Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Approaches

Join NYU's Center for the Study of Gender and Sexuality for the New York City book launch with editors Angelique Nixon, Carole Boyce Davies, and Christen Smith on Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Approaches.

An innovative contribution to the field of Black Feminist Studies, this landmark collection brings together the most influential historical and contemporary thinkers in Black feminist theories across transnational contexts.

Featuring ground-breaking new work alongside canonical essays from key thinkers, this book adopts a truly global approach to its subject. In doing so, it looks beyond North America to showcase a diverse range of continents and perspectives. The collection includes not only standard academic essays, but also vital statements, interviews, manifestoes, and creative work, which transmit and embody Black feminist thought.

The book is broken up into five carefully curated sections:

• Black Feminist Foundations
• Statements and Manifestos
• Cultures and Aesthetics
• Bodies, Genders, and Sexualities
• Black Feminist Futures

Timely and important, this is an indispensable resource for students and scholars of Black Studies, Women & Gender Studies, and Black Feminist Studies, as well as more generally to American Studies, African Studies, Caribbean Studies, and African Diaspora Studies.

CAROLE BOYCE-DAVIES is Professor of African Diaspora Literatures and chair of
Department of Literature and Writing (English) at Howard University. As Professor of Africana
Studies and Literatures in English (2007-2024) she is also the Frank H.T. Rhodes Professor of
Humane Letters emerita at Cornell University, New York. She is the author of Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) and Black Women's Rights.  Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022). She is the editor/co-editor of thirteen critical anthologies including Black Feminist Theories. Transnational Perspectives (2026). A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume Her popular essays, opeds and reviews have appeared in The Guardian (London), The Washington Post, Newsweek, The Boston Globe, The Miami Herald, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian, Caribbean Today, The Crisis, Jacobin Magazine, Ms Magazine, The Black Scholar.

Dr. Angelique V. Nixon is a Black queer writer, scholar, and activist, born and raised in The Bahamas, and based in Trinidad and Tobago since 2014. She is a senior lecturer and researcher at The University of the West Indies' Institute for Gender and Development Studies, and she is a director of the feminist LGBTQI+ organisation CAISO: Sex and Gender Justice in Trinidad and Tobago. She is author of art and poetry chapbook, Saltwater Healing: Myth Memoir & Poems (2013) and the scholarly award-winning book, Resisting Paradise: Tourism, Diaspora, and Sexuality in Caribbean Culture (2015). And she is co-editor of the edited collection, Black Feminist Theories: Transnational Approaches (2026). Angelique is a social justice educator and community worker with over twenty years of experience and leadership in community-based organisations and academic institutions. She also facilitates decolonial healing justice workshops for activists and community organisations using creative, ecofeminist, and somatic practices. Angelique works across civil society and academic institutions to bridge gaps and activate social transformation in working for justice. Her research and community work focuses on intersecting issues related to social and climate justice, race and migration, and sexual and LGBTQI+ rights. She is fiercely committed in her work to intersectional queer feminist praxis, decolonial healing, environmental justice, and Black liberation.

Dr. Christen A. Smith is a Black feminist and African diaspora anthropologist whose work explores the multi-sided dimensions of race, gender, violence, performance and Blackness in the Americas. Her research and writing is two-pronged. She studies the transnational, gendered, politics of anti-Black state violence in Brazil and the Americas—particularly with regard to policing; and Black women’s intellectual contributions to the Americas, especially related to transnational Black feminism. In 2017, Professor Smith started Cite Black Women.—a transnational initiative that brings awareness to society’s gross tendency to ignore Black women’s intellectual contributions and not to cite Black women inside and outside of the academy.

This event is co-sponsored by NYU's Center for the Study of Africa and the African Diaspora and the NYU Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies.

NYU campus access guidelines: Registration is required. Non-NYU guests may be asked to present a government-issued photo ID. NYU guests must present their NYU ID.

Accessibility note: This venue has an elevator and is accessible for wheelchair users. There are single-stall, all gender restrooms available. If you have any access needs, please email csgs@nyu.edu