Intimate Scholarship: Ways of Knowing Through Black Feminist Forms

Refocuses critical attention on how Black feminist scholars experiment with form and embodiment to connect with readers and critique structures of power. In recent years, scholars have turned to experimentations with form to imbue critiques of power with critiques of genre, discipline, and public accessibility. Yet these forays remain undertheorized. In Intimate Scholarship, Adena Rivera-Dundas proposes that experimental scholarship can perform a kind of intimacy that is enacted through the written form. Drawing on writing that brings together embodied epistemologies and experiential knowledge, she constructs an archive of intimate texts-a kaleidoscopic array of Black feminist output that blends scholarship and creative writing. Writers such as Saidiya Hartman, Claudia Rankine, and Jesmyn Ward articulate political and ethical relationships to privacy and intimacy, thinking through the role their bodies play in making sense of the world and connecting with readers in ways that are both intimate and resistive. Intimacy, defined here as a construction of connection made through the exchange of ideas, is necessary for envisioning a world that centers and celebrates Black life. Inviting readers to reflect and engage in pedagogical exercises throughout, Intimate Scholarship provides a sweeping historical framework for rethinking and reembracing contemporary scholarship.