Introduction: Black Feminism and the Practice of Care

IntroductionBlack Feminism and the Practice of Care Aisha K. Finch (bio) Black feminism has always been engaged in a radical process of care. This special issue explores how we might think more deeply and critically about this project of care, and the ways in which it has been imagined, lived, and violated across time and space. When the work for this volume began in 2018—at the height of the Trump administration—thefts of bodily and psychic well-being were normalized, sanctioned, and pervasive. The recurrence of anti-Black violence, fascist populism, heteropatriarchal and transphobic assaults, lethal xenophobia, forever wars, climate destruction, and state-sponsored terror produced a particular urgency to think about care in new ways. Although the political tenor has since shifted, the persistence of a racialized global pandemic and rampant state violence continues to demonstrate which lives are eligible for care, protection, and nurturing, and which are marked for abandonment, devaluation, and destruction. Perhaps then it is not surprising that Audre Lorde's famous contention—"caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare"—has been circulating widely in recent years.1 Across social media outlets, online publications, organizing spaces, academic conferences, and academic journals, Black intellectuals, activists, and artists—particularly those who identify as feminist, queer, trans, nonbinary, and genderqueer—have conveyed radical ways of thinking about care, and a deeply rooted desire for healing, nurturance, and transformational love. The conversation in this volume, then, forms part of a larger conversation on care that has gathered significant momentum in recent years. The editors of this volume sought to contribute to that conversation for a number of reasons. As a collective, we work on the histories of slavery, [End Page 1] colonialism, apartheid, radical social movements, and knowledge production in Cuba, the U.S. South, South Africa, and Ghana. Our work has therefore borne witness to racial capitalism's inability to care for—indeed its deliberate and undisciplined ravaging of—Black life. Confronted daily with the long historical arc of racial violence and the continued onslaughts of modern anti-Blackness—as well as the breaches of care produced by an insatiable academy—we reached across disciplines and subfields for alternative ways of thinking about care. It was a collective answer to the world-changing question posed by Minnie Ransom, the fictional healer in Toni Cade Bambara's The Salt Eaters: "Are you sure, sweetheart, that you want to be well?"2 Our broad investment in Black feminism, our desire to imagine a different world from the ones we had studied and lived, our desire to heal through writing, and our desire to build the house that bell hooks invoked, of "ontological resistance" through Black love, all led to the publication of this volume.3 There are many ways to think about the idea of care. At its core, care is "painstaking or watchful attention." One definition states that to be cared for is to be "looked after, protected, or dealt with in the right way."4 Others have defined care as "a basic way of being in the world," one that "creates both self and world."5 To care for someone, then, is to change the way in which we think about relationality.6 It is to rethink being in relation as a form of connection that derails the needs of state and capital, producing a radical otherwise in the midst of their violations.7 To care is to be about the business of living with people, sharing in and amplifying their life force, recognizing their value and worth. It is to "see ourselves as part of one another, even in the context of difference," as Jacqui Alexander once described it.8 Most of all, it is intentional—a deliberate and purposeful creation of collective well-being. This special issue seeks to put pressure on the above definitions of care, particularly when centering Black life and living. In so doing, it conceives of care as a way to disrupt the condition of premature death, as a way to unsettle the slow violence of late colonial modernity, and as a philosophy of survival in the face...