7 - Theorizing (with) Amy Ashwood Garvey

Summary

This chapter returns to the foundational questions of what it means to produce international thought. What are the markers of recognition, in terms of location and genre? Amy Ashwood Garvey was a race woman, a ‘street-strolling’ Pan-Africanist and leader of the Universal Negro Improvement Association. For this gifted conversationalist, public orator and rhetorician, political praxis and organizing were a way of theorizing. Although her political activism spanned the black Atlantic, it was partly due to her commitment to localized ‘women’s work’ that she understood the limits of a patriarchal Pan-Africanism. Rather than positing a unitary blackness, Garvey analyzed the intersections of race, class, sex, gender and nation in community-level struggles for self-determination. Viewed through such a lens, black patriarchy did not suppress but politicize black women. Understanding Garvey’s theorizing as fractal, accommodating struggle within struggle, resolves some of the seeming contradictions in her thought.