Pluto Press 50th Anniversary event

'To Exist is to Resist: Black Feminism in Europe ' with Akwugo Emejulu and Francesca Sobande

This book brings together activists, artists, and scholars of color to show how Black feminism and Afrofeminism are being practiced in Europe today, exploring their differing social positions in various countries, and exploring the ways in which they organize and mobilize to imagine a Black feminist Europe.

Deeply aware that they are constructed as “others” living in a racialized and hierarchical continent, the contributors explore gender, class, sexuality, and legal status to show that they are both invisible—presumed to be absent from and irrelevant to European societies—and hyper-visible, assumed to be passive and sexualized, angry and irrational.

In imagining a future outside the neocolonial frames and practices of contemporary Europe, this book explores a variety of critical spaces including motherhood and the home, friendships and intimate relationships, activism and community, and literature, dance, and film.

Akwugo Emejulu is Professor of Sociology at the University of Warwick. She is the author of Community Development as Micropolitics: Comparing Theories, Policies and Politics in America and Britain (Policy Press, 2015), and the co-author with Leah Bassel of Minority Women and Austerity: Survival and Resistance in France and Britain (Policy Press, 2017) and Fugitive Feminism (Silver Press, 2018).

Dr Francesca Sobande is a Digital Media Studies Lecturer at Cardiff University. Her work focuses on how racism and sexism manifest in media and the marketplace. She has published work in the European Journal of Cultural Studies, and Consumption Markets and Culture, and is the author of The Digital Lives of Black Women in Britain (Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming 2020).