Bodies in Politics

'If the present looks like the past, what does the future look like?' (Walker, 1983). Alice Walker's question introduces and frames a meditation on the gradations of color that have separated Black women from each other. The intimacy of Walker's essay, which begins as a letter to an unnamed friend, and its focus on internal divisions among African American women in the early 1980s could suggest that it has little to say about the contemporary condition of a predominantly white and, to a lesser degree, male academic discipline like political theory - a discipline, furthermore, that has been notably unresponsive to the concerns of women of color, in general, and Black women, more specifically. Without presuming that Walker aims to speak to political theorists, this critical exchange begins from the premise that her question and the essay it inaugurates can instigate a confrontation with the unowned intimacies that haunt the practice of political theory and indicate new avenues for inquiry. Walker's query troubles the narratives of progress and presumptions of theoretical innocence that shape expectations about what we write and how we teach political concepts, especially democratic concepts, in an era that has been heralded, disturbingly, as both post-racial and post-feminist. Against this backdrop, Falguni Sheth, Heath Fogg Davis, Shatema Threadcraft and Jemima Repo take up the challenge of considering the aims and status of political theories of race/gender and the relationship between 'feminist' and 'critical race' thinking. Before turning to their individual contributions, I would like to draw out four themes from Walker's piece that appear, in different guises, in the contributions collected here. First, and most obviously, Walker's title puts the idea of time into question. It both unsettles the teleologies that often undergird narrations of the civil rights and women's movements in the United States and presses readers to consider what kinds of revised temporality might give rise to more critical and visionary work in political theory. Second, by grounding general claims on behalf of 'women' in the experiences of those women to whom the promises of membership in the polity cannot be take for granted, Walker upends conventional assumptions about the particular and the universal and raises fertile questions about what it means to think theoretically about political subjectivity. Third, Walker traces the destructive and productive effects of racial and g