In recognition of the central place of
“intersectionality” in contemporary Women’s Studies—a
widespread disciplinary commitment to analyzing race,
class, and gender as powerful interlocking principles
by which people are organized globally and locally—the
Southeastern Women’s Studies Association is building a
Women of Color caucus. The objectives of the group
will be to provide a strong network for support and
the sharing of scholarly and pedagogical ideas around
issues of race throughout the region.
As a first step towards establishing this network of
scholars, activists, and students, and in celebration
of our keynote speaker, bell hooks, the Women of Color
caucus of SEWSA calls for papers that explore the
production of Black feminist knowledge in the U.S.
Southeast, to be presented at the SEWSA 2008
conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, in connection
with the conference theme, “Frontiers of Feminism at
Home and Abroad.”
TOPIC: STILL TALKING BACK—BLACK FEMINISM IN THE U.S.
SOUTHEAST
In her oft-cited essay, “Talking Back,” bell hooks
describes the punishments she received as a child for
talking back to authority figures. “I was taught that
it was important to speak but to talk a talk that was
in itself a silence,” she writes. “Taught to speak
and yet beware of the betrayal of too much heard
speech, I experienced intense confusion and deep
anxiety in my efforts to speak and write.” The
problem of developing and sustaining a progressive
Black feminist voice in the U.S. southeast could be
framed in similar terms, given the obstacles to
antiracist education faced by professors and scholars
of this field, ranging from student resistance to
faculty isolation and tokenism to what Patricia Hill
Collins calls “the new racism,” a post-Civil Rights
cultural belief that racism is a thing of the past.
In this call for papers, the Women of Color caucus of
SEWSA seeks treatments of race in the context of this
region. What are the obstacles and punishments—and
the rewards and necessities—for “talking back” about
race in the new millennial U.S. southeast? What are
the methodologies and pedagogies and theoretical
possibilities of Black feminism as a discourse of
resistance and social transformation? How can we
counter the problems of old racism, new racism, and
internalized racism in the production of knowledge as
teachers and scholars of Black feminism? What is at
stake? How can we generate a voice that not only
speaks but is heard? Why/how/and to what effect are
we “still talking back”?
Abstracts due by: Oct. 15, 2007. Send to Dr. Merri
Lisa Johnson (mjohnson@uscupstate.edu)
Panelists will be selected by Oct. 30, and the panel
will be submitted to SEWSA by the conference deadline
of Nov. 2.
If the paper is not selected as part of this panel, it
will be considered automatically for inclusion in the
conference as an individual paper submission.
