There's No Place like "Home": Mining the Theoretical Terrain of Black Women's Studies, Black Queer Studies and Black Studies

At turn of century, DuBois initiated and carried out his research both in Philadelphia and Atlanta with expressed purpose and intent of documenting life and culture, thereby improving life and culture of Americans. By following his lead and bringing rigorous academic analyses and description to discipline, scholars will continue to create new models of inquiry, examination, and evaluation useful to all disciplines. --Nathaniel Norment Jr., American Studies Reader, 2001, xxxiii Afro American Pan-African and African American programs and departments have been met with challenges and ideological unrest since their emergence in late 1960s and early 1970s. Responsible for disrupting dominant and hegemonic discourses surrounding race, identity, and white supremacy; as well as mining political and theoretical terrain of empire, neo colonialism, and Black agency within Western hemisphere, Black Studies has created a discipline within white towers of academic pursuit that challenged way in which white academicians conceived of and defined knowledge. The Civil Rights and Black Power movements of this period provided historical backdrop and social street scene (1) for Black Studies as a discipline to form, consequently, the political and rhetorical strategies of larger and rights movement were deployed by intellectual and cultural activists demanding institutional support for formation of [Black Studies]. (2) Regrettably, Black Studies' aim at forging a unified front for Black academicians, intellectuals, and activists alike, simultaneously created an environment of hostility and invisibility for many Black women and Black Queer identified (3) scholars in discipline. women's institutional work as well as their intellectual interventions in black studies departments remained understudied, devalued, or marginalized by reigning black male theorists who decided race to be proper sphere of study. (4) This discursive maneuvering left many women in Black Studies disillusioned and isolated, inevitably creating ideological space for seedlings of Black Women's Studies as a separate discipline to be planted. abject positioning of Queer identified Black Studies theorists within discipline has engendered a similar impasse in Black Studies. Black Queer Studies movement has been on rise as an intellectual and existential attendant to Black Women's Studies movement for years, and most recently has garnered more ideological currency in academic marketplace. (5) Both Black Queer Studies and Black Women's Studies as disciplines are prepared and have the potential to transform how we theorize sexuality [and gender] in conjunction with other identity formations, (6) namely Blackness. However, establishment of these alternative disciplines and/or ideologically segregated spaces for Black scholars and students leaves no room for Black Studies, (as still a newly forming discipline itself), to grow as a viable and necessary discipline for all Black liberation. This five part article seeks to elaborate on historical conversations of Black Women's Studies and to highlight newly emergent dialogue of Black Queer Studies to initiate dialectic between three disciplines in interest of expanding Black Studies as ideological and metaphorical home of Black libratory phenomena. PART ONE: NEW HOUSE~ SAME WALLS: BLACK LIBERATION AND MISOGYNY After 1965, Black women faced an ongoing battle with sexism within Black Civil Rights organizations. With publication of Moynihan Report, and growing Black Nationalist movement, Black women underwent an onslaught of sexism at hands of many prominent Black male figureheads. Maulana Karenga, one of most influential advocates for cultural and intellectual traditions and founder of Kwanzaa (a cultural holiday) also found himself endorsing extremely reductive patriarchal roles for Black women. …