n.d., http://www.candicebenbow.com/about/; Princeton Theological Seminary, “Candice Marie Benbow,” PTSEM.edu, n.d., http://www.ptsem.edu/people/candice-marie-benbow. 58 Search term #lemonadesyllabus on Twitter.com, found at: https://twitter.com/search?q=%23lemonadesyllabus&src=typd 59 Benbow, “Lemonade Syllabus.”

208 “Syllabus Contributors.” The final page contains the names and titles of over 70 scholars, writers, preachers, theologians and activists who contributed the resources listed in the document.60

The document follows a pattern that makes generous use of Beyoncé imagery and quotes from the film. It is unclear from the document which quotes are attributable to

Beyoncé, and which quotes are attributable to Warsan Shire, whose poetry was adapted for the Lemonade screenplay.61 However, a brief Google search revealed that most of the quotes from the document are from Warsan Shire’s Teaching My Mother How to Give

Birth, adapted for the film.62 At the top of each page is a full color screenshot from the film, most of which feature shots of Beyoncé’s face in various settings and costuming from the film. Throughout the document there are four full page graphics that place images from the film (three of them of Beyoncé, and one of them Eric Garner’s mother) behind large poetry quotes from the film. With the exception of the full-page graphics, the entire document has a honeycomb greyscale background. The remaining pages are dedicated to a pattern of book lists with the above-named themes, each followed by a single “Notes” page with a picture of Beyoncé from the “Six Inch Heels” portion of

Lemonade. The book list pages contain book titles and their authors, followed by a column named “Date Read.” On the page listing “Music,” the page lists only the titles of

60 Benbow, “Lemonade Syllabus.” 61 Amanda Hess, “Warsan Shire, the Woman Who Gave Poetry to Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’,” New York Times, April 27, 2016, para. 5, https://www.nytimes.com/2016/04/28/arts/music/warsan- shire-who-gave-poetry-to-beyonces-lemonade.html Shire is credited with “film adaptation and poetry.” 62 Search terms included: “If we’re going to heal, let it be glorious,” “You’re the magician, pull me back together again,” “I tried to make a home out of you,” “Grandmother, the alchemist, you spun gold out of this hard life,” “Did he bend your reflection?”

209 musical works and the name of the artists.63 On the “Theatre, Film & Documentary” page, the names of the creative work and the release dates are listed, omitting the names of the authors.64 On some of the book list pages, there are additional quotes from the movie. On the “Syllabus Contributors” page, Benbow lists the following credits at the bottom:

“Visuals: Parkwood Entertainment” “Lyrics: Beyonce.com” “Lemon Photography: CreateHER Stock” “Graphic Design: D. Pickett, LLC”65

Visually, the syllabus reads as a companion document to the Lemonade movie solely through the placement of the vibrant full-color images from the film and the ubiquitous use of quotations and song lyrics from the film/album. The entire reading list is framed by Beyoncé, quite literally. In addition, the honeycomb grayscale that sits in the background of the pages signals a beehive, which is reminiscent of the “BeyHive,” the moniker for Beyoncé’s legion of super fans, made all the more powerful by their access to social media and incredible ability to organize responses to Beyoncé-related events. At every page, the visuals of Beyoncé and the quotes from the film outsize, out-color, and outshine the text of the resources on the reading list. Some of the subject pages, in addition to being framed by a Beyoncé graphic from Lemonade, also include prominent quotes from the film intended to provide a sense of framing for the topic. Both literally and symbolically, the Lemonade text frames the document in such a way that the question

63 Benbow, “Lemonade Syllabus,” 27. 64 Benbow, 28. 65 Benbow, 30-35.

210 of the representation of Black womanhood becomes subsumed within the representation of Beyoncé within Lemonade.

The introduction text to the document is worth quoting here at length, because the manner in which Benbow frames Lemonade, the “Lemonade Syllabus,” the viewing experience of Lemonade, and Black womanhood writ large, gives important clues about the use of Beyoncé and her cultural productions in contemporary Black feminist thought:

“On April 23, 2016, Beyoncé Knowles-Carter released her sixth solo project, Lemonade, through a world premier on HBO. Traversing through pain and heartache towards healing and joy, the visual album chronicled the experiences of many Black women in intimate and social relationships. As they watched, several sisters saw themselves and lamented the treatment they’ve endured at the hands of men who professed to love them and the state that is supposed to protect them. Beyoncé spoke to the joys and pains of Black womanhood in such a way that left sisters exposed, yearning for a covering…for real healing and transformation.

After Lemonade aired, sisters began to seek resources that would help them unpack the rich Black feminist and womanist themes that permeate the visual album. To accomplish this, the “Lemonade Syllabus” hashtag was created. What followed is the essence of Black Girl Magic. Black women, spanning generations and class dynamics, used social media to suggest books, films, songs and poetry—primarily by Black women—that they believe best accompanied Lemonade and spoke to the essence of Black womanhood in its historical and contemporary manifestations. Compiled is over 200 resources that specifically speak to Black women from classics in fiction to Black feminist theory to inspirational and self-care guides. There are even resources for the young Black girls in our lives.

Though the “Lemonade Syllabus” is robust, it is not exhaustive. It is my hope that these works will introduce you to other offerings from amazing Black women who tell our stories in hopes of setting us free. I also hope this inspires other sisters to tap into their own magic and give us the work that will heal and transform us. Whether you use resources from this syllabus in your classrooms or community centers, in women’s prison and detention centers for girls or in Girl Scout troop meetings and bible studies, whether you are using it for your own personal growth and development—let us do the real work to be well. Let us lift up our stories, move beyond our pain and create worlds of hope for generations to come. Let us continue to take the lemons at our feet and make lemonade.

B—thank you for your vulnerability and your willingness to tell our story in such

211 a creative and powerful way. We needed this. Thank you for knowing that we needed it.

To glorious healing!

Candice Marie Benbow”66

Benbow’s introduction letter serves a number of purposes in framing the “Lemonade

Syllabus,” but I am most interested here in how Benbow frames Beyoncé-as-feminist and

Lemonade as an affective object which has the power to create an affective economy tied to the meaning of “Black feminism” in the contemporary moment. First, while Benbow attempts to qualify who she is speaking about in relation to “Black women,” words such as “many” and “several” insinuate that more “Black women” viewers than not could read their own experiences in the film. This quantitative language then slides into the more generalized “sisters,” and it is the use of this generalized language that begins to construct a monolithic “Black woman” who feels represented by the themes in

Lemonade. Next, Benbow uses the term “essence” twice, language that belies the consolidating flows of Beyoncé-as-feminist affective economies. First, she uses it in relation to describing “Black Girl Magic,” writing that the process by which Lemonade viewers came together across social media to create a list of resources resonant with the film was representative of a special power that Black women have. The second instance of “essence” comes just a sentence later, where Benbow states that these resources

“spoke to the essence of Black womanhood in its historical and contemporary manifestations.” Benbow here connects Beyoncé-as-feminst to the wider history of Black womanhood, but speaks about it in the singular, suggesting that what Beyoncé produced somehow catches these complications.

66 Benbow, 2.

212 Yet, words like “many” and “several” belie a level of support for this work that is hardly representative of Black women. In reality, the Lemonade syllabus emerged on the social media platform Twitter, and came primarily from those scholars and writers most engaged with that platform after the release of Beyoncé’s video. While there were certainly many and several Black women on that platform tweeting about Lemonade, and while they did indeed collect a number of scholarly and creative works that Lemonade caused them to think about, it is the cloud of affective affiliation that might serve as an important warning to us here.

In the first paragraph of the Introduction, Benbow states:

“As they watched, several sisters saw themselves and lamented the treatment they’ve endured at the hands of men who professed to love them and the state that is supposed to protect them. Beyoncé spoke to the joys and pains of Black womanhood in such a way that left sisters exposed, yearning for a covering…for real healing and transformation.”67

In Benbow’s construction, then, Black womanhood is heterosexual and politically liberal

(in the sense that they have trust in a state which can be disappointed). This narrow reading of Black womanhood leaves no room for queer Black women, gender nonconforming Black persons, Black trans women, or radical Black women who never expected the state to protect them. What is more, the Introduction funnels all of this consolidating rhetoric through the lens of Beyoncé-as-feminist, attributing to Beyoncé a sense of camaraderie and intention that we have no way to confirm.

At the end of the Introduction, Benbow writes:

“B—thank you for your vulnerability and your willingness to tell our story in such a creative and powerful way. We needed this. Thank you for knowing we needed it.”68

67 Benbow, 2. 68 Benbow, 2.

213 This message, addressed directly to Beyoncé, makes generous assumptions about the knowledge, intentions and political investments of Beyoncé as she created Lemonade.

And in fact, the short statement belies the investments of the affective economy of

Beyoncé-as-feminist, precisely because Benbow channels the longings of Black feminist communities to be recognized, heard, and cared for through Beyoncé. In this way,

Benbow frames Beyoncé as an intentional and community sanctioned public advocate on behalf of Black women’s pain, desires, and fears. It is clear in her construction of this letter that she believes Beyoncé’s Lemonade is a work representative of, and for, Black women. “Representative of,” meaning that it accurately “spoke to the joys and pains of

Black womanhood.”69 “Representative for,” meaning that it provides definitional power by which Black women can name their experiences—this is what Black womanhood looks like, feels like, and sounds like.

The “Lemonade Syllabus” itself is a strange but representative artifact of the obsession with and use of Beyoncé as a ritual figure in the public discourse of Black feminism. The arc of Benbow’s letter at the beginning of the syllabus is teleological. It assumes, from the very beginning, that hope, healing and redemption are all possible outcomes in the current world for Black women—both in heterosexual relationships and in relation to the state: “Traversing through pain and heartache towards healing and joy, the visual album chronicled the experiences of many Black women in intimate and social relationships. As they watched, several sisters saw themselves and lamented the treatment they’ve endured at the hands of men who professed to love them and the state that is supposed to protect them.”70

69 Benbow, 2. 70 Benbow, 2.

214 There is so much in this small space to unpack, yet small spaces of Black women’s discourse matter greatly to the way we construct possibilities for Black feminist futures. Indeed, in the broad literature of Black feminist work, whether it be in creative work, novels, poetry, in academic work, in journalistic work, Black feminist work assumes a level of intimacy with its subjects and objects. This assumption of intimacy is simply a fact, and that fact can lead to life-affirming results as easily as it can leave us devastated in its wake. The assumption of intimacy in so much Black feminist work comes, at least in part, from a belief in shared experiences occurring at the violent intersection of race and gender under U.S. empire. But it also comes from the fundamental problem with representation as it pertains to Black life. Underlying the ongoing debates about stereotypes and iconography in Black feminist work is the assumption that what we see on any screen speaks a particular truth about our own lives.

We believe, for whatever reason, that what we see on that screen contains a measure of lived truth for the subjects and objects doing the work of representation. We see Beyoncé say she “woke up like this,” and we believe her, even as we know, logically, that she produced that look with teams of makeup artists and hours of preparation. Hence, when

Benbow addresses Beyoncé directly, it is both the assumption of intimacy in Black feminist work as well as a misrecognition of the “truth” of representation that are the conditions of possibility for what comes next, which demonstrates the emotional power behind affective investment.

Benbow reinforces, in three short sentences, a central myth that is the basis of the affective economy of Beyoncé-as-feminist for fans that also identify as Black feminists:

215 “B—thank you for your vulnerability and your willingness to tell our story in such a creative and powerful way. We needed this. Thank you for knowing we needed it.”71

That community had already been sutured together through the actual social (media) experience of Lemonade’s premier, and Benbow both constructs the myth of Beyoncé’s intentions at the same time that she reflects it as a pre-existing sensibility among those she consulted with on Twitter in constructing the syllabus. What is most curious here, however, is the direct address to Beyoncé, and the imposition of certain knowledge and intentions onto Beyoncé as a figure who, in most cases, still exists as an image and a public figure, as opposed to y(our) friend from down the street. In Benbow’s construction, Beyoncé both knew and intended to tell Black women’s stories, and knew

“that we [Black women] needed it” to be told.

We could ponder what it means for a Black public intellectual to make an appeal to a Black celebrity in a forum that the intellectual knows will likely be seen by said

Black celebrity. But I am more interested in understanding the address to Beyoncé as not really being about Beyoncé herself, but being about Benbow articulating an investment in

Beyoncé to effectively stand in for “Black womanhood” as a representative figure in modern media and for affective investment. By framing Beyoncé’s Lemonade as a universal commentary on Black women’s interface with the state and representative of their relationships with Black men, academics and critics alike passed over a critical assumption which radical Black feminism has questioned for decades. In none of these intellectual or activist traditions has there been an assumption that “the state” as it has

71 Benbow, 2.

216 emerged in U.S. colonialism, was meant to “protect” Black women, much less Black people more largely.

Conclusion: Accountability and Divestment

It is exceedingly hard to hold texts accountable in mainstream culture. Said another way, there is no form of radical Black feminist accountability available to Black feminist thinkers that can change the imagery of Black celebrities which has already been produced. Beyoncé, as both a person and as a text, is beyond our accountability as Black feminist thinkers, and this matters for how we as use her as a site for Black feminist theorizing and a site for Black feminist affect and affection.

Despite Beyoncé being beyond accountability in this manner, the consolidating flows of capitalism create a space where Beyoncé’s productions and the discourse around her come to stand in for “Black womanhood,” just as her work comes to stand in for

“Black women’s experience.” Rather than being a window into one elite Black woman’s experiences, popular liberal Black feminist writers and scholars have articulated

Beyoncé’s work as representative of “Black women in America,” writ large.72 What is more, these writers have positioned Beyoncé as a potential Black feminist icon by centering analyses of her work, life, and social media presence in their writing for mainstream audiences.73 This represents a tremendous affective, economic, and

72 McFadden, “Beyoncé’s Formation Reclaims”; Zandria F. Robinson, “Beyoncé’s Black Southern ‘Formation,” Rolling Stone, February 8, 2016. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beyonces-black-southern-formation-20160208; 73 Lemieux, “Black Feminism Goes Viral”; Cooper, “Why Feminism Needed Beyoncé”; Melissa Harris-Perry, “A Call and Response with Melissa Harris-Perry: The Pain and the Power of ‘Lemonade,’” Elle, April 26, 2016, https://www.elle.com/culture/music/a35903/lemonade-call- and-response/; Lori Adelman, “Black Feminist Roundtable on bell hooks, Beyoncé, and ‘Moving Beyond Pain,’” Feministing, May 11, 2016, http://feministing.com/2016/05/11/a-feminist- roundtable-on-bell-hooks-beyonce-and-moving-beyond-pain/.

217 intellectual investment in Beyoncé-as-feminist that cannot sustain radical Black feminist critique and praxis.

This investment is unsustainable because Black feminists are largely unable to hold

Beyoncé accountable for—or even provide feedback about—the narratives that circulate through her work. In this way, the Black feminist theorizing that emerges from

Beyoncé’s work and life is ever more unapproachable in the way that the celebrity herself is beyond the reach of common people. Hence, Black feminist theorizing that centers

Beyoncé’s work trends increasingly toward the realm of fantasy, rather than being grounded in the lived experiences of Black women and femmes whose everyday lives do not yield the power and glamour of fame and celebrity. What is more, the effects of individualism are evident in much of the popular liberal Black feminist encounter with

Beyoncé. Radical Black feminist praxis relies heavily on practices of collectivity and community, even when those values are difficult to attain or are mired in conflict.

Beyoncé has no accountability to everyday Black feminists, and is beyond the accountability of Black feminists precisely because of her location as an elite entertainer in the United States.

Building a different type of future, such as a radical Black feminist future, necessitates a level of honesty about where we are, how we affect others, and as Pat

Parker reminds us, a serious commitment to divestment from those forms of production that provide us with comfort at someone else’s cost. Parker argues,

“In order for revolution to be possible, and revolution is possible, it must be led by the poor and working class of this country. Our interest does not lie with being a part of this system, and our tendencies to be co-opted and diverted are lessened by the realization of our oppression. We know and understand that our oppression is not simply a question of nationality but that poor and working class people are oppressed throughout the world by imperialist powers.

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We as women face a particular oppression, not in a vacuum but as a part of this corrupt system. The issues of women are the issues of the working class as well. By not having this understanding, the women’s movement has allowed itself to be co-opted and mis-directed.” 74

If we frame aspects of Beyoncé’s production as forms of capture by U.S. capitalism, and if we recognize the liberal Black feminist writing about Beyoncé as a misdirection of our resources away from the important work of evading those systems, then we can begin to recalibrate our efforts in the public sphere related to Black feminism. Specifically, reorienting the brilliance of Black feminist thinkers away from the affective economy of

Beyoncé-as-feminist, and instead marshalling our resources toward joining those who engage the daily lived conditions of Black women, could represent an intentional divestment toward more radical Black feminist visions.

74 Pat Parker, “Revolution: It’s Not Neat or Pretty or Quick,” in This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color, ed. Cherríe Moraga and Gloria Anzaldúa, (New York: Kitchen Table Woman of Color Press, 1981), 240.

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[CONCLUSION] “An Imagined Place Might Save Your Life:” Despair, Mourning, and World-Breaking

I am, in many ways, concerned about the current state of Black feminist theorizing as it takes on increasingly hidden and not hidden forms of post-sensibilities, including post-feminism, post-racialism, and what I would call post-critique. Much of this theorizing is taking place in readings of current mass culture texts and discourses, and I want to suggest here that simple, and even critical, readings of present-day mass cultural figures, images, and pieces do not constitute strong Black feminist critique when they are primarily concerned with the recuperation and/or defense of those mass culture texts. In other words, I am concerned about what I see as a blunting of incisive Black feminist critique that is conversant with and against other important forms of critical thought, including Marxism, cultural studies, psychoanalysis, and post-structuralism, to name a few.

The neoliberal university’s focus on “interdisciplinarity” is certainly one reason for what I argue is the weakening of Black feminist theorizing in the present day, in part because we have arrived at a time when there is a serious reduction in how much critical literature we must be conversant with in order to have something to say about mass culture texts. We have also entered a time when critiquing mass cultural texts, whatever they may be, is a more popular critical move than engaging with the structural, affective and psychic forms of unfreedom we are living through every day. This deficit, then, is blunting the critical force of much Black feminist criticism by reducing it to recuperative and/or defensive readings of and reactions to what is happening in mass culture.

220 In conclusion, then, I want to offer a refusal of sorts. I want to refuse, first, to read a mass-mediated cultural text and instead call us to the space of the written word, which works upon us in a different sort of way. And I want to refuse pleasure, happiness, empowerment and good feelings as solid ground upon which to launch an effective radical Black feminist critique, or as an adequate politics upon which we can engage a neoliberal, late capitalist society which survives in part through distortions of pleasure and joy. I want to be, borrowing from Sara Ahmed, a sort of Black feminist killjoy in order to engage what I believe is the generative ground of despair and mourning.

In her work “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,”

Hortense Spillers begins her meditation on how gender, slavery and blackness work together by drawing attention to the strange and complicated terrain of the many meanings of Black women within the context of national belonging. Drawing on the contingent relationship between national definition and Black women’s status as outsider,

Spillers states that “My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.”1 Yet, Spillers also gestures to a Black being—a Black woman-being—that exceeds these definitions, stating that “in order to speak a truer word about myself, I must strip down through layers of attenuated meanings, made an excess in time, over time, assigned by a particular historical order, and there await whatever marvels of my own inventiveness.”2 I want in this short conclusion to linger a bit on the journey through layers of pain, distortion, and despair in order to offer a lens on what a refusal of

1 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics, 17, no 2 (1987): 65. 2 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,” 65

221 happiness, comfort and belonging—or as I’m calling it here, world-breaking—might have to offer within the context of U.S. empire.

Dionne Brand, in her memoir Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, and Saidiya Hartman in her memoir Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic

Slave Route, both engage themes of mourning and feelings of despair as they examine their present-day relationship with the Atlantic slave trade, U.S. Empire, and the conundrum of belonging and placelessness that haunts much of the African Diaspora in the Americas.3 While both books could be, and have been, read as Afro-pessimist texts that engage a political ontology of blackness as void or nothingness, I want to read these texts within a broader understanding of each author’s work, as well as press them against the seemingly contradictory preoccupation of Black feminism with survival and reproduction, in all of their meanings.

I want to suggest that the ways Brand and Hartman mobilize mourning and despair in their work are actually generative. Specifically, they are generative for working against narratives of recuperation and reform, and as a way “in” to practices that “speak a truer word” of Black women as subjects, and can unlock radical potential. Here, my understanding of radical potential is potentiality which is willing to engage destruction toward a productive purpose; potential that is interested in destroying, not reforming, the status quo.

Both Brand and Hartman engage in a decolonial praxis of a refusal to be “happy,” which is significant particularly if happiness is understood as a neoliberal affect offered

3 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging, (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001); Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008).

222 in exchange for silence about one’s participation in the very real forms of oppression and precarity affecting the lives of most people living in the world today. What Brand and

Hartman offer are meditations on how despair and mourning can produce a refusal of empire-produced pleasure, in exchange for fugitivity, flight, and moments of self- possession. Despair, therefore, is generative because it is one requirement for taking action against an appealing and strong fantasy of the American Dream, which is only held in place via American Empire.

In this way, they both engage in a form of world-breaking which I want to posit is necessary in order to enact the world-making that author Katherine McKittrick examines in Demonic Grounds.4 World-breaking is a concept that I wish to offer here as a compliment to world-making, and which includes, but is not limited to, to those processes we commonly call “coming into consciousness.” If we understand decolonization as constant process, rather than an either/or state, and we understand hegemonic processes to be fluid rather than static, then world-breaking is a practice that can take on multiple forms and meanings necessary for gaining both the critical and sometimes physical, financial, emotional, and psychic distance necessary to imagine a new world.

Therefore, my working definition of world-breaking is simply any practice of decolonization that serve to sever subjects’ affective, psychic, financial and/or physical attachments to the forms of empire that serve to keep them “in place.” Spillers’ reference to “digging through the attenuated layers” of distorted Black womanhood is one such example of world-breaking. So, too, are practices of self-sustainability many Afro- diasporic communities have cultivated, as well as efforts aimed toward spiritual and

4 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle, (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2006).

223 psychic reclamation, such that we see in communities of Rastafari, voodoo, Yoruba, and

Black magic/mysticism. Black feminist critique, when it is employed toward the goal of illuminating the fetters of empire, can also be thought of as a world-breaking practice.

In Map to the Door of No Return: Notes on Belonging, Dionne Brand takes us on a wandering journey around the world, beginning with a place of great despair—the Door of No Return. Calling the door “not mere physicality” but “a spiritual location” and “also perhaps a psychic destination”, Brand posits “In some desolate sense it was the creation place of Blacks in the New World Diaspora at the same time that it signified the end of traceable beginnings”.5 In her description of the Door of No Return, the Atlantic slave trade, and all that happens to the descendants of the trade as chattel of the empire, Brand continuously breaks both our attachment to an idealized “Africa” that exists pre-colonial encounter, as well as attachments to the very idea of a “nation” to which Blacks in the diaspora can truly belong. I want to suggest that this engagement with despair is not simply hopeless musings, nor a fetishizing of the positionality of the abject; rather, Brand appears to be attempting to destabilize the taken-for-granted relationships that Black diasporic peoples have with the very structures of empire that might tempt them to believe they can achieve belonging if they “fit in” in the correct ways. Brand also breaks an idealized relationship with the past, reminding us that the neoliberal, neocolonial empire we currently live within emerged from the capitalist, colonial empire that broke our homelands into thousands of pieces. Not only is there no “going back” to an idealized past, but African enslavement, according to Brand, constitutes the founding condition of both empire and diasporic Black people’s alienation within/from that empire.

5 Brand, Map to the Door, 1, 5

224 What is Brand’s purpose in leaving us in such a devastating place in this work?

Part of the answer seems to be in her take on nationalisms:

“I know many nationalists along this journey. Each square foot of the Americas has its nationalisms. And probably the most powerful of these nationalisms can be experienced in the U.S. But Jamaica, Brazil, Antigua, even the volcanic Montserrat are no less virulent. There are flags and anthems, even a real love for each place—the ways and objects and events which collect into nations. But the Door of No Return opens all nationalisms to their imaginative void.”6

Brand seems concerned with breaking the idea that there can be “good” nations in the present age, an age that, as Sylvia Wynter argues, begins with the action of European colonialism (“1492: A New World View”). This act of colonial conquest and, as Brand is arguing here, colonial acquisition of both people and lands, has colored all configurations of the nation-state into the present-day. As such, there is no nation-state that can exist in a positive relationship to its citizens and (more importantly) its non-citizens, even when those nationalisms are composed primarily of the dispossessed in the centuries-long game of colonial empire. Brand is engaged here in the practice of world-breaking, brought about by her serious engagement with the devastating, despairing reality of The Door of

No Return.

She hints at her intentions again in her argument about origins and in her truth- telling about the relationship “we” want with the nation-states brought about through empire:

“Too much has been made of origins. All origins are arbitrary. This is not to say that they are not also nurturing, but they are essentially coercive and indifferent. Country, nation, these concepts are of course deeply indebted to origins, family, tradition, home. Nation states are configurations of origins as exclusionary power structures which have legitimacy based solely on conquest and acquisition.”7

6 Brand, 49 7 Brand, 64

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Through her discussion of origins, Brand connects conquest, acquisition, and the nation state. She complicates, or rather, reminds us of the complicated relationship between

Black people and the contemporary nation-state by signaling that if origins are what we seek, we must make our way through, not around, or above, or in spite of, or without the painful layers of chattel slavery and colonial occupation. It is a painful journey that, much like the original Atlantic slave trade itself, many of us may not be able to survive. Brand eschews any forms of idealization that would allow us to reclaim a homeland without first walking back through the Door of No Return and reckoning with what that journey means—and even if it is possible. In her long meditation on the Black body, which I have chosen not to quote here in the interest of time, Brand reminds us that this journey was as much a journey across physical space and time, as well as a journey of subject destruction and creation at the site of the Black body. Hence, as travelers, we are “world-broken” twice over: in our accounting of history, and also within our own bodies, which signify, among many other things, the physical manifestation of property-in-person that animates colonial capitalism.

Brand goes on to address those of us who might attempt to build our hopes in the present-day forms of nation-state that exist as a result of liberation struggles, such as those nation-states in the Caribbean:

“Some of us want entry into the home and nation that are signified by these romances. Some of us in the Diaspora long so for nation—some continuous thread of biological or communal association, some bloodline or legacy which will cement our rights in the place we live. The problem of course is that even if those existed—and they certainly do, even if it is in the human contraband which we represent in the romance—they do not guarantee nation for Blacks in the Diaspora.”8

8 Brand, 67

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Brand’s final move in her attempt to lay waste to nationalism as a useful (or even possible) site of affiliation for Blacks in the diaspora is to remind us that the very structure of the nation-state relies on winners and losers, on the excluded and the included—even when it is occupied predominantly by, and even “run” by, Black people.

This last moment of despair, her reminder that even living within nation-states of our

“own making” do not “guarantee nation for Blacks in the Diaspora,” is a final shattering, desperately sad layer to consider. What makes this last layer so difficult is her acknowledgement that nation—here a way to describe deep, certain belonging—is something that Black people in the diaspora long for. By reminding us, however, that the foundations of European, and later, U.S. empire are constructed with Black bodies as

“human contraband,” Brand forces us to face our arrivals in the empire, across time and space, as tied inextricably to slavery, genocide and deep unbelonging.

In a similarly devastating fashion, Saidiya Hartman in Lose Your Mother sets about a task of breaking a particular narrative of recuperation, idealization, and origins between U.S. Blacks and Ghana. Part memoir, part historical “fabulation,” Hartman sets about a monumental task of critiquing a Ghanaian tourist industry rooted in what remains of the Atlantic slave trade. Relying heavily on narratives of return, roots and homecoming, the industry—as Hartman sees it—relies on the present-day longing of

African Americans to find a place they belong. “We may have forgotten our country, but we haven’t forgotten our dispossession.”9 In Hartman’s construction of Black desire within the empire, Black people desire “a place that we can call home, a place better than

9 Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 87.

227 here, wherever here might be.”10 That desire, then, is hailed by the tourist industry that serves as the physical and psychic site of so many Doors of No Return.

For Hartman, however, it is in engaging the harsh reality of the irrecoverable voices of the enslaved from Ghana that she forces her readers to reckon with their present-day lives within the empire. Rather than offering an idealized African homeland as an escape from U.S. Empire, plagued with anti-blackness, Hartman instead points to the many ways that Ghana itself was changed through the Atlantic slave trade, colonization, and later attempts at Pan-African recuperation. She further points to how much “American empire” has marked her, even as she understands herself, and is marked, as outside that empire’s inheritance. By disrupting an idealized vision of return to an idealized homeland, Hartman engages in a process of world-breaking that interrupts an easy belonging anywhere for Blacks in the Diaspora:

“The hope is that return could resolve the old dilemmas, make a victory out of defeat, and engender a new order. And the disappointment is that there is no going back to a former condition. Loss remakes you. Return is as much about the world to which you no longer belong as it is about the one in which you have yet to make a home.”11

While Hartman has been criticized, probably fairly, for overstating her case as to failed belonging for U.S. Blacks in Ghana, this last quote tells us about some of the layers she intends to dig through in order to “speak a truer word” about herself and many U.S.

Blacks who do not feel at home anywhere. She asks us to interrogate why we want to return. Specifically, she asks what about our current world is unlivable as to cause a desire to live elsewhere. Hartman reminds us that the very thing we may attempt to fix

10 Hartman, 87. 11 Hartman, 100.

228 through a “return” to a homeland—our sense of alienation—can actually be made more acute when we recognize the ways in which empire has made an indelible mark on every place. Blacks in the diaspora are not just severed from home; African tribes also lost mothers, brothers, fathers, sisters and children, as well as land, autonomy, sovereignty, worldviews and ways of life. Everything is “contaminated” by the process of empire.

Perhaps more concretely than Brand, Hartman connects the afterlife of slavery with the present day, temporally, thematically, and in the lived conditions of Blacks living in the United States.

“I, too, live in the time of slavery, by which I mean I am living in the future created by it….the perilous conditions of the present establish the link between our age and a previous one in which freedom too was yet to be realized….If slavery feels proximate rather than remote and freedom seems increasingly elusive, this has everything to do with our own dark times.”12

Hartman, I believe, wants us to avoid idealizing an African homeland as a means to escape a truly horrible present under U.S. Empire. She could be (or is) responding in part to Afrocentrism as a critical framework capable of providing a vision of freedom that addresses what both Blacks in the diaspora and Africans in the motherland lost in the fires of colonialism. Hartman seems bent on making her readers face despair in the form of banal, everyday life within the “belly of the beast.”

In closing, I want to think about what the stakes of despair are, and what each author seems to be offering us in the face of (rather than despite) despair. Hartman offers what I think is a particularly cogent critique of both reformist politics and reparations as they have grown up in the United States:

“Needing to make the case that we have suffered and that slavery, segregation, and racism have had a devastating effect on black life is the contemporary analogue to the defeated posture of Wedgwood’s pet Negro. The apologetic

12 Hartman, 133.

229 density of the plea for recognition is staggering….The enslaved knew that freedom had to be taken; it was not the kind of thing that could ever be given to you. The kind of freedom that could be given to you could just as easily be taken back.”13

Hartman goes on to name some things that freedom looked like to the enslaved: dying in a revolt, burning cane fields, staging a general strike, creating a new republic. She argues that freedom is not a static state, or the accomplishment of one thing. It is, rather, “won and lost, again and again. It is a glimpse of possibility, an opening, a solicitation without any guarantee of duration before it flickers and then is extinguished.”14 In seeking to honor enslaved ancestors, then, Hartman suggests that Blacks in the diaspora must seek more than “the end of property in slaves,” but rather “the reconstruction of society.”15

Gesturing to DuBois in much of this language, toward the radical ends that Black

Reconstruction was written to convey, Hartman lays out the purpose of her journey of despair through this book: to make clear that reform will not release Blacks in the diaspora from our suffering, will not end the reign of empire, and will not honor the sacrifices of our enslaved ancestors.

World-breaking, and an engagement with despair, is necessary in the present day to assist us in releasing the very powerful forms of attachment that function to blunt our radical impetus to destroy the structures of empire that cause so much precarity and suffering around the world. In a very real way, African Americans and Blacks living within the United States are at a sort of crossroads in this moment. Faced with the despairing fact that Black lives do not appear to matter forces us to ask difficult and critical questions, including: To whom do Black lives not matter? Who are we addressing

13 Hartman, 169. 14 Hartman, 170. 15 Hartman, 170.

230 when we say that our lives matter? Are we Wedgewood’s pet negro, begging for recognition in this moment from people who have intentionally and consistently turned a blind eye to our suffering as a precondition of their power within U.S. empire? What work of abolition is left to do in the present day, and how do we set about this work with the eyes, ears, and desires of our enslaved ancestors as our primary guide? How do we, in this moment, reorient ourselves from supplication and begging to be recognized, to a stance that fights for and takes freedom (which is never given), regardless of who is willing to share it?

By engaging the despair of living within the empire under late capitalism, I believe we can begin to mourn not only the painful realities of unbelonging within the

U.S. and under global capitalism, but also mourn the fact that the civil rights movement, rather than being a monumental step in a journey toward freedom, was actually just the everyday forms of struggle that our predecessors undertook in a fight that was as unfinished for them then as it is for us now. Allowing our belief in the United States as a salvageable democracy to be broken, and allowing for the narratives we have been offered for Black progressivism in the 20th century to be destroyed, makes space for us to mourn our current states of unfreedom, and to let go of the many illusions that neoliberalism offers us to soothe our pain. Facing our pain, we can begin to see our own moment as deeply connected to a never-ending struggle for freedom, and when we understand that this freedom is never given, but must be taken, we can be more clear about what a complete reconstruction of society would entail.

231 [CODA] Poems on Capture

These poems were written in 2016 as an initial attempt to outline my thoughts on capture as a theoretical concept. I have included them here because the work that poetry does matters deeply to the Black feminist tradition, and because they serve as an archive of my process in a differently accessible way.

8/16/2016

21st Century Plantations

Freedom… Was never meant to be a better place on the master’s plantation And wearing the missus shoes Doesn’t mean we are going somewhere better

Freedom… Isn’t here in this place No matter how pretty we make our shacks look Or how many of us get into the big house

We are just resting here and sometimes the view is nice But some of us forgot we are just resting here So we’re trying to build a house On land drenched with ancestors’ blood and Under lynching trees And we tell each other that the monstrous view And slippery wet red foundation under our feet Is the condition everywhere So there’s no point in going elsewhere Or even imagining a new place to be

Freedom… Is out of (this) place With the big house and its big people And I never wanted to be big like white I just want to be Black me, but free

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8/17/2016

On Shine

When I hear the word shine I see oil-slicked bodies on an auction block Shiny and posed for the highest bidder Who are you shining for? Would it be shine if buyers aren’t looking?

It’s a strange thing How we carry these ancestral pains into our present Not as reminder of their sacrifice But as new chains

Only this time no one had to catch us And no one has to chop off your foot To make you stay

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8/18/2016

Scattered Soul

The frustrating thing is Not being able to get back the pieces of my soul You took from me that day

Even as they were unwillingly given There is no willing them back So I am amputated

As survivors we move forward ever healing but marked Without those pieces With a “come back to me” ever in our throats

If you still hold that piece of my soul Does it mean you can capture me again Anytime you wish?

Do these pieces give you a map To where I am trying to build A safe resting place

Is this why I am always running? Is this why even once I find my North I can always be compelled to return?

Is wanting me back Enough To bring me back

Is wanting me back Enough

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8/19/2016

Black Girls in Ivory Towers

They say knowledge is power But my knowledge doesn’t feel strong When stuffed into this tiny space Between academic press and white approval Between white European philosophy and social science eugenics

My words don’t come easily in this place You look at me as if you don’t understand when I write the word Black on a page When I write the world Black on a page Even though as I type, the words pop up, black, on this page I feel so strange in those moments

And I believe you know that what I write is true But it is also hard, for all of us And if we all encounter it honestly then No one can say they never read Black words on a page No one can say I didn’t tell them how to save the world

So maybe it’s easier to stuff me into a tiny space Between white expectations and Black fear Greying out my words until They mean just enough to you to be interesting But not enough to be powerful, for me

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8/21/2016

From Now

From now, inclusion seems closer But in my honest moments I can still taste white’s only water fountains And smell back door take-out bags

Now, I resent the space and time not belonging takes up But I do not leave this place because My grandmother could not imagine being here So I say I do this for her

Except I’m uncertain this is what she meant When she said she wanted better for me And we are carrying a burden of freedom imagined And we are uncertain of what that vision meant

Did they want what their oppressors had Or did they want freedom? How are those things the same, And how are they radically different?

What is the calculus we can use To decipher the difference Between then and now To multiply our freedom?

236

8/24/2016

Master’s Tools—A haiku

The master’s tools are The ones marked with someone’s blood Let’s leave those behind

237

8/26/2016

Except Magic

I am captured, not by fear, but by terror. And I want to know how to outrun this death-dealing, grotesque thing That chases all of the bright ones Until suicide seems like a viable option And I am looking for a small opening in this crowding darkness Where I can breathe and believe We gon’ be alright

But my escape going to have to come by a miraculous route The grotesque thing has taken everything except for magic And I was never taught how to weave possibilities from nothing

Somebody teach me the magic that is my birthright Or Goddess teach me how to teach myself I want to be free

238

8/31/2016

Caught

Can we get caught, and not know it? I suppose that depends On how big the cage they use to keep us is.

239

9/1/2016

C.A.P.T.U.R.E.

Catches All People Thru Unyielding Repetitive Engagement

240

9/4/2016

How It Looks

The challenge with being captured today is that it’s hard to tell Especially for those of us who aren’t on a plantation Or in a jail Or in a ghetto We look really free compared to others And maybe we even feel free but…. Something’s not quite right

Patriarchy

Sometimes The only way I can get free Is to look my greatest fear in the eye And stand there, vulnerable and without defense

Because sometimes It’s the fear that keeps me captive Rather than what you did Or didn’t do

Black Excellence

If you had to choose between being excellent Or being free Which would you choose?

241