Black Feminist Encounters: On Walking The Talk, Risking The Self And Shifting Centres

In engaging with the discourse of safe space from a self-reflexive perspective, I will start by paraphrasing the words of bell hooks: “I came to theory because I was hurting. The pain within me was so intense that I could not go on living. I came to theory desperate, wanting to comprehend—to grasp what was happening around and within me. Most importantly, I wanted to make the hurt go away. I saw in theory then a location for healing”. This affective pain is not unfamiliar to us who share in bell hooks’s embodied history. An affective pain that is so visceral and that by its historical constitution guarantees that surviving is tied to exiting and entering new temporalities and spatialities (discursive and material). However, these acts carry inherent risks due to the fact that this visceral pain is shaped by a shared history and culture. For scholars like me and beyond (African, queer, woman, migrant), engagement with decolonial and feminist theories is almost always personal. It involves a profound connection and investment in the transformative potential of these theories to shape both our public and private. To expose to view my journey in creating safer space as a Black woman, both within academia and my private life is to enter into a Black feminist act of risk. My presentation will interlock the private and the public— my struggle through epistemological paradigms, my personal journey of doing decolonial research in Western academia, coming into contact with Black feminist scholarship and bringing these ideas into the classroom vis-a-vis designing my own syllabus to shift conversations and the economy of power.