Alexis Pauline Gumbs
Biographic Data
| ID | 192572 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Alexis Pauline Gumbs |
| GIVEN NAMES | Alexis Pauline |
| FAMILY NAME | Gumbs |
| SIGNATURE | GUMBS A P |
| AFFILIATIONS | Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind, Durham, NC, USA |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 35 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 37 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 34 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2012 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2025 |
| H-INDEX | 1 |
Guest Editors' Note
Oya, Wind is our Teacher: A Conversation with the Guest Editors
You Hear the Wind: An Interview with Omisade Burney-Scott
Opening Plenary Oracle
Imagining Liberatory Futures with Alexis Pauline Gumbs and M. E. O’Brien
Quantum Particularity: For Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand
This essay brings together the writing of Audre Lorde and Dionne Brand and their responses to their visits, decades apart to the dungeons of Elmina. The essay proposes that Elmina Castle and the other forts used for the purposes of trading enslaved Africans can be understood as particle accelerators because of their reduction of key components of communities into individuals for sale. The word “particular” in the writing and speaking of Lorde and…
L'amour à une échelle où nous pouvons survivre
Un poème tiré de Non-noyées. Leçons féministes Noires apprises auprès des mammifères marines qui nous apprend à célébrer les manières collaboratives d'exister en nous parlant des « bancs » (en anglais, school , « écoles ») de dauphins bleus. Comment la survie intergénérationnelle s'y assure ? Comment les rôles familiaux s'y échangent ? Et comment ces manières mammifères marines d'exister peuvent nous apprendre à penser autrement les vies mammifèr…
Handshake
“in my dreams i can fly”—Ntozake Shange1the dancer shakeswhat her momma makesbelieve can be straightenedto book-on-her-headgracethe dancer makeswomen into colorscolors into wordswords into movementgod in(to) myselfon the seventh daythe eleventh hourthe last minutefierce love shrugs and takesalmost everythingand the dancer takesto her wheelchairand the poet givesdictationand the daughtermothersisterfriendasks the cab driver to play mamboon the way…
Face of the Deep
Dread Archive: Audre Lorde and What We Are Afraid to Want
Introduction to Creative Writing Contributions
Introduction to Creative Writing Contributions Alexis Pauline Gumbs, Akasha Gloria Hull, Cheryl Clarke, doris diosa davenport, Cheryl Boyce-Taylor, Asha French, Sharon Bridgforth, Omi Osun Joni L. Jones, Alexis De Veaux, and Sokari Ekine when i first began to dream of creative writing contributions for this special issue of Feminist Studies celebrating the fortieth anniversaries of This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color an…
Creation
Creation Alexis Pauline Gumbs how does a creative writing editor, who has been with Feminist Studies only for about five issues, speak to fifty years of creative practice? Add to that the importance of the fact that the creative writing in Feminist Studies over the past fifty years has been a major part of creating the feminist literary movement where I live and breathe and have my own revelations. I still don't know what the best thing is to do,…
Semences de liberté: Préparer le terrain pour l’abolition à Durham, Caroline du Nord
Ce texte passe en revue les caractéristiques principales d'une expérience de jardins ouvriers menée à Durham, en Caroline du Nord pour lutter contre les violences sexuelles et sexistes. Le jardin, l'acte de jardiner sont envisagés comme des techniques de justice transformatrice : se rassembler, entrer en contact les unes avec les autres, cultiver de quoi se nourrir, sentir la terre et les histoires de violence qui la précèdent, se donner les moye…
Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals
Those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances, are the undrowned. Their breathing did not make them individual survivors. It made a context of undrowning. Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we still do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. And this 'we' doesn't only mean people whose ancestors survived the middle passage, because…
Mouths of Rain: Be Opened
Archive de la poussière
Une plaisanterie qui se retourne contre la toute-puissance de Google permet à une descendante de Stagecoach Mary d'accélérer notre passage à la télépathie en re-matérialisant humoristiquement nos courriels sur des déchets de toutes sorte. La planète des utopies à venir est à inventer en riant de nos dystopies présentes
Black Astrophysics: A Homemade Field of Love: Dedicated to Clyde Eliot Gumbs
Sisters in the Life
Yvonne Welbon, an award-winning filmmaker and founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema, interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, cofounder of the Black Feminist Film School, as part of a larger trans-media project on the history of queer Black lesbian media makers, SistersintheLife.com. Gumbs speaks about Black feminist practices of education and filmmaking, delving into the founding and inspiration of the Black Feminist Film School and i…
Being Ocean as Praxis
This essay offers a meditation on how the idea of being human as praxis, as developed by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, applies to a melting planet. What is the intersubjectivity demanded by (and causing) the deadly heating of the ocean, and how is it informed by theories of blackness impacted by transatlantic oceanic encounter
Whale Songs
These are songs of oceanic longing taught to me in waking dreams by my grandmothers. Boda, my Ashanti grandmother who survived the Middle Passage and became mother of our Anguillian generations. Nunánuk, my collective Shinnecock grandmothers who witnessed whales beaching themselves on the Long Island shore as a survival offering to their whole community. Augusta Carty/Red Gussie, granddaughter of shipwrecked Irish born in Anguilla, mother out of …
M Archive: After the End of the World
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told f…
Silence and Sound in Black Girl Utopia
Ladeedah is an audio novella that takes place in a Black utopic space after “the improvised revolution.” Ladeedah is a tone-deaf, rhythm-lacking Black girl in a world where everyone dances and sings at all times. What is Ladeedah's destiny as a quiet, clumsy genius in a society where movement and sound are the basis of the social structure and the definition of freedom? This excerpt from Ladeedah focuses on Ladeedah's attempts to understand the m…
Coal: Black Matter Oracle
Audre Lorde’s “Coal” appeared in her very first book of poems (The First Cities) in 1968 and then reappeared as the title poem in her 1976 collection Coal. The poem, a response to the observation b
M is for Move (scenes from three lifetimes)
Research Article| March 01 2017 M is for Move (scenes from three lifetimes) Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a community cherished author and scholar in Durham, NC. Alexis is the author of the forthcoming book M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018) and the acclaimed Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016). She is also co-editor of the best-selling antho…
Pulse
M Archive: After the End of the World
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told f…
Coal: Black Matter Oracle
Audre Lorde’s “Coal” appeared in her very first book of poems (The First Cities) in 1968 and then reappeared as the title poem in her 1976 collection Coal. The poem, a response to the observation b
Pulse
Th Floor: A pedagogical oracle from/with Audre Lorde
In 1974, warrior poet mother Audre Lorde published the poem "Blackstudies," a freeform dream villanelle about her complicated experience as a Black lesbian feminist English professor at the City University of New York during the dynamic period when students rose up in protest. The university granted open admissions, and cultural nationalists who taught at City University worked to create a Black Studies program. In the poem, she describes her van…
Prophecy in the Present Tense
On June 2, 2013, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and Mobile Homecoming organized a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Combahee River uprising, an epic event organized by Harriet Tubman in which nearly 800 enslaved Africans achieved their freedom at the Combahee River near Beaufort, South Carolina, and the legacy of the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based, black, lesbian, socialist, feminist organization famous for its ana…
Black (Buying) Power: The Story of Essence Magazine
From its inception in 1970, Essence gained its reputation as a provocative Black women’s magazine by celebrating—and marketing—a Black power aesthetic. Its founders and editors hoped to both support the egalitarian society promoted by the revolutionary Black liberation movement and profit from it. But to do so, Essence would need to capture the attention of upwardly mobile Black women—newly empowered by the civil rights and Black power movements—…
The Business of Black Power: Community Development, Capitalism, and Corporate Responsibility in Postwar America
Explores business development in the Black power era and the centrality of economic goals to the larger black freedom movement
Repetition Is Sacred: School of Our Lorde, Mobile Homecoming, and Legacy in Flight
Feminist Studies 40, no. 1. © 2014 by Alexis Pauline Gumbs 207 Alexis Pauline Gumbs Repetition Is Sacred: School of Our Lorde, Mobile Homecoming, and Legacy in Flight Again. We are celebrating Audre Lorde’s birth, contributions, and legacy again. We are reading her poems again and sharing them with new generations. We are creating churches designed around the Lordean practice of speaking the truth that shakes us. We affirm that the energy we name…
Prophecy in the Present Tense
On June 2, 2013, Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind and Mobile Homecoming organized a celebration of the 150th anniversary of the Combahee River uprising, an epic event organized by Harriet Tubman in which nearly 800 enslaved Africans achieved their freedom at the Combahee River near Beaufort, South Carolina, and the legacy of the Combahee River Collective, a Boston-based, black, lesbian, socialist, feminist organization famous for its ana…
Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity
In Spill, self-described queer Black troublemaker and Black feminist love evangelist Alexis Pauline Gumbs presents a commanding collection of scenes depicting fugitive Black women and girls seeking freedom from gendered violence and racism. In this poetic work inspired by Hortense Spillers, Gumbs offers an alternative approach to Black feminist literary criticism, historiography, and the interactive practice of relating to the words of Black femi…
Pulse
Discussion| October 01 2016 Pulse Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a queer black troublemaker and a black feminist love evangelist who lives and loves in Durham, NC. She is the author of Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016), the co-editor of Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Front Lines (PM Press, 2016) and the founder of the Eternal Summer of the Black Feminist Mind Intergal…
Backwater Blues: The Mississippi Flood of 1927 in the African American ImaginationAin’t Got No Home: America’s Great Migrations and the Making of an Interracial LeftWriting through Jane Crow: Race and…
In 1995, Farah Jasmine Griffin’s foundational “Who Set You Flowin’?”: The African-American Migration Narrative argued that the migration narrative and movement itself played a definitive role in African American literary production across the twentieth century. Citing Jean Toomer’s Cane (1923), Griffin associated the movement of African Americans across space with the liquid (blood and water) metaphor of flow. Almost twenty years later, a new set…
Th Floor: A pedagogical oracle from/with Audre Lorde
In 1974, warrior poet mother Audre Lorde published the poem "Blackstudies," a freeform dream villanelle about her complicated experience as a Black lesbian feminist English professor at the City University of New York during the dynamic period when students rose up in protest. The university granted open admissions, and cultural nationalists who taught at City University worked to create a Black Studies program. In the poem, she describes her van…
Spelling Soul: For Cheryll Y. Greene
Poems I didn't write for you for Jasmine Richards
In the long tradition of black women protecting and honoring black women, Jasmine Richards, a Black Lives Matter organizer in Pasadena California, was part of a group of activists who intervened in the arrest of a participant in a peace March in Pintroesca Parkin Pasadena on August 29th 2015. In a move designed to attack the Black Lives Matter Movement and to disrupt their work in Pasadena, Jasmine was arrested and charged with "felony lynching" …
Silence and Sound in Black Girl Utopia
Ladeedah is an audio novella that takes place in a Black utopic space after “the improvised revolution.” Ladeedah is a tone-deaf, rhythm-lacking Black girl in a world where everyone dances and sings at all times. What is Ladeedah's destiny as a quiet, clumsy genius in a society where movement and sound are the basis of the social structure and the definition of freedom? This excerpt from Ladeedah focuses on Ladeedah's attempts to understand the m…
Coal: Black Matter Oracle
Audre Lorde’s “Coal” appeared in her very first book of poems (The First Cities) in 1968 and then reappeared as the title poem in her 1976 collection Coal. The poem, a response to the observation b
M is for Move (scenes from three lifetimes)
Research Article| March 01 2017 M is for Move (scenes from three lifetimes) Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs Alexis Pauline Gumbs is a community cherished author and scholar in Durham, NC. Alexis is the author of the forthcoming book M Archive: After the End of the World (Duke University Press, 2018) and the acclaimed Spill: Scenes of Black Feminist Fugitivity (Duke University Press, 2016). She is also co-editor of the best-selling antho…
Pulse
M Archive: After the End of the World
Following the innovative collection Spill, Alexis Pauline Gumbs's M Archive—the second book in a planned experimental triptych—is a series of poetic artifacts that speculatively documents the persistence of Black life following a worldwide cataclysm. Engaging with the work of the foundational Black feminist theorist M. Jacqui Alexander, and following the trajectory of Gumbs's acclaimed visionary fiction short story “Evidence,” M Archive is told f…
Black Astrophysics: A Homemade Field of Love: Dedicated to Clyde Eliot Gumbs
Sisters in the Life
Yvonne Welbon, an award-winning filmmaker and founder of the Chicago-based nonprofit Sisters in Cinema, interviews Alexis Pauline Gumbs, cofounder of the Black Feminist Film School, as part of a larger trans-media project on the history of queer Black lesbian media makers, SistersintheLife.com. Gumbs speaks about Black feminist practices of education and filmmaking, delving into the founding and inspiration of the Black Feminist Film School and i…
Being Ocean as Praxis
This essay offers a meditation on how the idea of being human as praxis, as developed by Sylvia Wynter and Katherine McKittrick, applies to a melting planet. What is the intersubjectivity demanded by (and causing) the deadly heating of the ocean, and how is it informed by theories of blackness impacted by transatlantic oceanic encounter
Whale Songs
These are songs of oceanic longing taught to me in waking dreams by my grandmothers. Boda, my Ashanti grandmother who survived the Middle Passage and became mother of our Anguillian generations. Nunánuk, my collective Shinnecock grandmothers who witnessed whales beaching themselves on the Long Island shore as a survival offering to their whole community. Augusta Carty/Red Gussie, granddaughter of shipwrecked Irish born in Anguilla, mother out of …
Undrowned: Black feminist lessons from marine mammals
Those who survived in the underbellies of boats, under each other under unbreathable circumstances, are the undrowned. Their breathing did not make them individual survivors. It made a context of undrowning. Breathing in unbreathable circumstances is what we still do every day in the chokehold of racial gendered ableist capitalism. We are still undrowning. And this 'we' doesn't only mean people whose ancestors survived the middle passage, because…
Mouths of Rain: Be Opened
Archive de la poussière
Une plaisanterie qui se retourne contre la toute-puissance de Google permet à une descendante de Stagecoach Mary d'accélérer notre passage à la télépathie en re-matérialisant humoristiquement nos courriels sur des déchets de toutes sorte. La planète des utopies à venir est à inventer en riant de nos dystopies présentes
Handshake
“in my dreams i can fly”—Ntozake Shange1the dancer shakeswhat her momma makesbelieve can be straightenedto book-on-her-headgracethe dancer makeswomen into colorscolors into wordswords into movementgod in(to) myselfon the seventh daythe eleventh hourthe last minutefierce love shrugs and takesalmost everythingand the dancer takesto her wheelchairand the poet givesdictationand the daughtermothersisterfriendasks the cab driver to play mamboon the way…
Face of the Deep
Dread Archive: Audre Lorde and What We Are Afraid to Want
Art (20 works) · Sociology (16 works) · History (13 works) · Literature (11 works) · Art history (10 works) · Philosophy (9 works) · Poetry (9 works) · Political science (8 works) · Race, History, and American Society (8 works) · Computer Science (7 works)