Racialization and Racism

On immanence and indeterminacy: Black feminism and settler colonialism

The essays in this forum originated out of a roundtable at the American Studies Association meeting on the occupied territory of the Kanaka Maoli (Hawaii) in 2019, sponsored by Environment and Planning D: Society & Space. Our roundtable was conceptualized around an open question about Black feminism’s relation to “settler colonialism,” a term that is understood as a critical framework, categorical description, and/or narrative genre.Among our questions: does Black feminism intervene in a settler colonial critical discourse that has become the “preferred discourse for examining colonialism in North America” (King, 2019: 56)? Does Black feminism even need settler colonial critique? Or does it already offer an immanent critique of conquest, accumulation, dispossession, disposability, and erasure? These are hardly neutral questions, and they speak both to the broadening appeal of Black feminist theory across the humanities and social sciences, alongside growing disenchantment with the white male center of settler colonial studies.

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Volume 39 Issue 1

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