Black Feminist Constellations

Dialogue and Translation across the Americas

Edited by Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu

University of Texas Press

A collection of essays, interviews, and conversations by and between scholars, activists, and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean that paints a portrait of Black women's experiences across the region.

Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer a triple erasure: as Black people, as women, and as non-English speakers in a global environment dominated by the Anglophone North. Black Feminist Constellations is a passionate and necessary corrective. Focused on and written by Black women of the southern Americas, the original works composing this volume make legible the epistemologies that sustain radical scholarship, art, and political organizing by Black women everywhere.

In essays, poems, and dialogues, the writers in Black Feminist Constellations reimagine liberation from the perspectives of radical South American and Caribbean Black women thinkers. The volume’s methodologically innovative approach reflects how Black women come together to theorize the world and challenges the notion that the university is the only site where knowledge can emerge. A major work of intellectual history, Black Feminist Constellations amplifies rarely heard voices, centers the uncanonized, and celebrates the overlooked work of Black women.

As Black women’s intellectual, cultural, and spiritual contributions are increasingly, albeit belatedly, included in the global feminist archive, Black Feminist Constellations challenges how ostensibly reparative methodologies can reinstate the very hierarchies they pretend to contest. In this immensely valuable volume, editors Christen Smith and Lorraine Leu do not simply insert those excluded voices, they ask us to imagine radical futures emerging from new foundations built on the work of Black feminists in the Global South and the political struggles they represent. Angela Y. Davis

This carefully curated volume is unprecedented, featuring work by and conversations between formidable Black feminists from throughout the African Diaspora and situated inside and outside the academy. It offers us the brilliant idea of constellations--rather than centers or peripheries--as a way of thinking about the often-parallel development of Black feminist thought and Black women’s movements around the world. The book’s insistence on a Black feminism that is dialogic, multilingual, and anti-imperialist is a much-needed contribution to the field. The intimate conversations, and the affective links that ground them, are special and offer new language for understanding power, freedom, and connection across the diaspora. Tianna S. Paschel, University of California, Berkeley, author of Becoming Black Political Subjects

Christen A. Smith is an associate professor of anthropology and African and African Diaspora studies and the director of the Center for Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Texas at Austin.

Lorraine Leu is a professor of Latin American and cultural studies in the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) and Department of Spanish & Portuguese at the University of Texas at Austin.

The Sacred Word of Women: A Performance (Elizandra Souza; translation by Christen A. Smith)
Palavra Sagrada de Mulher: Uma Performance (Elizandra Souza)
Toward a Dialogic Transnational Black Feminism: An Introduction (Christen Smith and Lorraine Leu)
Part I. Radical Movements: Caring for Life
- Oriki to Sueli (Elizandra Souza; translation by Luana Moreira Reis)
- 1. A Feminism So Complex and So Radical (Sueli Carneiro; translation and introduction by Christen A. Smith)
- 2. Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas: Perspectives from the Global South (Sueli Carneiro; translation and editing by Lorraine Leu)
- 3. Is It Time to Say Goodbye to “Feminism”? (Florencia Gomes; translation by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez)
- 4. Black Feminist(s) Work in Argentina (Florencia Gomes and Prisca Gayles; introduction, interview, and translation by Prisca Gayles)
- 5. Intimate Poetics: World-Making through Cuidado de la Vida (Care of Life) in and beyond the Borders of Colombia (Sofía Garzón and Yineth Balanta Mina; introduction by Alysia Mann Carey; translation by Keturah Nichols )
- 6. Black Women’s Epistemological Contributions: Afro-Mexican Women in the Twenty-First Century (Itza Amanda Varela Huerta; translation and editing by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez)
- 7. Black Women’s Struggle in Mexico: Anti-racism, Community Organization, and Reparation Politics (A conversation between Rosa María Castro Salinas, Itza Amanda Varela Huerta, and Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera; introduction by Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera; translation and editing by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez and Alida Perrine)
- 8. Beyond Words: Fugitive Embodiments, Creative Praxis, and Trans-Intellectual Genealogies for Black Life (A conversation between Dora Santana and Michaela Machicote; introduction by Michaela Machicote)
Part II. Radical Roots: Genealogies of Thought
- 9. A Genealogy of Black Left Feminist Claims (Carole Boyce Davies)
- 10. How Will We Organize to Live? Andaiye’s Radical Praxis (D. Alissa Trotz)
- 11. From the Archives: CAFRA Conversations--Audre Lorde and Andaiye
- 12. A Brief Introduction to the Life and Work of Sylvia Wynter: Early Life and Work(s) (Bedour Alagraa)
- 13. The Life and Work of Sylvia Wynter in the Americas (A conversation between Carole Boyce Davies, Bedour Alagraa, and Yomaira Figueroa)
- 14. Visualizing Blackness in Brazil (Rosana Paulino with Lorraine Leu; translation by Lorraine Leu)
- 15. Settlement: Rosana Paulino and Black Women’s Insubordinate Geohistories (Lorraine Leu)
- 16. Diasporic Memories: Black Women Writers’ Lived Experiences and Ancestralities (Elizandra Souza; translation by Christen A. Smith)
Coda. Whirlwind Women/Mulheres redemoinhos (Elizandra Souza; translation by Luana Moreira Reis)
Acknowledgments
Editors, Contributors, and Translators
Index