Detailed Table of Contents
- Editorial
- Sabine Broeck: Enslavement as Regime of Western Modernity: Re-reading Gender Studies Epistemology Through Black Feminist Critique
- Abstract: What emerges from Saidiya Hartman's, and Hortense Spillers's work about slavery which I am reading as a rather elaborate argument taking off where Toni Morrison left it with Beloved, is a picture of foundational violence which helped put the modern Euroamerican world's white subjectivity in its place. One of the ways this happened was the structural obliteration of access to gender, that is, gendered subjectivity for black human beings, male or female, while at the same time making black human beings, and particularly females, the target of white transgressively abusive desires of all shades and forms. I will draw out the implications of contemporary meditations on the slave trade for Gender Studies' epistemological horizon. I will follow Hartman's and Spiller's evolving arguments by way of a close reading which challenges (white) gender studies borders erected around the sanctity of gender as the founding difference of western societies.
- Author's Bio: Sabine Broeck, Professor of American Studies at the University of Bremen and acting Chair of the program English-Speaking Cultures, is one of the pioneering European scholars in transatlantic critical race studies. Her teaching and research focuses on the intersections of race, class, gender and sexualities, with a historical emphasis on modernity, slavery and the black diaspora, with a strong postcolonial bent. She has been a longstanding and active member of the European American, and African-American Studies community; at present, she is President of the international scholarly organization Collegium for African American Research (CAAR), as well as director of the University of Bremen Institute for Postcolonial and Transcultural Studies (INPUTS). For more information, see http://www.fb10.uni-bremen.de/lehrpersonal/broeck.aspx.
- Terri Francis: I and I: Elizabeth Alexander's Collective First-Person Voice, the Witness and the Lure of Amnesia.
- Abstract: Black women's writing is characterized by expressive multiplicity in three major ways: intertextuality, intergeneric textual strategies and the collective first person. In this essay, I show the ways in which in The Black Interior and Power and Possibility Alexander speaks in the tongues of many genres and at times uses the first person collective or, "I and I," in a radical depth of identification between a reader and the text. I find that Alexander's anthological or collective first-person voice is analogous to the Rastafarian (imperfectly realized) ideal of unity among people, which is expressed through the collective first person pronoun, I and I.
- Author's Bio: Terri Francis is Assistant Professor in the Film Studies Program and the Department of African American Studies at Yale University. She recently completed the manuscript, The Josephine Baker Body Museum: Pleasure, Power and Blackness. Upcoming projects include histories of Jamaican film and African American home movies.
- Alexis Pauline Gumbs: "We Can Learn to Mother Ourselves": A Dialogically Produced Audience and Black Feminist Publishing 1979 to the "Present".
- Abstract: In 1979, black lesbian feminist writers and scholars Barbara and Beverly Smith wrote, "There is…no guarantee that we or our movement will survive long enough to become safely historical. We must document ourselves now." In order to make themselves "present" black feminists (especially lesbian and bisexual feminists) operating in literary collectives from 1979 to 1990 stole the key term "motherhood" out of its heteronormativized function and instead used it to create a shared space and time of co-production. In 1983, when Audre Lorde suggested "[w]e can mother ourselves," she was explicitly suggesting the possibility of a co-productive relationship between black women of the same generation, countering the presumption that a black woman could only expect unconditional love from her mother. In addition, Lorde's statement implicitly requires a complete transformation of the mode through which black female subjectivity is produced, invoking a politics of presence which both frames the political practice of black feminist publishing and scholarship in the 1980's and provides a framework for how black feminist scholars, writers and publishers today can engage a legacy that will still be in the making.
- Author's Bio: Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a Phd candidate in English, Africana Studies and Women's Studies at Duke University. She is also the founder of BrokenBeautiful Press (www.brokenbeautiful.wordpress.com).
- Katherine Gerund: Sisterly (Inter)Actions: Audre Lorde and the Development of Afro-German Women's Communities.
- Abstract: Audre Lorde and her work as writer-activist have had a strong influence on the development of Afro-German women's communities, especially with regard to fostering solidarity among these women and creating a distinct group identity. However, the interactions between the "warrior poet" and her "Black German sisters" have not been one-directionally influential. Rather, traces of her connection with and impressions of Germany and Afro-German women can be found in Lorde's work and call for a reading of her writings in this context. The women she connected with personally or via her (literary) work have been transformed or at least affected by their mutual exchange(s) with her. This essay analyzes these transatlantic dialogues and interactions which are primarily based on gender and black solidarity and outlines Lorde's seminal role for Afro-German women as individuals and as an identifiable and visible group in German society. In the first part of this article, I, therefore, put Audre Lorde's works in the context of her relationship to Germany and particularly Afro-German women. The second part primarily focuses on Lorde's influence on Afro-German women's communities and the final part of this paper works towards an understanding of the overall conditions and consequences of this mutual exchange as well as its meaning within the context of the African Diaspora.
- Author's Bio: Katharina Gerund studied American Cultural Studies, Theater and Media Studies as well as Psychology at the University of Erlangen, Germany and African-American Studies at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, USA. She received her MA in 2007 and is currently a doctoral fellow at the University of Bremen. Her dissertation project focuses on the reception of African-American women's cultural production in Germany and their roles in transatlantic dialogues and cultural traffic.