Black Feminism

Introduction to Black Feminism is a course about Black women and their struggle to re-define themselves in America , from slavery to hip-hop. This course will examine Black women’s lives through the lenses of feminism and womanism. In doing so, we will interrogate feminism’s multiple meanings and controversies, specifically in relation Black women. We will read Alice Walker, bell hooks, Toni Morrison, Sista Souljah, hip-hop feminists and other women who seek to understand the impact of race, class, gender, religion, and sexuality in their lives. The syllabus in structured in such a way that we will alternate between works of fiction and/or memoir and works of theory, often by the same writers. We will trace the ways in which the life stories we read describe the development of a black feminist consciousness which leads to the development of feminist theory. In other words, we will explicitly be concerned with the interrelationship between life and theory and the way the two are written by black feminist writers. As such, an ongoing theme of this course will be the ways in which, as the old feminist slogan states, the personal is political.