Black Feminist Kitchen

WRITTEN BY SHARAH HUTSON

PHOTOGRAPHED BY MAYA IMAN Black Feminist Kitchen

the F in Feminist must be italicized as an ode to Black feminism as a multi-sensory and felt experience.

The BFSS is dedicated to building a political education, collective consciousness, and community with other folks and within this space, everyone is able to learn together and through being in relationship to each other. Black feminism does not wholly reside within the academy.

Ebony Oldham (they/she), founder and curator of The Black Feminist Kitchen, explains to me, “The Black Feminist Kitchen is a small gift to the world in honor of my late grandmother Patsy J. Lee, who tended to the kitchen and tended to me, fed lifeworlds, worked at Black intimacy, livelihood and ushered me toward Black feminism.” To Oldham, the F in Feminist must be italicized as “an ode to Black feminism as a multi-sensory and felt experience.” I felt the strength of Black feminism and Black feminists around me before I found a home within the language. Also, it’s a stylistic choice.” The Black Feminist Kitchen is also an ode to Portland-based artist Carrie Mae Weems who is known for her “Kitchen Table Series” as she moved forward with exploring Black people who continue to have complicated relationships with the kitchen. Embodying a Black Feminist Tradition of “the personal is political,” Odlham is interested in curating a space in which Black feminists texts, thoughts, embodiments, and knowledge are being studied by people regardless of their relationship to the academy.

As the founder of the Black Feminist Kitchen and the Black Feminist Summer School, Oldham recounts their experience with how their organization came into formation. The Black Feminist Kitchen is invested in collective political education and knowledge. Asking questions such as “How do we bring our own personal knowledge into spaces and engage with community learning,” the Black Feminist Kitchen is committed to supporting collective consciousness within communal spaces. Noting that anything that a person starts is oftentimes supported by loved ones and community, Oldham is thankful for the people in their life who have supported them in all that they do. The Black Femnist Kitchen is an emerging working group of Black feminist, scholars, acivists, artists and organizers who are committed ot Black liberaiton, interiority, and Black study. They explain, “The Black Feminist Kitchen and Black Feminist Summer School became possible because of ancestors who guide me and my chosen family who make every attempt to hold me. There is a whole lifeworld of people invested in me that brought me into this space. Even in my creation of the Black Feminist Kitchen and Black Feminist Summer School, there are people who have supported me in having the capacity to envision something like this.”

The Black Feminist Kitchen’s BFSS was created in 2019 when Oldham returned home to Portland, Oregon for summer break after completing their first year in their Ph.D. program. Calling upon the work that has gone into creating Freedom Schools and the community that raised her and nourished her as an organizer, Oldham sourced the inspiration to create a Black Feminist Summer School program. During the first year of the BFSS, the summer school was created as an extension of Oldham’s passion for creating a communal space for political education.

Reflecting on the gratitude that Oldham holds towards those who have deeply impacted their ongoing relationship with Black Feminisms and realizing the “potential to create more Black Feminist spaces,” their desire to further expand upon the BFSS by creating the BFK continued to grow. As a person who uses their Instagram account to reflect on Black Feminism and share content pertaining to furthering our collective understanding of Black Feminisms, they also wanted to create another space where they could further expand upon such work. Oldham desired to create a “whole page dedicated to Black Feminism” as they further thought about their involvement with Black Feminist scholarship, their artistic abilities, and all of the conversations that they have on a daily basis about Black Feminism.

With all of these thoughts and aspirations to engage in such work, Oldham messaged several comrades at the end of the summer of 2019 to bounce around a few names for what the emerging working group should be called. After going back and forth, they found that calling it the Black Feminist Kitchen felt right -- and included a rich history behind the origin of the name. Being mindful of when the Decolonial Summer School was founded, Oldham is aware of the existing work around the world that are developing spaces with a similar goal and vision. Oldham explained, “the intention of all of the work that the BFK is involved with is to create a space where Black Feminists can think with and work together regardless of their trade, modes of praxis, breadth of work, and etc. The space is for Black Feminists artists, organizers, activists, and cultural makers to curate and make work together.”

Due to COVID-19, the BFSS2020 was moved online in order to protect our most vulnerable communities and that resulted in utilizing online platforms to conduct the summer school in the most accessible way possible. This year, the summer school featured film screenings, viewings of various folks in conversation with each other, panels and workshops. Ranging from topics around gender, disability, fatness, Blackness, and labor, everyone who attended the summer school was given the space to contribute to the variety of ongoing conversations. Even though alterations had to be made to the programming, it still aimed at prioritizing the attendance of Black folks through making the program free for all Black transgender women. For Black folks who were interested in attending the online programming, Oldham created a sliding scale option and asked that non-Black folks who have the ability to donate funds do so. If a BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and Person of Color) was unable to send donations for the summer school, Oldham assured that they wouldn’t be turned away.

Realizing that even though they have been an artist and organizer for the past ten years, their involvement with academia is incredibly important to take note of. Oldham explained, “I deeply believe that as much as I do not want to replicate an academic conference or something like that, I still must recognize my positionality as a junior academic. There must always be room created for artists, activists, organizers, and other cultural makers who bring a life to Black feminisms.”

This year’s summer school focused on Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake: On Blackness and Being and Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. Even though both of these texts have been highly regarded within academic Black Feminist spaces, those who came to the summer school were not required to have read the texts before attending the online events. Oldham explained, “The point is to extrapolate something that might resonate with folks regardless of if they even know of who Saidiya Hartman or Christina Sharpe is. With concepts such as the wake and waywardness -- that leads to conversations around anti-Blackness, parenting, grief, labor, leisure, motherhood, and other topics that folks are able to weigh in on. The workshops are about those varieties of topics instead of being set up as spaces that are modeled after book clubs.” Once again, recognizing the history and labor that went into creating Freedom Schools, Oldham is not interested in replicating the hierarchy that automatically comes with academic conferences. Oldham reflects, “The BFSS is dedicated to building a political education, collective consciousness, and community with other folks and within this space, everyone is able to learn together and through being in relationship to each other. Black feminism does not wholly reside within the academy. It is not about transferring information within the Black Feminist Summer School or any theme to non-academics to make it more accessible or legible to them. It is about having a conversation about Black feminisms that are capacious enough to hold space for artists like Carrie Mae Weems who has made just as many contributions to Black feminisms.”

It is about creating spaces for other forms of knowledge production that does not center around the academy. Oldham continues, “How I came to Black feminism and Womanism has nothing to do with the academy. I came to it through Missy Elliot and folks across the web with Womanist blogs like Gradient Lair by Trudy. I am not interested in making the things that happen within the academy legible not because I have no desire to do so, but it is not the point. It is a chance for folks to come together and learn about Black Feminisms. The BFSS does not aim to take things from the academy back to the community as if those categories are totally separated, to begin with. We acknowledge that we are speaking to a full range of people who might have multiple relationships or non-relationships to the texts. The overall goal is to create a space that holds a full range of knowledge production around Black Feminisms.”

After my interview with Oldham, I found myself highly anticipating the Black Feminst Summer School as I looked over the various workshops, interviews, and roundtables that were being offered via Zoom. Some of my favorite things about the Black Feminst Summer School was how Oldham and their team created a Digital Program that contained information pertaining to a variety of -isms/phobias not being permitted in the virtual spaces, an in-depth explanation the summer school’s goals, pre-recorded offerings, and biographies of the individuals who would be presenting throughout the four day experience. While engaging with the various live offerings, I deeply appreciated the closed-captioning, how presenters paid close attention to all the virtual comments/questions, live ASL interpreters, and the manners in which this radical space was cultivated.

Each presenter spoke their truth and while these events were not held in person, I still felt warmth radiating throughout my body as I was made to witness how everyone held space for each other, presenters gave each other the space to process complicated thoughts, and how viewers consistently affirmed truths that presenters were putting out into the virtual space. The live sessions that were offered touched on topics such as Black Feminist Praxis in Art, how Black childhood needs to be reclaimed, care-centered labor in relation to our environment, poetic acts of resilience, why it is necessary to decriminalize sex work, confronting fatphobia, and so much more. Throughout the three day sessions, I learned about how Black folks are dreaming up worlds for themselves, moving past understanding intersectionality (as coined by Kimberlé Crenshaw) as the singular framework that will allow for changes to take place, the ungendering of Black existence, how healing/positivity culture is so deeply steeped in neoliberalism, and Black pleasure. If you would like to keep up with Oldham’s future endeavors, hear their incredible thoughts, and learn more about the Black Feminist Kitchen, then head over to Instagram to follow @ebonyoldham and @blackfeministkitchen.