Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework

Writing in Darkness

K. Melchor Quick Hall

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Topic: Literature
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000729955
• Subtopic: Feminist Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

By writing Black feminist texts into the international relations (IR) canon and naming a common Black feminist praxis, this text charts a path toward a Transnational Black Feminist (TBF) Framework in IR, and outlines why a TBF Framework is a much needed intervention in the field.

Situated at the intersection of IR and Black feminist theory and praxis, the book argues that a Black feminist tradition of engaging the international exists, has been neglected by mainstream IR, and can be written into the IR canon using the TBF Framework. Using research within the Black indigenous Garifuna community of Honduras, as well as the scholarship of feminists, especially Black feminist anthropologists working in Brazil, the author illustrates how five TBF guiding principles—intersectionality, solidarity, scholaractivism, attention to borders/boundaries, and radically transparent author positionality—offer a critical alternative for engaging IR studies. The text calls on IR scholars to engage Black feminist scholarship and praxis beyond the written page, through its living legacy.

This interdisciplinary volume will be of interest to feminist scholars, international relations students, and grassroots activists. It will also appeal to students of related disciplines including anthropology, sociology, global studies, development studies, and area studies.

1 Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework

Calling for an International Relations Intervention

Black feminist writer Audre Lorde (2007) wrote about “poetry as illumination” in the following way: “The quality of light by which we scrutinize our lives has direct bearing upon the product which we live, and upon the changes which we hope to bring about through those lives” (36). Artistic and creative works often hold deep insights into the necessary path forward. This book engages Black feminist living legacies as a way to highlight omissions of international relations (IR). White, mainstream IR (Vitalis 2015) has recently taken up the question of Black scholarship developed at historically Black colleges and universities, or HBCUs, focusing primarily on dead, Black, male scholars. What is radically different about this book’s intervention is the insistence on the engagement of Black feminist living legacies. In her poem entitled “Legacies,” Nikki Giovanni described a granddaughter refusing to learn to make rolls, who explains her resistance as follows:

that would mean when the old one died she would be less

dependent on her spirit so

she said

“i don’t want to know how to make no rolls”

(Giovanni 1972, 5)

This book is about legacies. Similar to the grandchild in Nikki Giovanni’s poem, I am born to a legacy. In my case, it is a Black feminist legacy. Having spent decades in quiet observance of and engagement with that legacy, it is time to write about the critical need for recognition of that Black feminist living legacy in my (scholarly) home discipline of IR. It is much easier to speak of the dead, manipulating writings to the conveniences of the living. Instead, I challenge IR to engage the Black feminist living legacies that have been marginalized “in the wake.” Christina Sharpe (2016) wrote about Black people living “in the wake” of a society memorializing, or positioning in the past, afterlives which are still unfolding: “For, if we are lucky, we live in the knowledge that the wake has positioned us as no-citizen. If we are lucky, the knowledge of this position avails us to particular ways of re/seeing, re/inhabiting, and re/imaging the world” (22). This text is a bold re/imagining of Black feminist pasts and futures at a time when my mentors are present to read (and critique) this righting (and writing) of Black feminist texts into the IR canon.

Black feminist scholarship has influenced many disciplines within the social sciences, which is why the lack of a Black feminist tradition in IR scholarship is so striking. Where is IR’s Black feminist tradition? Postcolonial and decolonial IR scholars (Anievas, Manchanda and Shilliam 2015; Chowdhry and Nair 2004; Persaud and Sajed 2018; Shilliam, 2015) have been the most vocal with respect to disciplinary omissions related to race and racism. This text intends to go beyond the naming of IR omissions toward the naming and claiming of a Black feminist engagement of the international. In particular, USAmerican¹ political science, a close disciplinary cousin of IR, has a well-defined Black feminist tradition (Curwood 2015; Harris 2011), even though IR has not adopted such approaches. An imagined Black feminist IR tradition would have its roots in the fields of anthropology (McClaurin 2001a) and sociology (Collins 2009), disciplinary homes for many of the seminal works of Black feminism. International studies that use a Black feminist lens have been pioneered by Black feminist anthropologists (Caldwell 2007; Perry 2013). From its inception Black feminist scholarship has engaged multiple disciplines. A Black feminist IR tradition similarly would be multidisciplinary.

In addition to building upon Black feminist traditions in various disciplines, a Black feminist approach to international studies would necessarily question and challenge the state-centric analysis of many IR studies. Given that the transatlantic slave trade dispersed Afro-descendants throughout the Americas and Caribbean, it is incomprehensible that a framework that emerges from the Black experience would not question the usefulness of contemporary states as the appropriate unit of analysis. In this regard, it is critical that a Black feminist approach to international studies challenge contemporary state borders and their significance in the analysis of the lives of Black, indigenous, and other marginalized peoples. “Coined by Lélia Gonzalez, one of the premier thinkers of Afro-Brazilian feminisms, the term Amefricanidade or ‘Amerifricanity’ references both the black diaspora and indigenous populations of the Americas, signaling their histories of resistance as colonized peoples” (Alvarez and Caldwell 2016, v). This project is one that embodies the Amefricanidade ethic that acknowledges shared struggle.

In my study of the Black and autochthonous Garifuna community of Honduras, challenging colonial claims is central to the defense of communities’ rights to land. Similarly, as Keisha-Khan Perry (2004) noted, “In black communities in Brazil and throughout the African diaspora, urban land and territorial rights are the local idioms of black resistance” (811). The Black indigenous Garifuna people have occupied coastal land along what was formerly the Republic of Central America long before the current state boundaries divided their communities. Thus, when I refer to the Garifuna community as a whole today, I must speak in terms of a transnational community, just as I must think in those terms to understand many autochthonous and indigenous communities divided by current state borders.

1 USAmerican is used in this text as a translation for estadounidense, or someone from the US. The use of American by people in the US marks US dominance and ignores the existence of other countries in the Americas.

In exploring the potential of a Black feminist tradition in the context of IR, I emphasize transnational relations rather than international, or state-level, relations. In doing so, I develop what I have named a Transnational Black Feminist (TBF) framework (Hall 2016). Building upon Black feminist and transnational feminist traditions, the TBF framework is intended to guide scholars, activists, and scholar-activists pursuing international and transnational studies. This effort to explore Black feminist theory follows similar efforts to explore an “Afrodiasporic feminism” in Colombia (Figueroa and Hurtado 2014) and a “Black diasporic feminist agenda” in Latin America (Perry 2009). However, this is a specific call to IR scholars to recognize the importance of a Black feminist tradition in the context of international (and transnational) studies. Doing so requires going beyond acknowledgment of Black traditions past (e.g., Vitalis 2015), and requires current engagement with living legacies that embody Black feminist traditions (e.g., 2017 National Women’s Studies Association conference²).

This text is also a call to interdisciplinary scholar-activists doing meaningful work with communities in ways that engage IR scholars, pushing them beyond the comfort of a predominately white and patriarchal academic silo. This intervention aims to make room for a transnational Black feminist tradition within IR, not simply at the disciplinary margins. At the heart of this TBF framework are five guiding principles—intersectionality, scholar-activism, solidarity, attention to borders/boundaries, and radically transparent author positionality—explored in detail below. These principles are articulated in relation to current Black feminist texts. In particular, the significance of recent Black feminist anthropological work in Brazil is highlighted.

2 The 2017 National Women’s Studies Association Conference was themed “Forty Years after Combahee: Feminist Scholars and Activists Engage the Movement for Black Lives.” The keynote address was a conversation between well-known Black feminist Angela Davis and Alicia Garza of #BlackLivesMatter fame. The two plenary sessions further facilitated intergenerational conversations between scholars and activists, highlighting the collective work of the radical Black feminist lesbian organization Combahee River Collective and their infamous Combahee River Collective Statement, which was published 40 years before the conference year.

Transnational Black Feminist (TBF) Guiding Principles

Intersectionality

Critical theorists who problematize constructions of class, gender and power are often disinclined to include the combination of race, class, and gender in their analyses (Chowdhry and Nair 2002). However, legal scholar and Black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw used the multidimensional experiences of Black women to demonstrate that a single-axis (race or gender) analysis is not only ineffective in capturing the experiences of Black women, but it actually distorts their realities (Crenshaw 1998, 314). In place of a single-axis analysis, Crenshaw recommended an intersectional analysis that would analyze simultaneously the experiences at the intersection of multiple categories (e.g., race, class, and gender): “Because the intersectional experience is greater than the sum of racism and sexism, any analysis that does not take intersectionality into account cannot sufficiently address the particular manner in which Black women are subordinated” (Crenshaw 1998, 315).

Although Crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” the Combahee River Collective Statement, published in 1977, named “interlocking oppression” as part of a Black feminist tradition nearly two decades earlier.³ In this way, Black feminist scholarship has long been shaped by the examination of a “matrix of domination” (Collins 2009), beyond any single axis of oppression. In particular, intersectional analysis helps to uncover a system of white privilege at work, by naming (i.e., racializing) the previously unlabeled experiences of whites (i.e., white men), and especially of white male elites (i.e., class-privileged white men). As Dunn (2008) described, “Certain groups enjoy unearned invisible assets from the systems of power underpinning social life. More often than not, those people are white middle/upper-class males from North America and western Europe” (47–48). Intersectional analysis illuminates these power-laden and multidimensional forms of agency. Dunn usefully described how the discipline of IR has functioned in the context of white male privilege.

The majority of authoritative IR theory (the canon’s canon, if you will) has largely been produced by white males from North America and western Europe. Yet those in the field rarely acknowledge it as the white male North American/western European field of international relations. Rather, it is cast simply as IR; and those scholars writing from outside those positions of privilege frequently have their work labeled in ways that mark it as outside the norm: feminist, post-colonial, non-Western, and so forth. Thus, I believe it is important to recognize that the current academic discipline is built upon a foundation of white male privilege and that the process of privilege remains an active element in how the discipline continues to be constructed, reproduced, taught and practised.

(Dunn 2008, 51)

3 Part of the violence done to a Black feminist legacy upon entry into a white US academic system is that these genealogies are erased. Individuals in the academy are rewarded for laying claim to concepts and terms, even when they are part of collective knowledge and communal legacies. Even when these scholars acknowledge this history, as Crenshaw does, the very form of how authors are cited in academic literature perpetuates an individualist framing. Further, the structure of the academy ensures that those who refuse to prioritize their individual knowledge claims through single-authored publications are unlikely to survive the tenure process.

Scholars who are more or less advantaged in the context of a white, patriarchal classist system write from their respective positions. However, those who are advantaged are seen as producing authoritative, objective knowledge, while the less advantaged (in relation to race, class, and gender) are interpreted as providing subjective and opinionated perspectives. This designation of white, class-privileged men as authoritative knowledge builders and holders requires an IR intervention that engages scholars in a “historical reckoning” to address and rectify these shortcomings. This text moves forward in that direction by centering texts by women of color doing intersectional research in the articulation of the TBF framework.⁴ In that way, the TBF framework engages intersectionality at the level of the integration of women of color scholars as central to IR theorizing as well as at the level of analysis by highlighting experiences of women of color.

In writing Black feminist texts into IR, there are multiple ways that we can build bridges. One way is to think about the social contract between the state and citizen that is often discussed in IR. What an intersectional approach highlights is that rather than having one social contract, the reality is that states often have multiple de facto implementations of social contracts in relation to different kinds of citizens. Caldwell described how health as a citizenship right was consolidated in the 1988 Brazilian Constitution. The rights-based, participatory unified health system that was created had as its core principles universality, integrality (or comprehensiveness), and equity. If IR scholars acknowledge from the outset that a state’s social contract, defining obligations to citizens, is shaped by the identities of those citizens, then we must consider the importance of an intersectional analysis.

4 I have found that white feminist circles in IR often silence diverse feminist voices, sometimes policing counter-hegemonic voices in destructive ways. An earlier, article version of this chapter articulating a TBF framework was sent to the leading feminist (predominately white) IR journal, and received the following feedback: “The aim of producing a ‘new framework’ is somewhat ambitious (in a problematic way). And though the ‘guiding principles’ (intersectionality, scholar-activism and solidarity building) are all interesting and do hold promise – it seems to me that there is already a lot of literature ‘out there’ that works with these kinds of principles. The idea that what is being offered h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Prologue
• Acknowledgments
• 1. Naming a Transnational Black Feminist Framework: Calling for an International Relations Intervention
• 2. Honduras’ Ereba Makers: Garifuna Foodways as Grassroots Alternatives to Development
• 3. Understanding Black Women’s Families: The Value of Centering Family inIR Studies
• 4. Honduran Garifuna Nation: A Black Matrifocal Society in a Mestizo Patriarchal State
• 5. Beyond States: Understanding Transnational Indigeneity in Latin America
• 6. Conclusion: Opportunities for Transnational Solidarity
• Epilogue
• Index