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Abstract

This second report on Geographies of Race and Ethnicity considers new developments in Black Feminist Geographies. It considers the spatio-temporal extensiveness of Black Feminist Geographies. It joins calls for more powerfully critical versions of intersectionality in Geography, using in/security as a means of conceptualising forms of negotiative agency. The article then considers the epistemic challenges posed by decolonial Black Feminisms, particularly from African writers. Finally, the article notes that Black Feminist Geographies are a locus for witnessing and honouring the complex humanity of the disproportionately large number of Black people who have died untimely deaths. To survive is a promise.

Keywords

Black feminist geographies intersectionality in/security decolonial feminism Black deaths

I Introduction

This is the second of three reports on Race and Ethnicity in Geography.¹ The first (Noxolo, 2022) reviewed the new field of Black Geographies. The second considers new developments in Black Feminist Geographies. Despite what this ordering might seem to imply, Black Feminist Geographies should not be considered a subsection of Black Geographies; just as Black Geographies are rooted in and routed through a wider interdisciplinary anti-colonial Black politics (Hawthorne, 2019), so Black Feminist Geographies is a geographical expression of the interdisciplinary field of Black Feminist Studies (see, for example, McKittrick, 2006 – deeply influenced by Sylvia Wynter and other transdisciplinary Black Feminist work, this book has itself become deeply influential in Black Feminist work across disciplines). Indeed, Black Geographies has in common with many anti-oppressive movements (Bryan et al., 2018) that Black women, most with considerable feminist heft (see, for example, Eaves, 2023; Hawthorne and Meché, 2016), contributed significant amounts of the labour on which its institutionalisation and intellectual profile was established (Noxolo, 2022). So my starting point here is to contend that, rather than Black Feminist Geographies being a subsection of Black Geographies, the formation and growing importance of Black Geographies can only be fully understood in the context of Black Feminist Geographies.

Not everyone who experiences racism as an embodied Black person,² who struggles actively for gender equality alongside anti-racism and other forms of anti-oppression, and who is interested in the spatial dynamics of this intersectional fight, will accept the label ‘feminist’. The insight that sisterhood is a terrain of contention, rather than a bounded field of solidarity, is foundational to Black Feminism (hooks, 1982; Mohanty, 2003; Vergès, 2021). Johnson (2020b), for example, express the weariness of Black feminists who must continually remind white feminists not to centre whiteness, decade after decade (see also Milner and Aromolaran, 2018). A range of alternatives to the word feminism – for example, Womanist (Walker, 2004), Afrofeminist (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019a), Africanist Sista-hood (Obasi, 2019) – have been coined to signal that an unapologetic challenge to racial oppression is as important as an unapologetic challenge to gender oppression. Nonetheless, by holding onto the word ‘feminist’, this report maintains the troubled intersections and strategic alliances among Black Geographies, Feminist Geographies and Black Feminist Geographies, as developed in recent work – the latter contests and troubles the other two, networking with each, rather than completely separating itself or being subsumed in either.

Similarly, Black Feminist Geographies network not only with the interdisciplinary fields of Black Studies and Feminist Studies, but also with a far wider range of anti-racist and feminist movements that intersect with class, queer, disability and a range of other anti-oppressive movements globally. Moreover, Black Feminist Geographies are not confined to the academy, but are also para-academic,³ non-academic and overwhelmingly activist (see, for example, a range of edited collections that bring together Black feminist voices in a showcase of this diversity and activist focus: Emejulu and Sobande, 2019b; Johnson et al., 2018; Olufemi et al., 2019). A consequence of this wide-ranging emphasis on activism, particularly within the visual and audio affordances of digital space, is that modes of Black Feminist practice are changing to emphasise creative and aesthetic modes – photographs, film, dance, etc. (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019a).

This report discusses three key elements of Black Feminist Geographies – its extensive and dynamic spatialities, the concept of intersectionality, and decolonial approaches to Black Feminist Geographies. It concludes by considering Black Feminist Geographies as a style of academic practice that witnesses to Black deaths, both in grief and as promise.

II Changing spatio-temporalities of Black feminist geographies

Unlike Black Geographies, which elsewhere I have argued globalises from an African-American epicentre (Noxolo, 2022), albeit one that is strongly informed by flows from Latin America, the Caribbean and Africa (Hawthorne, 2019) – Black Feminist Geographies are always already spatially extensive. Translocal connections between continents are key starting points for the collectivist ethos of Black Feminist Geographies: Africa, the Caribbean, Latin America and Canada have produced key Black feminist writers whose cross-disciplinary influence informs Black Feminist Geographies globally (see, for example, Mama, 2020; McKittrick, 2006; Nascimento and Gerber, 1989; Wynter, 2003). This is not of course to say that writers from the United States, Europe and Asia are unimportant, but it does mean that, in the spatialities of Black Feminist Geographies, the centrality of histories of Blackness that route through transatlantic enslavement and plantation culture cannot be entirely assumed. Nonetheless, due to its strong global voice, US versions of Blackness do provide globalised points of reference for activists in a range of places (see Emejulu and Sobande, 2019b; Hawthorne, 2023).

Black Feminist Geographies have a long history, particularly when understood as sometimes unmarked but very often interdisciplinary and expansive (Barriteau, 2003; Bryan et al., 2018; Fanon, 1968; Mama, 2020; McKittrick, 2006; Mohammed, 2003). This report focuses on the most recent iterations of Black Feminist Geographies which, particularly as more of us live more of our lives online (Oyosoro et al., 2022; Richard and Gray, 2018), often feature flexible, sometimes transient, translocal collectivities, whilst they also highlight and connect very small-scale, localised protests and practices. Within these more fluid forms of connectivity, alliances and identities are often mobile and unfixed – they are constantly under debate and in negotiation. Perhaps more muted than in the 20^th century, Black Feminist debates on and participation in more formal national, regional and global politics nonetheless remain salient, sharing multi-scalar agency with more localist and translocal movements – see, for example, Pan-African (Mama and Abbas, 2015; Tamale, 2020), regional and national Caribbean (Gahman and Collins, 2019; Reddock, 1998; Trotz and Mullings, 2013) and regional European (Emejulu and Sobande, 2019a) Black feminist interventions.

Mainstream scholarship has an equally long history of erasure followed by ‘wonder’-filled rediscovery of Black presence (McKittrick, 2006: 93; see also Sweet, 2021 on the erasure of Black and Indigenous histories in Mexico), and particularly of Black women’s political leadership (Covington-Ward, 2021). Therefore, the work of documenting the changing spatialities of Black women’s creative activism is still key (Greenidge and Gahman, 2020). Despite the globalised instantaneity of digital translocal interconnectivity, timelags remain an important feature of transnational Black Feminist practice. The politics of translation (see, for example, Smith et al., 2021, on translating the work of Beatriz Nascimento) and of colonialist marginalisation (Daley and Kamata, 2017) mean that some writers’ ideas circulate more slowly around the globe, becoming influential only years after they were written and subject to changing spatially specific ideas of what constitutes Geography (see McFarlane, 2021). More generally, Black Feminist writers are under-cited in mainstream research. So, although this article is largely about recent Black Feminist work in Geography, Black Feminist interdisciplinary work, some of it first published several years ago, is also relevant to a sense of where Black Feminist Geographies are now and where they are going.

III In/secure intersectionalities

In recent years intersectionality has come to be emblematic of Black Feminism. Most often linked with African-American lawyer Kimberlé Crenshaw (1991), intersectionality recognises that Black women experience racism in a gendered way and gender in a raced way – to consider race or gender in isolation is insufficient to our needs. From this juridical analysis and practice, intersectionality has spread rapidly across disciplines (see, for example, Andrews et al., 2019), including into Geography. It has become inclusive of a wider range of oppressions, though analyses are often understood in an additive way, without a deeper consideration of how and with what effects different oppressions or privileges intersect in particular contexts (Hopkins, 2019). As Hill Collins and Bilge (2020: 40) define it, based on its evolution amongst Black Feminist writers, intersectionality is not just an additive ‘my pain too’ analysis but a form of ‘critical praxis’ that is worked out in structurally informed dialogue across differences, in which people living in vulnerable conditions work out practical and political strategies to challenge and transform their situation. It is ‘a way of interconnecting personal experiences and structural analyses of interlocking oppressions, without skirting the meaning of life experiences, multiple identifications and political communities’ (Hill Collins and Bilge, 2020: 73).

When seen as a shorthand for Black Feminism, intersectionality often recentres African-American academic politics and then attempts to transnationalise from that spatial centre. Jennifer Nash (2019) considers how intersectionality takes place in US Women’s Studies departments through the racialised marginalisation of the bodies and labour of Black women academics. Where there are attempts in these departments to transnationalise intersectionality, this work falls on the multiply marginalised bodies of Black women from the Global South; both intersectionality and transnationalism become ‘minoritised’ together in analogic ways, within institutions that interpret both intersectionality and transnationalism as work by and about the marginal. This logic works similarly in Geography, where transnationalised versions of intersectionality do the work of adding Black Feminist Geographies into the margins of existing sub-disciplines that are centred elsewhere (see, for example, Faria et al., 2022, in relation to Economic Geography). Such interventions can be immensely valuable analytically: Christian and Namaganda (2018), for example, draw strongly on geographical and Black Feminist approaches to construct an elegant structural analysis of how aid regimes and other structural instruments of global capital produce intersectional gendered or intersectional raced domestic workers in Uganda. However, reducing intersectionality to a set of tools that can be easily slotted into (sub-)disciplinary convention risks undermining both the fluidity of intersectionality and its transformational energy.

In advocating for intersectionality as an ‘analytic sensibility’, Eaves and Falconer Al-Hindi (2020: 133) push geographers to the challenging question: ‘How am I invested in the very systems I might criticise in my research?’ It is precisely in this careful, sometimes combative, self-questioning that intersectionality most effectively begins to interrogate and challenge both oppression and collective identities. My own work (Noxolo, 2019) might suggest the in/security of intersectionality as one way of conceiving this analytic sensibility. The relative security of dialogic solidarity between identities that we know are shared, or of opposition to those that face us across fixed lines of privilege or exclusion (see, for example, Chennault, 2022), can be both seductive and useful. After all, structures of inequality really do exist. However, where intersectionality becomes more profoundly insightful is where it also interrogates static boundaries and opens up to the insecurity of profoundly fluid identities, uncertain alliances, unfixed meanings. Black Feminists have always shaken taken-for-granted solidarities (such as sisterhood) in this way (Mohanty 2003). Seeing intersectionality as in/secure keeps both the security and the insecurity of identities in play, honing an analytic sensibility that can recognise in which spatial and temporal contexts we can rely on stable identities, or in which we have to disrupt identitarian complacencies. Such a fluid, negotiative understanding of the in/security of intersectionality might ultimately act to disturb any attempts to keep race and gender unassailably centred within intersectionality analyses (Nash, 2019). In Stuart Hall’s (1991: 473) memorable words:

‘We are always in negotiation, not with a single set of oppositions that place us always in the same relation to others, but with a series of different positionalities. Each has for us its profound subjective identification. And that is the most difficult thing about this proliferation of the field of identities and antagonisms: they are often dislocating in relation to one another’.

However, such a fluid understanding might also enable a flexible analytics that can maintain intersectionality’s (and Black Feminist Geographies’) sharp-edged capacity to challenge disciplinary conventions.

IV Decolonial Black feminisms: (re)contextualising gender

Françoise Vergès has argued powerfully that development discourses (in which development geographies must be included) have presented a form of feminism that Vergès (2021: 36) calls ‘developmentalist feminism’. Here the emphasis is on forms of liberal feminism in which women in the Global South are framed as becoming empowered: through increased consumption (to be ‘good customers’, as Vergès, 2021: 40 puts it); through access to employment (to become exploitable labour); and, in a push that Vergès identifies as led by concerns over migration to the Global North, through access to birth control (in order to reduce the birth rate in the Global South). Vergès’s (2021: 13) formulation of decolonial feminism is, instead, a ‘struggle for epistemic justice’, in which women in specific contexts counter this framing by taking seriously their own contextualised knowledge of the world and of what they need (see also Tamale 2020).

Right at the heart of interdisciplinary Black Feminist scholarship has been the contention that Black women should not need to aspire – are in any case often effectively barred from acquiring – white western versions of womanhood (Brodber, 1982; Cooper, 2020; hooks, 1982). Instead such work considers how Black women negotiate complex gendered landscapes, in which gendered and sexualised practices are revealed as not only specifically located, but also as diverse and dynamic in their repertoires, engagements and identifications. See, for example, Wekker (2006) on woman-woman passion in Suriname and its diaspora; Oyěwùmí (1997) on woman-woman marriages in Nigeria; Venganai (2016) on the complex discursive field surrounding the practice of labia elongation in Harare, Zimbabwe; and Shio and Moyer (2021) on gay masculinities in Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania. Alongside these fluid forms of gendering, there is work that specifically targets the re-negotiation and restructuring of gendered roles in specific racio-capitalist contexts, making for new forms of subjectivity and (dis)empowerment. Freeman (2014), for example, unpacks discourses of self-improvement in Barbados, where middle class women’s identity becomes a site of entrepreneurial engagement. By contrast Esson et al. (2021: 197) describe lower-income young Ghanaian men as ‘neither autonomous actors nor as overdetermined victims’. Tired of economic exclusions that Esson et al. (2021: 199) identify as structurally produced, some become ‘oblivious’ to the shared exclusions faced by the women in their lives, retaliating to perceived gendered injustices with a renewed patriarchal discourse. The writers identify a need for more discussion of African Feminist scholarship, which can offer a gendered analysis that draws on Ghanaian knowledges and framings.

Some African Feminist scholarship goes well beyond locating gender, drawing on located knowledges to contest the category of gender itself. Due to the aforementioned timelag that often slows down the global influence of African scholars’ work, Oyèrònké Oyěwùmí’s contestation of the category of gender is only just beginning to attract geographical attention (George, 2015; Okoye, forthcoming), though there has been some international attention across disciplines (e.g., Moraka, 2018). Oyěwùmí (1997: 11; see also 2011) has been critiquing for decades the Eurocentrism of what she calls ‘Western bio-logic’, in which bodily organs define sex difference, even where western feminists argue that this sexed embodiment needs to be conceptually separated from socially inscribed gendering (see also Amadiume, 2015 [1987]; Tamale, 2020). Oyěwùmí (1997: 14) contends that Yoruba societies are not organised according to visual bodily cues but are more closely linked to metaphysical relationships that link human beings and other species together in ‘the many worlds human beings inhabit’ (see also Nyamnjoh, 2017). These are urgent decolonial questions for Black Feminist Geographies and for Geography as a whole, at a time of climatic crisis: they question not just particularist forms of gendering, including Western forms (Coetzee and Halsema, 2018), but also the concept of gender itself, pushing towards some more profound African and Indigenous questions around how different understandings of the human can reconnect us with the planetary (Gumbs, 2020; Millner, 2021).

V Conclusion: bearing witness to Black deaths

So this report has examined three key aspects of Black Feminist Geographies, maintaining an emphasis on spatial extensivity and on theoretical flexibility. By way of conclusion, I want to consider Black Feminist Geographies as a style of academic practice. What do we, as academics, contribute to Black Feminist praxis? Within that contribution, which could be manifold, my focus here is on witnessing, as Black Feminist practice. Kamunge et al. (2018: 3) explicitly interrogate this part of our practice: ‘What does it mean for us as academics/activists to witness? What is it that we are witnessing, for whom and for what purpose?’

One crucial element of Black life that Black Feminist academics witness is Black death. We witness Black death because the dead cannot bear witness for themselves, but we cannot bear for them to be forgotten. Christina Sharpe (2016: 10), in an interdisciplinary book that is increasingly influential in Black Feminist Geographies (see, for example, Hirsch, 2020) puts a sharper edge on the same question: ‘What does it mean to defend the dead? To tend to the Black dead and dying: to tend to the Black person, to Black people, always living in the push towards our death? It means work’. As Sharpe (2016) goes on to explain, to defend or tend to the dead begins with full recognition of the slow and the spectacular violence that kills Black people every day (see also Osbourne, 2020; Thomas, 2011). Such a witness also rests on flexible analysis of the historically grounded structures of inequality that not only lead to more deaths of Black people, but also work to erase both their deaths and the complex lives they lived (Sharpe, 2016; see also Purifoy, 2021). It is hard work to witness, to uncover, repeatedly and painfully, that which is stubbornly, iteratively and powerfully covered over (see, for example, Okechukwu’s, 2022, implication of gentrification in the removal of gravestone murals in formerly Black urban neighbourhoods).

Alexis Pauline Gumbs (2012) expresses why it is that Black Feminist writers bear witness to Black death. It is because we know that other Black Feminist writers did not survive. Audre Lorde, June Jordan, Barbara Christian and May Ayim did not survive. To those names I will add, just from the last 2 years and my own experience, Azeezat Johnson (see footnote 1, above) and Nicole Andrews, but of course there are many more. Globally, Black women suffer mortality rates that are worse than for other women, for example, through higher rates of maternal mortality, both in high-income and in low-income countries (see World Health Organization, 2023), or through higher incidence and worse outcomes from cancer (Andrews 2023). In other words, Black Feminist geographers are often personally at risk from the death to which we witness. However, although we grieve we also try to find ways to survive. As Gumbs (2012, n.p.) says: ‘Survival is a promise’ to remember those who have come and gone before us and therefore to live our academic lives, not for the academy, but in ways that honour their legacy.

As Katherine McKittrick (2014: 18) has so clearly pointed out, witnessing to Black deaths in the context of an academy that dehumanises Black life through endless statistical enumeration, is a difficult task: ‘How do we ethically engage with mathematical and numerical certainties that compile, affirm, and honor bits and pieces of black death?’ In order to ethically witness to Black deaths that become almost unspeakable in their erasure, Black Feminist Geographers experiment with style. Often drawing on literary writers (Toni Morrison or Octavia Butler, for example), these writers try to find words that will bring that analytical sensibility in an emotional register that reflects the ‘tending’ or tender care to which Sharpe refers (see above). A good example is Jones's (2021) short intervention that reflects, in dream-like prose, on why so many observers were asking whether Breonna Taylor was sleeping, perhaps dreaming, when she was killed in a police raid, in her home in Kentucky, United States. The question is revealed as a witnessing to ‘Black interiority, movements, and epistemologies in their complexity’ (Jones, 2021: 827). The #sayhername or #forbreonnataylor Twitter campaigns were not only calls for justice, but were also campaigns about, as Kadian Pow in another context (2018: 239) eloquently expresses, ‘Claiming the full humanity of our blackness, in whatever ways we can…’

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

The author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Pat Noxolo

Notes

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Geographies of race and ethnicity II: Black Feminist Geographies

Abstract

Keywords

I Introduction

II Changing spatio-temporalities of Black feminist geographies

III In/secure intersectionalities

IV Decolonial Black feminisms: (re)contextualising gender

V Conclusion: bearing witness to Black deaths

Footnotes

Declaration of conflicting interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Notes

References