Feminisms Unbound: Women of Color Feminisms in Authoritarian Times
This roundtable features a conversation about the important analytic and practice that women of color feminism, Indigenous feminisms, queer of color critique, and intersectionality brings to our current political moment of war, Islamophobia, antiblackness, media outrage, and authoritarian state practices. Speakers consider the genealogies of women of color feminism and its current relevance to our current post-election political moment of state violence and increased threats to Black, Muslim, Latinx, Native American and Asian immigrant communities, undocumented and refugee communities, LGBTQI peoples, working peoples, people who are differently abled, women and girls.
Roundtable discussion participants:
Erica Edwards, 2017-18 Fellow at Radcliff Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard
Erica Edwards specializes in African American literature, gender and sexuality, and black political culture. She is the author of Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leadership, which won the Modern Language Associations’ 12th annual William Sanders Scarborough prize. Her work, published in such journals as American Quarterly, Callaloo, American Literary History, and Black Camera, shows how contemporary African American literature challenges us to think in new ways about the relationships between African American narrative, American popular culture, and the contemporary history of black politics and black social movements. Professor Edwards is currently at work on a book on African American literature and the War on Terror.
Lorgia García Peña, Assistant Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Harvard University
Lorgia García Peña specializes in contemporary U.S. Latino/a literature and cultures, Caribbean literature and cultures, performance studies, race and ethnicity, transnational feminism, migration, human rights, Dominican and Dominican diaspora studies. Her book, The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nation, and Archives of Contradictions, examines the ways official narratives and histories have been projected onto racialized Dominican bodies as a means of sustaining the nation’s borders. García Peña constructs a genealogy of deominicanidad that highlights how Afro-Dominicans, ethnic Haitians, and diasporic Dominicans have contested these dominant narratives and their violent, silencing, and exclusionary effects. Her current research project, Translating Blackness: Latino/as Negotiating Race and Belonging Across the Atlantic engages various geopolitical spaces: Latin America, the United States and Europe, providing a new cartography for understanding contemporary Latinidad as resulting from the vaifen of peoples and ideas across geographical and imaginary spaces.
Iyko Day, Associate Professor of English and Critical Social Thought, Mount Holyoke College
Iyko Day’s research focuses on Asian American literature and visual culture, race and settler colonialism, and Marxian political economy. Her book, Alien Capital: Asian Racialization and the Logic of Settler Colonial Capitalism, re-theorizes the history and logic of settler colonialism by examining its intersection with capitalism and the racialization of Asian immigrants in Canada and the United States. She co-edits the book series Critical Race, Indigencity, and Relationality .
Moderated by:
Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and Humanities, Tufts University
Lisa Lowe works in the fields of comparative literature, comparative colonialisms, and the cultural politics of race and migration. She has authored books on orientalism, immigration, and globalization. Her most recent, The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke UP, 2015), is a study of settler colonialism, transatlantic African slavery, and the East Indies and China trades. With Jack Halberstam, she coedits the book series, Perverse Modernities, for Duke University Press.
About Feminisms Unbound
This Consortium for Graduate Studies in Gender, Culture, Women, and Sexuality (GCWS) initiative, Feminisms Unbound, is an annual event series featuring debates that focus on feminist concerns, theories, and practices in this contemporary moment. This series is intended to foster conversations and community among Boston-area feminist intellectuals and activists. The series, in its open configuration, endeavors to allow the greatest measure of engagement across multiple disciplinary trajectories, and a full array of feminist investments.
The event organizers, who are also visiting scholars with the GCWS this year, are Kimberly Juanita Brown, Assistant Professor of English and Africana Studies, Mount Holyoke College, Lisa Lowe, Professor of English and American Studies, Tufts University, and Jyoti Puri, Professor of Sociology, Simmons College, have programmed the four events in this series.