Intersectionality
Tutor: Rebecca Stone
In Wayward Lives, Saidiya Hartman seeks to 鈥渋lluminate the radical imagination and everyday anarchy of ordinary colored girls, which has not only been overlooked, but is nearly unimaginable.鈥� To do so, Hartman uses a methodology (first developed in her ground-breaking article, 鈥淰enus in Two Acts鈥�) called 鈥渃ritical fabulation鈥�, in which she combines archival research with speculative and fictional narratives. This approach is both theoretically and methodologically grounded in Black feminist approaches to the archive, most notably in the reading of sources 鈥渁long the bias grain鈥� (Marisa Fuentes), and in the analysis of the lives of Black women through an 鈥渋ntersectional鈥� lens (Kimberl茅 Crenshaw).
Seminar Questions
- What is an 鈥渋ntersectional鈥� approach, and why is it necessary to understand the oppression and lived experiences of black women?
- What are the methodological challenges faced by scholars writing about Black women? How does Hartman approach the archive?
- How useful is Hartman鈥檚 methodology of 鈥渃ritical fabulation鈥� to a historian?
- How does our understanding of modern history change if Black women are placed at the centre of the story?
Core readings:
Saidiya Hartman, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019)
Kimberl茅 Crenshaw, 鈥淢apping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence against Women of Color鈥�, Stanford Law Review 43: 6 (1991), pp. 1241-1299.
Recommended Reading
The Combahee River Collective Statement (1977)
Patricia Hill Collins and Sirma Bilge, Intersectionality (Polity Press, 2020)
Saidiya Hartman, 鈥榁enus in Two Acts鈥�, Small Axe 26:12 (2008), pp. 1-14
Marisa Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016)
Further readings:
Mia Bay, To Tell the Truth Freely: The Life of Ida B. Wells (New York: 2009)
Elsa Barkley Brown, 鈥楴egotiating and Transforming the Public Sphere: African American Political Life in the Transition from Slavery to Freedom,鈥� Public Culture 7:1 (1994), pp: 107–146.
Elsa Barkley Brown, 鈥溾�榃hat Has Happened Here鈥�: The Politics of Difference in Women鈥檚 History and Feminist Politics,鈥� Feminist Studies 18:2 (1992), pp. 295–312.
Ira Berlin, The Making of African America: The Four Great Migrations (New York: 2011)
Stephanie M. H. Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
Angela Davis, 鈥淩eflections on the Black Woman鈥檚 Role in the Community of Slaves.鈥� The Black Scholar 3:4 (1971), pp. 2–15.
Angela Davis, Women, Race and Class (Random House, 1981)
Paula Giddings, 鈥楳issing in Action: Ida B. Wells, the NAACP and the Historical Record鈥�, Meridians (1:2), pp. 1-17.
Thavolia Glymph, Out of the House of Bondage: The Transformation of the Plantation Household (Cambridge: 2008)
James Grossman, Land of Hope: Chicago, Black Southerners, and the Great Migration (Chicago: 1989)
Steven Hahn, The Political Worlds of Slavery and Freedom (Harvard: 2009)
Darlene Clark Hine, 鈥楤lack Professionals and Race Consciousness: Origins of the Civil Rights Movement, 1890-1950鈥�, Journal of American History 89:4 (2003), pp. 1279-1294.
bell hooks, Ain鈥檛 I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London: Pluto, 1982).
Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (eds), All the women are White, all the Blacks are men, but some of us are brave: Black women's studies (Old Westbury, N.Y.: Feminist Press, 1982).
Desmond King and Stephen Tuck, 鈥楧e-Centring the South: America鈥檚 Nationwide White Supremacist Order after Reconstruction鈥�, Past & Present 194 (2007), pp. 213-253
Danielle L. McGuire, At the dark end of the street: black women, rape, and resistance—a new history of the civil rights movement from Rosa Parks to the rise of black power (New York: Vintage Books, 2011).
Jennifer Morgan, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).
Nell Irvin Painter, Southern History Across the Colour Line (Chapel Hill: 2002)
Brian Purnell and Jeanne Theoharis, The Strange Careers of the Jim Crow North: Segregation and Struggle outside of the South (New York: 2019)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (ed.), How we get free: black feminism and the Combahee River Collective (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2017).
Christopher Waldrep, African Americans Confront Lynching: Strategies of Resistance from the Civil War to the Civil Rights Era (2009)
Barbara Y. Welke, 鈥榃hen All the Women Were White, and All the Blacks Were Men: Gender, Class, Race, and the Road to Plessy, 1855-1914鈥�, Law and History Review 13:2 (1995), pp. 261-316.
Emily West, 鈥淩eflections on the History and Historians of the black woman鈥檚 role in the community of slaves: enslaved women and intimate partner sexual violence鈥�, American Nineteenth Century History, 19:1 (2018): pp. 1-21.
White, Deborah Gray, Ar鈥檔鈥檛 I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (New York: W.W. Norton, 1985).
Kidada Williams, They Left Great Marks on Me: African American Testimonies of Racial Violence from Emancipation to World War I (New York: 2012)