African Sororities: Identity politics, intersectionality and empowerment

This essay will analyze Afropean sororities not as landlocked territories or segregated reflections, but rather spaces of political solidarity, aiming for a quest and a (re)conquest of oneself from the margins. In this regard, the intersectionality (Crenshaw 1989) inscribed in this work gives rise to a favourable theoretical framework articulated to the notion of empowerment from an Afro-feminist perspective. Empowerment - or power to act - is thus understood as a tool of socio-political liberation. Along the way, this makes it possible to question systemic inequalities in order to devise a series of anti-capitalist, anti-sexist and antiracist actions, with a collective aim, in a committed intersectoral dialogue. To lead our argument, the theme looks at three recent manifestoes, namely, Plantation Memories: Episodes of Everyday Racism (Kilomba 2008), Noire n'est pas mon metier (Maiga 2018) and Mariannes noires (2016), a documentary film by Mame-Fatou Niang and Kaytie Nielsen. By virtue of their prescriptive (object of the discourse), performative (place of the enunciation) and didactic (objectives targeted / achieved) function, these manifestoes aim to include Afropean women in the respective public spaces, based on endogenous paradigms, outside the moulds of assignment and subjugation of bodies constructed socio-historically as women and blacks. Moreover, the axis of our contribution being not only an object of study relieved of all anchoring, its conclusion is summarised by the triptych "train, inform (to) transform".