Trans*national Black Feminisms Series | University of Cambridge
Spring and Summer 2022
Co-Organizers: Sophie Marie Niang (Sociology), Carly Rodgers (CLAS), Dr Jasmine D. Cooper (MMLL) and Prof Martin Crowley (MMLL)
Series description, schedule & all registration links below!
Curated around questions of encounter and relation within transnational Black feminisms, this series centres interrogations of identity, trauma and the body, labour and care, the body politic and freedom as mapped and redrawn by trans-national Black feminist works. As ‘transnational’ suggests, the series frames the ethics of Black feminisms on a global scale, against a geopolitical backdrop of ecological disaster and hierarchies of precarity. The prefix ‘trans’ provides a conceptual exoskeleton for this endeavour, informed by both the etymological roots of ‘trans’ – across, beyond, through – and, specifically, the work of Christina Sharpe. ‘Trans*’ signals firstly vector, orientation, movement, highlighting our inquiry into the multiple mobile relations constituting Black feminisms as a plural site of struggle. Secondly, for Sharpe, its multiple extensions – ‘translation, transatlantic, transgression, transgender' (In the Wake (2016): 30) – trace political histories elemental to Black being and embodiment, while its asterisk ‘speaks to a range of configurations of Black being [...] the making of bodies into flesh and then into fungible commodities while retaining the appearance of flesh and blood’ (ibid.). Following Sharpe’s usage, ‘trans*’ also invokes transmission, transition, transfer, transference, thereby both inscribing these histories and opening a horizon of possibility, to reimagine borders (national, corporeal), identity and subjectivity, collectives and collective histories
The vector of ‘trans*’ informs our programme of speakers, capturing the divergent struggles of those working in, through and against structures of oppression. Our programme reflects that decolonising, anti-racist and imaginative worldbuilding is done by activists, artists, writers and thinkers alike. By finding the confluences in the work of the activist and the academic, the artist and the archivist, we endeavour to unearth the various ways in which genealogies are shared, but also move beyond the verticalities of inheritance and nation. The series forms a space for reflective conversation and practice, and recontextualizes academic discussion as one element in an ecosystem of decolonizing practices.
(NB: all times are BST)
Workshop - “The Wake”, Water and Ocean Bodies
The introductory session will consist in a reading and discussion group where we will look at the first chapter of Christina Sharpe’s In The Wake: On Blackness and Being and the second chapter of Katherine McKittrick’s Dear Science and Other Stories. This discussion will open up avenues of reflection for the entire series, and is open to everyone.
Date: Monday 16 May 2022, 16:00-17:30 BST