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)

Drawing on feminist philosophical accounts of reproduction and initial data acquired through research with migrant mothers in London, this article argues that the role and place of reproduction remains under-theorized within scholarly accounts of women's role in migration processes. Working with an expanded concept of reproduction that includes not only childbirth and motherhood, but also the work of reproducing heritage, culture and structures of belonging, it argues that feminist migration scholars can draw on valuable theoretical resources in order to tell (...) more complicated stories about the place of reproduction in migration, and challenge the often problematic gendered distinctions between travelling and staying put, change and repetition that continue to underpin some of the narrative structures operative in migration studies. (shrink)

This article considers some of the ways in which ‘the black woman’ as both representation and embodied, sentient being is rendered visible and invisible, and to link these to the multiple and competing ways in which she is ‘present’. The issues are engaged through three distinct but overlapping conceptualisations of ‘presence’. ‘Presence’ as conceived (and highly contested) in performance studies; ‘presence’ as conceived and worked with in psychoanalysis; and ‘presence’ as decolonising political praxis among Indigenous communities. I use these conceptualisations (...) of presence to consider the various ways in which the black woman as figure and as embodied/sentient subject has been made present/absent in different discursive registers. I also explore what is foreclosed and how this is itself linked to legacies of colonial ‘worlding’. I end with consideration of alternative modes of black women's presence and how this offers a resource for new modes of sociality. (shrink)