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).
