BCRW @ 50

Endnotes

When I was tasked to write a historical narrative of the development of Black Feminisms for BCRW I was fizzy with excitement and also dread: how would I do justice to the sprawling emancipatory space that has been Black Feminisms over the past fifty, now fifty-one years at BCRW? How would I do justice to the ever-evolving bodies of work that continue to challenge the oppressive systems while creating a repository of knowledge for future generations to come? As I fell deeper into my research, however, I realized that my dread was unfounded for the archive does justice to itself: it reveals that the legacies of Black Feminisms are legacies in motion. They urge us to think more about intersectionality every day and the ways our daily lives can be read as practices of refusal. They urge us to think about joy,  love, and possibility. Each section of this narrative begins with an aspiration, with forward movement captured in the word “towards”. Borrowed from bell hooks' 1987 lecture for the Scholar and Feminist, the word embodies the fugitivity and futurity of Black feminisms. It suggests that we are not only gesturing towards, but perhaps we have already arrived or are in a continual process of arriving at that future that has to have happened. Following the summer of 2020 and the way a global pandemic has only reminded us of what we already knew: that the racist, classist sexist hegemony is far from over, we might turn to Black feminisms and see that the resistance has always been alive and fertile. I am reminded, once again of the urgency of listening to the archive, not only where it speaks, but in its interstices too for the archive in its totality, allows us to think more radically about how to read into and live in a Black feminist future.

Tapiwa Gambura, '24

This page has paths: