European BIPOC Feminisms

Abstract

Scholarship and activism that center Black feminist thought, Women-ofColor feminisms, Indigenous feminisms, and Queer of Color critiques are not new in the European context. However, they are often overshadowed by white European feminist and queer theorization and political action on the one hand, and U.S.-centric scholarship and activism on the other. In one of the few edited volumes to take up Black feminism from a European perspective, Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande (2019: 5) note that “too often, when we think of Black feminist theory and activism, we look to the particular Black American experience and seek to universalize and apply it to Europe [,] . . . [a] dynamic . . . [that among other things] erase[s] . . . long histories of anti-imperialist struggles of Black feminists located across various European empires.”As coeditors of this special issue on BIPOC Europe, we feel strongly that the reality of Black feminist struggles that Emejulu and Sobande highlight, which is a reality that unequivocally extends to European BIPOC struggles as a whole, calls on us to remember that coloniality textures the current scholarly and activist landscape. These struggles have a history across European empires thatmust be acknowledged as critical to existing genealogies of Black, Women-ofColor, and Indigenous feminist epistemologies and praxes. As Black European scholars who live and work in Turtle Island, we recognize that we are situated on a site of continuing Indigenous dispossession and anti-Blackness (King 2019). From our location in North American institutions of higher education, we are keenly aware of the ways in which