African Diaspora Religions, Arts, Literature, and Religion, Body and Religion, Latina/o Religion, Culture, and Society, Religions in the Latina/o Americas, Womanist Approaches to Religion and Society, Women of Color Scholarship, Teaching, and Activism

Precarity: Being as Black Womanhood 

Precarity as a threat to the poetics of women in power, of black and Latine women’s religious leadership, and in their overall relationship to womanhood, agency, and autonomy is at stake. The ongoing divisiveness that has polarized societal, racial, and gendered distinctions fostering a hyper state of unpredictability asserts a need “to be Sankofic,”. A mandate for looking back to where we came from, and learning from it to build futures in this age of terror. Despite the ever-present madness, we are simultaneously holding beauty and the terror with aspirations to override the uncertainty, perform generatively, ‘owning our social locations without assuming patriarchal affirmations as the explicit and implicit markers of significance in community, culture, and faith traditions’—to paraphrase Urban Bush Woman founder, Jawole Willa Jo Zollar. Potentially by embracing Afrofuturist aesthetics to express our agency, and freedom through art, creative works and activism that envision liberated futures for Black life. Can futurist theorization provide an effective alternative to create a safe place in/or outside of contested spaces for the diverse experiences and cultural narratives of the African and Latine Diasporas? We invite art practitioners and scholars to submit work related to this theme.