Call for Chapters

Why Black Feminism in Europe?

How might we theorise and practice Black feminism and womanism in Europe today? This is a provocative question for women of colour as our politics are too often erased from or misrecognised in the European imagination (Mirza 1997; Bilge 2013; Wekker 2016; Bassel and Emejulu 2017). By ‘women of colour’ we mean women who experience processes of racialisation and hierarchies of gender, class, sexuality and legal status. Constructed as alien Others, women of colour exist in a contradictory state of invisibility—we are assumed to be absent from and irrelevant to European societies—or hypervisibility—we are presumed to be oppressed and passive and/or highly sexualised, angry and irrational. Across the political spectrum among ostensible allies, women of colour must struggle against our erasure and the debilitating constructions of ourselves that delegimitise our politics, interests and activisms. Furthermore, women of colour in Europe must negotiate the dominant discourses of racial, gender and intersectional politics of North American Black feminists and womanists that make it difficult to name and take action on our particular racialised, gendered and classed experiences in a European context.

Women of colour in Europe have always maintained critical spaces of analysis and activism based on our race, class, gender, sexuality and other categories of difference. Whether under the mantle of Black feminism, Afro-feminism, decolonial feminism or, increasingly in a European context, womanism, women of colour are undertaking creative resistances to and subversion of our institutionalised inequalities, to imagine radical new futures outside and against the neo-colonial frames and practices of contemporary Europe.

About the edited collection

Building on our successful one-day conference, Black Feminism, Womanism and the Politics of Women of Colour in Europe, we organised in Edinburgh in 2016 and the follow-up conference in Amsterdam in 2017, this edited collection will explore how women of colour:

  • Theorise Black feminism and womanism from European perspectives
  • Build and sustain activist spaces for survival and resistance
  • Challenge, subvert and transform socialist, feminist, populist and/or anarchist politics
  • Develop transnational alliances and intersectional and intergenerational coalitions for equality and social justice
  • Engage with creative practice as a means of activism and self-preservation

We have an agreement in principle from Pluto Press to publish this edited collection.

Deadlines

We seek 3,000-5,000 word chapters (including bibliography) in English from activists, practitioners, artists, students and scholars by Monday, 18th September 2017.

To discuss your potential contribution, please feel free to contact Akwugo Emejulu, a.emejulu [at] warwick [dot] ac [dot] uk.