Summer 2008 marked the end of my time at Barnard College, but my reflection and learning did not stop with my diploma. That summer, I attended a one-month gender-sensitive training institute for young women activists (and a few men) of the African continent and its diaspora. The training institute focused on economic and social justice, with goals to build the capacities of the young women of African descent in attendance, to encourage the formation of personal networks, and to explore the tools needed to actively engage in monitoring and fighting for social justice. On the eight-hour flight from New York’s JFK Airport to Senegal’s Leopold Senghor Airport in the capital city Dakar, I looked across the aisle and knew that I was flying with my sisters. They read books on my list of personal favorites—books that I was currently reading or intended to read. We were sisters, united by our interests, convictions, and aspirations to effect change in our communities.
I heard about the training institute from a Barnard graduate involved as both an organizer and a participant while studying abroad in Senegal a few years earlier. I viewed this as a unique graduation present that would expose me to women from all over the world who were striving to embody a vision of social justice through their work. The fact that airfare was included eliminated any financial obstacles that would have prevented me from going. And I couldn’t wait to meet the sixty women and seven men in attendance, ranging in age from seventeen to thirty and descending from all parts of the continent and the diaspora. The group consisted of students, professors, intellectuals, government officials, non-profit managers, actors, and radio show hosts. Yet beneath these titles were real people with stories of strength and survival within diverse contexts. There was an HIV-positive woman from the Southern African region; a West African refugee who spent the past ten years in the U.S.; the daughter of a prominent Brazilian political leader in O Movimento Negro; a maroon-descendent from Suriname; and a former child bride. There was even a young man who dedicated his life to helping men in his country learn about the negative impact of traditional practices on women’s health—along with someone actually formerly involved in those traditional practices.1 The array of personalities, experiences, and causes in attendance amazed me, as did our common passion for the psychological, economic, and social liberation of women of African descent.
A group of activists from the diaspora conducted various workshops. They included a woman from the Southern Africa region who described herself as an “International Water Warrior” and conducted lessons about globalization and water privatization; professional economists from Jamaica, the Gambia, and Senegal who facilitated workshops about trade liberalization; and a Ghanaian residing in England who facilitated discussions of the sexual and reproductive rights of women. There was even a “cross cultural arts facilitator” of Jewish descent from the U.S., whose role was to use alternative means (games, role-plays, and murals) to help participants process the themes discussed in class. The outcome of the workshops is best summed up by the comment of one participant who, toward the end of the training institute, said, “I finally have the ‘big words’ to describe my everyday experiences.” This declaration reveals the strength of the training institute, during which participants learned how to view their personal experiences as part of global phenomena, thus making their experiences understood by people outside of their own local worlds. Possessing such a language is paramount in enabling ordinary people to make themselves understood by the larger world.
Upon returning home, I was asked the standard question: “How was your trip?” I responded with the same three words: “Phenomenal, symbolic, and challenging.” It was phenomenal because the training institute represents an incredible endeavor that may, in fact, be the first meeting of its kind. That summer, I met women from all over the world—women who serve as leaders in their own nations and share a common passion for social justice issues. The experience was also symbolic because these women, abounding from Zambia, Mozambique, Egypt, Brazil, England, Trinidad, and other places, gathered on Gorée Island—one of the most active slave ports during the slave trade. This place, which saw the division of families five centuries earlier, became host to a family reunion of sorts, with descendants coming together to interrogate social and economic implications of that historical legacy.
Despite the phenomenal and symbolic aspects of the experience, I also describe it as challenging because, as a member of the diaspora, I felt the limitations of a theoretical program that, at times, seemed disconnected from real life and real people. It was only later that I began to make sense of—and support—the program’s transformative potential to effect change in a more subtle way.
This paper, I hope, continues that legacy of change by exploring the dynamics of the activism discourse in relation to my experience at the training institute. I use the implications of “diaspora” and “women” as legitimate categories of analysis to frame this discussion. Rather than critiquing the particular training institute that I attended, my goal is to make a general comment about the impact of certain discourses on activism. I first evaluate the legitimacy of identifying “diaspora” as a category of analysis and then reflect on my personal experiences and interrogate the unique realities of those referred to as members of the diaspora. Next, I examine the use of “women” as a category of analysis through a treatment of the feminist scholar Chandra T. Mohanty’s discussion of this topic. Finally, I discuss an alternative model of mobilizing activists (the activist exchange network), which aims to disrupt assumptions about diaspora and women by bringing activism back to the field of action.
The impressions and critiques that follow are based entirely on my personal experiences and do not in any way represent those of other participants at the training institute. My position as the only African-American participant frames my analysis and shapes my experiences. Before going, I questioned the particular space that I would occupy as both an African-American (born in Jamaica to a Jamaican father and an African-American mother) and a recent graduate of an elite university. I also recognized that my particular ideas about global power dynamics and the material implications on African lives were mainly theoretical. My hope was that by meeting self-described “activists” from the continent and the diaspora, I would emerge with a better understanding of the other side of the theoretical training I received at Barnard; in other words, I hoped to emerge with more awareness of real-life experiences. I planned to use my ability to communicate with Anglophone, Francophone, and, to some extent, Lusophone participants to interact with a broad range of people from diverse backgrounds. Having lived in Central Africa and volunteered in East Africa (and done a good bit of traveling elsewhere), I remained aware that these characteristics could define my worldview as “Western,” “privileged,” and even “elitist.” My experiences, however, are presented as I have lived them, though they embody an understanding of the challenges and limitations of my worldview and the institutionalized endeavors that have shaped my thoughts.
- Plenty of scholarly work exists that complicates the notion of “traditional.” See Mahmood Mamdani. Citizen and Subject. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. [↩]
