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Vol. 37 No. 2 (2022) Colloquy

Citation as Ceremony: #SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation

By Savannah Shange

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Cite As:
Shange, Savannah. 2022. “Citation as Ceremony: #SayHerName, #CiteBlackWomen, and the Practice of Reparative Enunciation.” Cultural Anthropology 37, no. 2: 191–198. https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.2.03.
https://doi.org/10.14506/ca37.2.03

Abstract

Liberal politics are subtended by several fatal, commonsense binaries: state vs. interpersonal violence; trans vs. non-trans women; armed vs. innocent victims. Each of these binaries render Black women alternately invisible, incidental, and illegible. In this essay, I examine the hashtags #SayHerName and #CiteBlackWomen as citational practices of reparative enunciation that refuse these binaries. When citation is practiced as a form of relation, it offers a model for an ethical ethnographic practice in which we cite our research participants as thought and theory partners in an effort to speak back to the silences and violences of extant social science.

Keywords

citational politics; Black feminism; grief; digital activism; social media

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