This article concerns itself with the ways that Black women have taken up #BlackGirlMagic as a critical reimagining of their subject positionalities as Black women. I argue that #BlackGirlMagic is a resistant imaginary that has significantly altered the contemporary western social imaginary and suggest that the intersectional ambiguity that Black women animate builds community among Black women toward collective liberation. Bringing together Kimberlé Crenshaw's concept of intersectionality, Simone de Beauvoir's concept of ambiguity, and María Lugones's concept of oppressed←→resisting subjects, I (...) argue that #BlackGirlMagic's so-called “magic” is both produced by and produces what José Medina has termed a guerrilla epistemology. In outlining the contours of this epistemology, I demonstrate how #BlackGirlMagic resists through the transmission of knowledge, the creation of a critical genealogy, its visionary orientation, and the development of an insurrectionary counterdiscourse. To illustrate, I briefly discuss how #BlackGirlMagic provides white women with an opportunity for a beneficial form of epistemic friction. In the end, I suggest that #BlackGirlMagic's ability to unite Black women transnationally bodes well for its continued effects on the western social imaginary. (shrink)

Recent years have seen an increased interest in black feminism. Whether thinking of the explosion of activism, the reprinting of classics such as Heart of the Race (Bryan, Dadzie and Scafe, 2018 [1985]) and Finding a Voice (Wilson, 1978) or the numerous journalistic or scholarly inquiries into black feminist formations in Britain in the 1970s–1990s, black feminism is a topic of interest once again. Sometimes it goes under other names: POC feminism, Womanism, Fugitive Feminism—each of which offers a specific inflection (...) of this thing I am calling black feminism. Given this context, my aim in this article is to consider how black feminism might be conceived—what kind of an object it is, but more importantly how it might be ‘used’ and utilised as a vibrant and well-honed tool in the armory with which we attempt to craft a politics of ethical freedom. I attempt to draw together work from the theoretical archive of black women’s writing with that of psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and his theorisation of ‘object use’ and ‘play’, as foundation stones in the development of a capacity for ethical relating based on the detoxification of racism’s effects on ‘self’, ‘other’ and the intersubjective field that the space between these constitutes. In my mind, the piece is a ‘call’ hoping for a ‘response’, the chorus is ‘black feminism’. (shrink)

White women's racism has been the topic of many critiques, discussions and conflicts within British feminist theory and politics over the last fifty years, driven by women of colour's insistence that white feminists must take on board the significance of race in order to stop perpetuating racism. Yet still today, feminist academia and activism in Britain continues to be white-dominated and to participate in the reproduction of racism and whiteness. This article examines the role of dominant historical narratives of feminism (...) in enabling this reproduction, arguing that there is a direct correlation between how the feminist past is constructed in relation to race and racism and how feminist theory and politics are articulated in the present. Focussing on three contemporary feminist texts that address feminism itself as a subject, it highlights three techniques used in these texts that, it is argued, are commonly employed in the narrative reproduction of white feminist racism. These are: (1) the erasure of the work of British feminists of colour; (2) white feminist co-option of work by feminists of colour; and (3) the narration of feminist theory and politics as having ‘moved on’ from racism. These techniques lead to evasion of the topic of white feminist racism, both historically and in the present. They also reinforce the construction of British feminism as a story that belongs to white women. The article argues that in order to work towards ending white supremacy, white feminists must relinquish control of the feminist narrative and stop moving on from the topic of white feminist racism. (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 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)