For this special issue, the editors seek submissions that examine class and economics in black women’s lives and think expansively about how economic inequalities and labor exploitation have historically or currently impact opportunities and access. The editors invite papers that examine how shifting conceptions of middle class/working class identities and cultural practices, constructions of the “underclass,” and spatialization of black poverty have been central to discourses about black female embodiment and gender/race/sexual identities. They also solicit contributions that consider the methodological possibilities and challenges of examining black working-class women, including new approaches to historical archives and other research tools that might provide the basis for the production of new knowledge and visions for the future.
The special issue will include an invited roundtable with contributions from Professor Tera Hunter, Professor Saidiya Hartman and other leading scholars in the field.
Possible Topics & Themes: labor organizing, black urban spaces and the policing of black poor communities, politics of respectability, uplift politics, working class cultures of resistance, contradictions between economic status and social status in black communities, class politics in social movements, black feminist theory, capitalist development, liberalism, and neoliberalism, migration, family, illicit economies and criminalization, state violence, cultural representation and cultural production, geographies of black female labor, and reproduction.
Guest Editors:
Dayo Gore, University of California, San Diego
Prudence Cumberbatch, Brooklyn College
Sarah Haley, University of California, Los Angeles
For further information, contact souls@uic.edu.