FROM THE GUEST CO-EDITORS’ INTRODUCTION:

This special issue is pro-Black. The pro-Blackness expressed by this tremendous collection of thinkers, healers, artists, and activists is one anchored in truth-telling. From a wide array of perspectives, what’s within these pages is an unapologetic centering of the critical matter of Black life. By critical matter, we mean the fleshy materiality of the Black body, as we encounter it in life, death, connections, and struggle. But in invoking a notion of criticality, we are also attuned to the ways that different communities of Black people have experienced this most recent onslaught of anti-Black state violence. We care here about feelings, impressions, relationships, forms of mourning and remembrance, epiphanies had in struggle—all of the “stuff” that regimes of racial terror are studiously interested in not being and/or disavowing. To be pro-Black is to care about all of these elements that help to make up any Black life and every Black life. Finally, to turn our attention to Black life as a critical matter is to remind us of the urgency of attending to Black lives; it is a reminder of the critical condition in which Black people continually find themselves, always gasping for breath, always figuring out how to survive, always forced to wrestle joy from the death-dealing clutches of white supremacy. Critical matters get top billing on political agendas. Our agenda in this special issue is, therefore, Black people and our ideas about what it looks like for our lives to matter.

-Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey

ARTICLES FROM THIS ISSUE:

Introduction to M4BL and the Critical Matter of Black Lives
by Brittney Cooper and Treva B. Lindsey

Movement for Black Love: The Building of Critical Communities through the Relational Geography of Movement Spaces
by Tabitha Jamie Mary Chester

Choreographies of the Ongoing: Episodes of Black Life, Events of Black Lives
by Rhaisa Kameela Williams

Black Lives as Snuff: The Silent Complicity in Viewing Black Death
by Rasul A. Mowatt

R.I.P. Shirts or Shirts of the Movement: Reading the Death Paraphernalia of Black Lives
by Robin Brooks

Black Lives Abroad: Encounters of Diasporic Solidarity in Brazil
by Gillian Maris Jones

Visible Black Motherhood Is a Revolution 
by Danielle Fuentes Morgan

Mama’s Gon’ Buy You a Mocking Bird: Why #BlackMothersStillMatter: A Short Genealogy of Black Mothers’ Maternal Activism and Politicized Care
by Kaila Adia Story

Restoring Optimal Black Mental Health and Reversing Intergenerational Trauma in an Era of Black Lives Matter
by Jameta Nicole Barlow

#BlackHealingMatters in the Time of #BlackLivesMatter
by Kai M. Green, Je Naé Taylor, Pascale Ifé Williams, and Christopher Roberts

From Ferguson to Palestine: Reimagining Transnational Solidarity Through Difference
by Marc Lamont Hill

Ferguson: An Identity Politics Liberation Manifesto
by Tef Poe

Contributors

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About the Journal

For over forty years, Biography: An Interdisciplinary Quarterly has explored the theoretical, generic, historical, and cultural dimensions of life writing.

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Unsolicited manuscripts between 2,500 to 7,500 words are welcome. Email inquiries and editorial correspondence to biograph@hawaii.edu.