Barbara Smith’s landmark 1977 essay, “Toward a Black Feminist Criticism,” argues for the development of a literary criticism that could make Black women’s writing, and their lives, “recognizable and real.” In honor of the fiftieth anniversary of Smith’s essay, this panel examines what has changed, and what has not, in the intervening years. Since the essay’s publication, a Black feminist criticism has been developed, incorporated into the university, and widely engaged by scholars. However, Black women’s literary and intellectual contributions still face erasure. Universities are under attack, with special ire directed at humanities departments where work in Black feminist criticism is most often undertaken. The state of things demands that we who write about and with Black feminist literature reckon with the following questions: What does it mean to do Black feminist criticism today? What are the opportunities and consequences of making Black women’s literature and lives “recognizable and real” under current conditions of austerity, censorship, and retaliation? We invite discussion about how Black feminist literary criticism might adapt, resist, and return to foundational thinkers and their methods to forge new ways of thinking with Black women’s literature and theory in the world as it is today.

Dominique Joe’s paper returns to Black feminist luminaries, including Barbara Christian, who once underscored the importance of reading as “another way of ordering your thoughts.” Analyzing the dynamic reading practices of Dionne Brand in Salvage (2024) and Alexis Pauline Gumbs in Survival is a Promise: The Eternal Life of Audre Lorde (2024), this paper argues for what it terms “queer diasporic literacy.” This form of literacy recognizes that the queer situatedness of Black feminists’ lives in diaspora offers methods for progressing Black feminist literary criticism into a new era. Queer diasporic literacy allows scholars to engage with a variety of texts/objects that are not normally associated with Black feminist literature (e.g. Gumbs’s finding Lorde’s locs in the archive), developing new ways of reading and thus new ways of ordering our thoughts in an increasingly violent and anti-intellectual present.

Archival research has long been vital to Black feminist thought, which has privileged genealogy as both method and inheritance. Yet contemporary theorists such as Jennifer Nash, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman turn to archives that are already tenuous, misrepresented, and structured by erasure. How does one write history from materials that obscure, distort, or refuse Black women’s presence? Reading alongside Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Moya Bailey, and Omise’eke Tinsley, Vallaire Wallace argues that Black feminist archival practice is less about recovery and more about inhabiting absence, a speculative, affective, and relational method that treats archival gaps not as failures but as generative sites of theory-making. Foregrounding method over motive, this paper invites a larger conversation about how Black feminist literary criticism understands itself while navigating institutional consolidation and renewed threats of deinstitutionalization.

James Bliss argues that the current crisis state of American higher education is fundamentally a state of resistance to Black feminist theory. Current attacks on higher education echo what Paul de Man famously termed “the resistance to theory.” There, de Man articulated the different threats posed by theoretical criticism: that it upset dominant “ideologies by revealing the mechanics of their workings,” disrupted the “established canon of literary works,” blurred the “borderlines between literary and non-literary discourse,” and revealed the “links between ideologies and philosophies.” Over the past decades, no academic discourse has embodied these threats as much as Black feminist theory, and Black feminist theorizing has generated some of the most radical interventions in the field of cultural and literary criticism. At the same time, the wider field has seen a shift away from Theory towards different historicisms, materialisms, aestheticisms, and “postcritique.” These post-theoretical criticisms are, the paper argues, also resistances to Black feminist theory, resistances that leave us either with no critique of power and ideology, or with only the most superficial critiques of power and ideology. Reading recent works of Jennifer Nash, Patrice Douglass, Zakiyyah Jackson, Christina Sharpe, and Saidiya Hartman, this paper asks what Black feminist theorizing might offer for contemporary practices of literary criticism as well as contemporary practices of resistance.

Through its membership, this panel emphasizes work by untenured and Black women scholars from diverse geographical locations. Each panelist will speak for twelve minutes, allowing for twenty minutes of discussion with Erica Edwards, our respondent, followed by more than fifteen minutes of Q&A. The panel’s presider, Kendall Dinniene, will introduce the speakers and the respondent, manage panelists’ time, and moderate the respondent discussion and Q&A.