Inside the Body of Black Feminism

Samantha Pinto is Professor of English, African & African Diaspora Studies, and Women’s, Gender, & Sexuality Studies at The University of Texas at Austin.

• Acknowledgments ixIntroduction. Material and Metaphor 1Part I. Bones and Blood: Black Feminist Thought and the Interior Infrastructures of History1. Bones: Collecting Black Feminisms and the Metaphor of History 252. Blood: Apprehending Your Mother’s Hematology 47Part II. Brains and Hearts: Reimagining the Pedagogies of Dissent3. Brains: Thinking Reparation and the Antiracist Cure 774. Hearts: Reading Racial Feeling and the Politics of Circulation 95Part III. Guts and Wombs: Black Feminism after Autonomy5. Guts: Metabolizing Racial Violence, Making the Black Feminist Self 1196. Wombs: Reproducing Black Feminism and the Knot of Autonomy 145Conclusion. Tender: On Black Feminist Method 169Notes 173Bibliography 185Index 211

“In asking what the truth of the interior parts of a Black ‘self’ might reveal, Samantha Pinto contests assumptions about proper objects, investigates the boundary of metaphor and its constraints, and pushes us to reevaluate what’s at stake in a particular kind of Black Feminist critique.”—Sharon P. Holland, author of an other: black feminist consideration of animal life “With a deep commitment to material and metaphor, Pinto takes us through the thoroughly racialized history of the black body – organ by organ. Weaving and reweaving the grammar and narrative of flesh and bones, this is an interdisciplinary tour-de-force! A must read for our times.”—Banu Subramaniam, author of Botany of Empire: Plant Worlds and the Scientific Legacies of Colonialism