Black Feminist Futures and the Practice of Fugitivity
What kinds of ‘practice’ create possibilities for new feminist futures? How do our everyday engagements with power complicate how we understand feminist struggle? This talk uses a black feminist conception of practice to think beyond conventional notions of resistance as the primary model for understanding the relationship of marginalized subjects to power. Focusing on archival photographs of black communities in diaspora, it explores the quotidian practices of black subjects whose micro-labors of struggle are frequently overlooked in an emphasis on collective and individual acts of resistance. The concept of “fugitivity” or “taking flight” emerges as a signature idiom of black diasporic culture and a meaningful pathway for realizing the aspirations of futurity articulated by black feminist theory.
Professor Campt’s lecture will also be our opportunity to welcome her publicly as BCRW’s new Co-Director and to celebrate the inauguration of BCRW’s new Fellows Program.
Tina Campt is Ann Whitney Olin professor of Africana and Women’s, Gender and Sexuality Studies, and newly appointed co-director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She the author of Other Germans: Black Germans and the Politics of Race, Gender and Memory in the Third Reich, and was previously the Director of Barnard’s Africana Studies Department.