Lessons from Audre Lorde’s The Uses of Anger: UCONN Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at 50
In recent years, we have witnessed renewed calls for women to embrace anger as a source of power. These voices have Lorde’s “The Uses of Anger”, first delivered at the University of Connecticut (UCONN), Storrs, in 1981, to thank for charting an innovative scholarly and poetic terrain that theorizes anger as much more empowering and liberating than conventional discussions of the term typically allow.
Lorde’s essay redefined anger productively, approaching it as an epistemological tool igniting a desire for self and collective liberation. The result was a remarkable critical reflection that laid the groundwork for deconstructing broader systems of oppression, particularly, heteronormativity, heteropatriarchy, institutionalized racial poverty, racial capitalism, and white privilege. Lorde’s essay moved with precision, centering Black women’s struggles in a world built around the use – and abuse – of racialized people subjected to systematic dehumanization.
In their introduction, Jane Anna Gordon, Elva Orozco Mendoza, and Sherry Zane reflect on the inheritance, lessons, and responsibilities that Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies must grapple with if it is to deepen and fulfill its radical mission.
Guided by the imperative to look backward to understand the present and forge a future, the book closes with a sankofic interview with M. Jacqui Alexander and Beverly Guy-Sheftall, conducted by Briona Simone Jones.
USD $ 15.00
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Categories: | Black Women, Feminism, Intersecionality, LBGTI, Pamphlets, Political Freedom & Security, Political Science, Politics and Society, Racism, Thinking Freedom |
Book Format | Print Book, PDF |
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Set out in seven sections, this book of 54 essays deals with deep ecological changes taking place primarily in Nigeria but with clear linkages to changes elsewhere in the world. The essays are laid out with an undergird of concerns that characterise the author’s approach to human rights and environmental justice advocacy. The first section rightly presents broad spectrum ecological wars manifesting through disappearing trees, spreading desertification, floods, gas flaring and false climate solutions.
You can read this book online for free.
The second section zeroes in on the different types of violence that pervade the oil fields of the Niger Delta and draws out the divisive power of crude oil by holding up Sudan as a country divided by oil and which has created a myriad of fissures in Nigeria. The exploitation of crude oil sucks not just the crude, it also sucks the dignity of workers that must work at the most polluting fronts.
Section three underscores the need for strict regulation of the fossil fuels sector and shows that voluntary transparency templates adopted by transnational oil companies are mere foils to fool the gullible and are exercises in futility as the profit driven corporations would do anything to ensure that their balance sheets please their top guns and shareholders. The fourth section builds up with examples of gross environmental misbehaviours that leave sorrow and blood in a diversity of communities ranging from Chile to Brazil and the United States of America.
Section five of the book is like a wedge in between layers of ecological disasters and extractive opacity. It takes a look at the socio-political malaise of Nigeria, closing with an acerbic look at crude-propelled despotism and philanthropic tokens erected as payment for indulgence or as some sort of pollution offsets.
The closing sections provide excellent analyses of the gaps and contortions in the regulatory regimes in Nigeria. It would be surprising if these were not met with resistance on the ground.
These essays provide insights into the background to the horrific ecological manifestations that dot the Nigerian environment and the ecological cancers spreading in the world. They underscore the fact there are no one-issue struggles. Working in a context where analyses of ecological matters is not the norm, decades of consistent environmental activism has placed the writer in good stead to unlock the webs that promote these scandalous realities.
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Claim No Easy Victories: The Legacy of Amilcar Cabral
This collection of essays explores the multifaceted nature of the Amílcar Cabral’s legacy with the specific goal of understanding his relevance to contemporary politics. Ranging from his philosophical arguments about culture and colonialism to more concrete historical explorations of his impact on African American movements in the United States, the book is an accessible and valuable introduction to Cabral’s thought. … As a collection it is a timely one and will be valuable for anyone seeking to be introduced or reacquainted with debates about revolution, colonialism and culture, nationalism, and pan-Africanism. Claudia Gastrow in Feminist Africa
2013 marked the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Amilcar Cabral, a revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cap Verde. Cabral’s influence stretched well beyond the shores of West Africa. He had a profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the black liberation movement in the US. In this unique collection of essays, contemporary thinkers from across Africa and internationally commemorate the anniversary of Cabral’s assassination. They reflect on the legacy of this extraordinary individual and his relevance to contemporary struggles for self-determination and emancipation. The book serves both as an introduction, or reintroduction, to one whom global capitalism would rather see forgotten. Understanding Cabral sheds light on the necessity of grounding radical change in the creation of theory based on the actual conditions within which a movement is attempting to develop. Cabral’s theoretical ideas and revolutionary practice of building popular movements for liberation are assessed by each of the authors as critically relevant today. His well-known phrase “Claim no easy victories” resonates today no less than it did during his lifetime. The volume comprises sections on Cabral’s legacy; reflections on the relevance of his ideas; Cabral and the emancipation of women; Cabral and the pan-Africanists; culture and education; and Cabral’s contribution to African American struggles. A selected bibliography provides an overview of Cabral’s writings and of writings about Cabral.
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Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain (New and Expanded Edition)
First published in 1978, and winning the Martin Luther King Memorial Prize for that year, Finding a Voice established a new discourse on South Asian women’s lives and struggles in Britain. Through discussions, interviews and intimate one-to-one conversations with South Asian women, in Urdu, Hindi, Bengali and English, it explored family relationships, the violence of immigration policies, deeply colonial mental health services, militancy at work and also friendship and love. The seventies was a time of some iconic anti-racist and working-class struggles. They are presented here from the point of view of the women who participated in and led them.
This new edition includes a preface by Meena Kandasamy, some historic photographs, and a remarkable new chapter titled ‘In conversation with Finding a Voice: 40 years on’ in which younger South Asian women write about their own lives and struggles weaving them around those portrayed in the book.
An amazing review of the book can be read here: https://librofulltime.wordpress.com/2023/03/03/book-review-amrit-wilson-finding-a-voice-asian-women-in-britain/
Here is an extract:
This book is a call to collective action and sisterhood, a memorial and an instruction to keep going. In her Reflections, Wilson points out White feminists need to let Asian women work on their own problems while standing in support, not intrude and try to sort their issues out for them, and the valuable material she gathers in this book is indeed because she was part of the communities she was studying, speaking to the women in their kitchens in their own languages. I was so pleased to be able to revisit this wonderful work. – Lix Dexter @LyzzyBee_Libro
A great interview with Amrit Wilson in Montreal Serai (October 4, 2020).
‘This book is a wonderful, important and necessary reminder of all the black feminist work behind us and all that is left to do.’ —Sara Ahmed, feminist writer and independent scholar, and author of Living a Feminist Life
‘Finding a Voice acquires a new significance in this neoliberal era…an indispensable archive as well as a narrative of a past that is not past but reactivated and recast…’ —Kumkum Sangari, William F.Vilas Research Professor of English and the Humanities, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee
‘A ground-breaking book, as relevant today as it was in the seventies – and evidence, if ever such were needed, that the struggles of Asian, African and Caribbean women remain inextricably linked.’ —Stella Dadzie, founder member of OWAAD and author of Heart of the Race
‘Finding a Voice… was affirmation that our lives mattered, that our experiences with all their cultural complexities, mattered.’ —Meera Syal, British comedian, writer, playwright, singer, journalist, producer and actress.
‘This new edition comes at a time…when we are experiencing the growth of the surveillance state and when our narratives are being co-opted and used against us. Finding a Voiceis not only welcome, it is necessary.’ — Marai Larasi, Director, Imkaan; Co-Chair of UK’s End Violence Against Women Coalition.
Amrit Wilson is a writer and activist on issues of race and gender in Britain and South Asian politics. She is a founder member of South Asia Solidarity Group and the Freedom Without Fear Platform, and board member of Imkaan, a Black, South Asian and minority ethnic women’s organisation dedicated to combating violence against women in Britain. She was a founder member of Awaz and an active member of OWAAD. She is author, amongst other books, of Dreams Questions Struggles—South Asian women in Britain (Pluto Press 2006) and The Challenge Road: Women and the Eritrean revolution (Africa World Press 1991). The first edition of Finding a Voice: Asian Women in Britain won the the Martin Luther King Jr award.
It is the impact of oppression, racism and class which unifies South Asian women and the book comes at a time where we see the continued rise of the far right, misogyny, issues of class and the gig economy here and across the globe being played out in the media and perpetuated by male leaders going unchallenged by the state.
These new voices confirm how groundbreaking the book has been as a reference point for south Asian women now through listening to the voices of women from four decades ago, honouring their contribution and speaking in solidarity with them. As Wilson says in her introduction, it “reclaims our collective past as an act of resistance.”
An excellent read.
‘Reclaiming our collective past’: Amrit Wilson reflects on 40 years of anti-racist feminist work
By Sophia Siddiqui ARCHIVESPOLITICS 30th October 2018
http://gal-dem.com/collective-past-amrit-wilson-reflects-anti-racist-feminist-work/?fbclid=IwAR2qF13MA82F-9hztnRg4hN8ry5EEiZ2rYUtzX4OPuG7CELOzffhCTBjm4o -
Transcending our Colonial Place: Africa and the dialectics of emancipation
Fanon exhorted us (his posthumous comrades) to abandon Eurocentric thinking and to reconnect with dialectical thought in order as he puts it to “work out new concepts” and he insisted that “if we want humanity to advance a step farther […] then we must invent and we must make discoveries”. I propose to take Fanon at his word and to return to the dialectic as subjective thought rather than as motion of history; as a specific political subjectivity rather than as an objective development. Dialectical thought should be considered as the core feature of any politics of emancipation, a politics that is founded on what is common to humanity, an egalitarian alternative to the existing neocolonial racist capitalist organisation of society.
This book seeks to outline and assess the thinking of emancipatory politics in Africa as it changed in different historical periods. It also contrasts such politics to state political subjectivities which, by their very nature, reproduce given social placements or stated differently the allocation of people to hierarchical locations in society. Emancipatory politics always affirms a rejection of the place allocated to the oppressed and therefore contradicts and transcends the regular state subjectivities embodied in culture which ultimately attempt to justify such placement. Emancipatory politics is exceptional and therefore rare, and it is dialectical because it combines in a contradictory manner the culture of placement from which it emanates with the idea of universal freedom.
Dialectics is not the affirmation of historical necessity; it is a subjective political possibility opposed to (neo)colonial capitalism which has relegated the majority of our population to conditions of perennial impoverishment, oppression and gradual alienation from any Idea of being Human. This work illustrates the fact that dialectical thought has existed in Africa over millennia, with its earliest manifestation being in Ancient Egypt. The text also draws on the universalist content of African proverbs to show the possible dialectical content of African modes of thought, illustrating the emancipatory potential already in existence in some African cultures.
The contemporary attempts at achieving freedom on the African continent – the liberation struggles of the twentieth century – failed fundamentally because they rapidly abandoned any idea of universal humanity and held that emancipation was to be achieved through the medium of the state. It was the desire of the oligarchy that inherited independence to be accepted and integrated into the global capitalist economy for the purposes of state-led ‘development’. The effect, after a short nationalist interlude, was not an inclusive form of ‘nation-building’ but rather the building of a neocolonial state by a Western-oriented oligarchy unable or unwilling to meet the basic needs of its own people. To succeed in this endeavour, the newly independent state retained many oppressive features of its colonial predecessor remoulding them to suit its needs. The book shows how in an overwhelmingly neocolonial context, it is of little consequence to the oppressed masses in Africa whether their political system is formally labelled as ‘democratic’ or not. In fact, given the endemic corruption among the oligarchies in power, military dictatorships can garner mass popular support for shorter or longer periods if they are seen to resist (however mildly) neocolonial domination. The recent examples (early 2020s) of proto-nationalist military coups in Francophone West Africa (Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso and Niger) are cases in point.
This book develops theoretical arguments that redirect intellectual thought away from Euro-American liberal conceptions as well as from neo-nativist fashions and vulgar Marxisms, so as to reassert the importance of latent ‘African potentials’ that are frequently embodied in collective popular statements for rethinking, dialectically, a true politics of emancipation on the African continent.
1) the Ancient World: Ancient Egypt (The Tale of the Eloquent Peasant – 4000 BCE) and Plato (as read by Alain Badiou);
2) Pre-colonial Africa and resistance to slavery: the Donsolu Kalikan (in the Manden/Mali, 1222), the Antonian Movement (in Kongo, 1684-1706) and its continuation in the Lemba Movement, and the Haitian Revolution (undertaken by slaves from Africa),
3) The National Liberation Struggles of the 1960s as thought by Fanon and Cabral, and
4) The mass popular struggles in South Africa during the 1980s.
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Lenin150 (Samizdat): 2nd expanded edition
For all the official historiographic efforts at forging a mythologised image of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov as the austere, no-nonsense, professional revolutionary, the really existing flesh and blood Lenin understood and appreciated that the most materialist action an individual must carry out without fault to metabolise the struggle for communism is to breathe. Not just biologically respire but consciously breathe. Breathe for oneself and breathe for and with others. If it is indeed our desire to breathe new life into the long choking red star, a new oxygenic Communist politics of walking and breathing is what we must aspire to, inspire, respire and encourage.
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Wither the Franc Zone in Africa?
Edited by Demba Moussa Dembele and Carlos Cardoso
This book is based on a conference held in October 2012, African Countries and the Franc Zone: Remaining in the Trap or Opting for Monetary Independence. It reviews the global context, characterized by the systemic crisis of capitalism and the questioning of its legitimacy in several regions of the world, particularly in the global South. It provides an overview the challenges of economic and monetary emancipation; the consequences of the Franc Zone and its implications for the development of African countries, including the analysis of the latter’s economic and social record; and reviews the experiences of countries that gained their monetary sovereignty and the lessons for the creation of a West African currency.
In addition to providing the proceedings of the conference, the book includes essays by Nicolas Agbohou, Sanou Mbaye, Demba Moussa Dembele, Mohamed Ben Omar Ndiaye, Yash Tandon and Lansana Keita.
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Partisan Universalism: Essays in Honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu
Critically engaging Ato Sekyi-Otu’s notion of partisan universalism, this timely volume of essays speaks directly to the onto-metaphysical issues that will give Africana thought the new foundations that will enable it to move beyond the lin- guistic turn, brush aside the ashes of Afro-pessimism, engage Badiou’s new mathematical universalism, and to launch new projects of liberation on decolonized grounds of greater epistemic independence. A must read for all concerned with the future of Africana theory and praxis. — Paget Henry, author of Caliban’s Reason.
Responding to the invitation ‘to re-member severed but shareable things’, these lovers of truth, freedom, and dignity celebrate the searing intellect, generosity, wit, and compassion of the person and the scholar Ato Sekyi-Otu. … Combined with Sekyi-Otu’s autobiographical reflections of learning to be Black in the United States and insistence that Afropessimism turns the perverse ontology of the antiblack world into a Black ontology, this is a precious contribution. Not to be missed! —Jane Anna Gordon, author of Statelessness and Contemporary Enslavement and co-editor (with Drucilla Cornell) of Creolizing Rosa Luxemburg
Ato Sekyi-Otu’s thought is one of the most important and exciting in Africa today. The texts compiled in this volume celebrate and engage with the work of Sekyi-Otu … They bear eloquent witness to Sekyi-Otu’s stature as a thinker and to his consistent commitment to the universalization of humanity in both theory and practice. Deeply anchored in African cultures and modes of life, Sekyi-Otu has shown how ideas of human universality are ingrained in African popular sayings and proverbs and are regularly reflected in artistic creations. — Michael Neocosmos, Emeritus Professor in the Humanities, Rhodes University, South Africa
This anthology in honour of Ato Sekyi-Otu is indispensable for those concerned with Frantz Fanon’s ideas of ‘ false’ and ‘ true ‘ decolonisation and about social humanist critique of post-structuralism’ s truncated version of anti-colonialism. Sekyi-Otu accomplishes precisely such a critique in his Fanon’s Dialectic of Experience and in Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays. The essays here are exemplars of such a critique which, together with Fanon and Sekyi -Otu, build a legacy for envisioning a post-imperialist world. The authors of this volume rescue post-colonial studies from a stale and unfruitful post-structuralist reading of anti-colonialism by positing an apparent paradox of ‘left ‘ or ‘ partisan’ universalism which can then be dialectically resolved. Intellectually and politically active at once, this anthology shows how Sekyi-Otu and his co- authors can help the reader to move beyond a binary and solipsistic stance towards a project of a real emancipation, a ‘ true ‘ decolonisation. In this neither the living experience individual nor the collectivity implied in the notion of the human lose their specificity and universality. — Himani Bannerji, Professor Emeritus and Senior Scholar, Department of Sociology, York University
This collection of essays celebrates the work of Ato Sekyi-Otu as a scholar, teacher and friend, marking his extraordinary contribution to the philosophy, politics and praxis of liberation. As Ato Sekyi-Otu has argued in his most recent book, Left Universalism, Africacentric Essays (Routlege 2019), universalism is an ‘inescapable presupposition of ethical judgment in general and critique in particular, especially indispensable for radical criticism of conditions of existence in postcolonial society and for vindicating visions of social regeneration’. Universalism must and can only be partisan. Edited by Gamal Abdel-Shehid and Sofia Noori, the collection includes essays by Stefan Kipfler, Patrick Taylor, Sophie Mcall, Gamal Abdel-Shehid, Jeremy M. Glick, Nigel C. Gibson, Jeff Noonan, Esteve Morera, Tyler Gasteiger, Olúfeṃ́i Táíẃò, Susan Dianne Brophy, Nergis Canefe, Chistoher Balcom, Lewis Gordon, and by Ato Sekyi-Otu himself.
CONTENTS
- Introduction: Gamal Abdel-Shehid
- Fanon for a post-imperial world: On universals and other human matters: Stefan Kipfer
- The Sea Menagerie: Esi Edugyan’s Atlantic: Patrick Taylor
- Reconsidering Fanon’s language of recognition in Indigenous studies: Sophie McCall
- On Fanon and Lacan: Continuities and structural psychiatry: Gamal Abdel-Shehid
- Aimé Césaire’s Two ways to lose yourself: The Exception and the rule: Jeremy M. Glick
- This Africa to Come: Nigel C. Gibson
- Speaking for, speaking through, speaking with: Abstract and concrete universality in the struggle for human emancipation: Jeff Noonan
- Universality: Notes towards rethinking the history of philosophy: Esteve Morera
- Husserl and Tran Duc Thao: Crisis, renewal, and the ontology of possibility: Tyler Gasteiger
- Can Kwame Gyekye’s moderate communitarianism take the individual seriously? Olúfeṃ́i Taíẃò
- ‘Innocuous Nihilism’, social reproduction and the terms of partisanship: Susan Dianne Brophy
- Marxism, Law and the Global South: Asiatic Mode of Production Debates, The Legal Subject and the Promise of Left Universalism: Nergis Canefe
- Universalism and immanent critique in ‘The End of Progress and Left Universalism’: Christopher Balcom
- CON-TEXTS OF CRITIQUE: Ato Sekyi-Otu
- Afterword: Lewis Gordon
- About the contributors