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• 1 2022-01-24T12:04:16-08:00 Towards a Black Feminist Future 10 Black Feminisms plain 2022-01-26T13:50:58-08:00

  “The oppression of women knows no racial nor ethnic boundaries, true, but that does not mean it is identical within those boundaries. Nor do the reservoirs of our ancient power know these boundaries, either. To deal with one without even alluding to the other is to distort our commonality as well as our difference.” 

  - Audre Lorde.

  The 2000s are marked, for BCRW, with a turn towards the future, international feminisms, and activist scholarship. Inaugurating the millennium with The Scholar and Feminist XXV, Black feminisms took on a global approach as the importance of cross-continental feminist solidarity became clear. An integral part of BCRW has been the Transnational Feminisms project launched in 2010 that seeks to bridge the gaps between global feminisms. Pioneered by former BCRW Associate Director, Catherine Sameh, the project allows students to engage with scholars and activists from around the world to think about what an antiracist and decolonial feminist praxis might look like. While the project launched after the turn of the century, its vision began as early as 1984 with conferences that discussed the realities of women from across the world.  Inviting activists and scholars from South Africa, Tanzania, and Haiti, for example,  Black Feminisms suddenly became multiple and revealed that experiences of Blackness can be multifaceted while still being interconnected. Similarly, the Critical Caribbean Feminisms series offshoots from an internationalist impulse. A literary series platforming writers from the African diaspora, the project explores themes such as statelessness, belonging, and resistance to the gendered constructs of the nation through writing. With conversations including those between Barnard Professor Kaiama Glover, poet Claudia Rankine, and novelist Edwidge Danticat ‘90, the series reveals the myriad ways that Black feminists experience and write the world.

  In 2014, former BCRW Director, Professor Tina Campt gave the annual Helen Pond McIntyre ’48 Lecture on “Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity”. Taking futurity as a way of looking at the future not as what will happen but rather as what has to have happened, Professor Campt gave language to a kind of forward-looking that sits actively in the present. The future for Black feminisms suddenly becomes tangible and urgent. Alongside the concept of futurity, Professor Campt offered “fugitivity” as a lens through which to read Black resistance. Described as a sort of “taking flight”, fugitivity expresses the ways that Black life eludes the marginality prescribed by racist and heterosexist systems of power–the ways that Black life refuses to be refused. Found in the practices of the quotidian, fugitivity represents a transient and tenseless state of being; it reaches towards a “there” without completely leaving the “here”. Neither an act nor a moment in time, fugitivity is rendered instead as a practice of daily life. Following Campt’s logic, if the language of resistance is refusal, then the practice of that refusal is fugitivity. 

  Professor Campt’s concept of futurity is especially meaningful when used to read the archive. While much of the work at BCRW has been essential in shaping Black feminist thought, it is still an institution, and institutions have ways of drawing attention away from the mass community action happening around them. What is exciting about futurity, however, is that when applied to the past, it fills in the gaps that the archive leaves out and begs the question: what had to have happened for the past to come to be? What had to have happened for Prettyman, Lorde, Walker, Spillers, Ferreira, and countless others to have been able to do the work that they did (and do) at BCRW? Suddenly the past shimmers with possibility and the silences in the archive begin to speak.

  
  Here, we might turn towards the students on campus whose tireless efforts at creating a Black feminist legacy are visible today. Founded in 1968, three years before BCRW, The Barnard Organization for Solidarity and Soul (BOSS) was a primary meeting point for Black feminists on campus; from the magazine Soul Sister which provided resources for Black students, to the annual gatherings that celebrated Black womanhood, and the constant petitioning to create safe housing, learning, and living conditions for the Black student body, BOSS expresses what it means to refuse to be categorized, erased, or defined. Similarly, Corinth J Jackson’s Black at Barnard project has been an invaluable resource for students on campus, and the writing of this narrative–its documentation of Black life at Barnard through the years shows the enduring legacy of student and faculty resistance to erasure. Though these are but two examples of student action, they represent the countless ways that Black feminisms have existed on campus alongside and outside the Barnard Center for Research in Women. 

  Recognizing the distance between the academy and the community around it BCRW established The Social Justice Institute in 2016. The residency hosts activists, organizers, and non-aligned scholars from around the world whose work inspires us to think intersectionally about justice, care and community. Such are the works of Mariame Kaba and Andrea Ritchie who were among the 2018-2020 cohort of fellows at the Institute that shaped the way BCRW and the wider Barnard community think about the carceral system today. Many of these conversations around the justice system began early in the late 60s  and they continue to allow us to reimagine redemption and the way we build care, trust, and respect between each other. These moments and spaces are part of what had to have happened for Spillers, Campt, Ferreira, Lorde, hooks, Prettyman, and more to have been able to stand at the podium and do the work they did. These moments and spaces remind us that the institution exists as part of a larger community of people working towards emancipation. 

   In acknowledging that these practices are found in the everyday non-momentous acts of living, we might see the archive as brimming with possibilities–the past as infused with a sense of currency. While the archive often remembers acts, Campt’s theory allows us to read into its silences and to listen to the practices of refusal that characterize those gaps. We realize, therefore, as Spillers told us in 82, that Black feminisms are interstitial, found in the places that the archive leaves out–found in the places that this narrative leaves out. While this can at first seem disconcerting, maddening or frightening even–it gives room for creativity, possibility, and the reminder that the absences in the archive signal that Black feminisms have always been and will always be present.