Transnational Black Diaspora Feminisms

Abstract

In 1970, when the young women previously involved in Britain’s Black Power Movement (BBPM) formed the Brixton Black Women’s Group (BBWG)¹ to address critical issues affecting black communities in Britain, they did so by building on a much longer black radical tradition in Britain and in the African Diaspora. As they took on the challenges of sexism, employment discrimination, police brutality, reproductive rights issues, insufficient opportunities for childcare, housing, and education, these young black women were striding down a path that the radical, black, feminist, activist-intellectual, theoretician, writer, and journalist Claudia Jones had paved in prior decades. It is important to begin this discussion with Claudia Jones because she, as Carol Boyce Davies so rightly states, is “central to an early formulation of blackness in Britain” and is “the pre-text to current definitions of black British feminism as anti-imperialist in orientation” (2008, 54). In other words, the activist-intellectual-political work of Claudia Jones serves as an important foundation as it allows one to contextualize, situate, and build upon black women’s socially engaged political work in Britain in the 1970s and early 1980s from a different point of departure: an earlier formulation rooted in deliberate, radical intellectual-activist, diasporic, and transnational work.

My context for understanding the radical black female subject is a particular formulation of the black radical tradition that combines intellectual and activist work in the service of one’s oppressed communities.

The radical black subject, male or female, challenges the normalizing of state oppression, constructs an alternative discourse, and articulates these both theoretically and in practice. This is a resisting black subject…resisting dominating systems organized and enforced by states, organizations, and institutions in order to produce a complicit and passive people and to maintain exploitative systems.

—Carole Boyce Davies (2008, 8, 5)