A Black Left Feminist View On Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism

Carole Boyce Davis, AAIHS

My point of entry to this engagement with Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition is as a black left feminist–thanks to the formation defined by Mary Helen Washington and used by Erik McDuffie in Sojourning for Freedom. Indeed, black left feminism is one of the political positions that describes Claudia Jones in my book though it was not explicitly indicated by using those specific terms.

'Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminism' - a review

by Wairimu Muriithi         

Tracey Denean Sharpley-Whiting, in her book Frantz Fanon: Conflicts and Feminisms (henceforth ConFem) (1998), provides a feminist-centred response to feminist critiques of the revolutionary doctor and theorist, a meta-feminist critique, if you will. Like Lewis Gordon in What Fanon Said (published 17 years later, in 2015), Sharpley-Whiting challenges notable feminist works on Fanon, mainly from the academy, by positing them as misreadings, misinterpretations, oversimplifications and/or even uninformed. The text’s engagements range from three main feminist frameworks – liberal Euro-American lit-crit feminism, Algerian nationalist feminism and radical U.S. Black feminism – to a closing call to post-modern US academic feminists to (re)commit to “Fanon’s radically humanist profeminist consciousness” (1998: 24).

The Patriarchal Woman in Modern South Africa

Challenging Imperial Feminism

Challenging Imperial Feminism by TigersEye99

Lewis Gordon on Race and Gender from the Standpoint of Sartre’s Philosophical Anthropology.

SA must transcend Big Man politics

Simamkele Dlakavu, The Star

Johannesburg - It was one of those student protests, the kind of protests at our universities that have become a norm again in this country.

I don’t remember the exact issue of contestation that day, because they are so many. We might have been protesting against the financial exclusion of hundreds of students; or it might have been a protest against the dehumanising treatment of our outsourced mothers and fathers. Or it could have been another protest where we sought to be reflected in a curriculum that is still centered on colonial thinking.

Gender, Sexuality, and Empire: Imperialist Feminism in Culture

Nirbhaya film: Solidarity is what we want, not a civilising mission

Kavita Krishnan, Daily O

I am beset with a growing sense of unease at the global publicity campaign surrounding the release of a film by Leslee Udwin called India's Daughter. The film's subject is the December 16, 2012 Delhi gang rape and the movement that followed it. The film is to be released on March 8, and we can discuss it after we have seen it. But I would like to flag some concerns about the "Daughters of India" campaign that is due to be launched in the wake of the film, and about the response to the film in India.

Feminist Africa: Feminism & Pan-Africanism

Some Are Soldiers, Others ‘Straatmeide”

Siphokazi Magadla, The Con

Reports that Julius Malema, the leader of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), called Minister of Small Business Development, Lindiwe Zulu, “a straatmeid” following a verbal exchange that came close to a physical altercation between Zulu and EFF Member of Parliament, Godrich Gardee, is a crude reminder of the sexist double-standards faced by female guerillas in the aftermath of war where they are expected to conform to dominant ideas of feminine respectability.

Malema's feminist mask slips over Zulu street meid comment

Verashni Pillay, Mail & Guardian

“Lindiwe Zulu is a street meid.”

The comment about the minister of small business development dropped like deadweight into a hot conference room at the Economic Freedom Fighters’ (EFF) headquarters in Braamfontein, Johannesburg.

We saw it go down, watched the dust settle and looked away.

Ananya Roy on Patriarchy and Insubordination in the Academy

Mother of the Nation or Lady Macbeth?

Winnie Mandela

There is no middle ground for Winnie Madikizela-Mandela write Vashna Jagarnath and Siphokazi Magadla. The Con 

There has been something of an online furore in response to Verashni Pillay’s Mail&Guardian column, Five times Winnie Mandela has letus down. In this vicious public condemnation of her character, Winnie Madikizela-Mandela is rebuked for failing both as a political figure and as a wife – there is no separation of these categories.

The Deafening Silence of the EFF's Women Leaders

Siphokazi Magadla, SACSIS

“All we are asking is that he pay back the money, why are we getting thrown out?” was the question that came from a parliamentary member of the Economic Freedom Fighters (EFF), who was identified in a Voice of America news report, as “Female EFF member” on 21 August, the day the EFF chanted “pay back the money”, to a humiliated and ill-looking Jacob Zuma. Right before Mbuyiseni Ndlozi, the EFF spokesperson started chanting, I hoped for a longer exchange between parliamentary speaker, Baleka Mbete, and the “Female EFF member”.

Everywhere is War

Danielle Bowler says that multiple identities have multiple, concomitant sites of oppression. Eyewitness News

There is a passage from Staceyann Chin’s essay Falling for Bob Marley that will always stay with me. It is indelibly marked on my consciousness, read at a time when I was a university student trying to understand the world and my place in it. That issue of place is fundamentally important, as contemplating your fit (or ill fit, more precisely) in a world designed for certain people will inevitably turn to questions of identity. This question is the through-line in Chin’s essay, as she contemplates the factors that led to her sitting a Brooklyn bar on a rainy, autumn day, instead of in the place of her birth. She writes:

“If I were heterosexual, I would still be in Kingston, eating jerk fish from Island Grill, and drinking a cold Red Stripe Light. But I am an out lesbian, so reality pounds icy on the windows of my New York City. Mixed green salad, chamomile tea, salmon and cream cheese on everything-bagel. I am in political exile. Self-imposed, necessary, difficult.”

'All the wives' become ANC gatekeepers

Shireen Hassim, Mail & Guardian

Reading the history of a political organisation is an exercise in reading against powerful official narratives – powerful both in their capacity to tell a story and in their rootedness in the hearts of their supporters. In the case of the ANC, that official narrative is one of a progressive and natural line of development, an arc of redemption from oppression. It is history told as a triumphal march rather than a series of conflicts, several of which may remain unresolved.

We Should All Be Feminists

'In Search of Equality' & 'Marriage, Land & Custom'

Richa Nagar - Muddying the Waters

Helen Bradford: Not a Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective

Not a Nongqawuse Story: An Anti-Heroine in Historical Perspective (Part 1) by TigersEye99