Black Feminist Arithmetic

Abstract: This essay contends that black feminists neglect an essential—and at times, uncomfortable—part of our intellectual tradition: our entanglement with the arithmetical. Rather than dismissing the arithmetical as a technology of antiblack violence, this essay thinks with black feminist mobilization of arithmetic as a strategy for counting violence and for making violence count toward a robust black feminist theory of harm. In turning to intersectionality and to critical fabulation and its afterlives, the essay reveals multiple—and competing—ways that black feminists have performed arithmetical thinking.