Surfacing: For our survival and our joy

Abstract

abstract In this perspective, I reflect on the surface, as articulated in Desiree Lewis and Gabeba Baderoon’s (2021) edited collection, Surfacing: On Being Black and Feminist in South Africa. To surface, in the first instance, is an engagement with my own points of entry in Black feminist scholarship and further, implicated in the range of methods in praxis within the book, a means by and through which situating myself, also offered as ‘positionings’ orients Black feminist, or Blackwomen in my usage, in the work of knowledge production. Surfacing also situates Blackwomen’s knowledge production, reorienting – ‘unmaking’, ‘homing’ – the locus of Black feminist scholarship from the dominance of the global North. I have explored ‘Home’ as an inside/outside situation that illuminates Black feminist and Blackwomen’s approaches to making knowledge, a practice of writing that deeply resonates with the vantage points of a praxis of surfacing.