Ce texte passe en revue les caractéristiques principales d’une expérience de jardins ouvriers menée à Durham, en Caroline du Nord pour lutter contre les violences sexuelles et sexistes. Le jardin, l’acte de jardiner sont envisagés comme des techniques de justice transformatrice : se rassembler, entrer en contact les unes avec les autres, cultiver de quoi se nourrir, sentir la terre et les histoires de violence qui la précèdent, se donner les moyens d’y faire pousser autres choses. Toutes ces pratiques interrelient (...) l’histoire, la communauté et les conditions matérielles d’existence pour faire exister la justice sous la forme de plantes qui poussent, là même où, selon les mots d’Audre Lorde, « nous n’étions pas censées survivre ». (shrink)

Une plaisanterie qui se retourne contre la toute-puissance de Google permet à une descendante de Stagecoach Mary d’accélérer notre passage à la télépathie en re-matérialisant humoristiquement nos courriels sur des déchets de toutes sorte. La planète des utopies à venir est à inventer en riant de nos dystopies présentes.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Introduction to Creative Writing ContributionsAlexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekinewhen i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color and All the Women Are (...) White, All the Blacks Are Men, But Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies, I imagined a wealth of examples of the world and the work made possible by these two groundbreaking anthologies. I wondered what their editors and contributors were writing now. I wondered about the work of their students and people like me: those of us who understand everything we write as indebted to the path-making, silence-clearing, generative, and bodacious work of the participants in the miracles that are This Bridge Called My Back and But Some of Us Are Brave.But today as I reread the contributions that actually emerged from this process, I realize that my dream was too small. I imagined writing that would provide evidence of the ongoing impact made by these two anthologies. Instead, the creative writing in this special issue offers something more crucial and beautiful than I had imagined. These works are not mere evidence of a transformed world; these works are continuing to transform the world in urgent and visionary ways. As repeated again and again by participants in the 2022 celebration for the fortieth anniversary celebration of This Bridge Called My Back, the work that inspired these anthologies is not over. The writings featured in this issue not only show [End Page 198] how this work continues, but they feed, nurture, and provoke us as we honor our responsibility to transform this world.For example, when Akasha Gloria Hull, coeditor of But Some of Us Are Brave, shares her daily early morning meditative writing in "Writing and Rebirth: A Set of Journal Poems," we remember not only her fundamental work excavating the daily lives of Black women writers from the nineteenth century—most notably in Give Us Each Day, her edited book based on the diaries of poet Alice Dunbar Nelson—but also our own imperative. Hull's reflections on health challenges, interpersonal conflict, resurrection, collaboration, and writing itself remind us that our feminist praxis is impactful because of its dailyness. Those of us who wake up tomorrow will need to ask the same critical questions the editors of But Some of Us Are Brave asked of the fields of Black studies and women's studies. We will find surprises and repetitions in the days we meet, and then we will have to do it again.When we read two new prose poems by Cheryl Clarke, an original contributor to This Bridge Called My Back, we have an opportunity to time travel. In "Living as a Lesbian in the Archive of Style," we venture into a critical engagement with the term "hardcore lesbian," displacing the desires of the person who needs to classify others using that term with those of someone who has been hailed by it. Clarke's poem is a reminder that as we work in literary traditions and fields of study made possible by the revolutionary identity politics of an earlier era, we are still responsible for centering the experiences of those most impacted by our fluent and fluid naming practices. In "History," Clarke offers us a timely Black lesbian feminist lens on many iterations of responding to police violence, centering the perspective of a lesbian, her lover, and her lover's husband.The poem "On Being an hbcu Graduate, Teacher, Professor-Scholar at Stillman College, Tuscaloosa, AL, in May 2015" by doris diosa davenport—an original contributor to But Some of Us Are Brave—highlights the intimacy, hilarity, and poignancy of the daily work of intergenerational critical and creative praxis. In particular, she considers the context of institutions and regions that are sometimes excluded from the imaginary of how and where feminist work happens. davenport transmits the lessons and energy gained through her practice of thinking and gathering otherwise... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface Sometimes, even those of us who have organized our entire lives around the transformative possibilities of Black feminist thought can sit back in wonder at the expansiveness of this intergenerational transnational practice.Thisspecialissuetakesamomenttoimbibewhere we have been, where we are, and where we have yet to journey. The contributors to this special issue on, or more precisely, of Black feminist thought find Black feminist thinking in a wide range of (...) times, places, and forms. Each of the contributors invites us to bear witness in a distinct way to the pushes and pulls of critical engagement with Black feminist thought. Biomythic origin point “mitochondrial eve” brainstorms the archive and admonishes those of us looking back to “be a forest of your own / dreams.” Gladys Bentley sends unrequited texts to... Gladys Bentley. Everything is possible here, even what should never have happened. In If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday, Farah Jasmine Griffin, one of the most dedicated and prolific stewards of Black feminist thought as a liberatory practice, cites Rita Dove’s poem “Canary” to evoke the protective strategies Black women employ to hold something (ourselves, each other) sacred in an unfree world.1 The lineage we participate in through our Black 1. Farah Jasmine Griffin, If You Can’t Be Free, Be a Mystery: In Search of Billie Holiday (New York: Ballantine Books, 2001), 155–56. “Be a Mystery”: (The Infinity of) Black Feminist Thought 8Preface feminist intellectual labor is sacred to us. For generations, even before the name “Black Feminist,” it has existed as a form of love, communion, protest, and prophecy, often far from the spotlight. Nurtured by the warmth of imagination, practices became praxis. Griffin and others have ensured a tradition wherein, to invoke Griffin’s paraphrase of Toni Morrison in her tribute to Nellie McKay, “the mothers may soar and the daughters may know their names.”2 We are some of the daughters. But we are living in times that neither we nor our mothers would hardly recognize. Abolitionist queer Black feminists are topping the New York Times bestseller lists. Our scholars and experts speak on the nightly news. Some of what were once our most marginalized proposals have become policies, funding keywords, and even memes. The Movement for Black Lives, one of the largest and most visible social movements of our time, or any time, explicitly connects its vision to the foundational Combahee River Collective statement. We do this work now in the light of recognition. Masses of people think they know what Black feminism is, and yet, this is not the world that we dreamed. We, the current generation of practicing Black feminist thinkers, are faced with the consequences of Black feminist practice feeling like less of a mystery. We celebrate the legacy our foremothers have made possible, and we must also think creatively, lovingly, and sometimes even cryptically about what this moment can and must mother—or bring into being. It has to bring into being something we cannot describe from here, something we have not yet known. It is exhilaratingly beautiful to look upon what’s been made possible, but we know there is so much more than recognition. Undaunted by a world still hellbent on not caring for or loving us, even as it consumes our insights, theories, and modes of organizing, we create worlds filled with an abundance of joy, affirmation, and ingenuity. It is from this robust, ancestral practice of world-making that this special issue emerges. The pieces found here provide insight into one of the most dynamic aspects of Black feminist thought: its generative power. The range of topics included in this special issue encapsulates the breadth of this interdisciplinary, transnational, multimodal, and 2. Farah Jasmine Griffin, “That the Mothers May Soar and the Daughters May Know Their Names: A Retrospective of Black Feminist Literary Criticism,” Signs 32, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 483–507. Preface 9 intergenerational practice. Given the seemingly infinite nodes and entry points of Black feminist thought, it is befitting that this issue coheres because of an unboundedness and porousness among the pieces. The art essays, articles, field reviews, and conversations converse, dance, and harmonize with... (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:preface The essays in this special issue on Indigenous Feminisms in Settler Contexts engage feminist politics from multiple Indigenous geographies, histories, and standpoints. What emerges is a panoramic view of Indigenous feminist scholarship’s conceptual, linguistic, and artistic activism at this moment in time. We learn of praxis aimed at reclaiming Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives and the varied modes of resistance, survivance, and persistence. We also unpack the complex (...) racial/gender politics of colonial encounters in contexts where white women cared intimately for Indigenous children, or where they helped to recover Indigenous oral traditions, and we note how modes of help can also reproduce imperial power relations. Some essays, art works, and poems extend the geographic ambit of critiques of settler colonialism beyond American contexts: they deploy feminist rubrics to critique the continuing violent settlement of Palestine and Kashmir to demonstrate that the occupation of “marginal” places is constitutive of state-​ society relations; others describe how Australian Aboriginal and Sámi artists engage the question of Indigenous visibility. In different ways, they each show how staying in place, against all odds, can be radical. Our first two articles examine the politics of praxis. Michelle M. Jacob, Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen analyze Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin Indigenous language education. The “artivism” of Sámi artists Maxida 284Preface and Timimie Märak, which expresses concern for land and water rights, gender and sexuality, and Indigenous rights in Northern Europe takes center stage in Kyle Bladow’s essay. The next three articles interrogate historical records shaping Indigenous lives in northern Canada, southwest Pacific, and southwestern United States and Mexico. Val Marie Johnson examines how white women staff members’ intimate care relations at residential schools for Inuvialuit, Inuinnait, and Iñupiat peoples in Canada were bound up with the latter’s dispossession. Carolyn J. Eichner recounts the encounter between the Indigenous Kanak people and Louise Michel, a feminist and participant in the revolutionary Paris Commune of 1871 who was banished to New Caledonia for seven years; Eichner argues that although Michel was staunchly anti-imperialist, her liberatory political project bore the temporal logics of colonization. Drawing on examples of Nahua reconfigurations of Christian scripture, Kenna Neitch proposes the language of “persistence” as a heuristic for avoiding the reactive, relational connotations that can pervade scholarly usages of “resistance” rhetoric. Next, our review essay by Jennifer McLerran describes recent Indigenous feminist scholarship that recasts the concept of sovereignty. Our News and Views piece focuses on modalities of occupation in the context of Kashmir: Nosheen Ali, Mona Bhan, Sahana Ghosh, Hafsa Kanjwal, Zunaira Komal, Deepti Misri, Shruti Mukherjee, Nishant Upadhyay, Saiba Varma, and Ather Zia argue that occupation is foundational to the making and reproduction of nationstates, and not exceptional to state power. The varied forms of resistance to occupation are examined by Sara Ihmoud in her article about how a group of Palestinian women, the Murabitat al-Haram, agitate for religious freedom simply by “staying in place.” Rabab Abdulhadi comments on shifts in contemporary settler colonial discourse in Israel, noting the increasingly overt and unapologetic deployment of highly sexualized and gendered images. Marina Tyquiengco examines the art of Australian Aboriginal artist Fiona Foley, specifically her Black Velvet series. Art and myth are also fused in Shantell Powell’s textual and visual rendering of Inuit memory. This issue features a range of poetry on topics such as language loss, human-land relationships, and sexual violence, written by Katherine Agyemaa Agard, Kei Kaimana, and Kai Minosh Pyle, and curated by our creative writing editor, Alexis Pauline Gumbs. In “Átaw Iwá Ichishkíin Sínwit: The Importance of Ichishkíin Language in Advancing Indigenous Feminist Education,” Michelle M. Jacob, Preface 285 Virginia R. Beavert, Regan Anderson, Leilani Sabzalian, and Joana Jansen examine Indigenous feminist praxis surrounding Ichishkíin-language education. They critique how Western education systems inflict pernicious forms of violence within Native communities, engaging in practices of linguistic genocide and alienating Indigenous peoples from their homelands. In response, Native peoples, along with non-Native allies, are engaging in educational and political activism to reclaim and revitalize Indigenous languages and ecological perspectives. In examining the foundational teaching of Ichishk... (shrink)