Survival Praxis through Hood Feminism, Negritude and Poetics

Abstract

In efforts to protect my sanity while learning computational arts at a Western institution, I have established a subversive anti-conformist strategy where I activate the ideologies of Hood Feminism, Negritude and Poetics to survive. Hood Feminism explores Black womanhood in a different modality from Black feminist studies. I am activating Hood Feminism in its intended form as praxis of women of color who survive without access to resources and privilege. These are women who survive by all means necessary against the propagation of toxic ideologies of Western society. I am activating Negritude as a way of maintaining positionality to the desired behavior that is institutionally imprinted on students, especially students of color. Negritude is a way for me to constantly reject the efforts of the conformist hegemonies by connecting with what it means to embody Blackness. Poetics materializes as a method of connecting with computation and other students in a meaningful way.

Keywords:

• black feminism
• Poetics
• Negritude
• Black studies
• institutional culture

Notes

1. Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016).

2. Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (2013): 737–780.

3. Bell Hooks, “Choosing the Margin as a Space of Radical Openness,” Framework: The Journal of Cinema and Media 36 (1989): 15–23.

4. Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Wivenhoe: Minor Compositions, 2013).

5. Anna J. Cooper, A Voice from the South (New York: Dover Publications, 1969), 9.

6. W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Publications, 2016), 5.

7. Ibid.

8. Hooks, “Choosing the Margin”, 15–23.

9. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 6.

10. Sara, Ahmed, “Uses of Use – Diversity, Utility and the University.” (Lecture, Cambridge University, Cambridge, U.K, October 13, 2018.)

11. Ibid.

12. Judith Butler, Gender Trouble (New York, London: Routledge, 2006), 181–193.

13. Ahmed, “Uses of Use.”

14. bell hooks, Ain’t I a Woman: Black Women and Feminism (London, United Kingdom: Pluto Press, 1987), 51–86.

15. Oliver Laughland, “Sandra Bland: Video Released Nearly Four Years after Death Shows Her View of Arrest,” May, 07, 2019, The Guardian News and Media, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2019/may/07/sandra-bland-video-footage-arrest-death-police-custody-latest-news. (Accessed December 1, 2019.).

16. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 6.

17. Cailyn Petrona Stewart, “The Mule of the World: The Strong Black Woman and The Woes of Being “Independent””, Knots 3 (2018): 31–39. Availible online: https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/knots/article/view/29187

18. Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthroposcenes or None (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 2–9.

19. Jamie Nesbitt Golden quoted in Hoodfeminism, “Welcome to the Hood.,” hoodfeminism, posted September 23, 2013, https://hoodfeminism.com/2013/09/23/welcome-to-the-hood/) (accessed December 1, 2019)

20. Gilberto Rosa, “Hood Bitch: A Black Feminist Framework for Understanding the Power and Resistance of Cardi B.,” Medium, https://medium.com/black-feminist-thought-2016/hood-bitch-a-black-feminist-framework-for-understanding-the-power-and-resistance-of-cardi-b-4d324720023e (accessed December 1, 2019).

21. Nesbitt Golden, “Welcome to the Hood.”

22. T. Denean Sharpley-Whiting, Negritude Women (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 2.

23. Édouard Glissant, “Creolization in the Making of the Americas,” Caribbean Quarterly 54, no. 1–2 (2008): 81–89.

24. Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2010), 27.

25. Sharpe, In the Wake, 19.

26. Ibid., 23–35.

27. Harney and Moten, Undercommons, 6.

28. Sharpe, In the Wake, 23–35.

29. Ibid., 19.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Clareese Hill

Clareese Hill is a practice-based researcher. She is interested in exploring the validity of the word “identity” through her perspective as an Afro-Caribbean American woman and her societal role as projected on her to perform as a Black feminist academic. She has given performance lectures in London at Royal College of Art, Goldsmiths’ College, University of London, University of Sussex, CUNY Graduate Center, The Chicago Art Department and Smack Mellon in Brooklyn. In May 2020, she co-organized Occupying the In-Between, a day-long interactive art research platform that questioned the validity of knowledge production and the body disseminating the research. She has exhibited her research internationally in Chicago, New York, California, London, France and cyberspace. Clareese was a 2020 Eyebeam Rapid Response fellow (phase 1). She holds a Master of Professional Studies in Digital Photography from The School of Visual Art (SVA) in New York City, an MFA from The School of the Art Institute of Chicago (SAIC) and a Master of Professional Studies in Interactive Telecommunications from New York University (NYU). She is currently completing a practice-based research Ph.D. across the Art Research and Computing departments at Goldsmiths’ College, University of London.