Unearthing the Historical Memory of Feminist Africa in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean

I begin this exploration of feminist theory and practice from a Spanish-speaking Caribbean perspective, where gender, sex, race, and color are a cohesive rhetorical assemblage that cannot be reduced to its individual components when studying the feminist project in this region. Since the Middle Passage, Afro-Caribbean women have been ontologically characterized by Others as victims of the slave owners, of the sugar barons, of the capitalists and neo capitalists, in what Spivak called “the palimpsestic narrative” that hides but does not fully erase the Afro-Caribbean women’s own narrative of inner strength, independence, and strategic planning. Such categories from the Others’ self-referential repertoire of epistemes have all but foreclosed the study of Afro-Caribbean feminism from a different and new ontological framework. This paper seeks to unearth some of the African pre-colonial constructions of gender that have all but faded from our historical memory and then trace a genealogy of 21st century post-slavery and post-colonial gendering epistemes in the Spanish-speaking Caribbean that constitute the legacy left for us by our African mothers and which remains present as a powerful force in Afro-Hispanic-Caribbean constructions of gender identities.