BLST 315 Black Feminist Movements
Black Feminist Movements is an upper-division course wherein we interrogate our conceptualizations of “Black,” “feminist,” “Black feminist” and “movements.” What, or who, do we mean when we say “Black,” “feminist” and “Black feminist”? What do we mean when we invoke “movements”? Why is movement – literal and figurative – central to our understanding of blackness? What might it mean for blackness – Black peoples, Black communities, Black intellectual, political and cultural traditions – to move across land and sea, through space and time and on page, stage and screen? By reading expansively across disciplines, our course affirms that Black feminists have long been at the forefront of revolutionary practices of radically re-imagining what our world can be. We will engage with cultural producers from the Black diaspora (including, but not limited to: the United States, the Caribbean and the United Kingdom) working within critical ethnic studies, literary analysis, queer of color critique and performance studies, among others, and take seriously what they share in regards to prison abolition, the linkages between racism and capitalism, Black trans activism and other critical issues that demand our attention and action. We will locate these intersectional conversations within Black diasporic contexts – the literary, theoretical, political and cultural – as we seek potential answers to the questions posed above. Students will be asked to complete a research paper at the end of the term.