All Skinfolk Ain’t Kinfolk: Third World Feminism as Citational Praxis
By T.D. Harper-Shipman
“Citations are the currency of academia.” I’ve heard some version of this expression throughout my academic life. As a graduate student in Political Science, the analogy made sense to me. Currency approximates worth. I understood citations then as a way to impute value to scholars and places that nurtured my thinking but remained invisible to the discipline. We know value in academia has traditionally been assigned to white, male, heteronormative scholars located in established disciplines at prestigious institutions in the Global North. By the 1970s, the ranks slowly cracked open to include ideas from exceptional male scholars of color and white women. Considering the premium academia and the world have placed on thoughts emanating from those racialized as white, gendered as men, and sexualized as heteronormative, it makes sense that intellectual identities forged in opposition to these standpoints would also want inclusion and equal valorization. It would be their right, considering the intellectual capital accrued to prominent white male scholars by excavating non-white lives.
Still, the gestalt of valuable ideas captured in the form of citations reflects the same hierarchies that order capitalism. The late Paulin Hountondji observed the parallel extractive logics of capitalism and Western knowledge production: researchers remove the quotidian and “unrefined” bits of non-white life through surveys, interviews, participant observations and other methods and filter them through Western theories to render the findings valuable commodities (i.e., books and articles). [1] When non-white, non-male scholars approximated and appropriated these practices, many found themselves still banging on the guarded gates of academia. Some were banging to be let in (think DEI) and some were banging to tear the gates down.
Throughout the Black world, people have worked to widen fissures in the capitalist structure, hoping to birth a new world. But with each rupture, capitalists (with state support) found ways to thwart these efforts. Along with violent suppression, the most effective means of neutralization was inclusion. Celebrating Black American billionaires or the growing number of Black women entrepreneurs reflects movement away from class critique to class abandonment, i.e., Black Joy and Black Excellence. The goal is no longer to abolish class distinctions but to successfully rise in its ranks or give the affective quality of doing so. The same can be said of academia. Student-led strikes at San Francisco State in 1968 led to Black Studies departments in the United States. However, students demanded not only Black Studies but the reconfiguration of the College as a redistributive institution. This could be done through popular education and moving away from Academia’s extractive proclivities. Inclusion, however, frustrated these goals.
[Delita Martin, I See God in Us/Soul Mates, 2020]
Black Studies was again on the academic radar during Black Lives Matters protests in the summer of 2020, when many institutions answered calls for racial justice and abolition of the carceral state with fellowships and tenure track lines for Black Studies scholars. Inclusive citational practices became integral to this moment. A growing trend within DEI-decolonial spaces is to wage war through citations—especially with respect to race and gender. Citing marginalized scholars is now an ancillary strategy for policing and reallocating the intellectual capital that has historically been accruing to white men. Citations are irrefutably important. But their importance dwindles when they’re a stand-in for intellectual engagement and reify tokenistic inclusionary politics. In parallel to Sylvia Wynter’s argument about the neoliberal inclusion of “African American Studies,” these citational practices mistake the map for the territory. [2]
To illustrate the perilous investment in DEI-redistributive citational practices, I draw briefly from personal experience. My current work examines colonial reproductive regimes— the racialized, gendered, and sexualized state mechanisms that embed fertility in the exigencies of capitalism’s anticipated labor needs. I use the U.S. and Senegal as comparative case studies. More importantly, I theorize decolonial reproductive politics or strategies that poor Black women deploy to decouple their fertility and labor from state and capitalist objectives. The result is an insistence on a fundamentally different category of human—one where deservingness is not bound to racialized, gendered, and sexualized measures of reproductive and productive output. My project is necessarily anti-capitalist, anti-development, anti-colonial (read anti-liberal)—rooted in disruptive feminist traditions.
In submitting my project for peer review, the responses suggested how pervasive and hostile citation policing has become under the guise of equity and inclusion. Though one reviewer loved the project, the other, a scholar who promotes citing Black women, rejected the project stating that it was “citation-blind.” With this ableist language, the reviewer suggested I avoid citing Black men such as Walter Rodney and Manning Marable because they do not contribute to a Black Feminist Economics—a framework I’ve never used because it conflates Black women with feminisms and Black feminists with a singular orientation to capitalism. The reviewer knew I was an untenured Black American woman, but the scarcity mindset that orders whiteness also naturally orders its citational practice.
Although the reviewer only received my North Carolina chapters, they spent considerable time asking, “Where are the [feminist] scholars from Senegal…Is the author reading in French and populating their library with local [women] scholars?” As a point of fact, there are Senegalese scholars cited throughout the book, not just in the Senegal chapters. One Senegalese scholar centered in the proposal, Codou Bop, has a name not easily gendered by someone unfamiliar with the culture. The reviewer did not realize that Bop is a Senegalese feminist scholar. Such DEI citational practices often rely on easily recognizable gendered, racially distinct names, or personal relationships to ensure representational bibliographies.
By contrast, in attempting to hold me accountable for my citation practices, the reviewer never vetted the North Carolina chapters for engagement with North Carolinian Black women scholars. This would have been preposterous: the idea that knowledge about North Carolina is the exclusive intellectual domain of North Carolinians would be absurd. Yet it would fit with the reviewer’s logic, insofar as it presumes that Senegalese scholars are important because they are “local,” not because of what they can tell us about global or regional articulations of power. Moreover, the reviewer never acknowledged different intellectual traditions across Senegalese women scholars—anti-capitalist, pro-capitalist, pro-nationalist, anti-nationalist, or anything in between. In other words, foregrounding citations as an inclusionary practice led to Senegalese women scholars being dis-embedded from disciplinary, theoretical, political, and ideological traditions. Their addition required that they first be flattened into an unassuming monolith that would not trouble academic precepts.
I couldn’t help but read these comments through a Third World Feminist analytic, which implored us to avoid the seductive artifice of inclusion since the 1970s. Having read scholars like June Jordan, H.L.T. Quan, M. Jacqui Alexander, Patricia McFadden, Maria Mies, and Chandra Mohanty inter alia, I am constantly aware of the limits of academia as an emancipatory space capable of redistributing power and the bankruptcy of inclusionary politics.
For me, Third World Feminism offers a way out of this dilemma by privileging genealogy and analytical nuance around essentialist notions of race and gender, while rejecting the project of multicultural inclusion as such. Moreover, as M. Jacqui Alexander and Chandra Mohanty note in Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures, the reading praxis of TWF moves us past such dangerous citation practices by demanding “serious intellectual, analytic, and political engagement with the theorizations of women of color” (xvi). As a theoretical framework, TWF underscores the complexity of power and privilege in the lives of Third World women. The framework itself troubles the false binaries between global/local and reassert intellectual genealogies that are anti-capital, anti-colonial, and anti-liberal.
For TWF, methodology and epistemological location take precedence over vapid citations. In “Under Western Eyes,” Chandra Mohanty argues that Third World and Western are “political analytic sites and methodologies—just as a woman from the geographical Third World can be a Western feminist in orientation, a European feminist can use a Third World feminist analytic perspective” (502). This point delimits the boundaries of DEI citation practices that conflate gender and/or racial representation as radical praxis. If we understand whiteness as a way of seeing, being, engaging, and thinking about the world, then looking for the phenotypical, cultural, and biological markers of difference to evince diversity has long been a white way of knowing. These markers become representational tropes. They exhaust what certain identities can say or know about the world beyond the reinscribed experiences contained within those identities. TWF reminds us that “third world woman” is an epistemological location in the same way that “whiteness” is an epistemological location. In other words, Black women can take up the same epistemological and political commitments of the first world, particularly in their efforts to be included and/or valued according to its metrics.
In addition, Alexander and Mohanty write, “Any understanding of women’s experiences based on a narrow conception of gender would simply be incapable of fully addressing the homogenizing hierarchizing effects of economic and cultural processes which are the result of [multinational capitalist] consumer culture” (xvi). TWF calls our attention to the appropriation of previously disruptive concepts such as feminism by powerful structures like capitalism and the nation-state. We can, again, extend this to academia where scholars who take-up essentialist notions of “woman”—a category that has always been mediated by race, class, space, and time—traffic in feminist discourse.
Third World Feminism showed me that my discomfort with “citations as currency” had to do with how it recenters conventions of academia that have historically been used to exclude, as right and proper when wielded by marginalized groups. A hyper-focus on citations is often about replacing white men and women as gatekeepers in academia because for many, academia is the end itself. But for many of us located in the Third World, academia has always been merely one of many possible means to end suffering in our non-academic communities.
Notes
[1] See Paulin J. Hountondji and Codesria, eds. Les Savoirs Endogènes: Pistes Pour Une Recherche. Série Des Livres Du Codesria. Dakar: Codesria, 1994.
[2] See Sylvia Wynter. “On How We Mistook the Map for the Territory, and Reimprisoned Ourselves in Our Unbearable Wrongness of Being, of Desêtre: Black Studies Toward the Human Project.” A Companion to African-American Studies. Eds. Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 107–18. Oxford, UK: Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 2006.
References
Alexander, M. Jacqui, and Chandra Mohanty, eds. Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York, N.Y: Routledge, 1997.
Mohanty, Chandra Talpade. “‘Under Western Eyes’ Revisited: Feminist Solidarity through Anticapitalist Struggles.” Signs 28-2 (2003): 499–535.
T.D. Harper-Shipman is the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Assistant Professor of Africana Studies at Davidson College. Prior to Davidson, she was a postdoctoral fellow in the Institute for Politics and Strategy at Carnegie Mellon University. Her first book, Rethinking Ownership of Development in Africa was published in 2019 with Routledge Press. She has published in Third World Quarterly, Journal of Asian and African Studies, Philosophy and Global Affairs, and International Studies Review. She has also published public-facing work in Pambazuka, The Global African Worker, Miami Institute of Social Sciences and Africa is a Country.