Genealogies are important. Very important.

Because of important Black feminist work in the 1970s and 1980s, it was possible to write scholarship in the 1990s and 2000s that cited Black feminists. It was possible to write work that cited ONLY Black women.

Those possibilities did NOT exist in the 1950s and 1960s. The intellectual genealogies had not yet been mapped in ways *legible* to credentialing bodies.

When I walked into a library, picked up an academic journal or book by Cheryl Wall, Gloria Hull, bell hooks, Deborah McDowell, Barbara Christian, and said I wanted to write about Harlem Renaissance women, I could do that in the 1990s. And I did.

It wasn't simply that I read work by Harlem Renaissance women and loved it—Maureen Honey's Shadowed Dreams transformed my entire intellectual trajectory.

It was that in article after article and book after book—and more articles than books for many reasons—Black women scholars created intellectual space and *legibility* so that many of us could pursue different types of intellectual work.

And we could *map* intellectual traditions. And legacies. In rich ways.

In Introductions and Prefaces to series and recovered works, languages were created and circulated to help us think and imagine.