This article takes direction from the transnational feminist lesbian encounter that took place between the Dutch collective Sister Outsider and Audre Lorde in the 1980s to reflect on the role of archives within transnational feminist research. Drawing on archival materials from the International Archive for the Women’s Movement (IAV) at Atria (Institute on Gender Equality and Women’s History) in Amsterdam in the Netherlands, and the Audre Lorde Papers at Spelman College in Atlanta, Georgia in the United States, I consider how (...) fragmented archives offer stories on kinship, intimacy and loss. Taking into account the ‘absences’ and ‘presences’ (Lewis, 2017) produced in this archival research project, I propose an archival research methodology that is rooted in a practice of ‘orientation’ (Ahmed, 2006a, 2006b), ‘listening’ (Campt, 2017) and ‘intervention’ (Appadurai, 2003). (shrink)

Ghost variables are variables in program languages that do not correspond to physical entities. This special issue, based on a panel on “Race as a Ghost Variable” at the 2017 Meeting of the Society for Social Studies of Science, traces ideas of “race” in particular niches of science, technology, and medicine where it is submerged and disavowed, yet wields power. Each paper is a case study exploring ghosts that emerge through the resonance among things as heterogeneous as hair patterns, hormone (...) levels, food tastes, drug use, clinic locations, proximity to disaster, job classifications, and social belonging and suspicion, all of which vibrate with meanings accumulated over long racial histories. Together, the papers further elaborate methods and analytic models for identifying the operations of race—the relations and processes that make it, the effects that it has. A chief appeal of the metaphor of the ghost is that it brings the importance of history to the fore. Ghosts are simultaneously history and the present, not just an accretion of earlier experiences, but the palimpsest left when one tries to erase them. Sometimes faint and hard to discern, sometimes rambunctious and disruptive, ghosts refuse our attempts to simply move on. (shrink)

This article aims to explore how the archival life of Olive Morris might radically rebuff the devaluation of Black womanhood and identity in Britain. Harnessing a Black feminist framework, I approach Lambeth Archives, where the Olive Morris Collection is found as a therapeutic space. Through an understanding of Olive as complex, I disrupt hegemonic expectations of Black women and propose that within the space of this research, Black womanhood be allowed the freedom of self-definition. In a conglomeration of the documents (...) and voices of the community that remembers Olive, marginalised epistemologies are legitimised. Their sometimes-conflicting accounts generate an unbounded image of Olive as a figure of Black British women’s history that harbours meaning as it is mobilised in social consciousness. Incorporating my own auto-ethnographic reflections, I explore the internal and external impact of Olive and my existence in this archival space. (shrink)

This article examines the development of a multidimensional, transnational feminist research approach from and within Uganda in relation to a high-profile case of domestic violence and femicide of a middle-class, upper-caste Indian migrant woman in Kampala in 1998. It explores indigenous Ugandan public and Ugandan Asian/indian community interpretations and the dynamics of cross-racial feminist mobilisation and protest that emerged in response to the Joshi-Sharma domestic violence case. In doing so, it advocates for a transnational feminist research approach from and within (...) Uganda and the Global South that works against the grain of nationalist and nativist biases in existing feminist scholarly trends. This approach lays bare power inequalities and internal tensions within and across racialised African and Asian communities, and thus avoids the romanticisation of cross-racial feminist African-Asian solidarities. (shrink)

This article explores the multi-pronged relation between individual and collective haunting and political investments in divergent feminist and queer formations. Taking the form of an interview conversation, it traces the trajectories of a political life in sites ranging from the kitchen and the demonstration to the conference and the writing page, and on the way marking the possibilities and limitations of various political-intellectual traditions linked to social justice and freedom in pursuit of being and becoming otherwise. It foregrounds a refusal (...) to accept the terms set by dominant political framings alongside and through a commitment to intersubjectivity and exploration of creative possibility opened up in spaces of excess. (shrink)

This article reads the photo album, The ‘Life and Times’ of an American Called Pauli Murray as an archive of anti-lynching pasts and futures. While scholarly discourses have leveraged Murray’s archive for evidence of her ‘true’ gender and sexual orientation, this article uses the reading practice of ‘accompaniment’ to reframe investigations of Murray’s identity into thinking with and learning from the strategies she archived in the album for living in atmospheres of antiblackness. Working with Christina Sharpe’s (2016) concept of ‘weathering’, (...) I read several photographs in Murray’s album as burgeoning ecologies of repair in relation to visual technologies of racial capture, particularly that of lynching photography. Reading passages in which Murray talks about lynching and race as atmospheric from Proud Shoes (1999 [1956]) and Song in a Weary Throat (1987) alongside The ‘Life and Times’, I read Murray’s portraits as rupturing white property relations through turning lynching photography’s scripts inside out. (shrink)

This article offers a reading of Ken Loach’s 2016 film I, Daniel Blake, a fictionalised account of experiences of the UK welfare system in conditions of austerity. We consider, firstly, the significant challenge the film poses to dominant figurations of welfare recipients under austerity, through a focus on vulnerability to state processes. We follow with a reading of some of the film’s interventions in relation to reciprocity, drawing on the important trajectories of care, community and resistance that the film renders (...) visible through the collective stories of the major characters. Finally, we conclude with reflections on citizenship, subject narratives and alternative imaginaries of ‘deservingness’. Our article offers an ‘against the grain’ reading (hooks, 1996; Wearing, 2013) of the film, highlighting some of the radical possibilities of the more minor moments, character arcs and subject positionalities within the film’s central narrative of Daniel’s experiences in the shadow of the steadily crumbling welfare state. (shrink)

What is the role of cultural archives in creating and sustaining connections between diasporic communities? Through an analysis of an audiovisual archive that has sought to bring together representations of and by African, Caribbean and Asian people, this article discusses the relationship between diasporic film, knowledge production and feminist solidarity. Focusing on a self-curated, UK-based archive, the June Givanni Pan-African Cinema Archive, we explore the potentiality of archives for carving out spaces of diasporic connectivity and resistance. This archive assembles the (...) holdings of pan-African films and film-related materials, built over several decades by June Givanni, a Guyanese-born London-based film curator. Givanni’s archive embodies her long relationship with the intersecting worlds of African and Asian diasporic cinema, which hold deep connections to Black British heritage through global networks spanning across empire. In the making of this cultural analysis, we employ a co-produced, decolonial methodological approach by designing and producing the article in collaboration with Givanni over a two-year period. We aim to foreground the role of feminist labour (academic and practitioner) as agents of change who are reclaiming stories, voices and memory-making. The wider backdrop to this co-produced analysis is the ongoing resilience of a cultural amnesia that has pervaded the Black British experience and the current fragility of Black arts and cultural spaces in the UK. Our question is how might archives help us map the connections between racialised ideas of belonging, memory politics and the reconfiguration of colonial power whilst also operating as a site of feminist connectivity? (shrink)

This paper considers the potential of impasses within cinematic assemblages and the pedagogy of cinema to expand the possible horizons of Black queer youth. Black queerness in film provides pedagogical tools for exploring the limits of the category of queer. Both Barry Jenkins’s Moonlight and Dee Rees’s Pariah counter uncritical narratives of pathology, and are research data in their explorations of affective dimensions of gender, sexuality, race, poverty, and love through moving-images and sound. After situating the context of Moonlight, Pariah, (...) and modern-day America within readings of antiblackness and heteronormativity, we explore the pedagogical work of affect and the impasse in film to make worlds differently. Through reading the impasses within Moonlight and Pariah with these concepts, we re/view how isolation, vulnerability, Blackness, and queer feeling entangle toward investment in the possible, but largely unimaginable, futures in a moment overwhelmed by queerphobia and antiblackness. In so doing, the pedagogy of cinema employed maps our collective potential to remake our moment. (shrink)