How
creativity makes its way through feeling—and what we can know and
feel through the artistic work of Black women
Feeling is not feelin. As the poet, artist, and scholar
Bettina Judd argues, feelin, in African American Vernacular English,
is how Black women artists approach and produce knowledge as
sensation: internal and complex, entangled with pleasure, pain,
anger, and joy, and manifesting artistic production itself as the
meaning of the work. Through interviews, close readings, and archival
research, Judd draws on the fields of affect studies and Black
studies to analyze the creative processes and contributions of Black
women—from poet Lucille Clifton and musician Avery*Sunshine to
visual artists Betye Saar, Joyce J. Scott, and Deana Lawson.
Feelin: Creative Practice, Pleasure, and Black Feminist Thought
makes a bold and vital intervention in critical theory’s trend
toward disembodying feeling as knowledge. Instead, Judd revitalizes
current debates in Black studies about the concept of the human and
about Black life by considering how discourses on emotion as they are
explored by Black women artists offer alternatives to the concept of
the human. Judd expands the notions of Black women’s pleasure
politics in Black feminist studies that include the erotic, the
sexual, the painful, the joyful, the shameful, and the sensations and
emotions that yet have no name. In its richly multidisciplinary
approach, Feelin calls for the development of research methods that
acknowledge creative and emotionally rigorous work as productive by
incorporating visual art, narrative, and poetry.