Thinking about feeling, feeling about thinking

Race Reflections AT WORK

In today's episode Guilaine takes us on a freeform reflection and roundup of her thinking and feeling in 2023.

From the publication of her second book White Minds to the writing and collating of her third book Creative Disruption she shares her position as someone who doesn’t identify as an academic due to the violence she has experienced as a Black woman in academia and psychology (something she explores in both these books.)
She then gives us an introduction to Creative Disruption beginning with its genesis at a conference that looked at creative disruption. The chapter she has written for that book also began at that conference in a talk she gave on Congolese music. Here she also makes links with Afrobeats (which she describes as the hybrid child of the African diaspora). She then expands on the reasons for highlighting and emphasising creativity and on the importance of thinking about feelings, and feeling about thinking. Thinking with the body or feeling with the mind. How these ‘things’ are split by Western society but are not split within us. For this she refers to Audre Lorde’s text Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.
Then she asks some questions to you, the listeners: Do we do enough to engage with the creative in the work we do at Race Reflections? Are we playing into the splitting of the rational self and the erotic self, this splitting of the feeling self and the thinking self?
She then talks about her latest piece (‘The world does not need more intelligent men’) which looks at the concept of intelligence and asks what intelligence is or might be. She explored these questions in relationship to the personal and the political overlapping and often being the same thing.
She ends with another invitation or provocation to the audience:

How do we find ways to reconnect body and mind, rationality and corporality, heart and head, as an organisation so that our dismantling, disruptive, anti-racist and anti-oppressive work continues to allow us to grow and be connected with the world and each other?

Audre Lorde: Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power https://www.centraleurasia.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/02/audre_lorde_cool-beans.pdf

‘The world does not need more intelligent men’ https://racereflections.co.uk/the-world-does-not-need-more-intelligent-men/

Guilaine’s first book Living While Black is available to buy here: https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/442992/living-while-black-by-kinouani-guilaine/9781529109436

Her new book White Minds is available to buy here: https://policy.bristoluniversitypress.co.uk/white-minds

Her third book co-edited with Hannah Reeves and Claudia Di Gianfrancesco is called Creative Disruption: https://creativedisruptioncouk.wordpress.com/about/

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