The Black Feminine Domestic: A Counter-Heuristic Exercise in Falling Apart. Symbiosis 13.2 (October 2009)

about

This essay was originally published in Symbiosis: A Journal of Anglo-American Literary Relations, Volume 13.2 (October 2009)

An extract from this essay:

In place of the ‘Black Atlantic’, the ‘Black Feminine Domestic’ requires a mapping that reveals and refuses the global economic mode of rape, the capitalist practice of using people’s bodies against their will by claiming a prior and self-reproducing consent. However I would not argue that ‘the Black Feminine Domestic’ should become the new organizing logic for black diaspora studies. In fact the reason I deploy the name ‘Black Feminine Domestic’ is to emphasize the fact that (though it almost rhymes with ‘Black Atlantic’) it is not an organizing logic but rather a subject position that is excluded from ‘The Black Atlantic’ and that gap demands an alternative mode of dialogic diaspora in which the promise of ‘home’ is both deferred and articulated as a poetics of relation.

About the author

Affiliation: Duke University