Journal of Intersectionality

Issue Number

Latest documents

• The Cycle That Brought Me, This Self, and Art Together

  This account details one individual’s struggle with the social construction of womanhood in Kurdish society, those roles that females are taught, misogyny and self-hatred that they see deeply imbedded in Kurdish society. Connecting their artwork to their private self, the authors open the space of their personal struggles with gender identification and being queer.

• The Impact of the Evil Side of the English Language on My Life as an Artist

  Discussing the English language and its difficult imposition into Kurdish life in Iraqi Kurdistan, Baram positions the Kurdish language as the boundary that marks Kurdish cultural space. He places Kurdish speakers in a precarious interrelationship between globalization and its negative effects, the endangered nature of the Kurdish language and its preservation as key to the cultural survival of the Kurds, and the English language as a problematic tool, necessary for interactions with a global community but laden with imperialistic anti-Middle Eastern and anti-Islamic meanings.

• Critical Artwork, Critical Actions, and the Inclusion of Difference

  Guest editor's introduction to the special issue.

• Front Matter 6.1

  Contains cover, credits, dedication, and TOC.

• Highlighting the Invisible: An Interview with Avan Sdiq

  Sulaimani-based artist Avan Sdiq talks about her involvement with Nawi Min Nawi Daikama, an activist project working to change the laws regarding the carti nishtinmani Iraqi (Iraqi identification card) for cases of children who are born after rape, abuse, or abandonment. Sdiq discusses what she thinks are the biggest challenges facing the art world in Kurdistan and her view of the role of the artist in Kurdish society.

• Civic Engagement, Public Intellectualism, and Art

  Revisiting a previously unpublished analysis of the Clamor (2016) and Tekist (2017) art shows presented at the Fine Arts Institute and the Museum of Modern Art in Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan, Cockrell-Abdullah considers the spaces in which artists are siting their work so that they may speak to specific public audiences and their social and cultural concerns, and how this work creates sheltered civic space in Kurdish society that allows for open discussion of social problems.

• Painting Without Paint: Four Sisters, Three Dresses

  Nuveen Barwari uses the multiple layers of the jilli Kurdi (Kurdish dress) as a metaphor for the multiple layers of a Kurdish diasporic identity. Using Édouard Glissant’s concept of opacity, Barwari engages with the jilli Kurdi as artistic inspiration, describing it as private space for an individual, and for a diasporic community as anapparatus that works in opposition to transparency, protecting the unseen, and resisting a colonial gaze.

• What if Life Were Black and White: An Interview with Behjat Omer Abdulla

  Artist Behjat Omar Abdulla discusses his most recent projects, What if Life is Black and White and From a Distance. These works focus on reflecting on identity, belonging, migration, and citizenship, along with the founding of Abdulla’s River of Light project.

• Space in the City’s Memory: An Example of Statues in Sulaymaniyah

  Gardens, parks, and public artworks around the city of Sulaymaniyah are among the city’s most admired features. An important hallmark of these public spaces are the statues of famous historical personalities who are remembered for serving the city, particularly those who were martyred for the sake of the Kurdish nation and were important figures of the Kurdish revolution. Despite their significance to the history of Sulaymaniyah, these statutes and the public spaces in which they exist are being reshaped and removed, at worst destroyed, to make way for new developments in the city.

• The Entanglement of the Disciplines: Why an Afrocentric Methodology to Advance Humanizing Research on People of the African Diaspora

  This review identifies some of the pitfalls in assuming the dominant theories, constructions of race and power, and methodological tools scholars are left to inherit in their traditional disciplinary training. In a quest for a new episteme for Black life, Africana Studies created space for methodological frameworks such as Afrocentricity. This analysis offers examples through an Afrocentric methodology to confront and repair research on Black populations that assume othering, permanent dislocation from power, land, and authority- particular to Africans in diaspora, and methodological constraints around language and conceptual construction in research on Black life. An Afrocentric methodology can and should be advanced beyond scholarship proliferating within Africana Studies. Research considerations and questions that distinguish disciplinary method from methodology are discussed. Additionally, a new conceptual framing is offered here — cultural location, as a theoretical tool for historical and cultural examinations of African diasporic groups that applies the aforementioned reorientation toward humanizing research.

Featured documents

• Claudia Jones, the Longue Durée of McCarthyism, and the Threat of US Fascism

  This article examines the ways that the Black Communist luminary Claudia Jones theorized the fascist threat in the United States in the early Cold War era. Drawing on her political thought and that of her comrades, the article begins by defining the peculiar brand of US fascism that loomed large in ...

• Upon the Walls of the UN Camp: Situated Intersectionality, Trajectories of Belonging, and Built Environment Among Syrian Refugees in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq

  Upon the walls of homes in the Arbat ‘camp’ community in the Kurdistan Region of Iraq (KRI), the ubiquitous UN logo lays claim to a built environment disrupted by ornamental facades, muralism, and radical iconography. Engaging photographs and qualitative interviews gathered in the Kurdish Region of ...

• The Black Organic Intellectual Tradition and the Challenges of Educating and Developing Organic Intellectuals in the 21st Century

  By summarizing the legacy of the first and second wave Black working class organic intellectuals in North America in the 20th century, I will use this as a backdrop to discuss my efforts in the first decade of the 21st century to develop a third wave of organic intellectuals in the hip hop...

• Pedagogic Paths to Liberation: Personal Struggles, Institution Building and the Rise of the Walter Rodney School of Groundings Praxis in Atlanta

  Dr. Seneca Vaught interviewed Dr. Jesse Benjamin about his personal pedagogical background and process, its intersections with activism and scholarship, and how this led him to working with the Walter Rodney Foundation and various associated projects in the Atlanta area. The discussion moves from...

• Decolonization Is Not a Dinner Party: Claudia Jones, China's Nuclear Weapons, and Anti-Imperialist Solidarity

  This article examines Claudia Jones's view on nuclear weapons and her attempts in the West Indian Gazette and Afro-Asian Caribbean News and Renmin Ribao to link Beijing's nuclear project to global anti-imperialist and nationalist movements. In hailing China's first successful nuclear test as a...

• Critical Artwork, Critical Actions, and the Inclusion of Difference

  Guest editor's introduction to the special issue....

• Extracting Life-giving Strength from my Roots: An Endarkened Feminist (Auto)Nkwaethnography of Navigating Tenure as a Black Woman at a Predominantly White Institution

  This auto nkwa (life-affirming) ethnography shares a Black woman’s journey to tenure at a predominantly white institution (PWI). Grounded in endarkened feminist epistemologies, the author weaves together elements of intersectionality, critical autoethnography, narrative inquiry, and Black womanist...

• Civic Engagement, Public Intellectualism, and Art

  Revisiting a previously unpublished analysis of the Clamor (2016) and Tekist (2017) art shows presented at the Fine Arts Institute and the Museum of Modern Art in Sulaimani, Iraqi Kurdistan, Cockrell-Abdullah considers the spaces in which artists are siting ...

• Women Crusade for Peace: Claudia Jones and the Cold War Peace Movement

  After World War II, peace became a central tenet of the Black freedom struggle. But it was also a liability to be associated with peace because the Soviet Union was a major advocate of the peace movement during the Cold War. Claudia Jones, a communist leader and theoretician, was an outspoken,...

• There Is No Kurdish Art

  This essay considers the powerful practice of art in Iraqi Kurdistan as it balances practices and nationalities, values and identities to create an aesthetic that is uniquely Kurdish in its expression. This examination of contemporary Kurdish art begins by considering the challenges to writing...