Professor Amina Mama, ‘Transnational Feminism in an Age of Genocide’

The televised genocide in Gaza has made us all witnesses to the carnage occurring in occupied Palestine. How are we responding to our responsibilities as witnesses? How are women’s movements in formerly colonized African nations responding? What does feminist transnational analysis make visible? What forms of solidarity and activism are emerging in the face of massive and unrelenting state violence against a trapped population of civilian women, children, and men? What legacies of struggle can usefully inform such action? This lecture argues that the many violences perpetrated against women have been the major driver of feminist organizing in the South, and that this continues to be the case in relation to the transnational outrage over the carnage of the Israeli military campaign. Old and new anti-colonial feminist solidarities are being mobilized at multiple levels to join the global resistance demanding an end to the US-backed genocide.