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This roundtable stems from a Zoom event, "New Directions in Feminism and Global Race Studies (a Book Conversation)" with authors Tiffany N. Florvil, Kaiama L. Glover, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, Katherine M. Marino, Robin Mitchell, and Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué, hosted by Samantha Pinto. These scholars discussed their recently published books, which expand how we think about transnational feminism and global Black feminisms in the Americas, the Caribbean, Africa, and Europe. The lightly edited transcript of the conversation explores how putting Black women at the center of histories of global feminisms and race studies transforms these fields and the questions that are usually asked. The authors also discussed navigating research challenges and confronting racism in the sources and in the archives. The conversation underscores the importance of intellectual community, as well as the relevance and urgency of Black feminist scholarship today. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Linda Smart Chubb made history in 1950 when she served as acting mayor of Colón City, Panama. Not only did she become the first woman to hold this position in Colón, but her tenure also marked the first time that a woman of Afro-Caribbean descent had been elected to any political office in Panama. Smart Chubb's position in the mayoral office also came only four years after women had secured the right to vote. Looking particularly at Smart Chubb's work with feminist organizations, advocacy groups for Afro-Caribbean migrants, the Black international press, and British consular offices in Panama, this article posits that Smart Chubb's election rested on her ability, beginning in the 1920s, to hone a Black feminist internationalist praxis. Such a praxis sought to secure the political rights of all women but also acknowledged the specific challenges faced by Black people in a world mired by xenophobia, anti-Blackness, and competing imperial mandates. Through a focused engagement with the life of Linda Smart Chubb, this article adds to recent scholarship on Black women internationalists while centering a vision of Black feminist internationalism rooted in grassroots local activism with attention to imperial and nationalist struggles emanating from Central America and the Caribbean. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this article I argue that Douglas Sirk's maternal melodrama, Imitation of Life (1959), advances an ideology whereby Black women are equated with and consigned to domestic labor. The film features two mother-daughter pairs, one Black and one white. The Black mother, Annie, works as a maid for the white mother. Annie's light-skinned daughter, Sarah Jane, passes as white to avoid following her mother's condition. But Annie's death at the film's end seems to bring a contrite Sarah Jane back to her subservient place in the white family. I consider Imitation in relation to nineteenth-century traditions of racial melodrama and current theories of Black materialism to trace how US labor practices worked with discursive systems such as the movies to make the "Black maid" ubiquitous and the modifier unnecessary. Moreover, the structural inequality that relegates Black women to service requires them to act as if they are free agents within a rigged system: that is, to perform an imitation of life. However, the Black characters seize agency from a scopic economy of pleasure founded on Black women's embodied pain and labor. The emotional power of Annie's funeral, heightened by Mahalia Jackson's performance as choir soloist, appropriates melodramatic sentimentality and subverts Sirk's intended irony to convey Annie's value on a different scale. Sarah Jane's protest through passing registers despite her capitulation after Annie's death because Sirk's technique for criminalizing her backfires. The film weaves elements of noir, including striptease, into the visual register to construct her as a dangerous femme fatale. But Sarah Jane inverts the narrative's attempt to strip away her whiteness by making Black servitude the costume, not the essence. Thus, she destabilizes the racial binaries asserted by the tragic mulatta conventions. By theorizing Black agency in scripted performance, revealing Imitation 's hybrid genre of melodrama noir, and reconsidering representations of Black women's labor, this essay contributes to work in Black materialism and Black feminist performance studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this essay, I analyze the rise of vengeful populism in relation to sex workers in late twentieth-century Philadelphia as part of the popular response to the transformation in the city's political economy. I juxtapose vengeful populism with the rage of Donnetta Hill, a Black sex worker tried and convicted for the murder of two men the state alleged were her clients. In order to appreciate the contours of rage as a fiery cascade of affect, emotion, and action in the hands of a Black woman who faced violence, economic depravation, and social ostracization, I draw on Black feminist thought, especially as located in Audre Lorde's writing, about the generative nature of Black women's and Black feminist rage. Rage, in the context of Black feminist analysis and in Hill's actions preceding and after her conviction—which I classify as a spitting rage—signifies a form of power connected to self-preservation and the fierce desire to maintain one's chosen bonds of family, kin, and community. Rage is thereafter a positive program of self-definition, resistance, and world making. I highlight the contours of Hill's rage as a generative, if confined and constrained, force over and against the novel enclosures related to the transformation in urban geography, political economy, and politics in the decade and a half between 1980 and 1995. Though Hill's politics remain largely illegible because of the bloody and vocal expression of her disquiet, I want to appreciate these as abolitionist resources, however constrained and impinged on by the violent context in which Hill attempted to survive and live in the wake of social and economic abandonment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This introduction demonstrates the critical place of rage in our contemporary moment in the face of the catastrophic COVID-19 pandemic, the surge of protests against police killings and the global Movement for Black Lives, and ongoing dissent against rising authoritarianisms around the world. In her overview of the special issue, Carla Kaplan explores the rich tradition of feminist scholarship on rage from Audre Lorde to Adrienne Rich. Kaplan reflects on the essential work of Signs in this moment as a critical space for engaged feminist public scholarship in a time of protest and crisis. Sarah Haley traces how Black feminist theories of rage have been foundational to broad feminist critiques of state violence and visions for a sustainable, livable world. Yet, Haley argues, Black feminisms are too often treated as a "commodity fetish," appearing primarily as a citation rather than as a subject of extended engagement and analysis. Durba Mitra analyzes how feminist protest defines our contemporary moment, with no single origin and no end in sight. Mitra highlights the diverse modes of feminist outrage in global protests, from singing and dancing to art making, through the example of the Shaheen Bagh protests against anti-Muslim laws in India. The final section highlights the wide-ranging feminist themes linked to rage in the issue: protests in Puerto Rico, trans politics, intersex protest, sex work, carcerality, the question of white womanhood, white women's gun ownership, disability, transnational #feminisms against sexual violence and femicide in Kenya and South Africa, Black girlhood, Indigenous feminisms, and disobedient humor in the age of Trump. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Throughout the twentieth century, Black women in the United States experienced at least double the rates of infant mortality experienced by white women. Through an analysis of oral histories collected in the US South in the 1930s—ex-slave narratives and Federal Writer's Project interviews—I detail what Patricia Hill Collins terms a "Black women's standpoint on mothering." From interviewees' discussions of infant and child loss emerge twin concepts of generation and Black relationality, which enable a theory of Black motherhood as connected to survival and remembrance. The concept of generation reveals how Black women in the 1930s defined themselves as mothering their children after Emancipation and yet as inheriting the ever-present enslaved past through their own mothers and grandmothers. Black women articulated a sense of self and well-being that was in conversation with the ancestors and unborn. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

"Writing Black Beauty" argues that contemporary black feminist theory is marked by a new form of writing—beautiful writing—that makes visible the centrality of loss to theorizing black female subjectivity. Drawing on work by Christina Sharpe and Nicole Fleetwood, the article contends that a commitment to the beautiful is marked by an attachment to ethics of risk and disclosure and to practices of nonlinearity, resonance, and echo. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on Women With A Vision (WWAV) which is black feminist collective walked into their first home and to improve the lives of marginalized women and their communities by addressing the structural conditions that hinder their health and well-being. It mentions isolating black women from necessary social services and criminalizing them for this victimization. It also mentions goal of political empowerment and social justice.

This special issue invites such reassessment across disciplines, broadly questioning and complicating feminist histories, debates, and politics of care and caring. Over the past four decades of feminist scholarship and practice, notions of care and caring, as noun and verb, have had great traction across disciplinary divides, spurring debate while challenging binaries of equality and difference, public and private, the cold hand of the market and the warmth of home, the rational and irrational, and paid and unpaid labor. The editors invite essays that consider, but are by no means limited to, the following questions: • What work have concepts of care and caring done in feminist scholarship?. [Extracted from the article]