Angela Yvonne Davis, Essay Example

While imprisoned and awaiting trial in 1972, Angela Yvonne Davis, wrote classic feminist piece entitled “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves”. Although Davis rejected the widely known idea that the enslaved women did or could function as chief rulers in an organization where slave-owners ruthlessly interrupted and disorganized families, she offered a counter narrative about the role of black women in enslaved communities.I this analysis, I will use Davis’ work to elucidate the fact that history is something we should not leave behind. In this context, I shall relate the work of Davis to the one written bySaidiya Hartman entitled “Venus in Two Acts”. In addition,my analysis will borrow from Hartman’s work entitled “The Devil behind the Mirror” .Moreover; my analysis will also draw from the work of Karina Cespedes’ titled “Hustling for a Good Story”, a narrative written about the roles played by the Cuban Sexworkers in the Tourism boom of 90’s in the country.

According to Hartman,history is a discipline that involves strict adherence to facts. He further asserts that historians must work within their jurisdictions. When historians have done extensive research, they can extend their roles to include finding new evidence that were not documented in new letters or other primary sources. He also points out that theymust look for evidence to fill the gaps left by those writing primary documents and those creating archives. It is for this reason that Hartman notes that such historians will give voiceto the silenced in the society. Hartman’s work further explains that writing history involves focusing on present events, as way to reconcile our own fate, and to explain how we have arrived where we are. He notes that present history is always a reflection of the intimacy of our experiences. Finally, heelucidates that responsibility is a key virtue for historians.

According to Davis, the patriarchal traditions of African society are nothing to celebrate or romanticize. He points out that “The African slave woman…was charged with keeping the ‘home’ in order.  This role was determined by the male supremacist ideology of white society in America; it was also woven into the patriarchal traditions of Africa”.Davis employs this gesture in order to illuminate black women’s lives in slavery through the category of labor, specifically, as community-building and community-sustaining labor, by refusing to take the historical fact of the “black community” as documented.  While she explicitly attempts to add more value to this labor as labor, she nevertheless avoids allowing it to become fetish.  According to her, the black woman slave’s community-making work is inseparable from her “infinite anguish”.  I addition, Davis refuses to draw a direct line from the conditions of slavery to the black struggle in the contemporary. She suggests that in order to “accept the full weight of a legacy wrought by our mothers in chains”; it is not the same as identifying ourselves with them.  Rather, “our fight, while identical in spirit, is a reflection of different and implication of different paths of struggle.  But as heirs to a tradition of supreme perseverance and heroic resistance, we must hasten to take our place wherever our people are forging on towards freedom”.

According to “The Devil behind the Mirror” by Stephan Gregory, “The rapid growth of the tourism industry in the Dominican Republic relied on the mobilization and reconfiguration of social hierarchies and ideologies based on gender, class, and racial distinctions. As many researchers have pointed out, the international tourism industry constructs, and markets eroticized and deeply gendered images of non-European host societies that stress the passivity and enduring ‘otherness’ of their peoples”. This isa perfect example of the society using “modern day slavery” through exploitation. Therefore, history repeats itself.