Black Feminist Constellations: Dialogue and Translation across the Americas

By Christen A. Smith

A collection of essays, interviews, and conversations by and between scholars, activists, and artists from Latin America and the Caribbean that paints a portrait of Black women's experiences across the region.

Black women in Latin America and the Caribbean suffer a triple erasure: as Black people, as women, and as non-English speakers in a global environment dominated by the Anglophone North. Black Feminist Constellations is a passionate and necessary corrective. Focused on and written by Black women of the southern Americas, the original works composing this volume make legible the epistemologies that sustain radical scholarship, art, and political organizing by Black women everywhere.

In essays, poems, and dialogues, the writers in Black Feminist Constellations reimagine liberation from the perspectives of radical South American and Caribbean Black women thinkers. The volume’s methodologically innovative approach reflects how Black women come together to theorize the world and challenges the notion that the university is the only site where knowledge can emerge. A major work of intellectual history, Black Feminist Constellations amplifies rarely heard voices, centers the uncanonized, and celebrates the overlooked work of Black women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Texas Press
• Release date: Dec 5, 2023
• ISBN: 9781477328323

Book preview

Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long Series in Latin American and Latino Art and Culture

Black Feminist Constellations

Dialogue and Translation across the Americas

EDITED BY CHRISTEN A. SMITH AND LORRAINE LEU

UNIVERSITY OF TEXAS PRESS

Austin

Most interviews and conversations that appear in the book are edited transcriptions of episodes of the Cite Black Women podcast. For a complete list, see page 303.

Copyright © 2023 by the University of Texas Press

All rights reserved

First edition, 2023

Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to:

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University of Texas Press

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LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA

Names: Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas: Perspectives from the Global South (Conference) (2020 : University of Texas at Austin), author. | Smith, Christen A., 1977–editor. | Leu, Lorraine, editor.

Title: Black feminist constellations : dialogue and translation across the Americas / edited by Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu.

Other titles: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture.

Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2023. | Series: Joe R. and Teresa Lozano Long series in Latin American and Latino art and culture | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2023019473 (print)

LCCN 2023019474 (ebook)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2829-3 (hardback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2830-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2832-3 (epub)

ISBN 978-1-4773-2831-6 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Women, Black—Latin America—Intellectual life—Congresses. | Women scholars—Latin America—Congresses. | Women scholars—Latin America—Interviews—Congresses. | Minority women activists—Latin America—Congresses. | Minority women activists—Latin America—Interviews—Congresses. | Women artists, Black—Latin America—Congresses. | Women artists, Black—Latin America—Interviews—Congresses. | Feminists—Latin America—Congresses. | Feminism—Latin America—Congresses. | Feminism—International cooperation—Congresses. | Radicalism—Latin America—Congresses. | LCGFT: Essays. | Interviews. | Poetry.

Classification: LCC F1419.B55 B54 2023 (print) | LCC F1419.B55 (ebook) | DDC 305.48/89608—dc23/eng/20230524

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019473

LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023019474

doi:10.7560/328293

For my grandmother, Annie Viola Williams Wiggins, who taught me the beauty of being a Black woman in this world.

And to my rocks, Kayô, Hoji, and Clayton—your support has been invaluable.

—C. S.

For my grandmother, Petronilla Modeste Williams, a descendant of Carib First Peoples and of the enslaved who made worlds in the Americas.

For Eva, inventor of worlds without limits, and Robin, who builds his whole world around us.

—L. L.

CONTENTS

The Sacred Word of Women: A Performance

Elizandra Souza; translation by Christen A. Smith

Palavra Sagrada de Mulher: Uma Performance

Elizandra Souza

Toward a Dialogic Transnational Black Feminism: An Introduction

Christen A. Smith and Lorraine Leu

PART I. Radical Movements: Caring for Life

Oriki to Sueli

Elizandra Souza; translation by Luana Moreira Reis

1. A Feminism So Complex and So Radical

A conversation between Sueli Carneiro and Christen A. Smith; translation and introduction by Christen A. Smith

2. Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas: Perspectives from the Global South

Sueli Carneiro; translation and editing by Lorraine Leu

3. Is It Time to Say Goodbye to Feminism?

Florencia Gomes; translation by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez

4. Black Feminist(s) Work in Argentina

A conversation between Florencia Gomes and Prisca Gayles; introduction and translation by Prisca Gayles

5. Intimate Poetics: World-Making through Cuidado de la Vida (Care of Life) in and beyond the Borders of Colombia

A conversation between Sofía Garzón, Yineth Balanta Mina, and Alysia Mann Carey; introduction by Alysia Mann Carey; translation by Keturah Nichols

6. Black Women’s Epistemological Contributions: Afro-Mexican Women in the Twenty-First Century

Itza Amanda Varela Huerta; translation and editing by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez

7. Black Women’s Struggles in Mexico: Anti-racism, Community Organization, and Reparation Politics

A conversation between Rosa María Castro Salinas, Itza Amanda Varela Huerta, and Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera; introduction by Meztli Yoalli Rodríguez Aguilera; translation and editing by Daisy E. Guzman Nuñez and Alida Perrine

8. Beyond Words: Fugitive Embodiments, Creative Praxis, and Trans-Intellectual Genealogies for Black Life

A conversation between Dora Santana and Michaela Machicote; introduction by Michaela Machicote

PART II. Radical Roots: Genealogies of Thought

9. A Genealogy of Black Left Feminist Claims

Carole Boyce Davies

10. How Will We Organize to Live? Andaiye’s Radical Praxis

D. Alissa Trotz

11. From the Archives: CAFRA Conversations—Audre Lorde and Andaiye

12. A Brief Introduction to Sylvia Wynter: Early Life and Work(s)

Bedour Alagraa

13. The Life and Work of Sylvia Wynter in the Americas

A conversation between Carole Boyce Davies, Bedour Alagraa, and Yomaira Figueroa

14. Visualizing Blackness in Brazil

Rosana Paulino with Lorraine Leu; translation by Lorraine Leu

15. Settlement: Rosana Paulino and Black Women’s Insubordinate Geohistories

Lorraine Leu

16. Diasporic Memories: Black Women Writers’ Lived Experiences and Ancestralities

Elizandra Souza; translation by Christen A. Smith

Coda: Whirlwind Women/Mulheres redemoinhos

Elizandra Souza; translation by Luana Moreira Reis

Acknowledgments

Editors, Contributors, and Translators

Index

THE SACRED WORD OF WOMEN

A Performance

ELIZANDRA SOUZA; TRANSLATION BY CHRISTEN A. SMITH

Inspired by the book Water of the Gourd Poetries

I hear voices inside

I hear voices inside

Screams, shouts

Diverse identities

the opposite of me

Quilt of knots made of us

Ancestry clamors

For us to light the flame

I hear voices inside

I hear voices inside

Shut up the scream and shout the silence

Shut up the shout and scream the silence

Sing the song . . .

Harmonize the uneven steps

Pulsate: the voice, life, and rhyme

Children hear the silence of words

Men insult children’s screams

Women desire the silences and the screams

The screams and the silences . . .

At this pace . . .

The silence . . .

The scream . . .

The silence . . .

The scream . . .

The silence . . .

The scream . . .

Deep down they will silence the scream

And scream the silence

Shut up the scream!

Shout the silence!

I hear voices inside

I hear voices inside

Shut up the scream and shout the silence

Shut up the shout and scream the silence . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

Around 12 women are murdered every day in Brazil

More than 200 femicides were recorded in 2019 alone

There are dead women in the four corners of Brazil

It is in Self Defense . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

I can already see men’s testicles on poles

Men who don’t know how to behave

Remember the hairdresser they killed the other day,

And the piles of unanswered police reports?

That the news media turned into a soap opera and impunity

She’s a dead woman in the four corners of the city . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

Tomorrow’s headline will have a woman,

head held high, saying:

—I killed! And I don’t regret it!

When the reporter questions her

She will simply touch up her makeup.

She won’t want to look ugly when the camera turns back

And focuses on her eyes, on her lips . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

If justice is blind, the retinal tear could be accidental

After all, throwing a car into the dam must be normal . . .

Throwing meat to the dogs casual procedure . . . *

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

They say that women know how to avenge

Maybe she doesn’t kill with her hands, but she orders the slaughter

Maybe she doesn’t shoot, but she knows how to poison . . .

Maybe she won’t gouge out the eyes, but she knows how to blind . . .

I’m just warning you, the score will change . . .

The word of a Black Woman

Black woman of words

I hear voices inside here

I hear voices inside here

The word of a Black Woman

Black woman of words

Black woman of her word

Black woman’s word

Wash Black soul

The woman’s sacred word

If my soul is black

And my society doesn’t accept me

My sacred word bleeds

Words that unite us

Separate the wheat from the chaff

. . . the decanted sediment from the river

. . . enchant the verses of the Black woman

. . . words that declaim

Cry, sing, enchant

We will decant prejudice

Until he rows away

Runs out of threshing shore

Go away to yesterday

Black woman’s word

Black woman of words

Black woman of her word

Black woman’s word

Who can calm this whirlwind of being a Black woman?

Who can calm this whirlwind of being a Black woman?

Who can stop this wind that lives in me?

This fertility of sowing good seeds

To unite contradictory elements within yourself

Weather that closes in without rain, dust of my unspeakable.

Fire that spreads indomitably along the way

Waters that retreat and return with intensity

In this instability of storm rising and fire dissipating

Close my weak point, in the spirals of my winds

I move my body so it doesn’t die

Who can calm this whirlwind of being a Black woman?

Who can calm this whirlwind of being a Black woman?

This racism that dehumanizes me and makes me empty

The invisible of all my undone steps

You know when the sea undoes the writing in the sand?

You know when the day turns to night and everything becomes a mystery?

There are days when madness mixes with loneliness

And I saw myself many times wandering without a clear destination

. . .

I’m afraid they won’t remember,

Our steps come from afar and we must continue . . .

I’m afraid they won’t remember . . .

Our steps come from afar

I hear voices inside here

Sacred women’s words

NOTE

*In this poem, Souza references the case of Eliza Samudio, a hairdresser who was murdered by her boyfriend, soccer player Bruno Fernandes, in 2010. After killng her, Fernandes had her body cut up and fed to dogs. https://www.bbc.com/news/10565346.

PALAVRA SAGRADA DE MULHER

Uma Performance

PORTUGUESE ORIGINAL BY ELIZANDRA SOUZA

Inspirado no Livro de Poesias Águas da Cabaça

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Vozeria, gritaria

Identidades diversas

O avesso do eu

Colcha do retalho do nós

Ancestralidade clama

Para acendermos a chama

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Calar o grito e gritar o silêncio

Calar o grito e gritar o silêncio

Entoa a canção . . .

Harmoniza os passos descompassados

Pulsam: a voz, a vida e a rima

As crianças ouvem o silêncio das palavras

Os homens insultam os gritos das crianças

As mulheres desejam os silêncios e os gritos

Os gritos e os silêncios . . .

Neste ritmo . . .

O silêncio . . .

O grito . . .

O silêncio . . .

O grito . . .

O silêncio . . .

O grito . . .

No fundo elas vão calar o grito

E gritar o silêncio

Calar o grito!

Gritar o silêncio!

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Calar o grito e gritar o silêncio

Calar o grito e gritar o silêncio . . .

Só estou avisando vai mudar o placar . . .

Só estou avisando vai mudar o placar . . .

Em torno de 12 mulheres são assassinadas todos os dias no Brasil

Foram registrados mais de 200 feminicídios só em 2019

É mulher morta nos quatro cantos do Brasil

É em Legitima Defesa . . .

Só estou avisando vai mudar o placar . . .

Já estou vendo nos varais os testículos dos homens,

Que não sabem se comportar

Lembra da cabelereira que mataram, outro dia,

E as pilhas de denúncias não atendidas?

Que a notícia virou novela e impunidade

É mulher morta nos quatro cantos da cidade . . .

Só estou avisando vai mudar o placar . . .

A manchete de amanhã terá uma mulher,

de cabeça erguida, dizendo:

—Matei! E não me arrependo!

Quando o apresentador questiona-lá

Ela simplesmente retocará a maquiagem.

Não quer esta feia quando a câmera retornar

E focar em seus olhos, em seus lábios . . .

Só estou avisando, vai mudar o placar . . .

Se a justiça é cega, o rasgo na retina pode ser acidental

Afinal, jogar um carro na represa deve ser normal . . .

Jogar a carne para os cachorros procedimento casual . . .

Só estou avisando, vai mudar o placar . . .

Dizem, que mulher sabe vingar

Talvez ela não mate com as mãos, mas mande trucidar

Talvez ela não atire, mas sabe como envenenar . . .

Talvez ela não arranque os olhos, mas sabe como cegar . . .

Só estou avisando, vai mudar o placar . . .

Palavra de Mulher Preta

Mulher preta de palavra

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Palavra de mulher preta

Mulher preta de palavra

Preta de Palavra

Palavra de Preta

Lava alma preta

Palavra sagrada de mulher

Se a minha alma é preta

E a minha sociedade não me aceita

Minha palavra sagrada sangra

Palavras que nos irmanam

Separam o joio do trigo

. . . o barro do rio que decanta

. . . encantam os versos da preta

. . . palavras que declama

Clama, canta, encanta

Decantaremos o preconceito

Até que ele reme para o longe

Fique sem eira nem beira . . .

Vá para o ontem . . .

Palavra de mulher preta

Mulher preta de palavra

Preta de Palavra

Palavra de Preta

Quem pode acalmar esse redemoinho de ser mulher preta?

Quem pode acalmar esse redemoinho de ser mulher preta?

Quem pode prender essa ventania que mora em mim?

Essa fertilidade de espalhar boas sementes

De unir elementos contraditórios dentro de si

Tempo que se fecha sem chover, poeira do meu indizível.

Fogo que alastra indomável pelo caminho

Águas que recuam e voltam com intensidade

Nesta instabilidade de nascer tempestade e dissiparse fogo

Fecha meu ponto fraco, nas espirais dos meus ventos

Movimento o meu corpo para que ele não morra

Quem pode acalmar esse redemoinho de ser mulher preta?

Quem pode acalmar esse redemoinho de ser mulher preta?

Este racismo que me desumaniza e me torna vazio

O invisível de todos os meus passos desfeitos

Sabe quando o mar desfaz a escrita na areia?

Sabe quando o dia vai virando noite e tudo se torna mistério?

Tem dias que a loucura mescla com a solidão

E eu me vi várias vezes vagando sem destino certo . . .

Eu tenho medo de que não se lembrem,

Nossos passos vêm de longe e precisamos prosseguir . . .

Eu tenho medo de que não se lembrem . . .

Nossos passos vêm de longe

Ouço vozes aqui dentro

Palavra sagrada de mulher

TOWARD A DIALOGIC TRANSNATIONAL BLACK FEMINISM

An Introduction

CHRISTEN A. SMITH AND LORRAINE LEU

Black feminism is not white feminism in a Black face. It is a genuine movement that 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.

—AUDRE LORDE IN CAFRA CONVERSATIONS: AUDRE LORDE AND ANDAIYE

I’m afraid they won’t remember . . .

Our steps come from afar

Sacred women’s words

—ELIZANDRA SOUZA, THE SACRED WORD OF WOMEN: A PERFORMANCE

We have been walking together for generations and we must keep going, as the poet Elizandra Souza reminds us in the lyrical preface to this book. Souza echoes a phrase that is often repeated in Black women’s feminist circles in Brazil—nossos passos vêm de longe (our footsteps come from afar).¹ This mantra resonates across diasporic Black women’s thinking and mobilization. The idea of Black women treading a path together underscores the collective, trans-spatial nature of our struggle, our labor of care, and our intellectual production—in short, our epistemological subjectivity. We owe a debt to those who have come before us across time and space: those who have organized for our liberation. Our roots and routes connect us. This journey speaks to Black feminist intellectual Lélia Gonzalez’s notion of amefricanidade, the common experiences and consciousness shaping all Black experiences—but especially Black women’s experiences—in the Americas.² This metaphor of footsteps echoing in the distance emphasizes continuity in the face of gendered anti-Black violence. The multiple voices of Souza’s poem that scream the silences of that violence also resonate and refract to inspire the courage to refuse and resist. The creativity, theorization, and action of our collective courage is the backdrop to this collection. Black Feminist Constellations makes legible Black women’s sacred word—the epistemologies that sustain our organizing, cultural production, and intellectual formation throughout our hemisphere: our intellectual contributions.

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 between Black women that focuses on Black women’s intellectual contributions from the vantage point of the southern Americas.

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.³ 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.⁴

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).⁶ 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 Hispanophone and Lusophone writings in translation, making them accessible to the English-speaking academy.⁷ 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.⁸ 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.⁹ 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 this book initiates a shift in thinking.

To disrupt the imperialist, Anglophone chauvinism that tends to dominate discourses of intellectualism in the Americas, we must be anti-imperialist in addition to being anti-racist, anti-sexist, and anti-homophobic. This requires insisting on the intellectual protagonism of Black women’s thought. Black women tend to be research objects rather than research subjects in academic discussions. As Sueli Carneiro notes in her conversation with Christen A. Smith in this volume, The intellectual, theoretical hegemony of the North is significantly sustained by reducing us to research objects. At best, they treat us like primary sources—that is part of the oppression. Epistemicide’s strategy is to consolidate hegemony, and hegemony is always constituted by thinkers from the North.¹⁰ This shows up in part through the deep-seated intellectual bias against knowledge formations that emerge from spaces outside of the university, like grassroots organizing and just plain everyday life and survival. Valuing Black women’s organic, everyday forms of knowledge production helps to undo this, and that is one of our many goals here as well.

DIALOGIC TRANSLATION

Anti-imperialist, transnational Black feminism must be dialogic. We define dialogic Black feminism as collaboration between radical activists, intellectuals, and cultural practitioners in thinking and praxis between linguistic and geographic communities. Through a series of conversations and reflections from Black women living, writing, creating, and organizing from diverse perspectives in the southern Americas, we consider what it means to engage with the radical thought and creative endeavors of Black women from the global South as an intellectual project. We highlight a select sampling of voices rather than cover the entire region. As mentioned above, there are only a few Black women from the Caribbean and a small representation of Anglophone intellectuals in this conversation. It is our hope that by selectively engaging with some Anglophone voices, we can reflect the diversity of the region while still collectively shifting our perspective toward the south. We seek to model what nonhierarchical transnational Black feminist dialogue might look like between Black women organizing, creating, and thinking about similar topics and issues across different languages.

A dialogue is a conversation between two or more people. One definition, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, that particularly follows our intent here is: A composition for two or more alternating voices. We use the word dialogue for its literal and philosophical meanings not only in English but also in Portuguese and Spanish—the primary languages of the women who have contributed to this book. Dialogue in English translates to mean diálogo in Portuguese and Spanish, and it carries the same significance of the word in English. It is a familiar term that is identifiable linguistically and politically. In English, Portuguese, and Spanish, to dialogue/dialogar indicates peer-to-peer conversation and also connotes political negotiation, particularly within organizing/activist/militant traditions. A dialogue is a meeting of the minds, a negotiation, a debate, an exchange between comrades. When organizers, activists, or militants come to the table with their friends and foes to dialogue/dialogar, they do so in the spirit of a level playing field, even when real-world power dynamics might render this abandonment of pretenses difficult and/or fraught. Dialogue is not only a medium but also a methodology. It is both an action and its form. Dialogue is therefore a critical, analytical, theoretical, and methodological realm of possibility that does not pretend to ignore tension, contradiction, or power dynamics, but rather attempts to put these things on hold (at least temporarily) in the interest of co-creating new understandings and new sets of meaning. Throughout the text we use dialogue alternately with the word conversation to refer to the literal exchanges of ideas as well as to our political and philosophical Black feminist interpretation of the term as we lay it out here.

If dialogue is the primary theme of our conversation in Black Feminist Constellations, then dialogic translation is its subheading. Language is one of the critical elements of communication and is also one of its primary obstacles. Epistemic imperialism goes hand in hand with linguistic imperialism. Due to US imperialism, it is no surprise to any of us that English has become the lingua franca of the world, and is also the hegemonic language of the global academy. There is a long, deeply historical relationship between language, dominance, and colonization. We work against this despite the challenges in doing so. For example, following Yomaira Figueroa, we refuse, as much as possible, the use of italics to emphasize non-English terms.¹¹ We do this in order to try to resist the temptation to differentiate Spanish and Portuguese from the English text as much as possible. We also spent considerable time translating the essays in this volume and tried, as much as possible, to employ Black women translators to do this work. Anti-imperialist dialogic translation entails micro and macro decisions about word choice, syntax, flow, form, and method, not simply a literal translation from one language to another.

One of the first things that colonizers have done historically and continue to do when seeking to dominate and extract resources from a community is to force their language on the colonized.¹² This legacy continues through the medium of the neo-liberal imperialist academy, which often requires that all of us speak a colonial language in order to publish and thrive. Indeed, linguistic fluency in colonial languages is the currency of success in the global academy (access to the university and academic publishing in particular). It is important to note, then, that despite our anti-colonial efforts to upturn academic hierarchies, we still engage with colonial languages as our primary lingua franca (Portuguese, Spanish, and English). This reproduction of colonial linguistic structures of power has not taken place without reflection. We are aware that while indigenous languages still thrive in the Americas, people of African descent in our hemisphere rarely communicate in indigenous African languages in their daily lives, not to mention write and speak in these languages fluently. The creolization of Portuguese and Spanish in Latin America is more common among Black populations (see, for example, Lélia Gonzalez’s deft theorization of pretôgues/Black Portuguese in Brazil).¹³ Of course, words from African languages pepper Portuguese and Spanish due to the tremendous influence of African peoples on the region. However, while African and Indigenous American languages have influenced Spanish and Portuguese, the standards for these languages still remain European. Even within this paradigm, there is a hierarchy among the colonial languages—a hierarchy that privileges the Anglophone over the Hispanophone and Lusophone—and it is this internal paradigm that we seek to disrupt here.

Dialogic translation is horizontal dialogue between people who speak different native languages and have different proficiency levels in other languages, and who seek to traverse linguistic barriers to achieve a common political goal. In the context of this volume, this denotes Spanish-, Portuguese-, and English-speaking Black women in conversation with one another multilingually and in translation in order to redress the historic gendered racialized discrimination that we experience and its effects. In this way, translation is a methodology of radical Black feminist politics. It is a tool of comprehension and knowledge production. What does dialogic translation look like? A good example is the conversation between Carole Boyce Davies, Bedour Alagraa, and Yomaira Figueroa in this volume. As they discuss, Bedour Alagraa’s reflections at our gathering in 2020 provoked an impromptu dialogic translation of her paper into Spanish by Yomaira Figueroa. That real-time translation was motivated by their mutual love for and understanding of Sylvia Wynter’s work, and the result was a beautiful and uncapturable moment of flow between languages and ideas that was spontaneous and generative: translation in conversation and sisterhood.

Among Black women of similar political trajectories, dialogic translation is the radical praxis by which we seek to understand one another in the joint interest of furthering our understandings of our experiences—mutual and divergent—our ideas, and our political struggles. Recognizing that epistemicide is a colonial project that seeks to silence and erase Black women’s intellectual contributions, allowing Black women to speak, listening to other Black women, and centering our ideas and thoughts is a radical act. Moreover, when language is an obstacle for allowing Black women to speak and be heard, translation—in an even, nonhierarchical, dialogic way—is a radical political project.

When Black women theorize our experiences in the Americas it is a conversation in both content and form. It is a site of encounter where ideas are formed through communion, exchange, tension, and negotiation. Historically, Black women’s theorizing has often taken place around the literal and metaphoric kitchen table. In 1980, Barbara Smith and Beverly Smith recorded a dialogue on feminist politics published as Across the Kitchen Table: A Sister-to-Sister Dialogue in This Bridge Called My Back (1983). That conversation—a rumination on race, gender, sexuality, and life—manifests the politics of dialogue that we refer to here: reflecting, discussing, going back and forth while also theorizing, creating, dialoguing, and nurturing sisterhood.¹⁴ We use the word sisterhood here deliberately, not to imply a relationship without tension or conflict, but rather to indicate a relationship that is grounded in kinship. Kinship refers to the strict definition of the term: a sharing of characteristics of origins. At times sisters share the same likes and dislikes and can even finish each other’s thoughts. In other instances, sisters are as different as night and day. Sisters do not always agree, get along, or even see the world in the same way. They do, however, share legacies. As Black women from the Americas, our shared histories and origins are our roots and routes from the Middle Passage and slavery to today across this hemisphere; our resonant experiences at the nexus of the super-exploitation of gender/race/sexuality discrimination; and our continuing contemporary struggles at this nexus.¹⁵

A GATHERING

In February 2020, the contributors to this volume came together in person for the Black Women’s Intellectual Contributions to the Americas conference at the Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. Little did we know that our gathering would be the last in-person meeting for many of us before the onset of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Just a few short weeks after we met, the world was gripped by fear and our lives were changed forever. The new normal of isolation and social distancing underscored the importance of our encounter and the important role that intimacy, proximity, and sitting around the table play in defining Black feminist praxis. What irony that for many of us