ASC Annual Lecture 2024

Convener: Miles Tendi

Speaker: Professor Amina Mama, University of California

With drinks reception afterwards.

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.

Amina Mama is a transdisciplinary feminist educator, researcher and organizer and a professor in the Dept of Gender, Sexuality and Women’s Studies at the University of California, Davis. Amina’s most influential books include Beyond the Masks: Race, Gender and Subjectivity (Routledge 1995) and Engendering African Social Sciences (co-edited with Fatou Sow and Ayesha Imam, CODESRIA 1997). She has over 30 years of experience on university campuses in Africa, Europe, and the USA. Her most prestigious appointments have included the Prince Claus Chair in Development and Equity at University of Utrecht (2004), the Barbara Lee Distinguished Chair at Mill’s College (2007-2009), the Angela Davis Guest Professor in Social Justice at the Cornelia Goethe Centre, University of Frankfurt (2016), and the Kwame Nkrumah Chair in African Studies (2020-2022). She co-produced two documentaries The Witches of Gambaga 2011, and The Art of Ama Ata Aidoo 2014, both with filmmaker Yaba Badoe. Amina continues to pursue her interests through writing, collaborative action-research, documentation and film projects.