Editorial
1 But some of us are brave: all the women are white, all the blacks are men - this anthology title for the collection edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott and the late Barbara Smith, first published in 1982, summed up the concerns black women's writing in the 1970s and 1980s had put on the political, cultural and literary agenda, ever since the groundbreaking publication of Toni Cade Bambara's The Black Woman in 1970. Pointing to the suppressions and negations of both, white feminism and black liberation and their discursive constructions of subjectivity, agency and a potential for resistance, writing by black women had created a powerful moment of social and cultural awareness which reverberates - even though in many contexts rather as an underground existence - until today and has been resurfacing in the contemporary interest in and attraction of theories of intersectionality. However, despite the noticeable current regard for the crossroads or interconnected axes of analysis framed by race, class, gender and sexuality though, the particular generative power of black women's writing as the crucial impulse to that critical development has, beyond the African-American context, gone missing. With a selection of contemporary criticism, this issue of gender forum wants to draw attention to the manifold contributions of black women's writing both to a cosmopolitan literary and cultural heritage of women, as well as to international Gender Studies.
2 In her reading of Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother Sabine Broeck reads Hartman's work on slavery as a commentary on the foundational violence which helped to put the modern Euroamerican world's white subjectivity in its place; the article points out the implications of contemporary meditations on the slave trade for Gender Studies' epistemological horizon.
3 Terri Francis' article interrogates the ways in which with The Black Interior and Power and Possibility poet/author Elisabeth Alexander speaks in the tongues of many genres. She discusses Alexander's anthological or collective first-person voice as analogous to the Rastafarian (imperfectly realized) ideal of unity among people.
4 Alice Pauline Gumbs examines 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. Black 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 cultural 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.
5 Katharina Gerund examines the impact of Audre Lorde's work as writer/activist on the development of Afro-German women's communities. Her essay analyzes transatlantic dialogues and interactions, which are primarily based on gender and black solidarity and outlines Lorde's seminal role for Afro-German women as well as the meaning of Lorde's work in Germany within the context of the African Diaspora.