Conclusion: The Fire of Love

Abstract

In “The Fire of Love,” Pearl Proud reflects upon how gender and race studies are areas of heated theoretical and political debate in the social sciences, particularly in the wake of equal rights movements such as Black Lives Matters and #Metoo. Proud argues that recent consciousness for black women has been in the counting of the cost of struggle, including challenging the very framing of lives and identity as having struggle and hardship at their core and acknowledging oppression fatigue, of educating others, of sharing lived experience to aid the awareness of others. She invites a reframing of this view of long-suffering selves and of being the embodiment of struggle, and a co-creating of a different narrative by which black women define themselves. She argues that self-love is, and will be, vital because self-love is a political act and a dimension of female self-empowerment. The essay ends with a reflection upon the significance of the Zulu concept of Ubuntu, a “seeing” of the other, an extending of a humanity and generosity of spirit to the other that has love at its core.