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Topics in Transnational Black Studies (381-0-20)

Topic

Black Feminisms in a Francophone Context

Instructors

Silyane Larcher

Meeting Info

Parkes Hall 212: Tues, Thurs 12:30PM - 1:50PM

Overview of class

What is the meaning of "Black Feminism" out of its US experience and initial theorization? How did women of African descent in continental France, the Caribbean (Haiti, Guadeloupe, Martinique), the Indian Ocean (La Réunion, Mayotte and the Comoros) and Africa (Senegal, Cameroon, Democratic Republic of Congo), whose cultures and political experiences were - at least partly - impacted by French colonial legacy, forge their critiques of patriarchy, colonialism and imperialism, racism? How did they also develop their own imagination of social justice, autonomy, and emancipation?

Based on a wide range of materials and references driven from social sciences scholarship, but also from literature and cinema, the course aims to introduce undergraduate students to a non-US centered and a transnational perspective on black feminisms. The historical period covered will span from 1945-1946 to the contemporary era without intending to be exhaustive. Depending on the needs of very specific topics addressed in the class, some comparative insights with the Caribbean and/or English-speaking Africa might be included.

The pedagogical and intellectual stake of the course is twofold. First, it calls students to reflect on the varying ways in which the very notion of "blackness" (which has no rigorous equivalent in French), and norms of gender and sexuality make sense or not in specific cultural, historical, but also religious and linguistic contexts. Second, the exploration of those different experiences and expressions of black feminisms and/or womanisms is an invitation to critically approach the concepts of "subjugated knowledges" and of "black feminist epistemologies".