Excerpt: Black Feminist Constellations

An illustration titled Futuro from the series Erês © Bárbara Quintino.

Books • Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu • April 18, 2024 • Leer en castellano

This is an excerpt from the introduction of Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and translation across the Americas, used with permission from the University of Texas Press.

Black Feminist Constellations is a curated collection of original essays and dialogues from key Black radical femme and feminist intellectuals, activists, and artists from across the southern Americas (Latin America and the Caribbean).

It weaves together interviews and conversations about Black women’s experiences in time, space, and language through the creation of horizontal dialogue among Black women scholars/activists/artists from diverse linguistic and geographic borders. Some of the contributors to this book consider themselves Black feminists. Some do not. 

All recognize, in step with Audre Lorde, that our struggle “comes out of the lives of Black women wherever we are—women of the African diaspora—and as such must be identified in terms of particular problems wherever we are.” In this way, Black Feminist Constellations is a dialogic project—a conversation. 

In this book, we foreground the Hispanic and Lusophone experience because Black feminist discourse tends to be overdetermined by scholarship in English, despite the fact that Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking people make up the vast majority of the population in our hemisphere. 

Moreover, on the rare occasions when discussions of Black women’s thought and Black feminism include a non-Anglophone perspective, the emphasis tends to be on the experiences of the Northern Hemisphere (particularly the Caribbean). Nevertheless, our goal is not comprehensive representation of perspectives of all Black women in the Americas; instead, it is to give you, the reader, a glimpse into what it might look like to put our struggles into conversation with one another across languages rather than remaining siloed within our linguistic communities. 

We define Black feminism from a radical, anti-capitalist, anti imperialist, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, anti-racist, and anti-sexist perspective, following the work of generations of Black feminists transnationally. From the Combahee River Collective to Andaiye, Lélia Gonzalez, Audre Lorde, Ochy Curiel, and others, Black women have been defining Black feminism as the fight against the uniquely interlocking oppressions of racism and sexism for generations. 

The southern Black experience (and here we include the global South in our definition of “southern”) is overdetermined by folklorization in the global imagination. Mainstream society celebrates Blackness for its aesthetic beauty and cultural richness, but rarely do people from the global North pay much attention to the rich intellectual contributions and theoretical insights that emerge from the global South.

This fact is compounded by the cultural hegemony of the Anglophone Americas, particularly the United States. This cultural hegemony overdetermines Blackness as US Black culture, ignoring the experiences of the majority of Black people around the world, and particularly erasing the diversity of Black experiences in the Americas. Gender compounds this flattening out. 

Black women’s intellectual contributions are frequently sidelined and/ or dismissed in our hegemonic, white supremacist, patriarchal world. However, even within Black feminist discourses, the experiences of the Hispanic and Lusophone southern Americas are often left out of conversations of Black feminism because of linguistic and cultural barriers. One of the consequences of imperialism is the hegemony of Anglophone narratives even within Black radical discourses like Black feminism.

This obfuscates the rich, expansive, and long-standing traditions of Black women who are organizing in Creole, French, Spanish, Patois, and Portuguese (among other languages). Consequently, we center the voices of Portuguese- and Spanish-speaking Black women living and working in the southern Americas, in an attempt to spark an epistemological paradigm shift southward.

What does it mean to reconsider transnational Black feminism through the lens of dialogic engagement? What does it mean to do this from a Hispanic and/or Lusophone perspective and quite literally turn our northern understandings of the world on their head? 

For us, it means shifting our center of intellectual gravity from the north to the south by allowing Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Black women to share their ideas and perspectives on the world unabashedly, in a nonhierarchical, dialogic space of exchange. 

This book curates points of dialogue that reveal some of the genealogies of thought, trajectories of struggle, and contours of collaboration that define Black women’s radical organizing around gender, race, and sexuality. We use the term “radical” to underscore the decidedly anti-imperialist, anti-patriarchal, anti-capitalist, anti–white supremacist political focus of our work. 

We follow the legacies of Andaiye, Victoria Santa Cruz, Claudia Jones, Lélia Gonzalez, Beatriz Nascimento, and Sylvia Wynter, among others. Our goal is to create conversations that rethink the topography of the Black condition and women and femme experiences by revisiting the past, pushing the boundaries of the present, and imagining liberation anew from the perspective of radical Black women who have quite literally changed the political landscape of our hemisphere. 

On Juneteenth (June 19) 2022, Francia Márquez was elected the first Black woman vice president of Colombia. A long-time environmental activist and defender of Black territorial and citizenship rights, Márquez found that her journey to the vice presidency was one of lucha/struggle. 

In 2014, Vice President Marquez and twenty-one other Black women from the Yolombó region of Colombia walked 470 kilometers (292 miles) from La Toma to Bogotá to express their outrage against illegal mining in the Cauca region—a historically and predominantly Black zone of the country. That march, which became known as the “Mobilization of Black Women for the Care of Life and Ancestral Territories,” was a turning point in Colombian political history, sparking a community effort to have a defender of Black life and ancestral territories elected to national office. 

That representative became Francia Márquez, and as Yineth Balanta Mina, Yannia Sofía Garzón Valencia, and Alysia Mann Carey discuss in this collection, this mobilization was a deliberately collective one that represents the communal politics of representation and intentional translocation that define the movement to defend Black life and Black land in Colombia. Francia Márquez’s ascendancy into the vice presidency was not a solitary political act. 

Yineth, Yannia Sofía, and Alysia’s reflections on Black women’s political organizing in Colombia not only chronicle the genealogies of this political turning point but also underscore the epistemologies that emerged and continue to emerge from Black women’s organizing in Colombia. This conversation, like the others in this volume, embodies the dialogic, politically decisive, historical significance of the Black women’s voices we gather here. 

Over the past two decades scholars have paid increased attention to the need to identify, read, archive, and critically engage with the intellectual work of Black women. To date very little has been published on Black critique by or about Black radical women thinkers from the southern Americas (those who identify as feminist and those who do not, but might be framed as “protofeminist”).

Notable exceptions include but are not limited to Carole Boyce Davies’s Out of the Kumbla (organized with Elaine Savory; 1990), Davies’ Left of Karl Marx (2007), Katherine McKittrick’s edited volume Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (2015), Alissa Trotz’s The Point Is to Change the World: Selected Writings of Andaiye (2020), and the edited collection Women Warriors of the Afro-Latina Diaspora (2012), edited by Marta Morena Vega, Marinieves Alba, and Yvette Modestin. Sonia Alvarez and Kia Lilly Caldwell’s special double issue of Meridians (volume 14, issues 1 and 2, 2016) notably gathers Black women’s Hispano phone and Lusophone writings in translation, making them accessible to the English-speaking academy.

Recognizing these important initiatives, we also note that most engagements with Black women’s intellectual contributions outside of the United States tend to focus on the Caribbean and largely ignore Central America, South America, and the circum-Caribbean. For this reason, we center these voices here. Our intention is not to ignore key voices from elsewhere, but rather to instigate a paradigm shift that will overturn power structures and hierarchies of knowledge. 

There are academic dimensions to our project in addition to political ones. Black women from the southern Americas have largely been excluded from the fields of Black studies, Latin American studies, and Latine studies, and from “traditional” disciplines with white male–dominated canons. The duality of racism and sexism rampant in the Latin American academy erases Black women from Latin American studies. 

Latent xenophobia and entrenched sexism of Black studies glosses over Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Black women’s theories and scholarship. The backdrop of this erasure in all of its manifestations is the inherent relationship between anti-Blackness, patriarchy, and imperialism that cannot be dissociated—in other words, each of these violent practices haunts one another. To follow bell hooks, white supremacy, patriarchy, imperialism, homophobia, classism, and misogyny are interconnected social projects. 

Sadly, Black women from the non-Anglophone Americas have also been glossed over in Black feminist theorizing because of the tendency to canonize English-speaking (particularly US-based) Black women’s thought, even within the global discourse of Black feminism. As a result, we should radically diversify the discourses of each of these fields and foreground Black women’s contributions to philosophical and political thought from Latin America and the circum-Caribbean. We hope that Black Feminist Constellations initiates a shift in thinking.