Black feminism: pedagogies, epistemologies, ethics, politics, and methods. Interview with Christen A. Smith

Abstract

Christen Smith is an anthropologist and a professor at the University of Texas (at Austin) where she researches themes such as State violence, antiblack racism and its effects over Black women and Black communities; she also investigates cultural and social movements that fight back this violence and the intellectual contribution of Black women in the American continent. Along her PhD studies, she researched Black activism against antiblack violence in Salvador (Bahia – Brazil); this was the beginning of a long-term relationship she has had with Brazil. During the interview, Professor Smith has told us about her formation time as an anthropologist, not only in the disciplinary sense: very vividly, she shared with us crises and choices that came to mould her ethical and political positions within an academic culture marked by White supremacy. In this process, she has found academic friendship in thinkers from the past and of today and has achieved a voice of her own, which cannot be separated from the community of Black women, writers, and researchers in which she found company. Very generously, Professor Smith has shared worries and dilemmas she has being facing in her fieldwork. She has commented on the importance of being with the communities she researched – being together in the buses, in the streets during public demonstrations, in the precarious accommodations during the meetings –, and also on the centrality of letting herself be educated by those who were producing knowledge about State violence in the process of fighting it. The talk included the uprisings against antiblack racism, both in United States and in Brazil (as well as in other countries), which took place during the Sars-Cov-2 pandemic. Christen has called our attention to the re-iteration of situations of violence and to how we must analyze them in order to produce the visibility of the transnational operations of antiblackness. We concluded the interview talking about the Cite Black Women project, which she started with the purpose of confronting erasure policies and the non-acknowledgement of Black women’s authorship and voice.