Introduction

This chapter presents the interdisciplinary framework of the book and its core argument linking issues of racism and religion--particularly heteropatriarchal Christianity--in the cultural support for gender violence. It argues that the conjoined presence of religion, anti-black racism, and sexual violence against women in American history of slavery and colonialism compels a similarly transnational exploration of inspiration from Africana activists and scholars to address U.S. gender violence. A methodological overview describes the book’s theoretical foundations in feminist and womanist studies, and how tools of ethnography, anthropology, and Christian theo-ethics inform the its unconventional narrative approach. The U.S.-based analysis features snapshots of the author’s encounters with leaders and their contexts, not a broad survey or comparison of gender violence in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil.

Vulnerability

Based on encounters with leaders in Salvador, Bahia, Brazil, this chapter launches an exploration of how to translate foreign political and spiritual innovations—without distorting them—to familiar terms to garner lessons for countering United States gender-based violence. For antiracist strategizing, Brazil’s prominence as a transatlantic slave trade port of entry provides a relevant racial and religious legacy, especially Candomblé, an African-based religion practiced by some activists. Concern about how racial and class stigmas increase poor black women’s vulnerability to domestic and sexual violence surfaces in conversations about implementing Brazil’s 2006 Maria da Penha gender violence law (including women’s police stations) and organizing domestic workers subject to workplace sexual harassment and assault. Their ideas evoke comparisons of such vulnerability for poor U.S. black women, such as New York hotel maid Nafissatou Diallo.

Authentic Cultural Values

In this chapter antiviolence ideas emerge about the needed reshaping of basic cultural values are sparked by examples of how Ghanaian activist leaders grappled with local cultural mores in order to create systemic change. A custom of sexual slavery related a traditional religious practice in Ghana sparks reflections on the depiction of sexual slavery in the United States by leaders such as Jimmy Carter. It features conversations with leaders in the wake of their successful struggle to pass a national domestic violence law (2007) as well an exploration of certain cultural factors that impede efforts to outlaw heterosexual marital rape in Ghana and in the United States.

Conclusion

The final chapter corrals common themes from the insights and lessons in the array of leaders, strategies, and places included in the book. With religion, spirituality, and antiracism as the focal points for the kaleidoscope of ideas gleaned throughout, it dwells on the process of how defiant Africana spirituality births hope for transnational solidarity. Offering particular cautions for U.S.-American Christian participation, the chapter outlines methodological characteristics of defiant Africana spirituality that enables hope for ending gender-based violence.

Defiant Spirituality

As interactions with South African activist leaders and social movement building strategies are examined, the chapter probes ideas about activist solidarity in opposing the targeting of lesbians for assault and murder. It conceptualizes the use defiant Africana spirituality as a resource in spontaneous street responses, grieving rituals, public witness, and other organizational practices in both South African and United States examples. To differing degrees, Christian, African Traditional Religious, and non-religious spiritual understandings inform solidarity building that combines antiracist commitments and/or interfaith religious cooperation to end homophobic gender-based violence. The argument focuses on communally generated defiant spirituality that accentuates human life-enhancing potential when confronting opponents of human thriving and freedom from violence and the threat of it for black lesbian and gender non-conforming community members.

How Much Time Is Needed?

Focusing on West’s meetings with South African activist leaders, this chapter explores the timing of truth-telling public intervention and intercultural and interreligious collaboration in order to build antiviolence solidarity. The South African context is introduced by highlighting connections between gender justice and antiracist organizing in their anti-apartheid struggle and their post-apartheid constitutional clauses on gender and sexual orientation equality. Discussions with Muslim and Christian leaders feature communal responses to sexual assault. In Pietermaritzburg, South African public discourse on racism, religion, and sexual assault such as Jacob Zuma’s trial for rape invite relevant comparisons to public debates about United States leaders such as Donald Trump. In Cape Town, discussions of South African Black and Coloured intracommunal racial politics and antiviolence collaboration instigate reflections on collaboration among U.S. activists of color.

Precious Bodies

Conversations with NGO activists in this chapter demonstrate how racial dynamics in sex tourism and sex trafficking in Salvador Brazil can assist in defining the harm of gender-based violence and in revealing direct transnational connections to U.S. consumerist desire and antiviolence strategizing. West criticizes the ways in which Christian moral judgments about sinfulness and normative sexual expression calibrate whose gendered bodies among the economically marginal are seen as precious and whose are not, though resistance to Christian sexism is also highlighted in the ideas of one Christian anti-trafficking activist. In sum, the argument stresses that intercultural learning and activist resistance to sexual violence and exploitation necessitate an antiracist understanding of vulnerability as well as holistic engagement of mind, body, and spirit.

Constricted Religious Responses

This chapter criticizes racial and religious assumptions in well-meaning responses to gender violence against black women in the United States, citing sexist Christian clergy betrayals of trust and narrowly individualistic crisis intervention strategies. Those problematic cultural dynamics also resonate with broader trends in U.S. popular media. The chapter defines the book’s key terms “gender-based violence” and “intimate violence”. Then, with an emphasis on Christianity and rape, it introduces the historical role of West Africa in both the transatlantic slave trade and U.S.-African American slave ancestry. The discussion of West’s initial encounters in Accra Ghana with Muslim and Christian leaders who discuss antiviolence strategies within their religious communities brings to the fore challenges for U.S. audiences of transnational learning from black African activists on gender-based violence.