A Decolonial Black Feminist Theory of Reading and Shade


Book Description

This book uses a decolonial Black feminist lens to understand the contemporary significance of the practices and politics of indifference in United States higher education. It illustrates how higher education institutions are complicit in maintaining dominant social norms that perpetuate difference. It weaves together Black feminisms, affect and queer theory to demonstrate that the ways in which human bodies are classified and normalized in societal and scientific terms contribute to how the minoritized and marginalized feel White higher education spaces. The text espouses a Black Feminist Shad(e)y Theoretics to read the university, by considering the historical positioning of the modern university as sites in which the modern body is made and remade through empirically reliable truth claims and how contemporary knowledges and academic disciplinary inheritances bear the fingerprints of racist sexist science even as the academic tries to disavow its inheritance through so-called inclusive practices and policies today. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Black feminism, Gender and women's studies, Black and ethnic studies, sociology, decoloniality, queer studies and affect theory.




Global Black Feminisms


Book Description

This timely and informative volume centres how global Black feminist narratives of care are important to our contemporary theorizing and highlights the transgressive potential of a critical transnational Black feminist pedagogical praxis. This text not only details how such praxis can be revolutionary for the academy but also provides poignant examples of the student scholarship that can be produced when such pedagogy is applied. Drawing on narratives from Black women around the globe, the book features chapters on pedagogy, mentorship, art, migration, relationships, and how Black women make sense of navigating social and institutional barriers. Readers of the text will benefit from an interdisciplinary, global approach to Black feminisms that centres the narratives and experiences of these women. Readers will also gain knowledge about the historical and contemporary scholarship produced by Black women across the globe. This book is an invaluable resource for scholars and researchers, including graduate students in Caribbean feminisms, Black feminisms, transnational feminism, sociology, political science, the performing arts, cultural studies, and Caribbean studies.




The Cambridge Companion to Contemporary African American Literature


Book Description

African American literature has changed in startling ways since the end of the Black Arts Era. The last five decades have generated new paradigms of racial formation and novel patterns of cultural production, circulation, and reception. This volume takes up the challenge of mapping the varied and changing field of contemporary African American writing. Balancing the demands of historical and political context with attention to aesthetic innovation, it considers the history, practice, and future directions of the field. Examining various historical forces shaping the creation of innovative genres, the turn to the afterlife of slavery, the pull toward protest, and the impact of new and expanded geographies and methods, this Companion provides an invaluable point of reference for readers seeking rigorous and cutting-edge analyses of contemporary African American literature.




Getting Real About Inequality


Book Description

Getting Real About Inequality is a contributed reader for undergraduate courses in Race/Class/Gender, Social Inequality, or the Social Construction of Difference and Inequality. It gives instructors in these courses a set of materials to help them moderate civil, productive, and social science-based discussions with their students about social statuses and identities. Like the book it is modeled after, Getting Real About Race, it is organized around myths and stereotypes that students might already believe or be familiar with through the media or popular culture. A panel of expert contributors were enlisted to write short, accessible essays address the same questions (What is the myth or stereotype under investigation? How do we know that the myth or stereotype is widespread? What does the empirical data tell us?) and provide the same pedagogical features (a summary of the research data, discussion questions, suggestions for further study, suggested activities and assignments). All of pieces in the book employ an intersectional perspective, to help students see the nuanced mechanisms of power and inequality that are often lost in everyday discourse.




Blackwildgirl


Book Description

Blackwildgirl begins her life as a queen superpower. When she is still a child, however, her parents strike a bargain that leads to her dethronement—and sets her on a forty-five-year journey to become the warrior she was born to be: Blackwildgoddess. Join an interactive adventure exploring the private life and journals of a young Black girl, beginning at the age of eight, as she struggles and evolves from a tennis player, musician, and college student to become a wife, mother, lawyer, scholar, and writer. Documenting revelations and reflections during her twelve-stage initiation journey in America and the African diaspora, this intimate, introspective autobiography—composed of acts, stages, scenes, and letters to Love—reveals how writing can unearth and give life to women’s powerful, sassy, and willful spirits. Authentic, vulnerable, and spirit-filled, this captivating and enthralling road map is a must-read for anyone who wants to understand the experiences of girls as they seek to become wild women—women who are fierce and fearless; women who are warriors for themselves and others; and women who are committed to excavating and cultivating their spiritual gardens to manifest and fulfill their destiny in the world. Be sure to get the companion journal, Blackwildgirl: Finding Your Superpower to journey and journal along as you read. Write your own story. Discover your own inner wisdom. Own your power and purpose. Celebrate yourself.




Postcolonial Imbusa


Book Description

Using decolonial and postcolonial nego-feminism, Postcolonial Imbusa: Bemba Women's Agency, and Indigenous Cultural Systems examines the daily lives of Bemba women and how imbusa has defined the behaviors and relations between women and men at home, church, and work.




Crisis Urbanism and Postcolonial African Cities in Postmillennial Cinema


Book Description

This book provides a framework to rethink postcoloniality and urbanism from African perspectives. Bringing together multidisciplinary perspectives on African crises through postmillennial films, the book addresses the need to situate global south cultural studies within the region. The book employs film criticism and semiotics as devices to decode contemporary cultures of African cities, with a specific focus on crisis. Drawing on a variety of contemporary theories on cities of the global south, especially Africa, the book sifts through nuances of crisis urbanism within postmillennial African films. In doing so the book offers unique perspectives that move beyond the confines of sociological or anthropological studies of cities. It argues that crisis has become a mainstay reality of African cities and thus occupies a central place in the way these cities may be theorized or imagined. The book considers crises of six African cities: nonentity in post-apartheid Johannesburg, laissez faire economies of Kinshasa, urban commons in Nairobi, hustlers in postwar Monrovia, latent revolt in Cairo, and cantonments in postwar Luanda, which offer useful insights on African cities today. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of urban studies, urban geography, urban sociology, cultural studies, and media studies.




Transdisciplinary Thinking from the Global South


Book Description

This book promotes constructive and nuanced transdisciplinary understandings of some of the critical problems that we face on a global scale today by thinking with and from the Global South. It is engaged in transmodernising, pluriversalising, decolonising, queering, and/or posthumanising thinking and practice. The book aims to contribute to and challenge current debates regarding knowledge, diversity, and change. This is achieved through the application of transdisciplinary and indisciplined perspectives to the Himalayan Anthropocene; transport services in Mexico City; the EU-Turkey border regimes and policy; egoism and the decolonisation of whiteness; the Witch and the decolonisation of the gender binary; Nepalese students in Denmark; and the decolonisation of global health promotion. The book thereby provides the reader a multiplicity of pathways of knowledges and practices that address current problems co-produced by the dominant Western colonial onto-epistemic outset, giving way to ‘other’ knowledge-practices, towards a pluriversal approach. This book will be of interest to upper-level undergraduate and graduate students in disciplines such as human geography, development studies, politics, international relations, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, planning, and philosophy. It is also relevant to researchers, development workers and human rights/environmental activists, and other intellectual practitioners.




From Post-Intersectionality to Black Decolonial Feminism


Book Description

In this accessible and yet challenging work, Shirley Anne Tate engages with race and gender intersectionality, connecting through to affect theory, to develop a Black decolonial feminist analysis of global anti-Blackness. Through the focus on skin, Tate provides a groundwork of historical context and theoretical framing to engage more contemporary examples of racist constructions of Blackness and Black bodies. Examining the history of intersectionality including its present ‘post-intersectionality’, the book continues intersectionality’s racialized gender critique by developing a Black decolonial feminist approach to cultural readings of Black skin’s consumption, racism within ‘body beauty institutions’ (e.g. modelling, advertising, beauty pageants) and cultural representations, as well as the affects which keep anti-Blackness in play. This book is suitable for undergraduate and postgraduate students in gender studies, sociology and media studies.




Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction


Book Description

Caroline Alphin presents an original exploration of biopolitics by examining it through the lens of cyberpunk science fiction. Comprised of five chapters, Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is guided by four central themes: biopolitics, intensification, resilience, and accelerationism. The first chapters examine the political possibilities of cyberpunk as a genre of science fiction and introduce one kind of neoliberal subject, the self-monitoring cyborg. These are individuals who join fitness/health tracking devices and applications to their body to "self-cultivate". Here, Alphin presents concrete examples of how fitness trackers are a strategy of neoliberal governmentality under the guise of self-cultivation. Moving away from Foucault’s biopolitics to themes of intensity and resilience, Alphin draws largely from William Gibson’s Neuromancer, Neal Stephenson’s Snow Crash, Richard K. Morgan’s Altered Carbon, along with the film Blade Runner to problematize notions of neoliberal resilience. Alphin returns to biopolitics, intensity, and resilience, connecting these themes to accelerationism as she engages with biohacker discourses. Here she argues that a biohacker is, in part, an intensification of the self-monitoring cyborg and accelerationism is in the end another form of resilience. Neoliberalism and Cyberpunk Science Fiction is an invaluable resource for those interested in security studies, political sociology, biopolitics, critical IR theory, political theory, cultural studies, and literary theory.