Stirring Up Trouble/Fighting Down Oppression: Nanny of the Maroons' Enduring Legacy to the Caribbean Diaspora (original) (raw)
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A Black Women's History of the United States, written by Daina Ramey Berry and Kali Nicole Gross, conveys Black women's countless testimonials within the United States dating back to pre-slavery. Although the various roles and experiences of Black women are known and have been recorded in particular parts of U.S. history, many historians and educators neglect to provide a holistic recollection of Black women's stories. Thus, Berry and Gross take readers on an exploratory journey of numerous unknown Black women throughout history, successfully readdressing and reapproaching the false narrative too often circulated about Black women within the United States. Moreover, they capture the emotional and mental turmoil Black women in the United States have experienced and continue to encounter, while also retelling moments in American history through each author's perspective. The authors tell this story skillfully, with vignettes of Black women trailblazers and lengthy footnotes documenting extensive historical research that reveals stories of self-reliance, agency, fortitude, bravery, and beauty. Berry and Gross uncover hidden and otherwise unacknowledged aspects of U.S. history from the voices and lives of Black women who marched forward, against all odds, to lead sustained change in their communities, the nation, and across the globe. A Black Women's History of the United States showcases the many themes in Black women's history that emerge across time and space. These thematic experiences entail stories of Black women's mobility, violence, activism and resistance, labor and entrepreneurship, criminalization and incarceration, cultural production, and sexuality and reproduction. These stories underscore Black women's own desires to seek out new opportunities and new worlds, domestically, nationally, and internationally. As Black women traversed new spaces, their travails profoundly influenced social, cultural, political, and legal practices. A distinguishing feature of Berry and Gross's writing is the inclusive narrative of the lived experiences of Black women from many walks of life (travelers, politicians, activists, enslaved, suffragettes, domestic workers, civil rights organizers, mothers, and sports champions), including transgender, bisexual, and cisgender voices. The stories are viscerally painful, psychologically difficult, heart wrenching, selfless, heroic, and triumphant. As Berry and Gross conclude, "We owe a debt to the Black women who came before us, those who persevered and those who did not, because the totality of their history is what informs our present and readies us to continue to demand justice, for ourselves and, by extension, for all" (p. 217). For Berry and Gross, the overall purpose of their ten-chapter book, including the introduction and conclusion, is to ". .. paint a richly textured portrait of Black womanhood in a manner that celebrates Black women's diversity and inspires readers to seek out more" (p. xi). To accomplish that task, every chapter within the book is named after a historically known or
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Phyllis Ntantala was born in South Africa in the 1920s and moved to the USA in the 1960s. She used her writings as a weapon to confront injustices meted out to African people the world over. Her struggle made a significant contribution to Pan-Africanism, as she identified not only with the struggles of black South Africans, but also with the struggles of African Americans. This Pan-African approach comes out strongly in her autobiography, A Life’s Mosaic: The Autobiography of Phyllis Ntantala (1992). The text captures not only the struggles of the African people in South Africa as they resisted and challenged discriminatory practices by a white settler minority community, but also that of the African-American community, as it depicts the dramatic struggles of the civil rights movement, led by figures such as Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, and Martin Luther King, Jr. To those who assumed that Ntantala would be grateful for the privileges she enjoyed in the USA, and which she lacked in her native South Africa, she responded that in her country she “lived as a black person”, and that in the USA she “was also a black person”; consequently, she “looked at things from a black person’s perspective” (1992, 198). This article is an academic and intellectual celebration of Phyllis Ntantala’s contribution to Pan- African struggles as an intellectual, woman, and mother. It is written from an Afrocentric and Pan-Africanist perspective by an African-American woman.
Slavery & Abolition, 1998
Recent reassessments of Caribbean women's political roles both during and after slavery suggest that their leadership was crucial to popular collective action throughout the Americas. Many historians, like Jean Besson, have come to see women as 'central to the Afro-Caribbean peasant cultures of resistance, rooted in the tradition of slave resistance, which emerged in response to colonialism and the plantation system'. For the period of slavery, there has been increasing interest in women's contributions to slave resistance, including both violent opposition and what James Scott calls 'everyday forms of resistance'; for the post-emancipation period, attention has turned to women's participation in labor protest, as well as in more diffuse community organization and cultural resistance.(1) Above all, the most recent comparative syntheses in the field demonstrate that 'despite the sexism and racism which initially denied black and coloured women the legal right to vote, the lack of the franchise did not exclude women from active participation in the public world of politics during slavery and in the post-slavery Caribbean'. Like disfranchised people elsewhere, Afro-Caribbean women turned everyday activities into sites of resistance, ordinary space into theatres for collective action.(2) In the case of Jamaica, one is confronted head-on with the unexpected but crucial participation of women not only in behind-the-scenes cultural resistance, but in public activities such as collective labor protest, petitioning, demonstration, and riot. This article