Front Porch Revolution: Resilience Space, Demonic Grounds, and the Horizons of a Black Feminist Otherwise

Abstract

Grounded in eighteen months of fieldwork and a decade of engaged partnership at Women With A Vision (WWAV)—a black women’s health and social justice collective founded in 1989—this article explores the remaking of New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina from the perspective of black feminist social life. By peeling back the histories of violence and struggle surrounding the storm, it reckons with what it means to build home and vision amid the everyday terror that resilience recovery efforts have wrought. Two questions frame this analysis: How have the gendered and racialized logics of resilience been spatialized? And how are the black feminist leaders of WWAV respatializing their city? To answer these questions, this article discusses key methods and practices of black feminist theory, locating authority and expertise over post-Katrina displacement and gendered violence with the black women working on the front lines. In so doing, it identifies and theorizes the resistant possibilities of the front porch as a critical site of black feminist practice for ending intimate, communal, and state violence. To be clear, the front porch here is not a metaphor. Southern front porches are deeply persistent black feminist geographies, made in the interstices through everyday practices of enduring. Porch talks, porch sits, and porch poses take place; they also exceed the space-time of the observer. In these ways, front porches are the grounds for not only for imagining a post-Katrina otherwise but also for realizing the New Orleans landscape anew.

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