Joining in Black Study

Abstract

In this article, I discuss the ways in which black Norwegian youth seek to understand or study the workings of blackness and anti-blackness in their everyday lives. I frame these everyday practices of inquiry as ‘black study’ and analyze how such practices are in fact methods of theorizing that enable community building. I build my theory of black study on black, queer of color and black feminist analytical resources, which lend me tools to conceptualize black study as a way of queering blackness. Black study refers to the cumulative everyday practices, both individually and collaboratively, enacted by black youth in their quest to understand blackness, what it means to be black in Norway and what black history in their context looks like. The article also reflects on what joining in black study has shifted for me as a black feminist researcher, operating in the margins of the Academic Industrial Machine.