Beyond the Side Eye: Black Women’s Ancestral Anger as a Liberatory Practice

Abstract

This article investigates how hauntology provides an entry into the ways relationships, forged out of trauma and anger, give way to Black women’s political actions. Anger, resulting from race-gender trauma, gives voice to the dead allowing them to speak in the here and now. Said anger can provide a vehicle to work through collective trauma and in my case, speak to Black women’s experiences with democracy. In this article I bring together hauntology, anger, and Black feminist praxis as a way of showing how hauntological relationships allow for an expression of intergenerational narratives of trauma and a critique of the state and state-centered violence, and offer a way for healing and achieving justice.