This article rethinks the challenges of radical politics within a global neoliberal context by rekindling conversations about the history of Afro-Latin American women's movements. The article explores the current economic crisis and its dehumanizing effects primarily on racialized populations, poor people, and women, and locates these groups in relation to the rise of the world-system. Likewise, it identifies the theoretical contributions made by Afrodescendant Latin American women to decolonial thought, not only in relation to the historical domination of the significance of the nation-state but, more importantly, as regards to the dependency relation of political subjects within capitalism, western modernity, European colonization, and the processes of racialization and sexualization of social relations. Acknowledging that the Afro women's movement in Latin America and the Caribbean is going through difficult times, this article considers the role of radical decolonial politics in the creation of a particular strain of thinking that would allow the movement to understand the specific configuration of these systems of domination, to overcome the binarism of theory and practice, to promote the creation of political alliances, to reconceptualize autonomy, to question essentialism, and to reconsider social class.
Since the beginnings of 1970s activism in Puerto Rico, like in other countries, there have been tensions between dialogues about race and feminism. Tensions between feminisms and Afrodescendant women's movements persist. As part of a cross-sectional analysis, it is necessary to recognize the wide range of subject positions that combine to create the identities of Afrodescendant women.
In June 1954, Eunice Kathleen Waymon performed on an Atlantic City stage for the first time under the name Nina Simone. This performative self-creation is mirrored in the structure and lyrical content of one of her best-known songs, “Four Women,” in which each verse features Simone singing as a different woman. By examining the similarities between the varying accounts of Waymon’s transformation into Simone, and by conducting a close reading of Simone’s performances of “Four Women,” it is possible to understand Simone’s song as challenging representational politics by pluralizing identities. This strategic decision was underscored when the rapper Talib Kweli and DJ Hi Tek recreated “Four Women” as “For Women” on their 2000 record Reflection Eternal. “For Women” reproduces the structure and message of Simone’s original. Mimicking the logic of self-creation that Simone embodied both in her life and in “Four Women,” Kweli and Hi-Tek craft a song where Kweli transitions, often mid-verse, between rapping about each of these four women in the third person and taking on the first-person perspective of each woman. Understanding these two examples together illustrates the power and legacy of “Four Women” and its critique of representational politics and of the rigidity of unique subject positions.
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