Resituating the Crossroads: Theoretical Innovations in Black Feminist Ethnography

Abstract

Inspired by the seminal Black Feminist Anthropology volume edited by Irma McClaurin, I examine how Black feminist ethnographies have theorized intersectionality or what the Combahee River Collective called the “simultaneity” and “interlocking” of oppressions. One overlooked theoretical contribution by Black feminist ethnography in terms of analyzing race, class, and gender is the conception of the simultaneity of conjuncture and disjuncture. Given the location of the ethnographers’ positionalities and “fields” within the African Diaspora, I suggest that the coexistence of conjuncture and disjuncture emerges from a diasporic heuristic of “crossroads,” signifying more complexity than the metaphor of intersection.

Keywords::

• anthropology
• black feminism
• ethnography
• intersectionality

Notes

Irma McClaurin, “Poem for my Black Feminist Anthropology Sisters Today and Forever,” http://www.insightnews.com/news/11630-black-feminist-anthropology-building-an-intellectual-legacy-one-book-at-a-time (accessed March 18, 2015).

Michel Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston, MA: Beacon Press, 1995), 96.

Ellen Lewin, ed., Feminist Anthropology: A Reader (Malden, MA: Oxford: Blackwell Publishing, 2006), 6.

See more examples in Lynn Bolles, “Telling the Story Straight: Black Feminist Intellectual Thought in Anthropology.” Transforming Anthropology 21, no. 1 (2013): 57–71.

Faye Harrison, Outsider Within: Reworking Anthropology in the Global Age. (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2008), 40.

A. Lynn Bolles, “Seeking the Ancestors: Forging a Black Feminist Tradition In Anthropology,” in Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 24–48, at 34.

Ange Marie Hancock, Intersectionality: An Intellectual History (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 18–21.

Leith Mullings, On Our Own Terms: Race, Class, and Gender in the Lives of African-American Women (New York: Routledge, 2014), 3–5.

This categorization is similar to the categories of liberal, cultural nationalist, and “insurgent” that Patricia Zavella uses to describe Chicana feminism. See Patricia Zavella, “Feminist Insider Dilemmas: Constructing Ethnic Identity with ‘Chicana’ Informants,” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 13, no. 3 (1993): 53–76, at 70.

Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum (1989): 139–67. See also, Kimberle Crenshaw, “Mapping the Margins: Intersectionality, Identity Politics, and Violence Against Women of Color,” Stanford Law Review (1991): 1241–99.

Cheryl Mwaria, “Biomedical Ethics, Gender and Ethnicity: Implications For Black Feminist Anthropology,” in Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001): 187–210, 204.

Leslie McCall, “The Complexity of Intersectionality,” Signs 30, no. 3 (2005): 1771–1800.

see Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter: On the Discursive Limits of “Sex” (New York: Routledge, 1993).

Mwaria, “Biomedical Ethics, Gender And Ethnicity,” 204.

Edmund T. Gordon and Mark Anderson, “The African Diaspora: Toward an Ethnography of Diasporic Identification,” The Journal of American Folklore 112, no. 445 (1999): 282–96.

This difference reflects those between Chandra Mohanty and Joan Scott, as explored by Shari Stone‐Mediatore in “Chandra Mohanty and the Revaluing of “Experience,” Hypatia 13, no. 2 (1998): 116–33.

Irma McClaurin, Women of Belize: Gender and Change in Central America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1996), 21.

Paulla Ebron, Performing Africa (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002), xv.

Brackette F. Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins: Guyana and the Politics of Cultural Struggle (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), xv, xvi, 29, 269–70.

Ibid., 150.

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 74.

Ebron, Performing Africa, 171.

Carolyn Martin Shaw, “Disciplining the Black Female Body: Learning feminism in Africa and the United States,” in Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 102–25, at 103.

Ibid.

David Forgacs, ed., The Gramsci Reader (New York: New York University Press, 2000), 201.

Robert F. Carley, Collectivities: Politics at the Intersections of Disciplines (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016), 49.

Pierre Bourdieu, Outline of a Theory of Practice, translated by Richard Nice (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1977), 78, 81.

Ibid., 82.

Jennifer Johnson‐Hanks, “On the Limits of Life Stages in Ethnography: Toward a Theory of Vital Conjunctures,” American Anthropologist 104, no. 3 (2002): 865–80, at 871.

Marshall Sahlins, Historical Metaphors and Mythical Realities: Structure in the Early History of the Sandwich Islands Kingdoms (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1981), 33, 34, 38, 50, 54, 72.

Allen Jafari, “One Way or Another: Erotic Subjectivity in Cuba,” American Ethnologist 39, no. 2 (2012): 325–38, at 327.

Georges Balandier, “The Colonial Situation: A Theoretical Approach,” in Social Change: The Colonial Situation, edited by Immanuel Wallerstein (New York: Wiley, 1966), 34–61, at 56.

Combahee River Collective, “A Black Feminist Statement,” in But Some of Us Are Brave, edited by Gloria T. Hull, Patricia Bell Scott, and Barbara Smith (New York: The Feminist Press, 1982), 13, 16, 21.

Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins, 159; Ebron, Performing Africa, 171.

Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within: The Sociological Significance of Black Feminist Thought,” Social Problems 33, no. 6 (1986): s14–s32, S19; Combahee River Collective, 18.

Ruth Frankenberg and Lata Mani, “Crosscurrents, Crosstalk: Race, ‘Postcoloniality’ and the Politics of Location,” Cultural Studies 7, no. 2 (1993): 292–31.

Ibid., 306.

Stuart Hall, “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance,” in Sociological Theories: Race and Colonialism, edited by UNESCO (Paris: UNESCO, 1980), 305–45, at 325 and 331.

Ibid., 335 and 342.

Ibid., 328.

Paulla A. Ebron, “Contingent Stories of Anthropology, Race, and Feminism,” in Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 211–31, at 222.

Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins, 160.

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 185.

Kimberly Eison Simmons, “A Passion for Sameness: Encountering a Black Feminist Self in Fieldwork in the Dominican Republic,” in Black Feminist Anthropology: Theory, Politics, Praxis, and Poetics, edited by Irma McClaurin (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2001), 77–101, at 79.

Shaw, “Disciplining the Black Female Body,” 117.

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 55.

Ebron, Performing Africa, 192–93.

Ibid., 197, 202.

Williams, Stains on My Name, War in My Veins, 177.

Ibid., 178.

France Winddance Twine, Racism in a Racial Democracy: The Maintenance of White Supremacy in Brazil (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998), 151.

Ebron, Performing Africa, xiii.

Gina A. Ulysse, Downtown Ladies: Informal Commercial Importers, A Haitian Anthropologist and Self-Making in Jamaica (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 120, 124.

Katya Gibel Azoulay, Black, Jewish, and Interracial: It’s not the Color of Your Skin, But the Race of Your Kin, and Other Myths of Identity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), 188; emphasis in the original.

Hancock, Intersectionality, 33; emphasis in the original.

See Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. I, translated by Richard Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990 [1978]), 100–101.

Appadurai Arjun, Modernity at Large: Cultural Dimensions of Globalization, vol. 1. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996).

Ibid., 35, 37, 39.

Barbara Browning, Infectious Rhythm: Metaphors of Contagion and the Spread of African Culture (New York: Routledge, 1998), 35.

Kara Provost and Audre Lorde, “Becoming Afrekete: The Trickster in the Work of Audre Lorde,” Melus 20, no. 4 (1995): 45–59, at 47, 49.

Hancock, Intersectionality, 110–15, 122.

Ulysse, Downtown Ladies, 125 [30].

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 167.

Ebron, Performing Africa, 185.

ibid.

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 113; Julia Sudbury, Other Kinds of Dreams: Black Women’s Organisations and the Politics of Transformation (London and New York: Routledge, 1998), 39; Dana-Ain Davis, Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform: Between a Rock and a Hard Place (Albany: SUNY Press, 2006), 41; Leith Mullings, “Resistance and Resilience: The Sojourner Syndrome and the Social Context of Reproduction in Central Harlem,” in Gender, Race, Class, and Health: Intersectional Approaches, edited by Amy J. Schulz and Leith Mullings (San Francisco, CA: Jossey-Bass, 2006), 345–70, at 361.

McClaurin, Women of Belize, 113.

Ibid., 116.

Ibid., 118, 122.

Sudbury, Other Kinds of Dreams, 225, 109–112, 174–75.

Ibid., 121.

Davis, Battered Black Women and Welfare Reform, 41.

Ibid., 42–44.

Mullings, “Resistance and Resilience,” 362.

Leith Mullings, On Our Own Terms, 6.

Ann Garry, “Intersectionality, Metaphors, and the Multiplicity of Gender,” Hypatia 26, no. 4 (2011): 826–50.

Priya Kandaswamy, “Gendering Racial Formation,” in Racial Formation in the Twenty-First Century, edited by Daniel HoSang, Oneka LaBennett, and Laura Pulido (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2012), 23–43, 36–39.

Combahee River Collective, 22.

McClaurin, Poem for my Black Feminist Anthropology Sisters Today and Forever.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amanda Walker Johnson

Amanda Walker Johnson is Associate Professor of Anthropology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, specializing in critical race theory, politics of race and education, and Black feminist theory.