“Let's face it. I am a marked woman, but not everybody knows my name. "Peaches" and "Brown Sugar," "Sapphire" and "Earth Mother," "Aunty," "Granny," God's "Holy Fool," a "Miss Ebony First," or "Black Woman at the Podium": I describe a locus of confounded identities, a meeting ground of investments and privations in the national treasury of rhetorical wealth. My country needs me, and if I were not here, I would have to be invented.” 
Hortense Spillers. “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book.” 1987 

“What does it mean when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow parameters of change are possible and allowable. Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged into the crucibles of difference–those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are Black, who are older–know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths,” 

Audre Lorde. “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House. 1984.             
Quoted by Denise Ferreira da Silva at the inaugural lecture of the Practicing Refusal Working Group.

The previous section ended with a problematic about naming and an inquiry into what it means to inherit the language and legacy of violence. Given that the figure of the Black woman is riddled with violence–both historical and present–Black feminisms have always grappled with rewriting, redefining, and reconstituting the Black female subject. At BCRW’s 1982 Sex Conference, distinguished literary critic and professor Hortense Spillers presented her groundbreaking essay “Interstices: A Small Drama of Words” where she discussed the impossibilities of speaking about the Black female subject without relegating her to a site of “non-being”; without, in other words, negating her. 

While the conference is oft-remembered for being the locus of ‘82’s Sex Wars, it was also crucial for hosting, through Spillers, one of the most thorough examinations of Black female sexuality in the academy to date. Spillers drew attention to the glaring absence of Black women in mainstream feminist discourses on sexuality that hinged on empowerment. She questioned, in “Interstices”, what kind of sexuality Black women had access to given that freedom, for them, was never a guarantee. This absence, she noted, meant that Black women were not afforded sexuality at all,  and in this way,  understandings of the Black female subject and sexuality were to be found not in what was said in feminist discourse, but what was not: in the interstices of speech or text. While little remains of the 1982 conference in the digital archive, Spillers' essay opened up the study of Black feminisms towards a broader critique of language and modern renderings of the subject. 

In 2017, she returned to BCRW as a guest speaker at the Helen Pond McIntyre ‘48 lecture. Her paper, Shades of Intimacy: Women in The Time of Revolution, critiqued the social worlds that the chattel economy had produced whereby family members could be owned and sold off. The Black woman, for Spillers, was a living example of the paradox of the 18th century–a century that “spoke of freedom yet tolerated slavery”. Drawing from her previous work, Spillers emphasized that in a social world where Black women were regarded as “flesh”–invadable bodies deprived of selfhood–intimacy and love would always be compromised. “Unless one is free,” she asserted “love cannot and will not matter”. In writing (and saying) so, Spillers made clear that the condition of the Black woman during slavery and its afterlives cast her as the 18th century’s Other–as the antithesis to freedom. It was necessary then to create a “grammar” that could articulate the language of emancipation outside of white heterosexist ideas of what constitutes the Black female subject. By forging a new Black feminist grammar, Spillers offered us the chance to envision ideas of selfhood, intimacy, and love that refused to be subsumed by the racist patriarchy. Through her hugely influential work, we can think creatively about the language that those new social worlds will be articulated.

Thirty-three years after Spillers’ first BCRW lecture, Black feminist academic Denise Ferreira da Silva stood at the very same podium Spillers did for the inaugural Practicing Refusal Working Group lecture. Like Spillers, Ferreira too recognized the need for a “critical grammar” that refused the alterity produced by hegemonic categories. Moving Black feminist critique towards a reconfiguration of the Black woman/feminine subject, she suggested that Black feminisms could be read as a series of refusals to comply with the categorizations of a racialized patriarchy. Drawing from “the long line of unacceptable women”, she noted that this critical grammar vernacular to Black feminisms was of evasion, one that allowed multiple possibilities for the subject without consigning them to the margin, center, or its various shades. Ferreira’s lecture launched the BCRW co-sponsored Practicing Refusal Working group: “an international Black feminist forum of artists and scholars dedicated to initiating dialogues on Blackness, anti-Black violence and Black futurity in the twenty-first century.”

Spillers’ and Ferreira’s works are some of the many examples of Black feminists pushing the limits of critique and language. While their work is largely theoretical, it finds itself realized in Black feminist praxis in multiple ways. In literature, for example, the writings of Christina Sharpe and Columbia Professor, Saidiya Hartman echo with attempts at envisioning this new language. Their work prompts us to read into what has not been written, to read that which has been written differently, and to listen to those voices that are seldom paid attention to.  The Practicing Refusal Working Group co-founded by former Barnard Professor, Tina Campt, and the Radical Women of Harlem Walking Tour led by former BCRW research assistant, Asha Futterman ‘21 and SJI Fellow, Mariame Kaba, are ways that groups of people have come together to refuse erasure and write new ways of life into being. Though these events happened at BCRW, much of the work they grew from and initiated extends beyond the academy as well and is visible in the practices of those who continue to push against oppressive regimes of language and power.