International Conferences as Sites for Transnational Feminist Struggles: The Case of the First International Conference on Women in Africa and the African Diaspora

Abstract

As we engage in our work in the Women’s Movement and in feminist scholarship, some of us from the so-called Third World are caught in our ambivalence. Faced with the contradictions in the Movement and in feminist agendas, we vacillate between hope and despair. We are frustrated and debilitated by the agendas even as we are encouraged by their possibilities. The “hopes and impediments”¹ of the feminist movement and of its offshoot, Women’s Studies, are captured by two oppositional moments in the history of the second wave of the Women’s Movement. These two periods, separated roughly by a couple of decades, allegorize the complexities of feminist engagement. The title of Robin Morgan’s book, Sisterhood is Global, which captures the spirit of the 1960s and 1970s, was greeted on the one hand with enthusiasm and hope and on the other hand with the cynicism that is engendered by feminist exclusions. The mythology of sisterhood was not lost on many of us, although some of us were either too naive or too lazy to probe the reality that the mythology of sisterhood mystifies. The spirit and radical questioning of the 1980s (generated by the “women of color movement”) is captured by the title of another book, Paula Giddings’s When and Where I Enter. That title encapsulates three important elements in feminist debates—history/time (when); location/space (where); and subjectivity/agency (I).

In our world, divide and conquer must become define and empower ... . I urge each one of us here to reach down into that place of knowledge inside herself and touch that terror and loathing of any difference that lives there. See whose face it wears. Then the personal as the political can begin to illuminate all our choices.

— Audre Lorde, Sister Outsider, 113 (emphasis in original)