ABSTRACT On the Other Side of Babylon: Black Women and Epistemologies of Resistance in the Third World Women’s Alliance Assata Sankofa Kokayi This cultural and intellectual history analyzes the Third World Women’s Alliance (TWWA), its relationship with decolonization struggles in Africa, Asia, and Latin America, and positionality as an anti-imperialist U.S. Third World feminist alliance. Much of the scholarship shaping the trajectory of U.S. black feminist organizing during the late 1960s and 1970’s focus on women’s response to masculinist rhetoric within black nationalist movements during the second wave of feminism. While recent scholars proffer a more expansive “Black Left Feminist” framework for reassessing radical, transnational, black feminist politics, scholarly narratives are oftentimes grounded in U.S. parochialism. Explicit connections between black women’s intellectual production remain obscured. This study advances a revolutionary, anti-imperial origins of Black feminist organizing shaped by Third World solidarity and anticolonial discourse. By tracing the ideological and cultural developments of a pioneering black feminist organization, and contextualizing decolonization struggles in the Global South, this study fills a critical historical gap in feminist and Black Power scholarship. TWWA activists identified with the Third World. ‘Grounding’ their anti-imperialist and anticolonial liberation praxis, my work situates activists as “guerilla intellectuals” (using Guyanese historian Walter Rodney’s concept), specifically investigating their analyses of internal colonialism and U.S. imperialism. This scholarly intervention is important because it sheds light on how revolutionary black feminists forged alliances across sovereign borders and contributed theoretical acumen to the black radical tradition. Finally, this dissertation analyzes radical black women’s sustained critique of American Empire. To better understand the nature of activists’ repression by the state and their response, this study advances a disrespectability politics analytic to shed light on epistemic ruptures and the destabilizing effect of racialized state-sanctioned violence against black women in U.S. Third World-oriented groups.

Creator

• Kokayi, Assata Sankofa

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/n2-nqfe-mj64

Subject

• African American studies
• Women's studies

Language

• en

Alternate Identifier

• etdadmin_upload_770932
• http://dissertations.umi.com/northwestern:15328

Keyword

• Third World Women's Alliance
• Black Radical Tradition
• Black Women's History
• Disrespectability Politics
• Black Radical Feminism
• US-Third World

Date created

• 2020-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright