“Hood feminism”: Whiteness and segregated (premodern) scholarly discourse in the post‐postracial era

Abstract

Homing in on the segregated culture of early modern English domestic criticism as its primary example, this article explores how white voices and “white logic” have dominated reading practices in early modern English studies, and academia in general, for some time—often without critique. In different ways, those voices and viewpoints have left little to no room at the metaphorical scholarly table for influencers of a different hue, thus rendering visible in the field and profession the existence of the “color line,” as W. E. B. Du Bois called it. With an antiracist agenda that embraces the goals of Black feminism, Brown thinks through the continued disconnect between domestic criticism and premodern critical race studies, a disconnect that denotes a representative pattern. Specifically, Brown highlights how whiteness goes unexamined critically, a fact that is surprising since the domestic sphere is, and was, a formative space where processes of racialization occur, processes informing the centuries‐old racism that persists in the post‐Obama era, or the post‐postracial era: a time where anti‐blackness and related violence (physical, verbal/rhetorical, psychological, emotional) is hypervisible. Encouraging readers to be(come) “accomplice feminists,” Brown calls for the decentering of whiteness and the desegregation of scholarly discourse and citational practices.