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Conference and Seminar with Angela Davis

How is it possible, Angela Davis wonders, after nurturing American feminism as a movement and as political theory at the centre of the abolitionist and workers struggles of the end of the 19th Century, that the voice and demands of the black woman have been systematically rendered invisible by white liberal feminism? It is this question which drives her to outline a new genealogy of radical American freedom movements, through which she uncovers the common roots of anti-slavery struggles and the women's rights movements. Davis uses the occasion not to point a finger at racial discrimination brought to bear by dominant feminism, but to put forward a new feminist programme, based on a transversal alliance which criticizes exclusion based on race, gender, class or sexuality, and which stands as a proposal for collective emancipation. Feminism becomes a vector in the criticism and radical dismantling of cross-structure political and social control, from the domestic space to prisons, via laws governing citizenship, work, identity or property.

Angela Davis (Birmingham, Alabama, 1944) is a political activist and theorist. After graduating from Brandeis University she studied philosophy with Herbert Marcuse, whose theory stating that the individual has an obligation to rebel against the system, was to have a great influence on her political ideas. Davis was active in the civil rights movement from the late 1960s, focusing on the class struggle and racial discrimination, and on criticism of the judicial and prison systems in the USA.

Her many published works include If They Come in the Morning: Voices of Resistance (1971), Angela Davis: An Autobiography (1974), the classic Women, Race and Class (1981) and Women, Culture and Politics (1989), as well as numerous essays on feminism, racism and prison systems. She is currently professor of Feminist and Afro-American Studies in the History of Consciousness Department of the University of Santa Cruz, California.


Programme

This activity is part of the workshop Technologies of Gender. Identity Micropolitics

THURSDAY, 12TH OF MAY, 7:30 pm.
Conference

Free Entrance. MACBA Auditorium. Limited Places

SATURDAY 14TH OF MAY, 5:00 pm – 9:00 pm
Seminar


Related

Activities

Audios

Women, Race and Class