Greenlight Bookstore Holds 'Crunk Feminist Collective' Panel

FORT GREENE, BROOKLYN — Greenlight Bookstore is hosting a panel discussion on Tuesday evening with "The Crunk Feminist Collective," a group of black women who aim to have real conversations about race, activism, intersectional feminism, and sisterhood. The writers and editors, who cheekily call themselves "critical homegirls," started a Wordpress in 2010, and now they have an annual readership of nearly one million.

The collective just published a new print essay collection called The Crunk Feminist Collection, which "tackles life stuck between loving hip hop and ratchet culture while hating patriarchy, misogyny, and sexism."

Examples of essays in the book are "Sex and Power in the Black Church," "Clair Huxtable Is Dead," "Five Ways Talib Kweli Can Become a Better Ally to Women in Hip Hop," and "Dating with a Doctorate (She Got a Big Ego?)."

In case you were wondering what these women define as "crunk," here is what their Facebook page says: "Crunk(ness) is our mode of resistance that finds its particular expression in the rhetorical, cultural, and intellectual practices of a contemporary generation."

"As part of a larger women-of-color feminist politic, crunkness, in its insistence on the primacy of the beat, contains a notion of movement, timing, and of meaning making through sound, that are especially productive for our work together. Percussion by definition refers to “the sound, vibration or shock caused by the striking together of two bodies.” Combining terms like Crunk and Feminism, and the cultural, gendered, and racial histories signified in each, is a percussive moment, one that signals the kind of productive dissonance that occurs as we work at the edges of disciplines, on the margins of social life, and in the vexed spaces between academic and non-academic communities..."

A discussion about the essays in the book takes place on Tuesday night at 7:30 p.m. at the Fort Greene location, and it will be moderated by Jamilah Lemieux and feature Robin M. Boylorn, Brittney C. Cooper, and Susana M. Morris, the women of Crunk Feminist Collective. Greenlight Bookstore is located at 686 Fulton St. in Brooklyn.

Photos via Crunk Feminist Collective Facebook