ABSTRACT
The time of slavery is now and the project of freedom remains not only incomplete, but also, in important respects, unbegun. The concept name “intersectionality” represented Crenshaw's engagement with longer traditions of Black feminist theorizing around multiple and overlapping modes of domination, and Crenshaw has acted as a steward for that concept name over the past decades. The challenge, for Crenshaw, is to cultivate the sort of collective vision that had earlier been available to the civil rights constituency, only under the revised circumstances of the late 1980s. The historical moment that has seen the popularization of “intersectionality” is the same moment that has seen the emergence of a scholarly discourse called “afro-pessimism”. It is the radicalization of the desires collected under the name of intersectionality. Abolition and intersectionality are both placenames for desires.
