Literary Nonfiction. African & African American Studies. Women's Studies. LGBTQIA Studies. The Church of Black Feminist Thought (CoBFT) is an effort to share citations in more accessible ways. The CoBFT met as an intergenerational community of artist and changemakers in the Bay Area from January 2018--January 2019. In preparation for each month, we (Miyuki and Malika) generated a portrait of the thinker and a written invocation. Notes from small group study sessions and large group dialogues were gathered and distilled until a collection of visual theory maps. How do we express what is felt at a gathering? How do we honor the meaning created between words? And how do we celebrate black feminist thinkers in ways that amplify their work to everyone? These are some of the questions that the visual theory maps begin to answer. We believe that our theory maps activate a more imaginative way to access learning that nourishes the spirit. Black feminist counter-imaginings and strategies for how to thrive in our minds, bodies, and spirits are thus shared in a format that opens up to living with theory/knowledge/wisdom, rather than mastering it.

The powerful Beyoncé, formidable Rihanna, and the incalculable Nikki Minaj. Their images lead one to wonder: are they a new incarnation of black feminism and black women’s agency, or are they only pure fantasy in which, instead of having agency, they are in fact the products of the forces of patriarchy and commercialism? More broadly, one can ask whether black women in general are only being led to believe that they have power but are really being drawn back into more complicated systems of exploitation and oppression. Or, are black women subverting patriarchy by challenging notions of their subordinate and exploitable sexuality? In other words, ‘who is playing who’? Black Women, Agency, and the New Black Feminism identifies a generational divide between traditional black feminists and younger black women. While traditional black feminists may see, for example, sexualized images of black women negatively and as an impediment to progress, younger black women tend to embrace these new images and see them in a positive light. After carefully setting up this divide, this enlightening book will suggest that a more complex understanding of black feminist agency needs to be developed, one that is adapted to the complexities faced by the younger generation in today’s world. Arguing the concept of agency as an important theme for black feminism, this innovative title will appeal to scholars, teachers, and students interested in black feminist and feminist philosophy, identity construction, subjectivity and agency, race, gender, and class.

In Black Feminism Reimagined Jennifer C. Nash reframes black feminism's engagement with intersectionality, often celebrated as its primary intellectual and political contribution to feminist theory. Charting the institutional history and contemporary uses of intersectionality in the academy, Nash outlines how women's studies has both elevated intersectionality to the discipline's primary program-building initiative and cast intersectionality as a threat to feminism's coherence. As intersectionality has become a central feminist preoccupation, Nash argues that black feminism has been marked by a single affect—defensiveness—manifested by efforts to police intersectionality's usages and circulations. Nash contends that only by letting go of this deeply alluring protectionist stance, the desire to make property of knowledge, can black feminists reimagine intellectual production in ways that unleash black feminist theory's visionary world-making possibilities.

In spite of the double burden of racial and gender discrimination, African-American women have developed a rich intellectual tradition that is not widely known. In Black Feminist Thought, Patricia Hill Collins explores the words and ideas of Black feminist intellectuals as well as those African-American women outside academe. She provides an interpretive framework for the work of such prominent Black feminist thinkers as Angela Davis, bell hooks, Alice Walker, and Audre Lorde. The result is a superbly crafted book that provides the first synthetic overview of Black feminist thought.

This book uses a decolonial Black feminist lens to understand the contemporary significance of the practices and politics of indifference in United States higher education. It illustrates how higher education institutions are complicit in maintaining dominant social norms that perpetuate difference. It weaves together Black feminisms, affect and queer theory to demonstrate that the ways in which human bodies are classified and normalized in societal and scientific terms contribute to how the minoritized and marginalized feel White higher education spaces. The text espouses a Black Feminist Shad(e)y Theoretics to read the university, by considering the historical positioning of the modern university as sites in which the modern body is made and remade through empirically reliable truth claims and how contemporary knowledges and academic disciplinary inheritances bear the fingerprints of racist sexist science even as the academic tries to disavow its inheritance through so-called inclusive practices and policies today. This book will appeal to students and scholars interested in Black feminism, Gender and women's studies, Black and ethnic studies, sociology, decoloniality, queer studies and affect theory.

Organized into two parts, "Literary Theory" and "Social and Political Theory," this Reader explores issues of community, identity, justice, and the marginalization of African American and Caribbean women in literature, society, and political movements.

Group identifications famously pose the problem of destructive rhetoric and action against others. Cynthia Burack brings together the theory work of women of color and the tools of psychoanalysis to examine the effects of group collaborations for social justice and progressive politics. This juxtaposition illuminates some assumptions about race and equality encoded in psychoanalysis. Burack's discursive analysis suggests the positive, identity-affirming aspects of group relational life for African American women. One analytic response to groups emphasizes the dangers of these identifications and exhorts people to abandon or transcend them for their own good and for the good of others who may be harmed by group-based forms of cultural or material violence. Another response understands that people feel a need for group identifications and asks how they may be made more resistant to malignant group-based discourse and action. What can black feminist thought teach scholars and democratic citizens about groups? Burack shows how the rhetoric of black feminism models reparative, rather than destructive, forms of group dialogue and action. Although it may be impossible to eliminate group identifications that provide much of the impetus for bias and violence, she argues, we can encourage more progressive forms of leadership, solidarity, and coalition politics.