Join us for a lecture from Tempest Henning, an associate professor at Fisk University.
Beyond Rejection and Reform: Toward a Black Feminist Logic
I argue that the dominant rejectionist and reformist feminist logical projects, while aptly critiquing classical logic, fail to confront how logic is also racialized. In asking the question ‘Whose feminist logic are we building?’ I offer a conception of Black feminist logic (BFL) that is not simply a variant of feminist logic. Rather, it is founded on distinct systems rooted in African logical traditions and manifested via the linguistic structures of African American English (AAE). I critique the rejectionist stance (Nye 1990) for incorrectly universalizing all logics as a ‘master’s tool.’ This is exemplified through the conception of ‘nommo,’ which is a logical system that is communal and spiritual. The reformist project (Plumwood 1993), although useful in the analysis of dualism, I show to be inadequate because it inherently still draws upon a bivalent framework. Such a framework has difficulty accounting for practices like negative concord in AAE, where multiple negations function not as logical cancellation, but as emphatic assertion. Both ‘nommo’ and negative concord within AAE reveal that a BFL is one that is context-dependent as opposed to strictly truth-functional.