Call for Chapter Proposals

Title: Unknowable: Geography and Black Feminisms

Editor: LaToya E. Eaves, Middle Tennessee State University

Expressions of interest are invited to contribute to an edited book on Black Feminist Geographies.

Unknowable: Geography and Black Feminisms articulates the empirical and philosophical work of Black women and Black feminisms in geography. The edited volume engenders a discussion concerning the legacies, trajectories, and possibilities of Black feminist intellectual and political traditions in geography. Black feminist geographies draw upon the conceptual and material underpinnings of Black feminisms and, in doing so, recognizes Black feminisms’ intellectual and physical necessity in the production of spatial knowledge. Katherine McKittrick’s seminal work Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (2006) unsilenced the interplay of Black feminist thought and space, therefore disrupting geography’s complicit violence against Black women and Black geographies – through objectification, displacement, dismissal, and erasure. Given the widespread use of Black feminist thought and Black women’s spatialties in and beyond geography and building on the “Legacies of Black Feminisms” sessions at the 2016 Annual Meeting of the Association of American Geographers, the text will work against the commodification of Black women’s geographies and Black feminist thought through raw engagement with the roots/routes of Black feminisms, physical materialities, and imaginative configurations., the book will posit what Black feminisms can offer for understanding the workings of racism and racial capitalism; liberatory praxis and theory; and political and economic decolonization.

Potential chapter topics include:

• Centralizing Black womanhood in geographic knowledge production
• Black feminist frameworks in geographic research and/or the use of Black feminist thought in challenging critical methods/epistemologies in geography
• Gendered perspectives in racialized state violence, police brutality, and national acts of terror (prison industrial complex, the Charleston massacre, Charlottesville, etc.)
• Black feminist utility in deconstructing social structures – racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, xenophobia – and largely perpetuated in/through patriarchy, imperialism, white supremacy, and capitalism
• Black feminist geopolitical strategies
• Queer critiques of and contributions to Black feminist articulations of home, territory and space
• African diasporic feminisms, Black internationalist feminisms, and/or postcolonial feminisms in geography
• Empirical and theoretical linkages and disjunctures between/among Black feminist thought and women of color feminisms

The book will have an international and transdisciplinary focus to represent the range of approaches and perspectives on Black feminist geographies. Independent scholars, educators, practitioners, and graduate students across disciplines are invited to submit abstracts for consideration. Chapter proposal submissions should be in the form of: a 200-word author bio, chapter title, and chapter abstract (400-500 words).

The book is being published with verbal interest by a top academic press.

Please respond by: October 15, 2017 to: latoya.eaves@gmail.com

Recommended Readings

• Alexander, M. J. 2006. Pedagogies of crossing: Meditations on feminism, sexual politics, memory, and the sacred.
• Cooper, B. 2017. Beyond respectability: The intellectual thought of race women.
• Collins, P. H. 2008. Black feminist thought: Knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment.
• Combahee River Collective. 1978. The Combahee River collective statement: Black feminist organizing in the seventies and eighties.
• Da Silva, D. F. 2014. “Toward a black feminist poethics: The quest(ion) of blackness towards the end of the world”. The Black Scholar, 44 (2).
• Davis, A. 1983. Women, race, and class.
• hooks, b. 1995. Killing rage: Ending racism.
• ——–. 1999. Ain’t I a woman: Black women and feminism
• Lorde, A. 1984. Sister outsider.
• McKittrick, Katherine, ed. 2014. Sylvia Wynter: On being human as praxis
• ———. 2006. Demonic grounds: Black women and the cartographies of struggle
• Mirza, H. S., ed. 1997. Black British feminism: A reader.
• Sexton, J. 2010. Racial theories in context
• ———. 2008. Amalgamation schemes: Antiblackness and the critique of multiracialism.
• Sharpe, C. 2016. In the wake: On blackness and being
• Spillers, H. J. 1987. “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Diacritics, 17(2), 64–81.
• Spillers, H., Hartman, S., Griffin, F. J., Eversley, S., & Morgan, J. L. 2007. “Whatcha gonna do? Revisiting “Mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: An American grammar book.” Women’s Studies Quarterly, 35(1/2), 299–309.
• Vargas, J. 2012. “Gendered Antiblackness and the impossible Brazilian project: Emerging critical black Brazilian studies.” Cultural Dynamics 24(1), 3-11.
• Walker, A. 1983. In search of our mother’s gardens: Womanist prose.
• Wilderson, F. B. 2010. Red, white & black: Cinema and the structure of U.S. antagonisms.
• Weheliye, A. G. 2014. Habeas viscus: Racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human.
• Wynter, S. 1990. “Beyond Miranda’s meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’.” Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature: 355-72.