Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality

How activists in Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil provide inspiration and strategies for combating the gender violence epidemic in the United States How can the U.S. learn from the perspectives of anti-gender violence activists in South America and Africa as we seek to end intimate violence in this country? The U.S. has consistently positioned itself as a moral exemplar, seeking to export its philosophy and values to other societies. Yet in this book, Traci C. West argues that the U.S. has much to learn from other countries when it comes to addressing gender-based violence. West traveled to Ghana, South Africa, and Brazil to interview activists involved in the struggle against gender violence. In each of these places, as in the United States, Christianity and anti-black racism have been implicated in violence against women. In Ghana and Brazil, in particular, their Christian colonial and trans-Atlantic slave trade histories directly connect with the socioeconomic development of the Americas and historic incidents of rape of black slave women. With a transnational focus on religion and racism, West brings a new perspective to efforts to systemically combat gender violence. Calling attention to forms of violence in the U.S. and international settings, such as marital rape, sex trafficking of women and girls, domestic violence, and the targeting of lesbians, the book offers an expansive and nuanced view of how to form activist solidarity in tackling this violence. It features bold and inspiring approaches by black women leaders working in each setting to uproot the myriad forms of violence against women and girls. Ultimately, West calls for us to learn from the lessons of Africana activists, drawing on a defiant Africana spirituality as an invaluable resource in the quest to combat the seemingly chronic problem of gender-based violence.

This book is a gift. Traci C. West synthesizes scholarship, spirituality and searing analyses to challenge the ways we perceive, practice, and oppose violence. West built an international platform between book covers to transform religious, social, and political-economic institutions that structure predatory power. This book helps us to clean old wounds as it offers healing through strategic perspectives to diminish and eradicate gender violence., Traci West's text is radically innovative, critically startling, and defiantly embodied. Her transnational approach to gender violence takes seriously the role of religion, spirituality, culture, and the wisdom of African women leaders. It utilizes courage, wit, and vast research findings extracted from many parts of the world., Africana women fight for their agency. Traci West acts as a griot for this Africana revolutionary becoming, documenting their journeys to freedom. She carefully recovers women’s voices lost to or drowned out by racist and sexist structures and creates a platform on and through which they can tell themselves. In ensuring their visibility Solidarity and Defiant Spirituality makes room for Africana women’s possibility and power., Can assist faith-based anti-violence and anti-racist activists in acknowledging religion’s collusion in the social structures that perpetuate sexual & gender based violence... This is a dense book that brings together transnational feminist theological, gender studies, sociological, and activist knowledge and experiences concerning SGBV. It is daring, creative work and an engrossing read for scholars familiar with these fields.

Traci C. West is Professor of Ethics and African American Studies at Drew University Theological School. She is the author of Disruptive Christian Ethics: When Racism and Women’s Lives Matter and Wounds of the Spirit: Black Women, Violence and Resistance Ethics (NYU Press).