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 Patricia 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