The Subversive Seventies by Michael Hardt

Author:Michael Hardt [Hardt, Michael]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2023-10-15T00:00:00+00:00

Third World Women

In December 1968, almost simultaneous with the launch of the student strikes, the Black Women’s Alliance (BWA), a caucus within the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee, dedicated to countering male dominance in the movement, renamed itself the Third World Women’s Alliance. The name change, Ashley Farmer explains, indicated the BWA members’ decision to open the organization to other women of color and thereby transform the composition of the alliance (2019, 160). By constructing a multiracial and multiethnic feminist organization, the TWWA, in Angela Davis’s words, “represents an early feminist impulse toward acknowledging connections, relationalities, and intersectionalities” (2018, 233).

Among activists in the TWWA and other feminist organizations that emerged in the 1970s, “third world” had a dual focus, one side facing inside the United States and the other outside. Within the country, which was the TWWA’s primary emphasis, “third world” solidarity was based on recognizing the shared conditions of diverse groups of nonwhite US women. “Although Asian, Black, Chicana, Native American and Puerto Rican sisters have certain differences,” affirms an unsigned essay in the TWWA publication Triple Jeopardy, “we began to see that we were all affected by the same general oppressions.” Specifically, the essay continues, “the third world woman must always be fighting against and exposing her triple exploitation in this society”—that is, her exploitation on the basis of gender, race, and class (“Women in the Struggle” 1971, 8). As in the case of the student strike organizations, “third world” here functions as a collective name for racial multiplicity that designates not only shared forms of subordination but also, potentially, a coordinated project of liberation.

This inward-facing usage of the term “third world” relied conceptually on an outward-facing one, which highlighted the forms of oppression and struggle shared with those in subordinated parts of the world. Several US antiracist organizations in the late sixties and early seventies emphasized the parallel between inside and outside, between the internally colonized and those fighting colonialism and imperialism elsewhere. “Blacks and yellows in the United States,” maintains Amy Uyematsu in a 1969 essay celebrating the emergence of the Yellow Power movement, for instance, “identify with their relatives in the Third World. And although the race situation in America is not strictly analogous to white colonialism and imperialism, the blacks and yellows have suffered similar consequences as Third World people at the hands of the America capitalist power” (Uyematsu 1969, 10). For Uyematsu, the parallel between outside and inside is grounded in a logic of diasporic identification, which she expresses with a family metaphor: the nonwhite relatives of the victims of colonialism and imperialism experience corresponding structures of domination. A 1977 editorial statement in The Black Scholar echoes this parallelism, adding that corresponding oppressions lead to corresponding struggles: since “the Third World—the world of the oppressed peoples of Africa, Latin America and Asia—exists just as certainly within the United States as it does outside its borders,” the editors reason, “[i]t is therefore not illogical that the rise of national liberation movements in the last several decades coincided with the upsurge of black and Third World freedom movements within the U.

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