Keisha-Khan Y. Perry,
"The Groundings with my Sisters: Toward a Black Diasporic Feminist Agenda in the Americas"
(page 2 of 4)
Groundings with my Sisters: Why Solidarity, and Why an Hemispheric Solidarity?
As the title of this essay and the introductory paragraph indicate, I
implicate myself as a Jamaican-born U.S. feminist who has traveled
throughout communities of African descent in Latin America and the
Caribbean for most of my life. My ongoing ethnographic work on black
women's activism in Brazil is inextricably tied to my own yearning to
unite scholarship and political action in ways that aim to improve the
lives of all black women, "my sisters," as well as myself. The title
also references the Guyanese activist scholar Walter Rodney's landmark
text The Groundings with my Brothers (1969), in which he narrates
the history of the Jamaican Black Power movement of the 1960s and
describes how solidarity forms in the black world. Rodney uses the term
"groundings" to define the process of building solidarity as black
people:
I was prepared to go anywhere that any group of Black
people were prepared to sit down to talk and listen. Because, that is
Black Power, that is one of the elements, a sitting down together to
reason, to 'ground,' as the Brothers [Sisters] say. We have to 'ground
together' . . .. Now the new understanding is that Brothers [Sisters] must talk
to each other (Rodney 1990: 78).
The term "grounding" is significant here for the purpose of
understanding the roles women play in black liberation struggles. I
consider myself one participant among many other black women in Latin
America and the Caribbean. Rodney's political passion for diasporic
connections becomes salient when we, as "sisters," are considered,
too.
In this re-inscribing of the term "sister" in black international
"groundings" in Latin America, I also cannot ignore Manning Marable's
pro-feminist essay, "Groundings with my Sisters: Patriarchy and the
Exploitation of Black Women" (2001), which critiques the tendency of
black liberation movements to erase women from political memory,
particularly the importance of black female radical thought and action.
This erasure represents one aspect of patriarchal exploitation and
violence in knowledge production, where black women are rendered
invisible, and black women's anti-sexist critiques are either ignored or
viewed as racial betrayal. Furthermore, Marable's reference to
"groundings with my sisters" reflects a need for "reasoning" between
black radical men and women's scholarship in a way that pushes for
greater ideological exchange, the building of cross-gender solidarity,
and unity in the struggle to end patriarchal practice in black
communities.
Carole Boyce Davies's most recent text, Left of Karl Marx: The
Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008), addresses
both this recognition of black women's radical thought and praxis, as
well as the urgency for reasoning among black feminist thinkers and
activists. For Davies (2008), Claudia Jones, a Trinidadian-born
African-American intellectual and activist, represents the general
silencing of black left radicalism in black feminist and black diaspora
studies in the U.S. and the Caribbean. As Davies asks in her
introductory chapter, "How could someone who had lived in the United
States from the age of eight, who had been so central to black and
communist political organizing throughout the 1930s and 1940s, up to the
mid-1950s, simply disappear?" (1-2). In her reversal of this collective
forgetting, Davies argues that, although Jones' state-sponsored
deportation from the U.S. to Great Britain expands the definitions of
diaspora, the Black Atlantic, and national belonging, her disappearance
illustrates just how possible it is to displace both black radicalism
and women's radicalism. In her text, Davies indicts not only the
anti-left U.S. government that actively disappeared communists
from within the geographic space of the nation but also the black
liberation and feminist activists and intellectuals who nourished the
omission of "radical black left female subjects" (18) from histories of
anti-racism, anti-imperialism, and workers' rights struggles. Davies
argues that the lacuna of black scholars' theoretical travel "outside
the border of U.S. thought" toward radical black women like Claudia
Jones ignores vast political views in black history, as well as the
"global and local imbrications" of black resistance.
Black women's radicalism can be read, then, as attentive to
discourses of geography, given that narratives of belonging within and
across territories participate in the global positioning of black
diaspora protests. As Davies writes, "Recovering Claudia Jones is a more
developed understanding of the transnational/African diaspora subject,
whose movement outside of circumscribing national space renders her
nationless" (7). The concept of the African or black diaspora concerns a
transnational historical and contemporary production of black individual
and collective identities. I want to invoke here Avtar Brah's definition
of diaspora as "an interpretive frame referencing the economic,
political, and cultural dimensions of these contemporary forms of
migrancy" (1996: 186). Brah's idea of diaspora "signals the processes of
multi-locationality across geographical, cultural, and psychic
boundaries" (194). For black women, the African diaspora suggests the
articulations of their subject positions vis-à-vis fixed geographical
spaces and migratory experiences (193). Blacks rooted culturally within
the diaspora both "feel at home" and struggle for inclusion within their
various transnational communities. The back-and-forth, up-and-down
crossings of black diaspora communities sometimes imply returning to a
"home" abroad, sometimes in Africa. But it also means claiming a
permanent space within new geographic locations, such as the
Americas.
It is in this vein that I enter the intellectual process of
understanding black feminist thought and social activism in Latin
America as part of the global black radical tradition. A certain
militancy lies within Latin American feminist thinking—a militancy found
in Claudia Jones' perspective on black women's social positioning, as
described by Davies: "If all workers are exploited because of the
usurping of the surplus value of their labor, then black women—bereft of
any kind of institutional mechanism to conquer this exploitation, and
often assumed to have to work unaccountable hours without
recompense—live a life of superexploitation beyond what Marx had
identified as a the workers' lot," (2). Thus, a crucial reason for
sisterly "grounding" is "to talk about international solidarity in the
black world" (81) and to develop strategies to address black women's
specific needs as the most marginalized. At an ideological level, black
women in Latin America are necessarily engaged in an international
struggle because their histories, experiences, and cultures are
international in form. For example, high rates of HIV/AIDS infection,
maternal mortality, unemployment, and forced sterilization among black
women provide evidence of a common struggle—and further convince us of
the importance of feminist "groundings." As Eliza Noh writes, "Third
world women and women of color have always been concerned with
cross-national issues of labor exploitation, imperialism, migration, and
racialized gender," (quoted in Davies 2008: 23).
From this perspective, I am very purposeful about giving little
credence to the many critiques of identity politics that dismiss
building political communities based on commonalities as racialized,
gendered, and classed subjects. I am inspired not only by black women's
action amidst the material reality of entrenched discrimination and
exclusion, such as in the case of labor exploitation, but also of their
firm defense of experience as a basis for forging group identity and
organizing politics on all levels. Moreover, my preliminary thinking
about these ideas have been heavily influenced by U.S. and Latin
American black feminist thinkers, such as Patricia Hill Collins and
Sueli Carneiro, who have asserted, like Claudia Jones, that black women
who tend to occupy the margins do not question the validity of their
experiences. For black women and the everyday working and non-working
poor, experience is the lexicon of their lives, as well as the source of
inventing new forms of solidarity. This leads me to Chandra Talpade
Mohanty, the feminist academic and activist who argues that identity
politics is neither an "unstable" nor a "merely strategic" approach to
forging group solidarity. As the organization of black women in Latin
America demonstrates, black identity or black womanhood is not always a
"natural" basis for developing political alliances. Rather, class,
gender, and other aspects of racial difference are always at play in
group solidarity. Mohanty points to this in her writings about
solidarity:
I define solidarity in terms of mutuality,
accountability, and the recognition of common interests as the basis for
relationships among diverse communities. Rather than assuming an
enforced communality of oppression, the practice of solidarity
foregrounds communities of people who have chosen to work together
(2003: 7).
Worth noting is that Mohanty's definition of solidarity provides an
adequate response to recent postmodern skepticism about politics and
identity. She argues that these skeptics have ignored the importance of
"experience" in identity construction, a dismissal that discounts the
possibility of identity as a basis of progressive group solidarity and
political mobilization (6). These critics not only deny race as a social
category—and racism as a central aspect of social organization—but also
provide "discourses of diversity and pluralism grounded in an
apolitical, often individualized identity politics," (e.g., the
multi/bi-racial movement). Similarly, as South African scholar and
activist Steve Biko affirms, "The interrelationship between the
consciousness of the self and the emancipatory programme is of paramount
importance," (1986: 49); and as Begoña Arextaga states, "When the experiences
of women from subordinate groups . . . is what is obscured, denied, excluded
from public discourse, to foreground experience might be a necessary
political act" (1997: 8). Hence the title "Groundings with my Sisters," which
expresses both my recognition of the interrelated complex experiences of
black women globally and how this political positioning informs feminist
and diasporic solidarity. A focus on experience, called for by a number
of scholars (myself included), emphasizes the centrality of a "global
sisterhood" for the advancement of radical ideas and social actions
(Mohanty 2003; Basu 1995; Souza 1983).
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