Surfacing: For our survival and our joy

abstract

In this perspective, I reflect on the surface, as articulated in Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon’s (2021) edited collection, Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa. To surface, in the first instance, is an engagement with my own points of entry in Black feminist scholarship and further, implicated in the range of methods in praxis within the book, a means by and through which situating myself, also offered as ‘positionings’ orients Black feminist, or Blackwomen in my usage, in the work of knowledge production. Surfacing also situates Blackwomen’s knowledge production, reorienting – ‘unmaking’, ‘homing’ – the locus of Black feminist scholarship from the dominance of the global North. I have explored ‘Home’ as an inside/outside situation that illuminates Black feminist and Blackwomen’s approaches to making knowledge, a practice of writing that deeply resonates with the vantage points of a praxis of surfacing.

keywords:

• Blackwomen
• surfacing
• translation

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Tumi Mampane

TUMI MAMPANE is an African feminist PhD candidate at the Department of Communication and Media at the University of Johannesburg, affiliated to the National Research Foundation SARCHi Chair in African Feminist Imagination at Nelson Mandela University. Tumi is also a lecturer at the Department of Communication Science, University of the Free State. Her research interests include cultural and media studies, township femininities, popular culture, African Pentecostalism, discourse analysis, narrative analysis, ethnography, and feminist theory. Email: [email protected]