Into the Fire

Abstract

As waves of executive orders to end “racial indoctrination,” stop “gender ideology extremism,” challenge “birthright citizenship,” and so forth, which target students and activists critical of the Zionist lobby, are surging in the US political landscape, it is apparent now more than ever that anti-imperialists need to shore up the international character of their struggle. While the Combahee River Collective has rightfully earned a secure position in the pantheon of US Black feminist thought, in many ways the socialist principles, explicit class politics, and internationalist framework to which the collective adhered have found fragile roots in US feminist theory and praxis. The author argues that while Pan-Africanism has been critiqued for its patriarchal/masculinist tendencies, a gendered revolutionary Pan-Africanism or a Pan-African feminist praxis has always been and remains a vital necessity for realizing the re-internationalization of Black/African women’s (and by extension Black/African men’s and all oppressed peoples’) struggles for freedom and self-determination. Drawing on the work of the Afro-Venezuelan feminists Argelia Laya and Merlyn Pirela and using an auto-ethnographic account of the author’s mother’s work as an organizer with the All-African Women’s Revolutionary Union in the United States, the author bridges these frameworks across time and space to explore Pan-African feminist praxis in our contemporary moment.