Archive
intersectionality
“Brown Sugar Makes the World Go ‘Round”: A Conversation with Kim F. Hall on The Sweet Taste of Empire
Oct 6, 2025
Lucyle Hook Professor of English and Africana Studies Kim F. Hall’s new book, The Sweet Taste of Empire: Sugar, Mastery and Pleasure in the Anglo Caribbean (The University of Pennsylvania Press, August 2025), centers the complicated history of sugar in order to ask what lies beyond its narrative of pleasure. Hall explores how the unique […]
Read MoreThe Scholar and Feminist: Fifty Years of Meeting the Moment
For half of a century, The Scholar and Feminist Conference has provided a mutually activating space for scholars, activists, and artists to confront the most pressing issues at any given moment. Defining scholarship as for activism from the very beginning, the conference has with unflagging regularity “met the moment” with intersectional feminist knowledge and action to inspire and build a robust response to contemporary crises. In many ways, the conference has grown up alongside academic feminism itself, yet, rather than uncritically mirror this history, it has consistently pushed back against feminism’s institutionalization. The conference highlights provocations, controversies, foundational gaps, and struggles that both cement its field-forming position and trouble a feminist progress narrative.
Read MoreBeyond the Shores: Tamara J. Walker on Black Americans Abroad
Jun 30, 2025
Barnard Professor of Africana Studies Tamara J. Walker is an experienced storyteller of elsewheres. As a historian she tells stories of the past; as a Latin Americanist she writes from outside the global north (her first book Exquisite Slaves (Cambridge University Press, 2017) examines the clothing of the enslaved in colonial Lima). As a lifelong […]
Read MoreNavigating Neoliberalism in the Academy, Nonprofits, and Beyond
Soniya Munshi and Craig Willse
This issue of S&F Online looks at the nonprofit and the university as two key sites in which neoliberal social and economic formations are constituted and contested. Emerging out of a 2009 meeting at the American Studies Association Annual Meeting convened by Munshi and Willse and drawing on the theoretical and historical models articulated by INCITE! Women, Gender Non-conforming, and Trans People of Color Against Violence, the collection asks: What are the possibilities for transformative politics given the capacity of neoliberal capital to incorporate, absorb and/or neutralize demands for social justice?
Read MoreTourmaline: Historical Erasure as Violence
Tourmaline talks about learning and sharing histories of trans women of color, including Sylvia Rivera, Marsha P. Johnson, and STAR (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries), as a strategy to transform and heal from historical isolation and erasure.
Read MoreAmber Hollibaugh: A Movement for Liberation
Amber Hollibaugh talks about a the importance of a liberation framework centering low-income people and people of color for LGBTQ organizing.
Read MoreDean Spade: History of Queers Against Police
Dean Spade talks about the dramatic shifts in queer and trans movements over the last 50 years with the emergence in the 1990s of a highly visible and well-funded gay rights movement whose demand for inclusion in hate crime legislation and police protection goes against queer and trans community-based grassroots organizing to end police and state violence since the 1960s.
Read MorePolicing the Crises: Thinking It Forward – Panel at Stuart Hall Conference
Panel featuring Ben Carrington, Karla FC Holloway, Barnor Hesse, and chair Tina Campt from the conference "Policing the Crises: Stuart Hall and the Practice of Critique."
Read MoreNew Media: Encoding, Decoding, Coding – Panel at Stuart Hall Conference
Panel featuring featuring Henry Jenkins, Nicholas Mirzoeff, and chair Rob King from the conference "Policing the Crises: Stuart Hall and the Practice of Critique."
Read MoreThe Worlds of Ntozake Shange
Kim F. Hall, Monica L. Miller, and Yvette Christiansë
“The Worlds of Ntozake Shange” highlights Shange’s centrality to black feminism and the continuing impact of her work both within and outside the academy. In addition to working as a poet, novelist, and choreographer, Shange created the choreopoem, a form that links the physicality of dancing and music to the written word. The contributors in this issue examine Shange’s continuing impact on literature, theatre, popular culture, feminist, afrodiasporic and queer movements, with many pointing to her linguistic innovations (for instance, her fluid movement across languages, prominent use of both slashes and lowercase letters) as tools that have proven vital to feminist practice. The “Worlds of Ntozake Shange” draws necessary attention to the fact that this artist has long been a creative force, providing new language and possibilities for both intellectual and artistic productions.
Read MoreZines
Released Mar 6, 2015
(Dare to Use The F-Word, Episode 13) In this episode of Dare to Use the F-Word, Research Assistant Michelle Chen '15 interviews Barnard Zine Librarian Jenna Freedman and founder of As[I]Am Jordan Alam '13 on zines as a feminist project. The episode also features interviews with participants at the NYC Feminist Zine Fest 2014, held at Barnard College.
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