“There is nothing new under the sun, but there are new suns.”
With this quote from Octavia Butler, an American science fiction writer and a Black feminist, Régine Michelle Jean-Charles opened the third annual bell hooks symposium at Northeastern.
Friday’s symposium helped kick off Black History Month across the university’s global campus network.
It also provided an opportunity for organizers, speakers and guests to spend the day looking at “other suns,” finding hope and imagining a different world, said Jean-Charles, director of Africana Studies at Northeastern, dean’s professor of culture and social justice, and professor of women’s, gender and sexuality studies.
This year’s symposium theme, “Black Feminist Worldmaking,” was conceived by AK Wright, the inaugural post-doctoral Black feminism fellow of the Africana Studies program.
Wright said it’s important to look at what technology and tools Black feminists need to build new worlds.
“We dive into the mess of digital worlds and speculative sites as areas for liberatory practices, understanding them as both limiting and groundbreaking, and everything in between,” Wright said.
The symposium featured two panels that included Black feminists, scholars, artists, writers and Northeastern students, whose work is focused on history, race, gender and culture.
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