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"Higashida, Cheryl"
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Black Internationalist Feminism
Black Internationalist Feminism examines how African American women writers affiliated themselves with the post-World War II Black Communist Left and developed a distinct strand of feminism. This vital yet largely overlooked feminist tradition built upon and critically retheorized the postwar Left's nationalist internationalism, which connected the liberation of Blacks in the United States to the liberation of Third World nations and the worldwide proletariat. Black internationalist feminism critiques racist, heteronormative, and masculinist articulations of nationalism while maintaining the importance of national liberation movements for achieving Black women's social, political, and economic rights. Cheryl Higashida shows how Claudia Jones, Lorraine Hansberry, Alice Childress, Rosa Guy, Audre Lorde, and Maya Angelou worked within and against established literary forms to demonstrate that nationalist internationalism was linked to struggles against heterosexism and patriarchy. Exploring a diverse range of plays, novels, essays, poetry, and reportage, Higashida illustrates how literature is a crucial lens for studying Black internationalist feminism because these authors were at the forefront of bringing the perspectives and problems of black women to light against their marginalization and silencing. In examining writing by Black Left women from 1945 to 1995, Black Internationalist Feminism contributes to recent efforts to rehistoricize the Old Left, Civil Rights, Black Power, and second-wave Black women's movements.
eBook
Citizens Band: Surveillance, Dark Sousveillance, and Social Movements
This essay argues that technology, specifically sound reproduction, was a crucial terrain of struggles for civil rights, farmworkers’ rights, and Indigenous self-determination in the 1960s. Two-way radiotelephony including citizens band (CB) mediated the civil rights movement’s development and formative connections with the Black Power, Chicanx and Filipinx farmworker, and American Indian movements. Through archival research of movement records and media, I show that a goal of the civil rights movement was to develop grassroots technopolitical agency through CB communications, self-defense, and movement building. Part of the “Southern diaspora” (Donna Murch) of people, organizations, and ideas, rural African American CB activism shaped West Coast farmworkers’ and urban social movements in the mid-1960s. I further demonstrate that Black, Latinx, Asian, and Indigenous adaptations of CB constitute important, overlooked acts of technopolitical “reconception”: “the active redefinition of a technology that transgresses that technology’s designed function and dominant meaning” (Rayvon Fouché). While associated with freewheeling truckers, two-way radio emerged from and proliferated military and police violence. However, Black, Latinx, Filipinx, and Indigenous organizers reconceived two-way radio’s criminalizing technology of surveillant citizenship to create networks of “dark sousveillant” solidarity (Simone Browne). This media history from below expands conceptions of historical and contemporary social movements, surveillance, and media.
Journal Article
To Be(come) Young, Gay, and Black: Lorraine Hansberry's Existentialist Routes to Anticolonialism
This essay argues that Lorraine Hansberry’s black, queer anti-imperialist and anticolonial dramatic vision was shaped by her engagement with post-World War II European and American existentialisms and their politics of race and sexuality. Throughout the 1950s and 1960s, Hansberry debated Albert Camus, Samuel Beckett, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, and Jean Genet over the meanings of human existence, responsibility, and freedom. While these writers and thinkers presented diverse worldviews, Hansberry understood them to be linked by a bankrupt nihilism and solipsism that precluded historical materialist analyses of social change. She saw in their work a denial of social change that relied upon and re-articulated heteropatriarchal, racist ideologies. Of these existentialists, Jean Genet was especially important to Hansberry because of his play, The Blacks , which became a vital part of African-American theater and cultural politics. Hansberry criticized not only Genet’s cynicism about anticolonial struggle, but the sexual and racial ideologies through which this cynicism was expressed. In framing her own anticolonial play, Les Blancs , as a response to The Blacks , Hansberry drew upon the Beauvoirean existentialist feminism that had informed her early feminist plays featuring lesbian protagonists. Like this earlier feminist work, Les Blancs represents homosexuality as a site of interracial, international reciprocity in order to counter Genet’s exoticized, eroticized “Blacks,” and to represent black national liberation. Recovering Hansberry’s engagement with existentialism, I argue, illuminates the ways in which feminist as well as queer critique were for her integral to a nationalist internationalism linking the struggles of First World minorities with Third World anticolonial nationalist movements. Consequently, while Hansberry’s work exemplifies some of the transnational and cross-cultural dimensions of black thought, it also contests the anti- or post-nationalist perspectives of contemporary studies of diasporic and transnational blackness.
Journal Article
Audre Lorde Revisited
Let me begin by juxtaposing Audre Lorde with another Black revolutionary whose nationalist investments have been misunderstood and repressed. In “On National Culture,” Frantz Fanon reflects that
humanity, some say, has got past the stage of nationalist claims. The time has come to build larger political unions, and consequently the old-fashioned nationalists should correct their mistakes. We believe on the contrary that the mistake, heavy with consequences, would be to miss out on the national stage. If culture is the expression of the national consciousness, I shall have no hesitation in saying, in the case in point, that national consciousness
Book Chapter
The Negro Question, the Woman Question, and the “Vital Link”
Feminism, Marxism, and Black nationalism have had contentious relationships with each other, to say the least. How is it, then, that the Communist Party’s theory and tactics of African American nationhood gave rise to the Black internationalist feminist tradition that came into its own in the post–World War II era? This chapter investigates the histories of African American involvement with the Communist Left that shaped Black women writers’ strategic commitments to national liberation as they strove to represent emancipatory enactments of gender and sexuality. I begin by discussing the intertwining of Black nationalist and Old Left movements in the
Book Chapter
Lorraine Hansberry’s Existentialist Routes to Black Internationalist Feminism
Soon after arriving in Harlem, Lorraine Hansberry began writing for Paul Robeson’s anti-imperialist and anticapitalist newspaper Freedom. With offices in the same building as the Council on African Affairs, the most visible anticolonial organization in the first years after World War II, Freedom put Hansberry in the midst of a vibrant Black Left network that included Robeson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Louis Burnham, Shirley Graham Du Bois, and Alice Childress.¹ For Freedom, Hansberry covered the outrage of African and Asian attendees at a World Assembly of Youth convention marred by paternalism; the trip to Washington, D.C., the Sojourners for
Book Chapter
Rosa Guy, Haiti, and the Hemispheric Woman
To frame the Black feminist intervention of Rosa Guy’s The Sun, the Sea, a Touch of the Wind (1995), I want to discuss a contemporaneous novel that shares with Guy’s the theme of African American female rejuvenation and empowerment through Caribbean romance—Terry McMillan’s bestseller and pop culture phenomenon, How Stella Got Her Groove Back (1996). Because McMillan is one of the most widely known authors who defines Black feminism today,¹ it is worthwhile to consider how her work takes up Carole Boyce Davies’ salient questions: “How do United States Black women/women of color, often the most dispossessed on the
Book Chapter
Reading Maya Angelou, Reading Black Internationalist Feminism Today
In reflecting on the relevance of African American women writers of the postwar anticolonial Left today, it is useful to look closely at the work of Maya Angelou. Not only has she attained the most mainstream visibility and commercial success of all the women affiliated with the African American Left, but her Black internationalist feminist autobiography, The Heart of a Woman (1981), has become part of U.S. mass culture. Although this attests to the co-optation of radicalism, Angelou’s autobiographical series (composed of five other volumes) should also be examined as a site of contestation over national identity, race, and the
Book Chapter
Rosalind on the Black Star Line
In 1951, as Alice Childress was securing her reputation within the Left as one of the foremost playwrights and promoters of Black drama, she published an essay, “For a Negro Theatre,” in the left-wing journal Masses and Mainstream and in the Communist Party’s newspaper The Daily Worker (where it was more radically titled, “For a Strong Negro People’s Theatre”). Drawing on her own efforts to establish Black theater at Harlem’s Club Baron with the support of the leftist Committee for the Negro in the Arts, Childress articulated crucial aspects of the nationalist aesthetic that would be developed over ten years
Book Chapter