Sabine Broeck - Böcker

An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field.In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism-the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "woman as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique.

An anti-racist critique of gender studies as a field.In Gender and the Abjection of Blackness, Sabine Broeck argues that gender studies as a mostly white field has taken insufficient account of Black contributions, and that more than being an ethnocentric limitation or blind spot, this has represented a structural anti-Blackness in the field. Engaging with the work of Black feminist authors Sylvia Wynter, Hortense Spillers, and Saidiya Hartman, Broeck critiques a selection of canonical white gender studies texts to make this case. The book discusses this problem at the core of gender theory as a practice which Broeck terms enslavism-the ongoing abjection of Black life which Hartman has called the afterlife of slavery. This has become manifest in the repetitive employment of the "woman as slave" metaphor so central to gender theory, as well as in recent theoretical mutations of these anti-Black politics of analogy. It is the structural separation of Blackness from gender that has functioned over and again as the scaffold enabling white women's struggles for successful recognition of equality and subjectivity in the human world as we know it. This book challenges white readers to rethink their own untroubled identification with gender theory, and it provides all readers with a white feminist theorist's sophisticated theoretical and self-critical scholarly account of her own reckoning with and learning in dialogue from Black feminism's critique.

Among the most influential and insightful thinkers of her generation, Audre Lorde (1934--1992) inspired readers and activists through her poetry, autobiography, essays, and her political action. Most scholars have situated her work within the context of the women's, gay and lesbian, and black civil rights movements within the United States. However, Lorde forged coalitions with women in Europe, the Caribbean, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and Africa, and twenty years after her passing, these alliances remain largely undocumented and unexplored. Audre Lorde's Transnational Legacies is the first book to systematically document and thoroughly investigate Lorde's influence beyond the United States. Arranged in three thematically interrelated sections -- Archives, Connections, and Work -- the volume brings together scholarly essays, interviews, Lorde's unpublished speech about Europe, and personal reflections and testimonials from key figures throughout the world. Using a range of interdisciplinary approaches, contributors assess the reception, translation, and circulation of Lorde's writing and activism within different communities, audiences, and circles. They also shed new light on the work Lorde inspired across disciplinary borders. In addition the volume editors, contributors include Sarah Cefai, Cassandra Ellerbe-Dueck, Paul M. Farber, Tiffany N. Florvil, Katharina Gerund, Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Gloria Joseph, Jackie Kay, Marion Kraft, Christiana Lambrinidis, Zeedah Meierhofer-Mangeli, Rina Nissim, Chantal Oakes, Lester C. Olson, Pratibha Parmar, Peggy Piesche, Dagmar Schultz, Tamara Lea Spira, and Gloria Wekker.

Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in CriticalEpistemology explores the central but often critically neglected role ofknowledge and epistemic formations within social movements for Black “freedom”and emancipation. The collection examines the structural subjugation andcondemnation of Black African and Afro-mixed descent peoples globallywithin the past 500 years of trans-Atlantic societies of Western modernity,doing so in connection to the population’s dehumanization and/or invisibilizationwithin various epistemic formations of the West. In turn, the collectionforegrounds the extent to which the ending of this imposedsubjugation/condemnation has necessarily entailed critiques of, challenges to,and counter-formulations against and beyond knowledge and epistemicformations that have worked to “naturalize” this condition within the West’svarious socio-human formations. The chapters in the collection engage primarily with knowledgeformations and practices generated from within the discourse of “race,” butalso doing so in relation to other intersectional socio-human discourses ofWestern modernity. They engage as well the critiques, challenges, andcounter-formulations put forth by specific individuals, schools, movements,and/or institutions – historic and contemporary – of the Black world. Throughthese examinations, the contributors either implicitly point towards, orexplicitly take part in, the formation of a new kind of critical – butalso emancipatory – epistemology. What emerges is a novel and morecomprehensive view of what it means to be human, a formulation that canaid in the unlocking and fashioning of species-oriented ways of “knowing”and “being” much-needed within the context of ending the continuedoverall global subjugation/condemnation of Black peoples, as a central part ofending the “global problematique” that confronts humankind as a whole.