Black Feminist Theory Working Group - Working Syllabus | 2020-2021

The Black Feminist Working Group is a space for faculty and graduate students working
on Black Feminist Theory. The group gathers two times a month to discuss texts in Black
Feminist Theory, and provide a space for its members to present their work as the year
progresses. It is open to Yale faculty and graduate students who are interested in the black
feminist movement and related subjects.

Summary of year 2020-2021:

This year we used Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust as a foundational text to explore
questions of ecology, culture, and genealogies of Black feminism. We held a reading
intensive this Spring where we worked through several texts historicizing Black
feminism as both a movement and a theory. Given the routes of our growing
conversations we instituted a summer reading study group, where we will slowly read
through Toni Cade Bambara’s The Salt Eaters and accompany it with short readings on
Third World feminism. Now that things are opening back up we are hoping to return to
our Spring 2020 plans of hosting a speaker series: bridging the fields of academia,
activism, and art--we want to bring in prominent speakers to lead a series of talks that
will help us make sense of the diverging and at times de-radicalization of Black
feminism. Inspired by recent talks given by Dr. Joyce James and the Black Feminist
Colloboratory, we hope our salon will help define the future of the Black feminist

Frame Text(s):

Toni Cade Bambara, The Salt Eaters
Julie Dash, Daughters of the Dust
Third Worldism
Young, Cynthia A. “Angela Y. Davis and U.S Third World Left Theory and Praxis,” Soul Power:
Culture, Radicalism, and the Making of a U.S. Third World Left, 184-208.
Prashad, Vijay. “Bandung: The 1955 Afro-Asian Conference,” 31-50. “Cairo: The 1961 Afro-Asian
Women’s Conference,” The Darker Nations, 51-61.
Heng, Geraldine. “‘A Great Way to Fly:’ Nationalism, the State, and the Varieties of Third-World
Feminism,” Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, 30-45.
Language
Jordan, June. “Problems of Language in a Democratic State” Some of Us Did Not Die.
Christian, Barbara. “The Race for Theory,” New Black Feminist Criticism, 1985-2000.
Alexander, Elizabeth. “Toward the Black Interior,” The Black Interior, 3-21.
Phillip, Nourbese M. “The Absence of Writing or How I Almost Became a Spy.”
Bambara, Toni Cade. “Reading the Signs, Empowering the Eye: Daughters of the Dust and the Black
Independent Cinema Movement,” Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fictions, Essay, and
Conversation.
Black Feminist Organizing & the Black Feminist Left
Kelley, Robin. “This Battlefield Called Life: Black Feminist Dreams,” Freedom Dreams: The Black
Radical Imagination, 135-156.
Jones, Claudia. “An End to the Neglect of the Problems of the Negro Woman!” 108-124.
Hansberry, Lorraine. “Simone de Beauvoir and The Second Sex: An American Commentary” 128-142.1
Higashida, Cheryl. “Black Internationalist Feminism: A Definition,” Black Internationalist Feminism:
Women Writers of the Black Left 1945-1995, 1-30.
Ecology
Newton, Huey P. “Dialectics of Nature,” The Huey P. Newton Reader.
Gumbs, Alexis Pauline. “Archive of Dirt: What we Did,” M Archive: After the End of the World.
Walker, Alice. “In Search of Our Mothers’ Garden,” 231-243. “Looking for Zora,” 93-118. In Search of
Our Mothers’ Gardens.
Intimacy & Kinship
Alexander, Jacqui M. “Transnationalism, Sexuality and the State” Pedagogies of Crossing, 181-254.
King, Tiffany Lethabo. “Our Cherokee Uncles: Black and Native Erotics,” Black Shoals: Offshore
Formations of Black and Native Studies, 141-174.
McKittrick, Katherine. “Black Ecologies. Coral Cities. Catch a Wave,” 83-86. “Charmaine's Wire,”
87-90. “Curiosities (My Heart Makes My Head Swim),” 1-13. Dear Science and Other Stories.
Johnson, Jessica Marie. “Black Femme: Acts, Archives, and Archipelagos of Freedom” Wicked Flesh:
Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, 153-186.
Policing
Roberts, Dorothy. “Making Reproduction a Crime,” Killing the Black Body: Race, Reproduction, and
the Meaning of Liberty, 150-201.*
Wilson, Ruth Gilmore. “Prologue,” “Introduction,” Golden Gulag: Prisons, Surplus, Crisis, and
Opposition in Globalizing California, 1-29.
Plotting (As an Insurgent Act)
1 Selections from Words of Fire.
Roane, J.T. “Plotting the Black Commons,” Souls, 20:3, 239-266.
Wynter, Slyvia. “Novel and History, Plot and Plantation,” 95-102.
Da Silva, Denise Ferreira. "Reading the Dead: A Black Feminist Poethical Reading of Global Capital,"
Otherwise Worlds: Against Settler Colonialism and Anti-Blackness, 38-51.

Members:

Jocelyn Proietti
Teona Williams
Amara Lawson Chavanu
Alexandra Thomas
Candace Borders
Andie Berry
Bianca Dang
Alycia Hall
Yasmina Price
Kassidi Jones
Nala Williams