Black Women in the African Diaspora Seeking Their Cultural Heritage Through Studying Abroad

NASPA Journal ◽  
2002 ◽  
Vol 39 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rose M. Morgan ◽  
Desideria T. Mwegelo ◽  
Laura N. Turner
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
African Women ◽  
Black American ◽  
Mutual Learning ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
Studying Abroad ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
And Gender

While African women and women of African heritage share many similar experiences, their continental separation causes them to have many differences. However, examining the collective experiences of African and Black women of African descent can help frame discussions about ethnic, racial, and gender identities. Central to this discussion is the question: How can African and Black American women connect to share their experiences and engage in mutual learning? World travel is one way for women to experience such an identity connection.

“Four American Moslem Ladies”

Being Muslim ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 39-75
Author(s):  
Sylvia Chan-Malik
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
Muslim Women ◽  
Black American ◽  
African American Female ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
Missionary Movement ◽  
And Gender ◽  
The U.S

Chapter One is an examination of the earliest known photograph of self-identified Muslim women in the U.S. Taken in 1923, the photo features four African American female converts to the Ahmadiyya Movement in Islam (AMI), a South Asia-based missionary movement that attracted significant numbers of Black women, between the 1920 and 1970s. The chapter offers a multilayered and at times, circuitous account of the histories which produced the photograph, specifically the racial politics of 1920s Chicago, the race and gender politics of Ahmadiyya missionary Dr. Mufti Muhammad Sadiq; and the desires for safety and spirituality that led Black American women to Islam.

Sprints of Citizenship

2020 ◽  
pp. 46-80
Author(s):  
Cat M. Ariail
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
The United States ◽  
American Identity ◽  
Black American ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
Pan American ◽  
And Gender ◽  
United States Olympic Committee ◽  
The Cold War

This chapter examines how the performances of black women athletes at the 1951 Pan-American Games and 1952 Olympic Games made it difficult for the institutions of mainstream American sport to advance an uncontested image of American identity. Due to the conditions of the Cold War, the United States Olympic Committee and Amateur Athletic Union became more committed to using athletes to advertise the believed superiority of American democracy. Because of their race and gender, black women track stars disrupted this project, inserting blackness and femaleness into the image of Americanness through their accomplishments. In doing so, they also demonstrated that sport, despite its conservative connotations, served as a rare cultural space in which black American women could display their capacity and autonomy.

The Pan-African Woman, 1972–1976

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Ashley D. Farmer
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Gender Equality ◽  
Women Activists ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
Black American ◽  
African Woman ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
Pan African ◽  
Politics And Gender ◽  
And Gender

Chapter 4 explores how black women activists extended these gendered debates beyond American borders. It contextualizes their interest in and identification with the African and Pan-African liberation struggles of the 1970s and explores their speeches and conference resolutions from the 1972 All-Africa Women’s Conference and the 1974 Sixth Pan-African Congress as examples of how they articulated their ideal of the “Pan-African Woman.” The chapter illustrates how black women activists theorized a political identity that advocated for African-centered politics and gender equality across ideological, geographical, and organizational lines. It also foregrounds how they repositioned black American women at the forefront of diasporic liberation struggles, challenging black men’s real and imagined positions as the leaders of global Black Power struggles.

THE SINS OF THE FATHER: GENDER- BASED VIOLENCE IN POST-APARTHEID SOUTH AFRICA

2017 ◽  
Vol 14 (2) ◽  
pp. 57-70 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lyn Snodgrass
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Black Women ◽  
South African ◽  
African Women ◽  
Gender Based Violence ◽  
Political Issues ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Gender Based ◽  
And Gender ◽  
South African Women

This article explores the complexities of gender-based violence in post-apartheid South Africa and interrogates the socio-political issues at the intersection of class, ‘race’ and gender, which impact South African women. Gender equality is up against a powerful enemy in societies with strong patriarchal traditions such as South Africa, where women of all ‘races’ and cultures have been oppressed, exploited and kept in positions of subservience for generations. In South Africa, where sexism and racism intersect, black women as a group have suffered the major brunt of this discrimination and are at the receiving end of extreme violence. South Africa’s gender-based violence is fuelled historically by the ideologies of apartheid (racism) and patriarchy (sexism), which are symbiotically premised on systemic humiliation that devalues and debases whole groups of people and renders them inferior. It is further argued that the current neo-patriarchal backlash in South Africa foments and sustains the subjugation of women and casts them as both victims and perpetuators of pervasive patriarchal values.

Kenya Colony and the Kenya Novel: The East African Heritage of “A Very Fine Negress” in A Room of One’s Own

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeanne Dubino
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Black Women ◽  
Virginia Woolf ◽  
African Women ◽  
East African ◽  
African Heritage ◽  
The People ◽  
African Women Writers ◽  
White Settlers ◽  
Isak Dinesen

‘It is one of the great advantages of being a woman that one can pass even a very fine negress without wishing to make an Englishwoman of her.’ Virginia Woolf, A Room of One’s Own At the time Virginia Woolf’s narrator made this observation in the late 1920s, a number of her British and other European contemporary women writers were in fact passing by and indeed living among black women in one of Great Britain’s colonies, Kenya. Isak Dinesen (1885-1962) was among the most famous, and her memoir Out of Africa (1937), commemorates her years on a Kenyan plantation (1914-1931). Along with the canonical Danish Dinesen were British women whose work has been long forgotten, including Nora K. Strange (1884-1974) and Florence Riddell (1885-1960), both of whom wrote what is called the “Kenya Novel.” The Kenya Novel is a subgenre of romantic fiction set in the white highlands of Britain’s Crown Colony Kenya. The titles alone—e.g., Kenya Calling (1928) and Courtship in Kenya (1932) by Strange, and Kismet in Kenya (1927) and Castles in Kenya (1929) by Riddell—give a flavor of their content. Because these novels were popular in Britain, it is very likely that Woolf knew about them, but she does not refer to them in her diaries, letters, or published writing. Even so, it would be worth testing this famous comment by a Room’s narrator about (white) women’s lack of propensity to recreate others in her own image, or more specifically, to dominate the colonial other. How do Woolf’s white contemporaries, living in Kenya, represent black women? Given that Strange and Riddell were part of the settler class, we can expect that their views reflect dominant colonial ideology. The formulaic nature of the Kenya Novel, and its focus on the lives of white settlers, also mean that the portrayal of the lives of the people whose lands were brutally expropriated would hardly be treated with respect or as little more than backdrops. Yet it is important to understand these other global contexts in which Woolf is working and the role that some of her contemporary women writers played in the shaping of them. This paper concludes with an overview of the separate legacies of Woolf and her fellow Anglo-African women writers up to the present day.

scholarly journals Triple Consciousness: The Reimagination of Black Female Identities in Contemporary American Culture

2018 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 296-306
Author(s):  
Nahum Welang
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
White Women ◽  
American Culture ◽  
Black Female ◽  
Double Consciousness ◽  
Black Womanhood ◽  
Race And Gender ◽  
Black Feminists ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
And Gender

Abstract My article underscores the intermediate existence of black American women between race and gender by stressing the role white patriarchy and black hypermasculinity play in the marginalisation of black female voices and the prioritisation of white women’s interests within and beyond mainstream feminist spaces. In order to legitimise this intermediate existence of black women, my article develops the triple consciousness theory (TCT). Inspired by W.E.B. Du Bois’ concept of double consciousness, TCT argues that black women view themselves through three lenses and not two: America, blackness and womanhood. Black feminists, TCT affirms, are able to reimagine misguided narratives of black womanhood in contemporary American culture by unpacking the complexity of this threefold consciousness. In Bad Feminist, Roxane Gay strives for the inclusion of pluralist voices in the mainstream feminist movement and in Lemonade, Beyonce uses Afrofuturist tropes, reappropriation and gothic imagery to exorcise the generational pain of betrayal by black men and white women. With Insecure, Issa Rae radicalises feminist theory by critiquing archetypes attached to black womanhood and in Marvel’s Black Panther, not only do black women possess the unprecedented agency to shape their own identities on their own terms, there is also an existential reconnection with their past.

“Deep Like the Sea and Strong Like the Earth”

2016 ◽  
Vol 43 (1) ◽  
pp. 77-103
Author(s):  
Buffie Longmire-Avital ◽  
Brenda M. Reavis
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Online Survey ◽  
Male Partner ◽  
Marriage Market ◽  
Early Death ◽  
Black American ◽  
American Women ◽  
White American ◽  
Black American Women ◽  
White American Women

Research indicates that 52% of Black American women will marry by age 30, compared with 81% of White American women. Black women prefer a partner of the same race and one who has the means to provide financial support. However, due to factors that disproportionately affect Black American men, such as incarceration, early death rates, unemployment rates, and lower educational attainment, finding an available Black male partner is challenging. Black women may have a smaller marriage market. To explore how this limited market may be influencing partner selections for Black women, the current study looked at which characteristics heterosexual Black American women seek in an ideal partner, as well as what traits are considered nonnegotiable. Qualitative responses gathered from 128 nonmarried Black American women (ages 18-29, M = 23) who completed an anonymous online survey were analyzed using content analysis. Overall findings indicated that compatibility was the most frequently listed characteristic, not race or financial status. This and other findings are discussed in regard to an expanding perception of heterosexual Black female partner selection habits.

Invisible Visits

2019 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Tina K. Sacks
Keyword(s):  
Black Women ◽  
Healthcare Providers ◽  
Black American ◽  
Medical Terminology ◽  
Health Capital ◽  
American Women ◽  
Socioeconomic Resources ◽  
Black American Women

This chapter presents the first key finding of the book. In it, women describe their perceptions of healthcare providers including the challenges they face trying to avoid race, gender, and other forms of discrimination. The chapter also analyzes how the specific stereotypes levied against Black American women negatively affect their relationships with healthcare providers. Furthermore, the chapter presents specific strategies Black women use to mitigate discrimination including emphasizing their cultural health capital (e.g., facility with medical terminology) and socioeconomic resources. However, these data suggest that the strategies women use to resist discrimination may still be experienced as a form of stress that negatively affects their health.

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