Black Feminism and Democratic Politics: Lessons on Emotion and Judgment

Face-to-face event
Venue: Room L002, 1 place Saint-Thomas d'Aquin - 75007 Paris 

Workshop organized within the programme of the Chaire d’Etude du Fait Religieux

During the 1980s, Black feminists including Audre Lorde, Assata Shakur, Alice Walker, and bell hooks developed a distinctive political vision that challenged both the culture of male-dominated liberation movements and the norms of the liberal state. By integrating spiritual and moral commitments with their orientation toward politics, these Black feminists introduced a new political vocabulary and new political dispositions. Yet the most critical elements of this strand of thought is being forgotten as Black feminism is secularized and made palatable to a liberal political frame. I argue that recovering the relationship between emotion and judgment theorized in Black feminism, through their appeal to spirituality, is crucial to resisting this domestication.

 

Vincent Lloyd is Professor and Director of the Center for Political Theology at Villanova University, where he has directed the Africana Studies Program. He is the author of seven books on social movements, critical theory, prison abolition, and anti-Blackness, most recently Black Dignity: The Struggle Against Domination (Yale University Press, 2022).

 

We are pleased to host Professor Hélène Charlery in dialogue with Vincent Lloyd.

Hélène Charlery is Professor at the Université Toulouse Jean-Jaurès. She has written extensively on gender and race identities in the movie industry in the United States. Her recent research focuses on Black feminism and cinema in the United States. Among other publications, she has co-edited (with Aurélie Guillain) Erasure and Recollection. Memories of Racial Passing Within and Beyond the United States.  Peter Lang, 2021.

 

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Scientific coordinator: Nadia Marzouki, Sciences Po-CERI