The Black Women's Gathering Place: A Black Feminist-Centered Space of Storying

• In Event: "I Am Because We Are": Critical Narratives of Community and Identity Among Black Women

Abstract

In, “Communities of Practice and Black Feminist Thought,” the first presenter will contextualize both the larger, intergenerational community of participants (approximately 17 Black women) and the specific stories to be shared by the other two session presenters (who are also researcher participants in this community of practice). She will highlight the theoretical frameworks guiding this collaboration: Collins’ (2000) Black feminist thought and Black Female Literacies (Richardson, 2002; Royster, 2000; Womack). The intersections of these theoretical frameworks were employed to analyze the impact that identity, sense of self, and fictive kinship (see Fordham, 1996) have on an intergenerational collaboration involving Black women. As will be argued, there is a need for a more explicit discussion of the influences of race, gender, language, and literacy within Lave and Wenger’s (1991) communities of practice (see also Wenger, 2000). Therefore, the movement toward a Black community of practice should be grounded in tenets of Collins’s (2000) Black feminist thought.
Black women possess an extensively rich history of engagement with literate practices, seeking to make sense of unjust conditions and reaping benefits for ourselves and our communities (Royster, 2000). Black female literacies employ language to speak with authority, to resist value systems that
render our ways of knowing irrelevant, and to envision a world through the collective standpoints of Black women (Royster, 2000). Within our intergenerational research Collective, we engage in practices of storytelling (Richardson, 2002) to illuminate the legacy of struggles against violence, the connections between experience and consciousness, and the intellectual activity necessary to carve safe spaces for Black women to be and to do.
A collective identity is fostered, offering a re-imagined view of ourselves and our worlds.
As will be argued, there is a need for safe spaces (Collins, 2000), such as The Black Women’s Gathering Place, where we can critically interrogate the important roles of Black women’s identities and how we navigate those identities within oppressive situations. She explores what it would mean, theoretically, for the creation of such spaces that center Black women’s ways of knowing within the context of Black women’s personally- and politically-situated stories. In what ways might such spaces reveal how—and under what oppressive conditions—many Black women and their stories are marginalized in “mainstream” spaces? These imaginings emphasize the theoretical significance of intergenerational collaborations —framed within a community of practice and by Black feminist thought—insofar as the stories shared and narrated by Black women are concerned. In closing, this presenter describes the importance of a theoretical framework that relies on Black Feminist Thought and Black Female Literacies to discuss oppression, historically marginalized ideologies and epistemologies, and the value of Black women’s lived experiences in relation to Black cultural, historical, and feminist practices.

Author

• Arianna Howard, The Ohio State University