#Black Transnational feminism

[nora-durst]

A list of national grassroots feminist organizations that are going to be looking for membership right now:

Young Feminist Party (formerly known as Generation Ratify): founders of the #ERANow movement, a student-run organization trying to get the Equal Rights Amendment finally published to enshrine the rights of women and gender expansive folks in the Constitution. I know personally that they are going full throttle ahead in the next couple of months to try and get Biden to do this before Trump takes office as our surest bet to protect trans and abortion rights. Most of their membership is based on the East Coast but they are a national organization that anyone can join from anywhere.

The Feminist Front: an organization of youth 15-35 advocating for feminism that fights back (hence the name “front”). They organize around reproductive rights, protecting trans youth, prison abolition, combatting disinformation in immigrant communities, and Palestinian freedom. They work closely with the Young Feminist Party. Their leadership is located in LA and NY but they are a national organization that anyone from anywhere can join and they are eager to expand to more local chapters.

Palestinian Feminist Collective: an intergenerational body of Palestinian and Arab feminists that centers the Palestinian struggle for social and political liberation through anti-colonialism. Their current project is the Palestinian Feminist Futures Calendar & Program, where they created a calendar of Palestinian feminist art and have a monthly Zoom event centered around the activist principles of each art piece.

Black Feminist Future: a political hub of Black feminists focused on galvanizing and harnessing the social and political power of Black women and gender-expansive folks. They are focused on developing Black feminist leaders, disrupting the culture of misogynoir, and improving the material conditions for Black women, girls, and gender-oppressed people. They host town halls, raise funds for Black reproductive justice organizations, conduct labs and trainings, work to get out the vote for Black feminist candidates, and organize in-person socials for Black feminists to meet and build organizing power. They are mostly based in the Southern United States but you can join from anywhere.

Af3irm: An organization of women engaged in transnational feminist, anti-imperialist activism and dedicated to the fight against oppression in all its forms through militant movement-building and grassroots organizing in the United States. They have local chapters in LA, San Diego, Hawai’i, Boston, and New York/New Jersey.

Radical Women: a socialist feminist collective of cis women, trans women, and nonbinary people united by anti-capitalist feminist ideals engaged in multi-issue organizing for social and economic justice. They are a national organization based in Seattle; they have national online meetings on the 4th Saturday of each month at 2pm PT/5pm ET. They also have an Australian chapter.

Gender Liberation Movement: a volunteer-run national collective centering bodily autonomy and self-determination in the face of gender-based sociopolitical threats; specifically, abortion and trans healthcare access. In September, they organized the first-ever Gender Liberation March and are currently organizing an action that will take place in Washington D.C. in December as the Supreme Court hears the case that is challenging Tennessee’s trans-affirming healthcare ban. I believe they are mostly located in NY but you can join from anywhere.

The Ruth Project: a youth advocacy organization fighting against gender discriminatory policies. Their big initiatives are fighting sexist school dress codes, protecting Title IX, and promoting sexual harassment education. They are a national organization with members all across the US; they also have initiatives in Canada and Europe.

UltraViolet: an intersectional community working for feminist cultural and political change. Right now they are focused on expanding and protecting reproductive healthcare, ending sexual assault and harassment (including SA in the cyber sphere and AI), and fighting back against sexism and disinformation in the media. They work through social media campaigns, online petitions, and by leveraging connections to influence and pressure journalists, executives, board members, elected officials, and celebrities to make decisions that improve the material conditions of women. They’re a national organization that can be joined from anywhere.

I also want to shout-out Rising Majority, which is actually a collective of organizations that several of the above organizations are a part of. They host lots of great Zoom and in-person events across the country where you can meet folks from the above orgs as well as other like-minded folks, and learn more about organizing in general. They are built around long-term strategies for the next 25 years to build a united front of progressives and leftists and bring more people into the movement.

Lastly, a few things:

This list is not exhaustive by any means! I will likely be reblogging this with additions in the coming days. I wanted to specifically list feminist orgs because that is the organizing space I am most familiar with; I also wanted to only list non-local organizations that the highest amount of people would be able to join. I will probably update this list at some point soon with more local feminist orgs.

Please reblog with your own additions if you have any!

Many of these organizations focus on different specific issues, have different org structures, and use different strategies; some may be a better fit for you or more in alignment with your specific beliefs than others, and that’s okay! We need all kinds of people utilizing all kinds of strategies to build out our power.

You don’t need to know the first thing about organizing to join these orgs! They need volunteers and people on the ground. They will train you and guide you and help you and will take whatever you might bring to the table, even if it’s just attending their monthly calls. They just want people who believe in their cause and are willing to stand with them.

If for whatever reason you can’t join them, donate to them! Many of these orgs are very small and need all the help they can get.

Now is the time to get off your phone, get involved, get organized. We are stronger together, in community.

Feel free to DM me with any questions!

[xiphactinusfish]

Palestine Book List:

Children's and Young Adult:

Baba, What Does My Name Mean?: A Journey to Palestine by Rifk Ebeid, Lamaa Jawhari

Homeland: My Father Dreams of Palestine by Hannah Moushabeck

Olive Harvest in Palestine: A Story of Childhood Memories by Wafa Shami, Shaima Faouki

These Olive Trees by Aya Ghanameh

Farah Rocks series bu Susan Muaddi Darraj, Ruaida Mannaa

Squire by Nadia Shammas, Sara Alfageeh

Young Palestinians Speak: Living Under Occupation by Annemarie Young, Anthony Robinson Jr

The Boy and the Wall by Amahi Bishara

Gaza Writes Back: Short Stories from Young Writers in Gaza, Palestine by Refaat Alareer

Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq

Nayra and the Djinn by Iasmin Omar

We Are Palestinian: A Celebration of Culture and Tradition by Reem Kassis, Noah Eilouti

Zain and Mima Stand for Palestine by Eman Kourtam, Sophia Soliman, Darah Rateb

Adults Nonfiction:

Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape by Raja Shehadesh

Light in Gaza: Writings Born of Fire by Jehad Abusalim et al.

Freedom is a Constant Struggle: Ferguson, Palestine, and the Foundations of a Movement by Angela Davis, Cornel West

The Biggest Prison on Earth: A History of the Occupied Territories by Ilan Pappe

The Hundred Years' War on Palestine: A History of Settler-Colonial Conquest and Resistance, 1917-2017 by Rashid Khalidi

The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine by Ilan Pappe

They Called Me a Lioness: A Palestinian Girl's Fight for Freedom by Ahed Tamimi

Except for Palestine: The Limits of Progressive Politics by Marc Lamont Hill, Mitchell Plitnick

Queer Palestine and the Empire of Critique by Sa'ed Atshan

Gaza in Crisis: Reflections on Israel's War Against the Palestinians by Noam Chomsky, Ilan Pappe, Frank Barat

Black Power and Palestine: Transnational Countries of Color by Michael R. Fischbach

Israel/Palestine and the Queer International by Sarah Schulman

Greater than the Sum of Our Parts: Feminism, Inter/Nationalism, and Palestine by Nada Elia

Adult Fiction and Poetry:

Power Born of Dreams: My Story is Palestine by Mohammad Sabaaneh

From Whole Cloth: An Asexual Romance by Sonia Sulaiman

Blood Orange by Yaffa As

The Specimen's Apology by George Abraham

To All the Yellow Flowers by Raya Tuffaha

Shell Houses by Rasha Abdulhadi

Hijra by Hala Alyan

You Exist Too Much by Zaina Arafat

Guapa by Saleem Haddad

[rf-times]

Hello, I'd like to share with you this article I read about imperialist feminism.

https://redsails.org/imperialist-feminism/

You're one of the only radical feminists out here who speak out against imperialism so I thought this might be of interest to you. It touches on a lot of things like criticizing “Beauty without Borders” campaign in Afghanistan and also about how Iraqi women were forced into prostitution due to US imperialism and many other such things.

I hope you enjoy reading this and sorry if you already read this before. Thanks!

Thank you for this brilliant article, I hadn't seen it before! Sorry for the very delayed response: this is very insightful and highlights the exact issues that come with an imperialist feminism: I recommend everyone has a read of it as it an angle that is rarely addressed here on tumblr. I especially think the analysis of NGOs is very pertinent. And a very good outline of colonial feminism, how it is cannibalising and an acknowledgement of how women in imperial centres have leveraged imperialism believing it to empower them and other women without denouncing feminism as a whole.

"The question we might ask is why this campaign is called “India’s Daughter” rather than “America’s Daughter” or “The American Problem” because, after all, not only is sexual violence against women a massive issue in this country but also, around the same time as the Delhi rape, in Steubenville, Ohio, a sixteen-year-old girl was gang raped and sexually assaulted by a group of men. Why didn’t this case become the focus of a documentary and global campaign?"

"the message is that rape, sexual violence, and other forms of female oppression take place elsewhere: in the Global South, in cultures that the West considers backward and barbaric, and not only is it not a problem here, but it the responsibility of women in the West to wage a moral crusade to rescue their Brown and Black sisters. This then is the logic of imperialist feminism in the twenty-first century, shaped by the deeply racist framework of the “clash of civilizations,” which is based on the idea that the West is a superior culture because it believes in democracy, human rights, secularism, women’s rights, gay rights, freedom of speech, and a whole host of other liberal values, whereas the Global South is barbaric, misogynistic, driven by religion, and illiberal. From this follows the “white man’s burden” and the “white woman’s burden” to intervene through any means necessary, including wars of colonization, to “liberate” less fortunate women in other parts of the world."

"It is not enough to simply talk about rape culture and misogyny here and “backward cultures” there, but instead to ground our analysis of sexual violence within the structural context of neoliberal capitalism and the ways in which it is restructuring people’s lives in various locations in the twenty-first century. When our feminism is based in an anticapitalist and anti-imperialist politics, we have a real basis for solidarity, one, moreover, that is rooted in material interests rather than morality and charity. At the end of the day, it is not beauty campaigns that are going to liberate women but their own self-activity and a politics of transnational solidarity based on a rejection of neoliberalism and empire."

More of my favourite passages from this essay to come!

[lboogie1906]

Beatriz Nascimento (July 12, 1942 – January 28, 1995) was an Afro-Brazilian academic and activist. She was an influential participant in the Black Movement in Brazil. She evaluated the importance of quilombos as autonomous spaces for people of African descent during the colonial period and challenged the political environment and racial policies of the government toward Afro-Brazilians. Her scholarship on the invisibility of African women, and particularly non-Anglo women of the African diaspora had an international impact on research regarding the complexities of the African experience and the lack of attention focused on Afro-Latinas in transnational feminism.

She enrolled at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro, graduating with a BA in history. She became involved in the Black Movement in Brazil. She was a co-founder of several associations and attended numerous conferences and public forum discussions on blackness and racial politics.

She began working as an intern at the Brazilian National Archives and continued her education, studying at the Fluminense Federal University. She was involved in the founding of the Andre Rebouças Working Group, which had a significant effect on the resurgence of Black identity and the politicization of race under the Brazilian military government. Her research during this period centered on ethnographic studies in three of the surviving quilombo communities in Minas Gerais. She came to recognize quilombos as “autonomous Black spaces of liberation”. #africanhistory365 #africanexcellence

[sorchanitua]

Wesleyan University Open-rank Professorship in Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies

Deadline: October 1 Length/Track: Tenured, tenure track Description: Seeking candidates “with substantive research and teaching interests in the area(s) of Transnational Feminist and Queer Studies of the Global South and/or Black Feminism / Black Queer Diaspora…

[femgeniuses]

Queer Berlin Walking Tour w/ Mal Pool + the Schwules*Museum

Queer Berlin Walking Tour w/ Mal Pool + the Schwules*Museum

[albertserra]

my trans/faggot reading list

The Queer Art of Failure by Jack Halbertsam

Stone Butch Blues by Leslie Feinberg

Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices by Toby Beauchamp

Whipping Girl: A Transsexual Woman on Sexism and the Scapegoating of Femininity by Julia Serano

gay masculinities by peter nardi

Homosexuality in Cold War America : Resistance and the Crisis of Masculinity by Robert J Corber

Out of the Shadows: Reimagining Gay Men's Lives by Walt Odets

nevada by imogen binnie

gender nihilism by alyson escalante + addendum

Trans-in-Asia, Asia-in-Trans: An Introduction 

Trans Exploits: Trans of Color Cultures and Technologies in Movement by  Jian Neo Chen

The Terrible We: Thinking with Trans Maladjustment by Cameron Awkward-Rich

Nonbinary: Memoirs of Gender and Identity (various)

Acceptable femininity? Gay male misogyny and the policing of queer femininities Sadie E Hale and Tomás Ojeda

Please Miss: A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Penis by grace e lavery

delusions of gender by cordelia fine

a failed man by michael v smith (part of persistence: all ways butch and femme)

time is the thing a body moves through by T. Fleischmann

kai cheng thom’s writing

we want it all: an anthology of trans radical poetics

second skins: the body narratives of transsexuality by jay prossner

transgender warriors by leslie feinberg

the faggots and their friends between revolutions by larry mitchell

translating the queer: body politics and transnational conversations by hector dominguez ruvalcaba

captive genders: trans embodiment and the prison industrial complex

we both laughed in pleasure: the selected diaries of lou sullivan

how we get free: black feminism and the combahee river collective

trans girl suicide museum by hannah baer

dagger: on butch women by lily burana

black queer studies: a critical anthology by e patrick johnson and mae g Henderson

queer sex by juno roche

black on both sides: a racial history of trans identities by C. Riley Snorton

transgender liberation by leslie feinberg

female masculinity by jack halberstam

transecology by douglas a vakoch

street transvestite action revolutionaries : survival, revolt, and queer antagonistic struggle (Sylvia Rivera , Marsha P. Johnson)

a body that is ultra body: in conversation with fred moten and elysia crampton

building an abolitionist trans and queer movement with everything we’ve got (morgan bassichis, alexander lee and dean spade, 2011)

feminism and the (trans)gender entrapment of gender nonconforming prisoners (julia oparah, 2012)

normal life: administrative violence, critical trans politics, and the limits of law (dean spade, 2015)

Tseng Kwong Chi: Performing for the Camera by Việt Lê

detransition, baby by torrey peters

paul takes the form of a mortal girl by andrea lawlor

a failed man by michael v. smith (part of persistence: all ways butch and femme)

my new vagina wont make me happy by andrea long chu

sexing the body by Anne Fausto-Sterling

something that may shock and discredit you by danny lavery

the argonauts by maggie nelson

gender outlaws by kate bornstein

special mentions for articles ive read that were already very formative for me

Masquerading As the American Male in the Fifties: Picnic, William Holden and the Spectacle of Masculinity in Hollywood Film by Steven Cohan

The Production and Display of the Closet: Making Minnelli's "Tea and Sympathy” by David Gerstner

huge thanks to @mypocketsnug who sent #20-40

this is not at all intended to be some kind of definitive resource as ive literally read none of these yet save for the two i mention at the bottom and im compiling this for my personal use, im only publishing this bc an anon asked me to! feel free to reblog and also recommend me more but keep this disclaimer in mind

[gatheringbones]

[“While many U.S. radicals of color adopted the umbrella term “Third World” as early as the 1960s to signify and enact an “affiliation with an international anticolonial community,” the conference coordinators made a point of elucidating and opening up for discussion their own usage: “The definition of ‘Third World’ proposed for the Conference is those nations of people struggling to break the shackles of colonialism and neocolonialism. Principally, this includes those nations of Asia, Africa, the Pacific, South and Latin America, and Native and Black Americans who suffer under a form of domestic colonialism here in this country. While Third World was originally a phrase coined primarily to describe a state of economic dependency and the lack of technological advances, these same characteristics of underdevelopment tragically describe the condition of Black, Asian, Hispanic, and Native American women worldwide.”

Seen through this anticolonial, internationalist lens, an “alarming consistency” of labor exploitation, reproductive control, and sexual violence pervaded histories of genocidal acts against indigenous peoples, racial slavery and Jim Crow, the making and policing of U.S. national borders, and U.S. imperial wars in Asia, forming a foundation for an interwoven analysis of violence against those facing “the triple oppression of race, class, and sex.” In their overview of the proceedings, Ross, Touré, and Kathy Powell, another African American RCC staff member, contended that rape and abuse in contemporary society must be analyzed in the context of this transnational genealogy of violent subjection.

The summary papers by the conference organizers provide partial insight into the discussions that occurred about the place of the criminal legal system in analyses of, and solutions to, violence against women of color. They report a consensus that antiviolence movements must earnestly contend with the record of police violence against women and men of color and racially disproportionate rates of incarceration. The intertwined forces of racial, gender, and economic oppression conspired to lock up the “most disadvantaged of offenders,” most reliably when their victims were white women and less often when their victims were women of color. Moreover, as recent legal cases had shown, the most marginalized women survivors of violence were also unjustly incarcerated.

Although a few attendees saw the question of what role men might play in the antiviolence movement as “either premature or diversionary,” there was a fairly broad consensus behind a formal resolution that uprooting violence against women of color would require “re-educating,” rather than incarcerating, individual men who perpetrate rape and battering; in addition, greater numbers of progressive men of color (around ten of whom had attended the conference) should be engaged in advocating community-based sanctions against interpersonal violence. The absence of heated controversy about this resolution reflected the fact that the majority of the women in attendance were participating in mixed-gender political organizations alongside organizations focused on sexual and domestic violence. On the other hand, and relatedly, the “Third World Women and Feminism” workshop surfaced a more divergent range of viewpoints. Whereas some participants were concerned that an “analysis of power and its distribution within the feminist ranks” was not yet “dominant within the majority white movement,” others explained that their reluctance to identify with feminism stemmed primarily from their understanding of feminism as a separatist, “anti-male” project that disregarded the “political realities of Third World people.”]

emily l. thuma, from all our trials: prisons, policing, and the feminist fight to end violence, 2019

[mariacallous]

In “Why We Lost the Sex Wars,” Bracewell suggests that the women’s-liberation movement could have retained its radical edge had it paid more attention to its Black and Third World participants. Feminists of color on both “sides” of the sex wars—Alice Walker, Patricia Hill Collins, Cherríe Moraga, Mirtha Quintanales—cautioned against using the power of the carceral state to address the pathologies of sex and imagined a form of sexual freedom based on the eradication of racism and imperialism. Today, activists readily agree that feminism must be “intersectional”—that is, alert to the complex ways in which the workings of patriarchy are inflected by race, class, and other axes of oppression. And yet intersectionality is often seen as a primarily domestic concern. In a recent conversation with Barbara Smith, one of the authors of the 1974 Combahee River Collective Statement, a founding document of intersectional feminism, the Black feminist Loretta J. Ross observed, “In the seventies and eighties and nineties we were much more transnational in our organizing than I am seeing today.”

“Direct, personal internationalism,” Sheila Rowbotham writes, “was very much part of sisterhood.” Her memoir describes visits to, and from, the women’s movements in Germany, Italy, Spain, Greece, and France; time spent poring over a friend’s notes on a Vietnamese women’s delegation; and research into the role of women in nationalist movements in Cuba and Algeria. In the United States, “Sisterhood Is Powerful,” the hugely popular 1970 anthology of writings from the American Women’s Liberation Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, was followed, in 1984, by the publication of “Sisterhood Is Global,” a collection of essays on the women’s movement in nearly seventy countries, each written by a feminist theorist or activist working on the ground.

Such internationalism has largely withered away in Anglo-American feminism. This no doubt has something to do with the broader demise of the international workers’ movement, with a general Anglo-American tendency toward insularity, and, perhaps, with the Internet, which has simultaneously given us too much to read and corroded our capacity to read it. These days, it can seem that, because feminism is so pervasive, so much on the best-seller lists and the syllabi and Twitter, we already know all about it. But there is, unsurprisingly, still much to learn. Shiori Itō’s “Black Box,” which appeared in English this year, is an arresting first-person account of a Japanese journalist’s attempt to secure justice after she was raped by a prominent TV personality. First published in Japan in 2017, “Black Box” has been central to the #MeToo movement there, laying bare how the country’s culture and history shape a specific regime of male sexual entitlement. It could be read instructively alongside Chanel Miller’s “Know My Name,” her 2019 memoir of being sexually assaulted by the Stanford student Brock Turner.

“Who Lost The Sex Wars?”

[inclusiveexcellencecca]

Black Women Radicals

Black Women Radicals (BWR) is a Black feminist advocacy organization dedicated to uplifting and centering Black women and gender expansive people’s radical political activism. Rooted in intersectional and transnational Black feminisms and Womanisms, we are committed to empowering Black transgender, queer, and cisgender radical women and gender expansive activists by centering their political, intellectual, and cultural contributions to the field of Black Politics across time, space, and place in Africa and the African Diaspora.

We are a collective that uplifts Black people of diverse gender identities and gender expressions, educational backgrounds, nationalities, religious and/or non-religious affiliations, languages, ethnicities, and more and who have diverse pathways of and to Blackness and to Black person-hoods and ways of being, but who are all committed to uplifting, centering, and honoring Black women and marginalized genders in their entireties. Our mission is to overcome the systemic erasure of Black women and gender expansive peoples’ radical activism by ensuring that their voices, perspectives, grassroots organizing, theoretical frameworks, leadership, and memory are seen, heard, felt, and known. For so long, Black women and gender non-conforming and non-binary people’s political leadership and movement building has been overlooked in academia and society writ-large. Our vision is to create and catalyze safe, inclusive, and informative spaces and critical conversations of and about historical, contemporary, and transnational Black women’s and gender expansive peoples’ activism. Through our blog, our database, community-centered events, research, and more, our purpose is to disrupt this erasure by uplifting and educating on and about Black women and gender expansive people’s political activism on the African continent and in the African Diaspora.

[hamiltonreview]

Upcoming Talks at the University Seminar in American Studies...

The University Seminar in American Studies will be meeting online through the fall, so look to this space for links to our sessions. As in previous years, we have invited scholars from a range of fields and disciplines associated with American Studies, to present works-in-progress in a collaborative context. We have sought to include people who are just starting out in their careers as well as those with established research records. It is an urgent moment to consider the contradictions of American culture and history, so we hope very much that you’ll join us at our upcoming meetings. Mark your calendars!

Fall:

9/22 - Westenley Alcenet is an assistant professor of History at Fordham University. His research focuses on the early Black Atlantic, abolitionism, and Reconstruction, especially narratives of African-American emigration to Haiti. His academic writing has appeared in The Journal of Haitian Studies and Politics, Religion and Ideology. He has written public historical commentary at The Root, The Immanent Frame, Black Perspectives, and Jacobin.

10/20 - Sarah Blackwood is associate professor of English at Pace University and author of The Portrait’s Subject: Inventing Inner Life in the Nineteenth-Century United States (UNC, 2019). She is co-editor of the “Avidly Reads” short book series with NYU Press, and editor of the Penguin Classics centennial edition of Edith Wharton’s The Age of Innocence. Her essays and criticism have appeared in The New Yorker, The New Republic, Slate, The Hairpin, and the Los Angeles Review of Books as well as American Literature, the Henry James Review, and MELUS: Multiethnic Literature of the United States.

11/17 - Julio Capo Jr. is associate professor of History at Florida International University and author of Welcome to Fairyland: Queer Miami before 1940 (UNC, 2017). His research centers on  the United States’s relationship to the Caribbean and Latin America, and especially how gender and sexuality have historically intersected with constructions of ethnicity, race, class, nation, age, and ability. His work has appeared in the Journal of American History, Radical History Review, Diplomatic History, Journal of Urban History, Journal of American Ethnic History, Modern American History, GLQ, H-Net, American Studies, and several volumes.

12/8 - Diane Detournay is a lecturer in English and Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Fordham University and is currently working on a book manuscript titled “Feminism, Race, and the Category of ��Woman’: The Civilizational Architecture of Women's Rights.” Her work has appeared in academic journals such as Parallax and Transgender Studies Quarterly as well as several anthologies.

Spring:

1/26 - Sasha Panaram is assistant professor of English at Fordham University. She received her Ph.D. in English from Duke University in 2020. Her research, which focuses on twentieth and twenty-first century African American and Caribbean literature, brings together discourses in slavery studies, Black feminisms, and geography studies. Her writing has been published in The Black Scholar.

2/23 - Autumn Womack is assistant professor of English and African American Studies at Princeton University. Womack’s research is located at the intersection of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century African American literary culture, visual studies, and print culture. She is currently at work on a book manuscript entitled "Un-discipling Data: Race, Visuality, and the Making of African American Literary Aesthetics, 1880-1930." Her writing has been published in Black Camera, American Literary History, Women and Performance, J19, and The Paris Review.

3/23 - Howard Rambsy II is a professor of literature at Southern Illinois University Edwardsville, where he teaches courses on American and African American literature. He has written articles and curated mixed media exhibits focusing on literary history, poetry, and the intersections of race and technology. He is the author of two books, The Black Arts Enterprise (Michigan, 2011) and Bad Men: Creative Touchstones of Black Writers (Virginia, 2020). His writing has appeared in a number of academic journals, including American Studies, The Mississippi Quarterly, The African American Review, Southern Quarterly, the Journal of Ethnic American American Literature, MELUS, and the PMLA.

4/20 -Benjamin Balthaseris associate professor of English and author of Anti-Imperialist Modernism: Race and Transnational Radical Culture from the Great Depression to the Cold War (Michigan, 2015). His research focuses on the relationships among social movements, racial identity, and cultural production. His critical and creative work has appeared or is forthcoming in journals and publications such as American Quarterly, The Oxford History of the Novel in English, Reconstruction, Criticism, In These Times, Cultural Logic, Minnesota Review, the Massachusetts Review, and elsewhere.

[citylightsbooks]

5 Questions with Megan Fernandes, Author of Good Boys

Megan Fernandes is a writer and academic living in New York City. She is the author of The Kingdom and After (Tightrope Books 2015) and the new book of poems, Good Boys (published by Tin House). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in the New Yorker, Tin House, Ploughshares, Denver Quarterly, Chicago Review, Boston Review, Rattle, Pank, the Common, Guernica, the Academy of American Poets, and McSweeney's Internet Tendency, among others. She is a poetry reader for The Rumpus and an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College. She holds a PhD in English from the University of California, Santa Barbara and an MFA in poetry from Boston University. She reads from her new book Good Boys with special guests at City Lights Bookstore on Tuesday, February 25th.

***

City Lights: If you’ve been to City Lights before, what’s your memory of the visit? If you haven’t been here before, what are you expecting?

Megan Fernandes: Of all the places I’m reading this Spring (and it’s probably not politic to say this), I am most excited to read at City Lights. I’ve never been, but I understood at a very young age that the bookstore symbolized possibility, spontaneity, digression, lostness, community, etc. As a teenager, I read a lot of Beat literature, my favorites being Dharma Bums, In the Night Café, and everything Ginsberg. I was compelled by their portraits of America’s expansiveness. And I also just think as an immigrant kid not born in the USA, the Beats gave me some sense of American geography. I went to Colorado for the first time last year and I had this memory of my first impression of Colorado as a place described in On the Road. When traveling across the country, I often have Ferlinghetti’s feverish, twitchy, carnivalesque poetics in my head. I also think in this indirect way, Beat literature shaped some of my thoughts around feminist thinking as I was conscious of my orientation as outside certain privileges of the “male, womanizing adventurer” often romanticized in Beat lit. I had to interrogate what it meant to feel intimacies with Ginsberg and Duncan who were destabilizing masculinities and cultural logics of hate. 

And so what I learned from City Lights and Beat lit is really something about the relationship between myth-making and counter-culture communities. I’m understanding the truly expansive network of the movement in so much more detail right now while reading an advanced copy of a fabulous new book called The Beats: A Literary History by Steven Belletto. 

What are you reading right now?

I’m reading a book called Dapper Dan: Made in Harlem, co-written by Dapper Dan himself and my good friend, Mikael Awake. It’s a history of Dapper Dan’s iconic work in fashion, of course, while being really intimate. And it’s just as much a history of his family’s internal dynamics and, through his family, New York City at large. In particular, 1970’s NYC is so vividly, brilliantly wrought in this book.

There’s this one section where Dap is at Iona College at a lecture on protohistory and the professor, a Czech immigrant, tells the class that “In order for man to have survived during those ancient times… he must have had powers that he doesn’t have now. The only people that could possibly still have these powers today are the black and brown people on the planet” and when Dap hears this, he is transfixed. He says: “This is one of the most esteemed scholars at Iona College telling a packed lecture hall that black and brown people were the only ones on the planet who still had spiritual powers. How come this was my first time hearing about that? I looked around. I was the only black student in the class. I wasn’t tired anymore. He had my full attention… I said to myself, This is what I need to know. This is how I need to formulate myself.” I’m loving how the book captures these intense moments of transformation. I love that word choice: formulate. What poetic agency is modeled in that word? I needed that word the moment I read it. 

Recently, I’ve also read Samiya Bashir’s Field Theories and Edgar Kunz’s Tap Out. Samiya wrote this legitimately weird and imaginative book that feels like it’s made out of the time-space continuum. Some cosmic materiality is really showing up in that book. I remember this line: “A body. A zoo. A lovely savannah. Walls of clear, clean glass” and I’m just on a ride with the musicality of her shifting assonance. Plus, I know that writers like June Jordan and Toni Cade Bambara are operating influences/specters of the book and you can feel that energy. Edgar’s book is more narrative and quieter, but so devastating. I sort of get what makes his speakers tenderize if that makes sense. I think it’s the same phenomena that tenderizes me, too.

Some of my favorite novels of recent years includes A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims, The Small Backs of Children by Lidia Yuknavitch, Sonora by Hannah Lillith Assadi, and very recently, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead.

What book or writer do you always find yourself recommending?

I think Jean Toomer’s Cane is the most beautiful book of the 20th century. I remember just being blown away by its call and response, the repeating imagery of sun and smoke and pines. That book is so stunning. Other astounding work that I always recommend includes Mebvh McGuckian’s Captain Lavender, Anne Carson’s The Autobiography of Red, Evie Shockley’s The New Black, Franz Wright’s Walking to Martha’s Vineyard, Eleni Sikelianos’ Body Clock, Jorie Graham’s The Errancy, Bhanu Kapil’s The Vertical Interrogation of Strangers, The Collected Poems of W.B. Yeats, and Galway Kinnell and Hannah Liebmann’s translations of Rilke. Those are my hard-hitters. Those books are why I became a poet. 

What writers/artists/people do you find the most influential to the writing of this book and/or your writing in general?

You know, I collected poems while I was writing and editing this book. And I think those specific poems created a kind of constellation around me, almost protective, that kept me writing. Some of those poems include “The Long Recovery” by Ellen Bass, “A Matter of Balance,” by Evie Shockley, “What lips my lips have kissed, and where, and why” by Edna St. Vincent Millay, “I am Not Seaworthy” by Toni Morrison, “Becoming Regardless” by Jack Spicer, “A New Bride Almost Visible in Latin” by Jack Gilbert, “To the Young Who Want to Die” by Gwendolyn Brooks and many, many others. Definitely O’Hara as well. He never leaves me. The most important poem of that little self-curated archive is Frank Bidart’s “Visions at 74” where he writes: “To love existence / is to love what is indifferent to you.” I remember reading that line and just losing it. I have been guided by so much of Bidart. And maybe my book is a little bit about how to sustain rage in the face of that which is indifferent to you, what cannot love you (both personally and abstractly). How do you sustain rage so as to not fall into despair?

I also listened to a variety of music while writing and editing. A mix between contemporary sad kid hip-hop, old school jazz and blues, gospel, 80’s bands, pop culture queens, 1970’s hypnotic modal vamp, classical Spanish guitar, electronic pop, really pretty varied. A few names that come to mind: KOTA the Friend, NoName, Vince Staples, Travis Scott, Miles Davis Quintet, Bessie Smith, Sam Cooke, The Knocks, Solange, Archie Shepp, Pharoah Sanders, Alice Coltrane, Big Mama Thornton, Miriam Makeba, Kamasi Washington, Thompson Twins, Misfits, Bowie, Talking Heads, Tears for Fears, Cher, Whitney Houston, Portishead, Goldfrapp, Memphis Slim, Dinah Washington, Alberto Iglesias, Gustavo Santaolalla, Holychild, Blood Orange, etc.

If you opened a bookstore, where would it be located, what would it be called, and what would your bestseller be?

My grandpa played violin on a ship that sailed between Tanga, Tanzania and Goa, India. I never had the chance to meet him. He died when my dad was sixteen, but I always thought about what that journey might have looked and felt like, its many hardships, but also the wonder of gazing out at the sea playing strings. For that reason, I’d love to open a bookstore that focused specifically on Indian Ocean diaspora and sold books exclusively by authors working, uncovering, or investigating the literature of that oceanic rim. I think there is something rich in thinking about books not necessarily focused on nation-statehood but thinking more about a kind of social-imaginary with a literature that is messy in its conceptualization and crosses, migrates, misses, and mythologizes across many cultures over generations. You could have sections on food, underwater exploration, piracy, long-distance intimacy, trade routes, empire, transnational feminism. I like the idea of a bookstore that is anti-genre and instead, organized by associative thinking and imagination. It would be a logistical nightmare. You would never find what you were looking for, but you might find something you didn’t know existed.

So yes, I’d vote for a little homegrown network of bookstores in India, East Africa, and actually, maybe one of them in Lisbon which is a city that has a long (and problematic) history with the Indian Ocean. I’ve spent a lot of time in Lisbon the past eight years of my life, spending time visiting family and researching the history of the Portuguese empire especially as it relates to my family history (my folks are third generation East African Portuguese colonized Indians). I have a lot of conflicting homelands which is a way of saying that there are times when I feel like I have nothing but a rootless present. That’s something I investigate in my work, that weird (a)temporality. And I’m drawn to the particular light of Lisbon which is quite unusual. I’d call the bookstore “Malaika” which means “Angel” in Swahili and is the favorite folk song of my parents who grew up in Tanzania. I like the idea of a bookstore in Lisbon with the name in Swahili run by a Goan-Canadian-American woman. That’s the world I grew up in… one of multiplicities. 

[marxist-feminist]

A

ABLEISM ACTIVISM ADDICTION & RECOVERY ALLYSHIP ART ASIAN FEMINISM

B-C

BLACK FEMINISM BLOGS/WEBSITES BODY IMAGE CALL OUT/IN CULTURE CLASSISM CONSENT CULTURE CULTURAL APPROPRIATION CYBERBULLYING

D-E

DISABILITY EATING DISORDERS EDUCATION EMOTIONAL LABOR

F-G

FAT STUDIES FOOD GENDER IDENTITY & TRANS LIVES GIRLS' STUDIES

H

HARASSMENT HEALTH HISTORY

I-L

INTIMATE PARTNER VIOLENCE LAW & LEGAL LGBTQIA+

M-O

MARRIAGE MENSTRUATION MENTAL ILLNESS MISOGYNY MUSIC NATIVE/INDIGENOUS FEMINISM NEURODIVERSITY #NOTALLMEN

P-R

PARENTING PODCASTS PREGNANCY PRIVILEGE RACE & ETHNICITY RACISM RADICAL SELF CARE RAPE & RAPE CULTURE RELIGION & SPIRITUALITY REPRODUCTIVE RIGHTS RESPECTABILITY POLITICS

S

STIS & SEXUAL HEALTH SEX & SEXUALITY SEX WORK SEXISM STALKING

T-Z

TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM TRAUMA, HEALING & RESILIENCE WORK & EQUAL PAY XICANISMA/LATINA FEMINISM ZINES

by Lachrista Greco, MA & MLIS Follow her work: theguerillafeminist on IG

[sorchanitua]

Assistant Professorship in Interdisciplinary Studies -- Black, Decolonial, or Queer Feminist Theories

Deadline: December 4 (to ensure full consideration) Length/Track: Apparently tenure track Description: ” We especially seek candidates interested in Theories of Intersectionality, Transnational feminisms, Grassroot women’s organizing, Feminist histories/futures, Black/Latinx/Indigenous/Queer sexualities.” “Candidates should hold a Ph.D. in a humanities or social science field.” “They will…

[izenidak]

Jamaican Feminism

I am concerned about the type of "feminism" being advocated in Jamaica. Third World or Transnational Feminism it is not... It is simply something else.

It is something evolved. Something... undefined.

I am also concerned about "how" this type of "feminism" is being advocated. Not only is the "how" of it all, scary... the "what" is exceedingly ambitious.

We must always try to remember that, the ultimate goal of feminism (ending what bell hooks calls the White Supremacist Capitalist Patriarchy) is the equivalent of checking the King in a game of Chess. But, in order to check the King, we have to get rid of his pawns, knights, bishops, etc.

Likewise, in order to put an end to the hegemonic system of WSCP, the structures that support this system must be first eliminated (eradicated).

If it is that we self-identify as Feminists and lack this essential understanding... we are merely Feminists in disguise.

- I am not a feminist, I advocate feminism (iMe)

[femgeniuses]

BlackEurope: The Beginnings of Black Self-Organization in Europe

BlackEurope: The Beginnings of Black Self-Organization in Europe

by Erin Huggins Photo Credit: Erin Huggins The question and answer session begins, and the panels for the day come to an end. One of the last people to speak starts to ask their question by stating, “I was expecting a Blackity, Black, Black Black event.” This individual points out how they cannot truly be comfortable and vulnerable at a Black conference on Black issues when there are still white…