-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Anne-Marie McCallionPublisher's Note: A powerful study of the women's liberation movement in the U.S., from abolitionist days to the present, that demonstrates how it has always been hampered by the racist and classist biases of its leaders. From the widely revered and legendary political activist and scholar Angela Davis.Comment: This text would be useful for courses which touch upon Black Feminism, intersectionality, Slavery or the history of feminism.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Tomasz Zyglewicz, Shannon Brick, Michael GreerIntroduction: The paucity of literature on the black woman is outrageous on its face. But we must also contend with the fact that too many of these rare studies must claim as their signal achievement the reinforcement of fictitious cliches. They have given credence to grossly distorted categories through which the black woman continues to be perceived.Comment (from this Blueprint): Content warning: Details of cruelties of slavery, sexual assault. In this 1971 text written while incarcerated, Angela Davis makes an argument against the truth of a stereotype of the black enslaved woman. She argues that, contrary to popular belief, the stereotype of a black woman under slavery as the “matriarch” (i.e., dominating the men in their lives and colluding with the white slaver in black people’s oppression) is not true. Instead, she argues, appealing to empirical evidence and marxist theory, that black women’s position in the community of slaves uniquely positioned them to aid in liberation struggles. She argues it is empirically borne out that they in fact were crucial to both explicit and everyday resistance efforts.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
Fanon (1925-1961) was born in the French West Indies and studied in France before moving to Algeria to join the independence struggle. In this text, originally published in French in 1952, he addresses the Black man's condition, and more particularly his subjectivity and experience in the colonial context of the French West Indies and of France in general, also drawing parallel with North Africa and Indochina. Black Skin, White Masks is both a minute and complex description of the violence of colonization and a sketch of a liberation from its effects. A psychiatrist by training, Fanon investigates the psychological impact of both racism and colonization, with a strong focus on inter-subjective relations, including the intersection of race and gender relations. He uses a large variety of resources: philosophy (a critical reading of Sartre, an elaboration of Hegel's slave-master dialectic, Leiris, Marcel, and contemporary linguistics) ; Marxism (materialism and alienation); psychiatry and psychoanalysis; the literary Négritude movement (Black Francophones writers who, starting in the 1930s, wrote about lived experience of blackness, displacement and colonialism). Its reception, though belated, has nevertheless made it one of the seminal works of postcolonial theory.
Comment: This work is rather difficult by its intricacy, the importance of often implicit philosophical references, and its inscription in hyper-contemporary debates in philosophy, literature and psychology. However, both its radicalism and the descriptions of lived first-person experiences make it a rather didactic and striking short essay. A classical text of postcolonial theory and French thought in general.
-
Expand entry
-
Added by: Zoé Grange-MarczakAbstract:
A Jew born in Tunisia, Memmi (1920–2020) rose to fame with The Colonizer and The Colonized, prefaced by Sartre. Educated in Tunisia, Algeria, and France, he settled in Paris, where he wrote novels and essays alike. His main topics include colonialism, the Jewish condition, and Tunisia.
An early theorist of decolonization, he used a sociological approach, getting to psycho-sociology, working through portraits—the original title of the book is Portrait of the Colonized, Preceded by Portrait of the Colonizer—trying to describe "rendings of the spirit" as "introjections of social conflicts", according to Sartre in his preface.
Published in 1957, this work aims to show the interweaving of the colonizer's and the colonized's mind, clearly sketched out by the binary structure of the essay.
Memmi starts with the economic aspect of colonization, describing how the fundamental inequality of colonization gives the colonizer a much more favorable material situation. One of his key theses is the interdependence of the colonizer and the colonized, trying to go beyond Marxism and psychoanalysis. He characterizes the consciousness of the colonizer through three discoveries: "profit, privilege, and usurpation". To this duality, he adds several third parties: nationals of other countries, assimilated minorities, Jews, colonized participating in the colonial administration, etc, giving a vivid account of the entanglement between both subjectivity and objective structures, and colonizer and colonized.Comment: Memmi is a good complement to a class on colonization as he brings in a specific North-African Jewish point of view. His influence on existentialist philosophy also makes him appropriate for political philosophy. Can go with readings of Sartre, Said or Fanon.