From Amazon: 
"Murch exposes the devastating consequences of overlapping punishment campaigns against gangs, drugs, and crime on poor and working- class populations of color. Through largely hidden channels, it is these punishment campaigns, Murch says, that generate enormous revenues for the state. Under such difficult conditions, organized resistance to the advancing tide of state violence and incarceration has proved difficult.
This timely and urgent book shows how a youth-led political movement has emerged since the killing of Trayvon Martin that challenges the bi-partisan consensus on punishment and looks to the future through a redistributive, queer, and feminist lens. Murch frames the contemporary Black Lives Matter movement in relation to earlier struggles for Black Liberation, while excavating the origins of mass incarceration and the political economy that drives it."

​Black cyberfeminism has been gaining traction as a way to think about black women’s feminist engagement with digital space. Described by Kishonna Leah Gray-Denson in her chapter “Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory,” cyberfeminism calls attention to the liberatory potential of digital spaces for feminists, for whom self-determination and expression is deeply important. Gray-Denson provides us the frame of black cyberfeminism, combining articulated qualities of cyberfeminism with black feminist thought. Black cyberfeminism argues that, in the onslaught of negative or negligible representation of black women, the space the Internet can provide for self-definition and self-determination has particularly high stakes and high potential rewards.
 
However, the Internet is not a safe space from the realities of our racist, sexist society. Reminding us of the limitations of black cyberfeminist digital theorizing, Gray-Denson states:
 
As Lorde and Clark (2007) posited, the master's tools will never dismantle the master's house. This is fundamental reality that those with consciousness recognize: the oppressed will never be given full access to spaces, websites, blogs, social media, and other Internet technologies. Although technologies were never created with the intent to destroy the hegemonic structure, they can provide temporary or partial games in countering the establishment.([1])
 
I work against this critique by arguing that black cyberfeminism is a framework uniquely equipped to engage with the concept of a mediated, complex, contested space where liberation, healing, and black feminist discourse happens. This is because, simply, black feminist discourse always takes place under these tenuous conditions, and digital cultures do not depart from that trend. Black cyberfeminism can work from the black feminist tradition of loving the struggle([2]), of making a way out of no way([3]), and of finding ways to move and speak amongst those who would prefer our silence, obedience, and obliteration.


[1] Gray-Denson, Kishonna Leah. "Race, Gender, and Virtual Inequality: Exploring the Liberatory Potential of Black Cyberfeminist Theory." In Produsing Theory in a Digital World 2.0: The Intersection of Audiences and Production in Contemporary Theory, 178-79.

[2] Phrase taken from Alice Walker’s definition of a womanist. Walker, Alice. In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1983.

[3] Colloquiual phrase, meant here to reference Monica Coleman’s text Making a Way out of No Way. Coleman, Monica A. Making a Way out of No Way: A Womanist Theology. Minneapolis, Minn,: Fortress Press, 2008.

(Caitlin Gunn)

​The political events of the past months have forced me to contend with the stakes of my work as a black feminist scholar and an Afrofuturist in entirely new ways. On the morning after the election, I called my mother in tears. She told me we as black people are particularly good at surviving conditions we were never meant to survive, and that we would do as our ancestors did and endure the unendurable.
 
Yes, this is the narrative we as black women so often hear and believe about ourselves. Survive today.
Make it until tomorrow.
Endure. Your survival is resistance.
Your presence here, now, in this space, is transgression.
 
But that narrative grows less comforting to me as I begin to witness palpable terror about the future for black people, and for immigrants, queer people, Muslims, and other people of color. It seems the widespread exercise of speculating the future is neglected until the futures called into being contain violence for us, against our souls and against and our bodies. This muscle of futurity is one we have largely forgotten to flex. We are deeply out of the practice of radical speculation.
 
Doing the work of imagining black futures is an urgent obligation. It is no longer a luxury. I use this language Audre Lorde gave us in Sister Outsider, when she told us poetry is not a luxury. She says, “It is a vital necessity of our existence. It forms the quality of the light within which we predicate our hopes and dreams toward survival and change, first made into language, then into idea, then into more tangible action.” (36)
 
Lorde was writing about poetry, but I argue speculative fiction works toward our dreams even more explicitly, sheparding us into conversations about hope and change, making them into language, allowing us space to play in our futures and pasts, and prompting us begin to imagine tangible action.
 
Fortunately, there are those among us with similar investments who practice speculative thinking as a way of life. Afrofuturists and other black authors of speculative fiction work to imagine futures where we exist and survive. They imagine worlds where we thrive, and histories that never came to pass, and contend with later consequences of current oppressions. They have utterly rejected versions of the future that erase us entirely, whether they come from within science fiction or from white supremacist fantasies. So, in this time that necessitates an urgent black futurity, turning to black speculative fiction authors to inform this project makes sense to to this project which is not solely about black imagination—it also attaches this radical speculation and future play to the current moment, grounded in social technologies and tools black people are using to combat oppression.
 
Of poetry, Lorde wrote: “If what we need to dream, to move our spirits most deeply and directly toward and through promise, is a luxury, then we have given up the core-the fountain-of our power, our womanness; we have give up the future of our worlds.” (39)
 
Political Afrofuturism is a refusal to give up those futures. 

Caitlin Gunn
​
A connection between civil rights activism through the black church and womanist theology is implied throughout womanist literature, but rarely discussed at length. One exception is Mary K. Schueneman, who writes about Christian mission work performed by black women during the civil rights era in her article A Leavening Force. She critiques the idea that the mission work of black women during civil rights and the political activism by black women in the civil rights movement are separate phenomena. Her article is an attempt to close the gap in literature about black women’s religious history by framing mission work as “a site for cultivating leadership and engaging segregation and racism,” which gives context to the civil rights work of Black Church women.[1] Similarly, this literature review attempts to bridge the gap between a rich history of political activism rooted in the Black Church to the theological imaginings of womanism realized in 1985.

Three students at the Union Theological Seminary in New York, Katie Cannon, Delores Williams and Jacquelyn Grant, were responsible for bringing womanism to theological scholarship at the American Academy of Religion conference of that year. The literature that resulted from those initial presentations and conversations would form the first wave of womanist theological scholarship: most significantly Katie’s Canon: Womanism and the Soul of
the Black Community by Katie G. Cannon, Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk by Delores Williams, and Jacquelyn Grant’s White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response. These three texts form the traditional, first- generation canon of womanist theology. All are focused on securing a place at the table for black women within the Black Church and in the black community. Katie’s Canon directly engages the history of black women’s contributions to theology and to the history of black people in the country. She speaks at once through a respected and longstanding canon of theological thought and of black women as the “other,” laying outside of the traditional canon but within “Katie’s Canon” and the newfound lens of womanism. Cannon makes it clear that recognizing history and struggles of black women is crucial for a womanist understanding.

Sisters in the Wilderness is Delores Williams’ testimony of black women’s place in Christianity and theology. Williams utilizes the story of the biblical Hagar to both give context for women of color in biblical history, and to use her story as a metaphor for the oppression of women of color that has been perpetuated throughout black women’s presence in America. Hagar’s story, in her eyes, is one that resonates as women of color pushing for survival, endurance, and preserving faith. Hagar the African slave navigating the wilderness after being forced from Sarah and Abraham’s home, pregnant and mistreated at Sarah’s hand. Williams finds connections in notions of surrogacy, but rejected the long-held notion of divine suffering, and that the suffering of black women was somehow Christ-like or Christian. Instead, she claims that the way out of suffering for black women is a recognition and visibility of their unique oppression. [2]

Jacquelyn Grant’s approach in White Women's Christ and Black Women's Jesus: Feminist Christology and Womanist Response is also a historical account, but of a much more recent phenomenon. Where Williams and Canon can be seen as engaging more directly with black liberation theology and building upon claims of black liberation theologists, Grant offers a substantial critique of feminist theology and exegesis that has ignored and silenced the unique positionality of women of color in its scope. A feminist biblical interpretation that highlights the question of a male savior fails, in Grant’s eyes, to capture the entirety of black women’s concerns and experiences when encountering Christ—that is to say, feminist Christology has been inherently linked with white theology that black women have found unrepresentative at best, and outright oppressive at worst. Far from dismissing feminist theology, Grant calls for a “coalition” with feminist theologians, but also for the separate space of womanist theology to explore the historical traumas and experiences of black women.

The efforts of Black Church women throughout history, particularly during the Civil Rights- Black Power movement, were fundamental for the way womanist theology operates and situates itself in religious scholarship today. Kelly Brown-Douglas, prominent second generation womanist scholar and author of Sexuality and the Black Church: A Womanist Perspective, frequently writes about the women and events that influenced her trajectory into womanist theology. One such assertion comes in her essay Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge written for Deeper Shades of Purple: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity edited by scholar of womanist ethics Stacey Floyd-Thomas. Within, she speaks of her childhood tendency to draw wisdom from “my mama and all of those other black women not necessarily in the academy— those everyday women who sit in the pews of black churches on Sunday morning looking for the sustenance to carry on during the week,” and asking them about things related to the black community and Civil Rights like “this man Martin Luther King, Jr., who was on the news all the time. I asked about those four little girls in Birmingham who adults whispered were killed at church. I asked about the riots that were going on all around. But, my mother said those were grown-up things and I needed to go play with the other children. I remember the struggle well.”[3]
 
This relationship between events and people of the Civil Rights Movement and the womanish desire for understanding is highlighted in Brown-Douglas’ words. The heart of womanism beats in the daily lived experiences of black women and the wisdom and power of black women throughout history. For many, this means the active political lives of Black Church women during the Civil Rights Movement contribute to their understanding of what it is to be a black woman, a black feminist, and a womanist.
 
Vast amounts of the support, leadership, and strength of black women activists during the Civil Rights Movement and the women’s movements of the 1960s-1970s has been overshadowed and erased in favor of black men’s and white women’s contributions and leadership. In spite of these transgressions and oppressions, the historical memory of the traditionally capable black women who changed the face of American race relations runs strong in womanist theological imaginings.


[1] Schueneman, Mary K. "A Leavening Force: African American Women and Christian Mission in the
Civil Rights Era." Church History 81, no. 04 (2012): 873-902. doi:10.1017/S00096407120

[2] Williams, Delores S. Sisters in the Wilderness: The Challenge of Womanist God-talk. Maryknoll, NY: Orbis Books, 1993.

[3] Brown-Douglas, Kelly. "Twenty Years a Womanist: An Affirming Challenge." In Deeper Shades of Purple: Womanism in Religion and Society, by Stacey M. Floyd-Thomas. New York: New York University Press, 2006.

We presented our papers on Afrofuturism Feminism and Digital Blackness at WisCon 40 on Sunday. Check out some of the audience's tweets during the panel:

It was very exciting to hear brilliant feminist scholars Kristie Dotson (who brings the realness) and Naomi Scheman (one of Caitlin's mentors) share their wisdom about the field of philosophy and where critical race theory, feminism, and decolonial theory are situated in modern philosophy. The two spoke at University of Minnesota's Institute for Advanced Study lecture series.
(Also, check out the shoutout to ya gurl Caitlin around 1:10:30)