ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I will examine the consciousness and practices of a network of African-American women, the veterans of civil rights, labor, environmentalist, and reproductive health movements, who have dedicated themselves to building a human rights movement in the U.S. South, and linking that movement to its counterparts across the nation and the world, particularly in the Global South. Indeed, these women view the U.S. South as being part of the Global South, a South within the North. Interestingly, while most contemporary black feminist writers tend to focus mainly on the problems that black women face within the national context (and often within their own families, communities, and workplaces), the activism examined in this case study raises questions about black women’s location within multiethnic and transnational fields of power, issues that remain under-analyzed and theorized in North American-based black feminist and womanist scholarship. This under-theorization persists despite important historical precedents that have linked black women’s struggles in North America to those in other parts of the African world and the wider world of racially subjugated peoples.1 A commitment to interrogating both the local and global in black women’s contemporary experiences is found in the writings of such scholars as Philomina Okeke,2 Filomina Chioma Steady,3 and myself.4 The research that this chapter describes builds upon aspects of this analytical trend by pointing to the usefulness of situating African-American and other Africandescended and diasporic women within transnational and global contexts in order to fully understand their negotiations of difference and power in their everyday life.
