We Would Have To Fight The World: The Cultural Politics of Black Feminist Critical Theory: A Reading List by Naomi Simmons-Thorne
Photo Credit: Background image: Pauli Murray in 1970. Associated Press Image. Top image (left): Photo of Michele Wallace. Retrieved from goodreads.com. Bottom image (left): Octavia E. Butler signing a copy of Fledgling after speaking and answering questions from the audience. The event was part of a promotional tour for the book. October 25, 2005. Nikolas Coukouma. Wikimedia Commons.
Top image (right): The Combahee River Collective’s Black feminist retreat in Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Back Left to Right: Margo Okazawa-Rey, Barbara Smith, Beverly Smith, Chirlane McCray, & Mercedes Tompkins. Front Left to Right: Demita Frazier & Helen Stewart. Retrieved from Making Gay History. Bottom image (right): Ntozake Shange, Reid Lecture, Women Issues Luncheon, Women's Center, November 1978. Barnard College, digitally restored by Chris Woodrich. Wikipedia.
A reading list by Naomi Simmons-Thorne from her teach-in, “We Would Have to Fight The World: The Cultural Politics of Black Feminist Theory” for The School For Black Feminist Politics.
On Saturday, January 16, 2021, activist, organizer, and scholar Naomi Simmons-Thorne led a teach-in on the “We Would Have To Fight The World: Cultural Politics of Black Feminist Critical Theory”. Black scholars have traditionally assumed race as the identity “of primary historical importance” concerning Black communities and their movements for social justice (Dawson 1994). This teach-in sought to interrogate this assumption through a survey of critical discourses spanning abolition to Black Lives Matter. While few would argue against the historical “overdetermination” of racism, Black feminist critical theory has often sought to destabilize what scholars call the “metalanguage” of race. They argue while the force of racist brutality is often overwhelming, that Black people remain equally targeted by systemic structures unaccounted by the “single-axis” of conventional anti-racist discourse and politics. Systemic failures to address oppression on multiple axes renders particular systems and their targets analytically invisible, thus stratifying the politics of Black communities on the structural lines of visibility and re-inscribing oppressions by treating counter discourses and counter movements as ancillary projects to Black liberation. This teach-in surveyed critical discourses concerning gender, sex, and sexuality, locating their relationships to black politics—historical and contemporary—and their ongoing relevancy to the construction of Black political discourse.
About the teach-in curator: Naomi Simmons-Thorne (she/her/hers) is a graduate student at the University of South Carolina studying social theory and educational foundations. She specializes in the sociology and philosophy of education and draws upon critical methodologies to analyze U.S. schooling and its attendant inequalities. She is best known for her work as an activist-organizer in the south and her writings on social justice, trans studies, and black queer feminist politics. Naomi is Brooklyn-born of Trinidadian descent and identifies as a transgender woman. You can follow Naomi on Twitter at @naomiedu.
“We Would Have To Fight The World: Cultural Politics of Black Feminist Critical Theory” Reading List
On Traditions in U.S. Black Feminist Thought
Patricia Hill Collins. 1996. “What’s in a Name?: Womanism, Black Feminism, and Beyond,” The Black Scholar 26 (1).
Octavia Butler. 1993. Parable of the Sower.
Clenora Hudson-Weems. 1993. Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves.
Patricia Hill Collins. 2000. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness and the Politics of Empowerment.
Saidiya Hartman. 2019. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments.
Black Feminist Critical Theory
Patricia Hill Collins. 2019. Intersectionality as Critical Social Theory.
Sharpening the Critical Edge
Sojourner Truth. 1867. “American Equal Rights Association Address.”
Frances E. W. Harper. 1869. Minnie’s Sacrifice.
Mark D. Matthews. 1979. “Our Women and What they Think: Amy Jacques Garvey and The Negro World”.
Pauli Murray. 1964. “Jim Crow and Jane Crow” in Black Women in White America” by Gerda Lerner.
Frances Beale. 1969. Double Jeopardy: To be Black and Female.
Ntozake Shange. 1976. For Colored Girls.
Combahee River Collective. 1977. “Combahee River Collective Statement.”
Michele Wallace. 1979. Black Macho and the Myth of the Superwoman.
Black Subaltern Politics
Cathy J. Cohen. 1999. Boundaries of Blackness: AIDS and the Breakdown of Black Politics.
Ed. Devon W. Carbado. 1999. Black Men on Race, Gender, and Sexuality: A Critical Reader.
Jennifer Lisa Vest. 2007. “Somebody Forgot to Tell Somebody Something.”
Eds. Miriam Jiménez Román and Juan Flores. 2010. The Afro-Latin@ Reader.
African American Policy Forum. 2015. Say Her Name: Resisting Police Brutality Against Black Women.
Chris Bell. 2017. “Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?” in The Disability Studies Reader.
Sabrina Strings. 2019. Fearing the Black Body: The Racial Origins of Fat Phobia.
The Rustin Times. 2020. Defiance: Voices of a New Generation: Nigerian LGBT+ Documentary.