AFST-101 Midterm Key Terms

Anti-Blackness vs. Racism

• Anti-Blackness: A specific, systemic form of racism directed explicitly against Black people and Blackness, which constructs Black subjects as uniquely outside of humanity, society, and social citizenship.

• Racism: A broader system of prejudice, discrimination, and institutional power directed against racialized non-white groups.

Double Consciousness

• Definition: A psychological concept (coined by W.E.B. Du Bois) describing the internal sense of "twoness" experienced by Black individuals in a white-dominated society—always viewing oneself through the eyes of a hostile, dominant culture while trying to reconcile dual identities (e.g., Black and American).

• Exam Context: Analyzed by Paul Gilroy in The Black Atlantic to explain how diasporic Black intellectuals navigate cross-cultural identity across borders.

Intersectionality

• Definition: An analytical framework developed by Kimberlé Crenshaw demonstrating how social categories (race, gender, class, sexuality) overlap and intersect, creating interdependent systems of discrimination or privilege rather than operating in isolation.

• Exam Context: Central to Week 4 (Black Feminisms), showing how Black women face distinct oppression that cannot be addressed by anti-racism or mainstream feminism alone.

The Gaze (aka The Historical Gaze)

• Definition: The institutional, colonial, and white supremacist perspective that historically observed, measured, categorized, and objectified Black bodies through visual culture (art, photography, media, science), enforcing racial hierarchies.

• Exam Context: Contrasted with bell hooks' concept of the Oppositional Gaze, where Black viewers actively resist and critique mainstream colonial representations.

Saartjie Baartman (aka Sarah Baartman)

• Definition: A Khoikhoi woman from South Africa who was exhibited in 19th-century Europe as a freak-show attraction under the name "Hottentot Venus."

• Exam Context: The primary historical example of The Historical Gaze and racialized/sexualized objectification of Black female bodies in Western visual culture and pseudoscience.

Pushback

• Definition: Acts of political, cultural, artistic, and intellectual resistance exercised by African and African-descended peoples against colonial domination, anti-Blackness, and systemic oppression.

• Exam Context: Refers to how Black scholars, artists, and activists actively subvert dominant colonial narratives rather than being passive victims of history.

Collective Autobiography

• Definition: A genre of writing where an individual's personal memoir or life story serves as a lens to tell the shared historical trauma and lived experiences of an entire community or group.

• Exam Context: Used in Saidiya Hartman’s Lose Your Mother, where her personal journey along the Atlantic slave route in Ghana represents the broader diasporic memory of loss and dispossession.

The Erotic (Audre Lorde)

• Definition: A creative, emotional, and spiritual power within women that provides deep joy, self-knowledge, and fulfillment. Lorde argues patriarchal society suppresses "the erotic," mislabeling it as mere pornography or sensation, because it empowers women to refuse compromise and demand excellence.

Internal Debates and Issues within Africana Studies

• Definition: Discussions regarding method, scope, and terminology within the field—such as naming conventions (Africana vs. Black vs. Pan-African Studies), continental vs. diasporic priorities, and tension between academic institutionalization vs. community activism.

Intellectual Tradition within Black Studies

• Definition: The lineage of Black thought, scholarship, and pedagogy born out of political activism (e.g., the 1968 Black Student Union strikes at San Francisco State University) that centers Black lived experiences, counter-narratives, and interdisciplinary analysis.

San Francisco State / Cornell University Student Strikes

• Definition: Pivotal student-led protests in 1968–1969 (led by the Black Student Union and Third World Liberation Front) demanding culturally relevant curricula, ethnic studies departments, and increased minority student admission.

• Exam Application: Represents the historical origin and institutional founding of Africana/Black Studies as an official academic discipline born out of student activism rather than traditional administrative planning.

The Black Power Movement

• Definition: A political, cultural, and intellectual movement in the 1960s and 1970s that emphasized Black self-determination, racial pride, economic independence, and the creation of Black-led political and cultural institutions.

• Exam Application: Served as the ideological backdrop that spurred demands for Black Studies in higher education and shifted Africana intellectual traditions toward self-definition and systemic critique.

Critical Fabulation (Research Methodology)

• Definition: A narrative methodology created by Saidiya Hartman that combines archival research with critical, speculative storytelling to address and fill in the silences, gaps, and missing voices of enslaved Black women in colonial archives.

• Exam Application: Used in Lose Your Mother to represent lost lives where official historical records only treated enslaved people as property or commodities.

The Transatlantic Slave Trade

• Definition: The global, state-sanctioned forced migration of over 12 million Africans across the Atlantic Ocean to the Americas between the 16th and 19th centuries, forming the foundation of modern racial capitalism.

• Exam Application: The primary historical catalyst for the creation of the African Diaspora, dispossession, and the global legacy of anti-Blackness.

The Middle Passage

• Definition: The grueling, horrific forced ocean voyage of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean aboard slave ships, characterized by mass violence, death, and dehumanization.

• Exam Application: Analyzed by Paul Gilroy as a foundational site where the shared cultural memory, trauma, and hybrid identity of the "Black Atlantic" were born.