In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva: New Methodologies for Race, Ethnic, and Decolonial Studies

Ferreira da Silva's own words, in interviews and an original essay, frame this collection of interdisciplinary scholars and artists engaging with her influential work at the intersections of global race, ethnic, and feminist studies. As a decolonial feminist philosopher, Denise Ferreira da Silva has pushed the fields of ethnic and feminist studies beyond traditional stakes in US-centered formulations of difference and inclusion. In Conversation with Denise Ferreira da Silva is an interdisciplinary reading companion of Silva’s work – and its reckoning with the persistence of global racial violence – designed to help scholars, students, artists, and activists better engage in a global idea of race. While traditional scholarship around difference has often focused on describing difference as separation, segregation, and subjugation, Ferreira da Silva's art practice and philosophical writings attempt to think and teach "difference without separatability." The book is framed by original interviews with Ferreira da Silva on topics including Black Brazilian thought and feminist studies, disorder and Afro-pessimism, citation politics and decoloniality, and Spinoza and physics. Contributors from a broad range of disciplines – such as comparative literature, creative writing, criminology, gender studies, and global studies – provide short reflections on Ferreira da Silva’s methods and arguments on these topics. By providing a way to enter into dialogue with Ferreira da Silva’s works, this volume brings one of the most distinguished and consistent recent voices on the nature of the human to those interested in engaging questions of racial power and difference within their own disciplines.