Abstract: As national president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Dorothy Height maintained a visible, though marginalized, position within civil rights leadership. While studies have recovered her contributions to the domestic civil rights struggle, her six-week, five-country tour of West Africa in 1960, studying the training and leadership needs of West African women, demonstrates that the international dimensions of her activism remain under-examined. I argue that under Dorothy Height's administration, NCNW's internationalism in the early period of African decolonization embraced on-the-ground engagement as a means of expanding black women's sphere of leadership still hampered in the US by racial and gendered limitations. While their anticommunism in the Cold War shaped their engagement in the international arena, their encounters with African women leaders also influenced how they came to understand support for African decolonization. This assessment expands our understanding of the gendered dimensions of civil rights, African decolonization, and the Cold War, and provides tools to better understand the complexities of black women's internationalism.
As national president of the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW), Dorothy Height maintained a visible, though marginalized, position within civil rights leadership. While studies have recovered her contributions to the domestic civil rights struggle, her six-week, five-country tour of West Africa in 1960, studying the training and leadership needs of West African women, demonstrates that the international dimensions of her activism remain under-examined. I argue that under Dorothy Height's administration, NCNW's internationalism in the early period of African decolonization embraced on-the-ground engagement as a means of expanding black women's sphere of leadership still hampered in the US by racial and gendered limitations. While their anticommunism in the Cold War shaped their engagement in the international arena, their encounters with African women leaders also influenced how they came to understand support for African decolonization. This assessment expands our understanding of the gendered dimensions of civil rights, African decolonization, and the Cold War, and provides tools to better understand the complexities of blackwomen's internationalism.
This article examines how the movement of Black Caribbean feminist knowledges shape processes and spaces beyond the places we call(ed) home. I present a case study of a mentoring program designed to support first-generation students, who at times find themselves isolated, alongside the frameworks that informed its creation. I employ the concepts of lakou and Gina Athena Ulysse's rasanblaj as examples of Black Caribbean feminist pedagogy, both of which center collaboration and provide models for community care and development. With that, I highlight the possible interventions of these Caribbean, particularly Haitian, ways of knowing, gathering, relating, and cultivating community. Caribbean-centered ideas and theories travel, offering tools to navigate social challenges and locations. Ultimately, this article challenges imperialist approaches to education that look to Western countries as pedagogical experts. Instead, I emphasize that much can be learned by looking to Caribbean-based and Caribbean-born epistemology and pedagogy.
This article examines writing by Black left feminist Claudia Jones (1915-1964) and Black feminist writer bell hooks (1952-2021) and their unique contributions to discourses regarding love, particularly in the context of radical movements for social change. Through this transhistorical approach, which combines original archival research alongside literary analysis of hooks' love trilogy All About Love: New Visions (2000), Salvation: Black People and Love (2001), and Communion: The Female Search for Love (2002), I argue that Black feminism contributes to understandings of love in three distinct ways: by centering the political valences of love, uncoupling love from sex by advocating for loving friendships and healthy self-love, and insisting upon the spiritual dimensions of love. The article concludes by considering the legacy of Jones and hooks' praxis of love as demonstrated in pleasure activist and writer adrienne maree brown's 2017 book Emergent Strategy: Shaping Futures, Changing Worlds.
In this article, I consider strategies by which Black Brazilian writers Esmeralda Ribeiro (b. 1958) and Lima Barreto (1881-1922) write against the grain of national discourses of mesti & ccedil;agem that condone plantation sexual violence in the name of a patriarchal, whitened national subject. I study a short story, "Keep It Secret," (1995) by Ribeiro, the longest-term contributor to the Black collective writing project, Cadernos Negros (1978-ongoing), which intertextually references key moments in Barreto's work, where he denounces the mesti & ccedil;agem myth. Instead of monumentalizing this denunciation, Ribeiro's story and selections of Barreto's archive, I argue, practice unnaming, in an effort to work through and against the national narrative that casts Black women as sacrificial victims. I connect this strategy to Black Studies theories by Hartman and Sharpe on approaches to the archival problem of libidinal violence, and to theories by Spillers, Chandler, and Ferreira da Silva suggesting that the symbolic detour offered by affectability, in the wake of racial violence, might break a path toward Black literature against the grain of the racial absorption model of Brazilian nationalism.
This essay uses the literary and musical output of the double bassist and bandleader Charles Mingus to read the overlap of fantasy and reality in Gayl Jones's Eva's Man. This essay suggests that Mingus's work evinces the same blurring of boundaries and understands this overlap to be a blues concept, an instance of what Jones describes as "the 'both/and' one finds in African American music, rather than an 'either/or' of the West." The essay finds the overlap between fantasy and reality is particularly relevant to the blues because they express the link manufactured and precipitated by white supremacy between blackness and madness. Finally, the essay contends that Jones and Mingus's blues express a similar iteration of Black madness that attempts to resist oppressive power structures and systems of abuse (particularly antiblack psychiatry) and to cultivate a democratic community that makes ethical demands of its members
This essay argues for reading Gayl Jones's The Healing (1998) through the framework of what I call contrarecognition in Black women's stories. Predominantly about a relationship between two Black women, the novel centers the stories that the two women tell themselves and each other. In the process, it posits Black women's epistemologies as a contrarecognition, one that not only counters the recognition of the Man as the Human but also resists the way of knowing that buttresses the social order constituted by that recognition and calls attention to the limitations in dominant understandings and narrativizations of identities. Specifically, by situating different figures of Asian femininity within the genre of Black women's stories, The Healing makes space for a way of reading and knowing that has the potential to enable not only ethical but also political communions beyond a desire for recognition.
Crystal Wilkinson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs explore Gayl Jones's impact on creative writing practice in this abridged keynote conversation, transcribed by Sydney R. Villegas. Together they explore the ways the creative, the critical, and the political blend together in the author's work while they also challenge listeners to take up Jones's "unflinching" methods. Their dialogue traverses a range of topics including the importance of oral storytelling as a literary tool, the transformation and extension of the first-person perspective through the practice of active listening in daily life, and the reclamation of space, breath, and narrative for Black women. Ultimately, the conversation invites "surrender to the flow of Black women's genius," as Gumbs states, by making and reclaiming space to explore Black women's experiences in their entirety with room for repetition, layering, and breath.
In Palmares, Gayl Jones returns to formulations of silence and gender in a spiritual coming-of-age story that demands an expansion of scholarship on these recurring themes in her novels. Almeyda, another silent protagonist in Jones's oeuvre, becomes a woman while both her enslavement and fugitivity bring her across Brazilian landscapes to its largest quilombo. This paper examines two fugitive disguises in the novel that stage the complex links between Almeyda's silence, her gendered coming of age, and her diasporic storytelling. The framework of "silent stories" aims to explore the novel's productive paradox of silence alongside encounters with queer gender and sexuality that mark Almeyda's coming of age. As Almeyda becomes a woman, or perhaps many women, her stories embody gender possibility and paint silence as more than a restitutive and resistant strategy for those in the diaspora, but rather as a spiritual necessity.
This article considers Gayl Jones's interventions as a counter-storyteller of Black Brazilian history, focusing on her narrative-poem Song forAnninho (1981) and novel Palmares (2021). Highlighting in each the history of the Palmares quilombo, or maroon community, through the eyes of Almeyda, a Black woman, Jones features marronage as an act of resistance to enslavement as well as a radical Black tradition through which she can critique the white historical and literary canon in the Americas. These questions surrounding Black women's fugitivity put Jones directly in hemispheric conversation with Lelia Gonzalez (1935-94) and Beatriz Nascimento (1942-95), pioneers in Black Brazilian feminist theory. Jones, Gonzalez, and Nascimento understand orality as critical to Black resistance through storytelling, language, and knowledge production. As each offer readings of Black Brazilian history, the mis-readings-misrepresentations of Black women by the archive and what Black women purposefully obscure-are potential risks taken to resist archival silences.
This essay focuses on the process and aftermath of reprinting Gayl Jones's first two novels, Corregidora (1975) and Eva's Man (1976). Both novels were reprinted in the now-defunct Beacon Black Women Writers Series, founded by Deborah McDowell in 1986 and sponsored by Beacon Press. The essay considers the broader academic and cultural context from which the series evolved at the height of the much-ballyhooed "black women's literary renaissance," the emergence of Black feminist criticism, and the widespread incorporation of African American women writers into college and university curricula.
Abstract: Crystal Wilkinson and Alexis Pauline Gumbs explore Gayl Jones's impact on creative writing practice in this abridged keynote conversation, transcribed by Sydney R. Villegas. Together they explore the ways the creative, the critical, and the political blend together in the author's work while they also challenge listeners to take up Jones's "unflinching" methods. Their dialogue traverses a range of topics including the importance of oral storytelling as a literary tool, the transformation and extension of the first-person perspective through the practice of active listening in daily life, and the reclamation of space, breath, and narrative for Black women. Ultimately, the conversation invites "surrender to the flow of Black women's genius," as Gumbs states, by making and reclaiming space to explore Black women's experiences in their entirety with room for repetition, layering, and breath.
