Not Your Papas Wynter: Women of Color Contributions Toward Decolonial Futures [3/30/18] (original) (raw)
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Sojourner Truth's powerful statement at the Women's Convention in Akron, Ohio in 1851 was a deconstruction of the notion of a global, common womanhood. Eminent black feminist critic bell hooks had spoken in the context of the racial realities that had made African-American women's experience in America a unique one because of the unusual position they occupied in society. Black women were expected to choose between " being black " and " " being female ". Literature is a powerful ideological tool that influences as well as responds to socio-cultural and political discourses. Literary representations therefore can debunk stereotypical notions about marginalized groups in grappling with problematic issues of ethnicity and identity and intersections of race, gender and class. Black Feminist theory was instrumental in defying homogenization of the " woman's dilemma " and monolithic concepts of sisterhood. The rich and diverse experience of black women in America has been given space within the tradition of black women's writing. Contemporary feminist debates and changing perspectives have emerged as challenges to the literary practice adopted by Black women writers. This paper proposes to examine the relevance of a distinct and unique Black Feminist consciousness as triggering the emergence of a black women's literary movement. The paper would interrogate the implications of deconstructionist debates in the context of black women's struggles (in life and literature). The paper shall incorporate historicity as a methodology to examine the intersections of race, gender and class in theory and practice. It would establish that reverberations of Sojourner Truth's question " And Ain't I a Woman? " forged the sisterhood between lived experience and literary representations to reinforce the black feminist theoretical standpoint.
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This article seeks to examine some of the processes through which gender comes to be racialized in order to challenge the tendency in much feminist theories of gender to analytically separate these categories. The paper explores the theoretical and political consequences of that separation for those that bear the historical mark of slavery and colonization, while also examining how an attentiveness to these histories and bodies paves the way towards new critical questions as well as a more nuanced understanding of the relationship between oppressed and oppressor. Drawing on the work of decolonial thinkers such as Maria Lugones and Sylvia Wynter, I propose developing at least four ingredients that could be considered integral to the making of a decolonial feminist methodology. I argue that these ingredients allow us to maintain “gender” as a critical political category of analysis that can serve to denounce and transform colonial relations of power and colonial ways of relating that continue to persist in our present.
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