ABSTRACT
This part introduction presents an overview of the key concepts discussed in the subsequent chapters. The part examines silence and violence in her review of Rachel Swarns’s American Tapestry: The Story of the Black, White, and Multiracial Ancestors of Michelle Obama, a book concerned with the genealogy of the Obama Administration and its roots in enslavement. It explains that Black Women’s Studies have contributed to the “academies most robust contemporary intellectual debates.” The part describes the critical Black feminist reading practices in her review of Katherine McKittrick’s Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle. Such interdisciplinary texts model the capacity to listen to, amplify, theorize about, and expect Black women’s “uncertain,” “unpredictable,” and unbowed political action.
