Black Feminist Thought and the New Materialist Turn: Understanding the Paradigm Shift in Contemporary Black Feminist Studies

Abstract Black feminist studies has undergone a paradigm shift in recent years, marked by a pivot from critical theories like intersectionality and identity politics to new materialist themes like social death and the body. Linked to the broader “new materialist turn,” this intellectual movement has insisted on the limits of ideology critique and negative theorizing, urging positive theories which account for complex assemblages between bodies, objects, and the nonbuilt environment. Against this backdrop, black feminist scholars have begun calling for parallel theories, arguing that earlier critical theories failed to sufficiently posit the materiality of the black female body. This climate, I contend, primed the field for the rise of black feminist new materialism and helped effect the concerted decline of black feminist critical theory. A remarkable sea change, surprisingly little has been explicitly written about this topic, leaving the field with unanswered questions about the nature of these schools and their interconnections. This paper proposes to address this limited treatment. My analysis reconstructs these schools of thought, embedding them in their respective intellectual currents—New Materialism and Frankfurt School critical theory. I argue that their essential differences lie most constitutively in their preoccupations and theories of affectation.