2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe
A One-Day symposium | Amsterdam, 7th October 2017




2nd Annual Black Feminism, Womanism, and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe

A One-Day Symposium
Saturday, 7th October 2017,
Amsterdam, The Netherlands

In September 2016 in Edinburgh, we welcomed over 100 activists, practitioners, artists and scholars to critically debate contemporary Black feminist and womanist theories and practices in Europe. Our first event demonstrated the possibilities of building solidarity across race, class, gender, sexuality and legal status. However, the symposium also highlighted the inter-generational tensions between veteran and newer activists and scholars about how to build and sustain inclusive and democratic Black feminist spaces for education and action.

For our second symposium, we seek to expand and deepen our debates about the theory and practice of Black feminism and womanism in Europe but also spotlight the very real conflicts between different types of women who identify as Black feminists and womanists. Our aim is to examine how we might build community, collective strategies for survival and a politics for social justice in an unstable European context wracked by a variety of crises linked to austerity measures, racist and xenophobic public discourses about migration and the rise of far right political parties and groups.

We seek activist narratives, academic papers, practice-based reflections and art/music/film contributions related, but not limited, to:
Theorising European Black feminism and womanism
Gendering racial capitalism
Building Black feminist and womanist activist spaces
Black feminism and sex work
Women of colour and the European racial contract
Developing transnational, intersectional and intergenerational coalitions
Queering European Black feminism and womanism
Race, gender and affective relations
Gendering migration experiences
Women of colour and digital diasporas
Black feminism and Black Lives Matter in Europe
Black feminism and trans* women’s rights
Women of colour and anti-fascist resistance

Please send titles and abstracts of no more than 300 words, which include your name, affiliation and contact details to woceuropeconference@gmail.com by Monday 3rd April 2017.
Organising committee

Akwugo Emejulu, University of Warwick

Marly Pierre-Louis, Tracian Miekle, and Lene Hypolite, Amsterdam Black Women’s Meet-Up

Labor’s Aphasia: Toward Antiblackness as Constitutive to Settler Colonialism

JUNE 10, 2014
tags: antiblackness, fungibility, labor, settler colonialism
by Tiffany King

For the past few weeks a convergence of social media discussions on reparations, Shona Jackson’s book Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean, and her recent post “Humanity beyond the Regime of Labor,” as well as my own thinking about Black Studies’ engagement with Conquest have all compelled me to think critically about the issue of Black labor.[1] I would like to take a moment to focus on the conceptual limits of labor as an epistemic frame for thinking about Blackness (as bodies and discourse) and its relationship to settler colonialism. I am particularly concerned about the ways that Black labor may crowd out Black fungibility as a conceptual frame for thinking about Blackness within settler colonial discourses.

While many scholars who understand themselves as humanists have long ago conceded that strict or heavy-handed Marxian (political economic) analyses are generally impoverished and wanting; labor as an analytic persists. Indeed, labor as a discourse, or what Shona Jackson would call a “metaphysics” and “ontoepistemology”—a way of living and a way of articulating this mode of living— still haunts our critical theories (Jackson, 2012, p. 217).[2] This is particularly true as scholars undertake the difficult work of understanding and naming how racialized people are situated within White settler colonial states. Configuring People of Color into the calculus of settler colonial relations is onerous and in fact laborious. It is especially difficult when trying to conceptualize the unique location of Blackness. I commend scholars for taking on this task.

In order to do this cumbersome work, scholars tend to rely on the tried and true rubric of labor. Labor becomes the site and mode of incorporating non-Black and non-Indigenous people into settler colonial relations in White settler nation-states. People of Color scholars often rehearse histories of arrival as populations of coerced labor as a way of explaining their presence, as well as distance or proximity to the category of the Settler. Labor also becomes a liberal discourse that allows immigrants and migrants to narrate the terms of their belonging and citizenship within White settler colonial states. In this way, labor functions as another discourse of inclusion. Recently, Jamilah Martin in response to Ta-Nehisi Coates’ article “The Case for Reparations” made a similar and astute point in her blog post “On Reparations: Resisting Inclusion and Co-optation” that reparations work as a discourse of inclusion within the project of American Democracy within the “U.S. anti-Black settler-imperial state.” While the integrationist project of reparations may be a liberal project of inclusion, it also relies on a “teleology of modern labor” (Jackson 2012, p. 147). It holds out hope for Black inclusion into a human family of laborers/workers. Yet, despite the claim of the Black laborer as “subject”, embedded within the metaphysics of labor, the bill H.R. 40 (otherwise known as the Reparations Bill) has not gained traction.

H.R. 40’s lack of success partially speaks to the inability of Blackness to become fully legible through human categories like the laborer/worker. Further, it evinces the ways that laborer and worker do not explain the ontological state of Blackness. In Red, White and Black, Wilderson attends to the ways that Afropessimists “have gone considerable lengths to show that, point of fact, slavery is and connotes an ontological status for blackness; and that the constituent elements of slavery are not exploitation and alienation but accumulation and fungibility (Wilderson 2010, 14). The “alienation” and “exploitation” that the human worker experiences through labor are contingent conditions resulting from human conflicts.

Many people can and have occupied these temporary and conditional abased human coordinates. White, Asian and South Asian, Latina/o and Middle Eastern indentured and other kinds of laborers have long inhabited White settler territories and nation-states and, as laborers, immigrants and migrants have all helped build the settler nation. Black laboring bodies have even been used to build the settler nation. However, Black labor is just one kind of use within an open, violent and infinite repertoire of practices of making Black flesh fungible.

Black Cinderella

I’m against putting POC characters in tales of European origin, because, y’know, historical and ethnic accuracy is an actual thing. It’s folklore and it comes from this or that European culture so, yes, accuracy IS a thing.
BUT. I’m all for making more movies based on mythology and folklore of other cultures, for example, African or Native American ones. This I support, it would be a great thing. Because, in all honesty, no one needs Black or Asian Cinderella, that’s just stupid (and, yes, inaccurate). but everyone needs more tales about a child lost in the forest meeting spirits and forest gods. Or at least lets make a movie using an Asian variant of Cinderella fairy tale, there’s more than one, y’know? Because I’m all for accuracy and I’m all for representing more than one dominant culture in multicultural society.

Are you for real? I bolded the above statements because you know what?



*I* needed a Black Cinderella. And I bet a lot of readers here did, too. We still do.

Because of colonialism, most of us have been force-fed European history, mythology, fairy tales, and Medievalism; told it’s the best, the highest, the only. It’s everywhere we look: movies, cartoons, books, tv shows, and we’re told that this is something you are required to learn, and in some cases, the only context you’re allowed for your imagination, but it’s not really for you. It’s not about you. Because you aren’t “Historically Accurate.”

That can go to hell and so can you. Because you know what? Our histories, once again, because of colonialism, kidnapping, enslavement, genocide, are marginalized, misunderstood, and misrepresented. They’re stolen from us and given to white people considered “more qualified” to tell them, and they make millions of dollars off of those misrepresentations. Entire libraries and histories were purposely, methodically burned in order to disempower people of color. These stories, when they survive, are made illegal to teach, specifically because they empower people of color! People of color are removed from their own stories and their own contexts and replaced with white people, because Ridley Scott “can’t mount a film of this budget, where I have to rely on tax rebates in Spain, and say that my lead actor is Mohammad so-and-so from such-and-such.I’m just not going to get it financed.”