Theorizing Empowerment

Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought

Notisha Massaquoi, Njoki Nathani Wane

• Publisher: Inanna Publications
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781926708454
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

Theorizing Empowerment: Canadian Perspectives on Black Feminist Thought is a collection of articles by Black Canadian feminists centralizing the ways in which Black femininity and Black women's experiences are integral to understanding political and social frameworks in Canada. What does Black feminist thought mean to Black Canadian feminists in the Diaspora? What does it means to have a feminist practice which speaks to Black women in Canada? In exploring this question, this anthology collects new ideas and thoughts on the place of Black women's politics in Canada, combining the work of new/upcoming and established names in Black Canadian feminist studies. There are very few collections within Canada that have been produced with a Black Canadian feminist agenda in mind. This book stands out as a landmark contribution to feminist scholarship in general and the new and emerging area of Canadian Black feminist thought specifically. More broadly, this anthology is a celebration of Black Canadian women's lives, situating those lives in the Canadian landscape, and giving context and meaning to those lives in Canadian feminist theory and politics.

BLACK CANADIAN FEMINIST
EXPERIENCES AND STRUGGLES
MULTIPLE JEOPARDY

ROBERTA K. TIMOTHY

“THIRD WORLD WOMEN,” “WOMEN OF COLOUR,”
AND “MINORITY WOMEN”

An African/Black Feminist Analysis of Our Identities

I Am Identity

Wrapped in a warm blanket
I am adorned with Grandma’s homemade
coconut oil
Twisted is my hair in braids done tightly by my
mother,
Secured in brown wood beads given by my Aunty.
I am named after my Father’s mother
Ruchina is my Kikuyu name
I am from the womb of red soils
And the land of smiling suns and tall palm
trees.
I am the Black earth’s sweat
And the rain’s dance.
I breathe.
I feel.
I cry.
I resist.
I am an African woman.

—R. Timothy

African/Black1 communities in Canada are heterogeneous and made up of African peoples who speak a variety of languages, come from different classes, diverse sexual orientations, and have varying political, social, historical, economical, spiritual, and cultural affiliations. There are those who have lived in Canada for many generations, and others who have recently immigrated. The struggle for an African/Black identity in a society like Canada’s2—a white-settler colonial country, indoctrinated, developed, and maintained on colonial legacies—is a complex issue for members of African/Black communities. Identities are historical, social and political constructs used to categorize and relate to and among individuals, collectives, communities, and societies based on intersectional factors such as race, class, gender, sexual orientation, (dis)ability, and age, among others. These identities constitute labels that are either chosen or imposed on individuals, groups, and societies. Hence, the anti-colonial struggle for identities reflects the acts of resisting colonial-based imposition by actively examining and choosing constructs that reflect the socio-historical-political individual and collective experiences and realities, in this case, of African/Black women. These identities are often fluid, diverse, and multifaceted. Carole Boyce Davies (1994) discusses the complexities inherent in African/Black identities:

The terms that we use to name ourselves (Black, African, African-American, Black British, Minority, Latina/o, West Indian, Caribbean, Hispanic, People of Color, Women of Color, Afro-Caribbean, Third World and so on) carry their strings of echoes and inscriptions. Each represents an original misnaming and the simultaneous constant striving of the dispossessed for full representation. Each therefore must be used provisionally; each must be subject to new analyses, new questions and new understandings if we are to unlock some of the narrow terms of the discourses in which we are inscribed. In other words, at each arrival at a definition, we begin a new analysis, a new departure, a new interrogation of meaning, new contradictions. (5)

The racialized notions of “Blackness” constructed on colonial ideologies of “inferiority” and “savageness” (see Loomba 1998; Fanon 1966) have created homogenous racist perceptions and images of African/Black identity that persist today. We see this in racist portrayals like the 1994 Royal Ontario Museum display of the “uncivilized” African; the Canadian media’s creation and coverage of “Black-on-Black Crime,” particularly with respect to recent gun violence in Toronto; the descriptions of the oversexed and/or ignorant African/Black HIV victim; the impoverished African nation “saved” by international development agencies such as CIDA3 and World Vision (Timothy 2007); the silencing of African Canadian Muslim communities after the September 11th, 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre Towers in New York. We continue to struggle to justify the need for Black-focused schools in Canada (Dei 2005; Sium 2005) where African students are still disproportionately dropping out or failing within the educational system (Dei 1996; Dei and Calliste 2000). These are only some examples of the contemporary colonial experiences of African/Black peoples within modern day Canada. These examples highlight the influence of colonial constructed identities and practices that impact and prescribe homogenous conceptualizations of African/Black identity locally and globally. These examples have also generated collective responses of resistance from within African/Black communities that challenge racist stereotypes of African identity (see Timothy 2007).

The perceived homogeneity of African/Black identity has been used by the Canadian government, its media, and educational systems (colonial systems of power) in conjunction with international bodies to sustain the perceptions of African/Black communities as “inferior,” “criminal,” and “needy,” thus silencing and excluding our diverse voices and experiences. More importantly, this strategy has been used to systematically dominate, control, and dichotomize African/Black people through a power politics based on violence that divides “us” (African peoples with little power) and “them” (the rest of the world, usually referring to the dominant White society, which has a lot of power).

The experiences of being African women in Canada is even more complex based on intersectional factors such as race, gender, class, (dis)ability, and sexual orientation, all of which intensify the violent oppression that deems them an oxymoron—irrelevant but necessary to sustain the capitalist, colonial systems and practices.4 African/Black women living in Canada come from diverse backgrounds, experiences, and respond differently to societal inequalities. I argue here that there are many kinds of African/Black feminisms based on our diverse multiple locations, which in the Canadian context are unique.

The diversity among African women living in Canada is a meeting of difference and sameness. Unlike our African American sisters, the majority of African/Black women arrived in Canada during the past 50 years through recent immigration/migration processes.5 The African/Black Diaspora in Canada consists of African feminists who have lived in Africa, the Caribbean, Europe, and other parts of the Americas. The differences between them are also based on their diverse social, historical, and political locations that vary depending on their country of origin, class, sexual orientation, age, (dis)ability, language, health, employment, education, immigration status, trauma, and many other related factors. The similarities among African/Black feminisms are the struggles to continually define our communities and ourselves as heterogeneous while collectively resisting colonial, oppression-based violence.

In this article, I examine the heterogeneous identities of African/Black women living in Canada, contrasting them to pre-assigned, socially-constructed homogenous identities that are reflected in the use of labels that impose membership to specific groups. I suggest that these labels are racialized social constructions of a colonial legacy, and do not become de facto identities. Thus, my focus in this article is to explore the way in which some African/Black women identify themselves in relation to these labels—“Third World Women,” “Women of Colour,” and “Minority Women”—and what it means for these women to be “Canadian.”

I draw from ten interviews conducted in 1998 with diversely located African/Black women counsellors working in shelters in the city of Toronto. The methodology employed in the research was an integrated African/Black feminist, anti-colonial, anti-racist lens where women’s diverse voices and experiences were revealed, not only supporting oral traditions and the production of indigenous African feminist knowledges but also challenging colonial constructions of sameness of African/Black women’s identities by using counter-hegemonic responses. Additionally, diversely located women’s voices and experiences support and foster transnational collective strategies of resistance. In this essay, I will illustrate that African/Black feminists’ theorization and praxis is essential for collective resistance to homogeneous elaborations of African/Black identities as well as to challenge these oppressive constructions. First, I will establish the theoretical framework through a discussion of African/Black feminisms, their relation to anti-colonialism, and some examples of their diverse elaborations. Second, I will briefly illustrate the socially-constructed use of labels as markers of identity and how African/Black women relate to these labels. The perceptions of African/Black women implicit in the use of these labels will be discussed indicating how they impact African/Black women’s identities. Third, African/Black women’s own perceptions of their identities will be outlined by looking specifically at how a group of ten African/Black women relate to the labels “Third World Women,” “Women of Colour,” and “Minority Women.” I will conclude by discussing the connection between African/Black feminisms and collective resistance against racist, colonized identities.

WHAT ARE AFRICAN/BLACK FEMINISMS?

Definitions of what African/Black feminisms are, or are not, vary according to the social locations of the subjects or collectives that these specific definitions refer to. African/Black feminisms consist of relationships between theory and praxis of resistance based on Black women’s lived and worked experiences, histories, knowledges, cultures, identities, theorizations, and political actions. African scholars’ critiques of mainstream feminist movements need to be reexamined without focusing solely on experiences of white supremacy within co-opted feminist movements. African women’s feminism not only predates colonialism but also mainstream white feminisms whose historical memory pertains to a post-industrialization era of changes and struggles for white, middle-class, female emancipation. African feminisms must re-examine the dismissal of feminism as a “white women’s concept,” re-evaluating falsified memories positioning African/Black feminisms’ emergence as a result of Eurocentric exclusion in the feminist movements of the 1970s (Mama 1997; Steady 1981; Timothy 2007). In many ancient African cultures women were active participants in advocating and demanding change in their communities (Amadiume 1997).

Numerous debates focus on whether patriarchy did or did not exist in Africa before colonization (see Timothy 2007). The experiences of African women are a direct result of the violence of colonialism in relation not only to patriarchy but also to racism, sexism, heterosexism, and classism. The violence perpetuated on Black women through enslavement, and domestic and state-based violence sanctioned by colonial nations is certain. The impact of colonization on Black women’s lives is very critical to understanding African/Black feminisms. Black women, for instance, are often presented as poor, illiterate, hypersexualized, aggressive, and irrelevant in local and global arenas. African/Black feminist lenses continue to dismantle oppressive international ideologies often backed by unsubstantiated statistics that exist to silence the voices and experiences of African women (Timothy 2007). Dialogues on A...