Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era

2018; Oxford University Press; Volume: 105; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/jahist/jay263

1945-2314

Katherine Mellen Charron,

Race, History, and American Society

Ashley D. Farmer offers students of twentieth-century U.S. history a marvelous gift: an intellectual genealogy of radical black women's black power activism, grounded in their political theorizing and cultural production and spanning the post–World War II years through the 1970s. Remaking Black Power focuses on the gendered imaginary—a symbolic terrain where activists critiqued ideas of manhood and womanhood and envisioned new paths to empowerment—as a primary site of women's engagement with the larger project of redefining black identity. Examining speeches, essays, prison writings, and artwork, Farmer considers what they reveal about radical black women's aspirations and how a range of activists endeavored “to reshape Black Power–era symbols and politics to fit their needs and lived experiences” (p. 3). Farmer's argument is broad and deep, a remarkable achievement given her expansive chronology and the proliferation of black power groups with often-conflicting agendas and allegiances. She manages this by organizing the book so that each chapter considers a specific trope generated by radical women. Readers first meet the “militant black domestic,” a working-class figure reimagined as occupying “the vanguard of race, class, and gender liberation struggles” from the late 1940s to early 1960s (p. 49). The “revolutionary black woman” follows, articulated by women in the Black Panther party to “dislodge universal, male-dominated conceptions of the black revolutionary subject and assert a woman-centered political identity” (p. 75). Cultural nationalist women, by contrast, theorized the “African woman.” If fidelity to conservative gender principles limited these activists, Farmer contends they also leveraged it to claim more capacious and equitable movement roles. Meanwhile, the “pan-African woman” reflected “a diasaporically minded ideology that could account for black women's gender-specific experiences with racist and imperialist oppression,” and enabled activists participating in international conferences to underscore “the impossibility of subordinating the ‘woman question’ when charting the future of global black revolt” (pp. 147, 157–58). The “third world black woman” emerged from the intersectional analysis of the multiracial Third World Women's Alliance. As members rethought women's roles within “Black Power, feminist, and anticapitalist organizing,” they came full circle, uniting the radical ideologies of the postwar period to those produced by women in the 1960s and 1970s (p. 175).