Black Intersectionalities: A Critique for the 21st Century: FORECAAST (Forum for European Contributions to African American Studies)

Black Intersectionalities goes beyond conventional identity studies to offer a critique of identity categories themselves. Markers of identity are too often assigned, examined, and theorized as definitive binaries that fail to take into account the dynamism of individuality and its relationship to the social whole, relegating people to either male or female, straight or gay, black or white, and so on. Focusing on the way identity is both constructed and constructive, the contributors here progress beyond prescribed categories, seeking to develop new types of interdisciplinary frameworks in which subjective and political spaces can at once be universalized and kept particular. In doing so they offer a truer concept of identity—as imagined, plural, and continuously shifting.