Translating Black Feminisms: Transnational Currents Then and Now

Liz Rose^[1]i, Mariana Felix^[2]ii

Keywords: Black Feminisms, Amefricanity, Translation, Manifestos, Language Politics

Amefricanifesto: For Black Brazilian Women

By the Lélia Gonzalez Vive Project

Translated by Liz Rose and Mariana Felix

We Black women have crossed the Atlantic. We are, therefore, Amefricans^[3]. “We know very well the extent to which we carry within us the marks of economic exploitation and racial and sexual subordination^[4].” Our ancestry is the strength and substance for our daily struggle. We are the force of the waters that move and nourish the noisy revolution of those who no longer accept silence. Just like the water, our life methods carve stone and open pathways.We do not recognize the margins. We want to choose our own path. After all, our footsteps come from afar and will build tomorrow. We are the ones giving birth to a different relationship with the world since we are the vanguard of the transition necessary for new ways of being and living for humanity, just as our ancestors taught.We are the largest Brazilian demographic group, representing 28% of the population. As a political force, we have the right to occupy the spaces wherein decisions are made that directly impact our lives.We are decolonizing our imaginaries, creating our own utopias, and projecting ourselves into places unimaginable to the system.We are as revolutionary as the love we dedicate to ourselves. And so, our ancestral vanguard will overcome the backlash.We will not be interrupted, and from our march, many others will rise.

Amefricanifesto: por mulheres negras brasileiras

Por Projeto Lélia Gonzalez Vive

Nós, mulheres negras, atravessamos o Atlântico. Somos, portanto, Amefricanas: “sabemos bem o quanto trazemos em nós as marcas da exploração econômica e da subordinação racial e sexual”.Nossa ancestralidade é a força e substância para a luta diária. Somos a força das águas que movimenta e nutre a revolução barulhenta das que não aceitam mais o silêncio. Assim como as águas, nossas estratégias de vida driblam pedras e abrem caminhos. Não reconhecemos as margens. Queremos decidir nosso próprio percurso, afinal, nossos passos vêm de longe e construirão o amanhã. Somos nós que estamos parindo outra relação com o mundo, pois somos vanguarda da transição que precisamos para novas formas de ser e estar da humanidade, conforme ensinaram nossas ancestrais. Somos o maior grupo demográfico brasileiro, representamos 28% da população, e enquanto força política, temos o direito de ocupar os espaços de onde saem as decisões que impactam diretamente nossas vidas.Estamos decolonizando nosso imaginário, criando nossas próprias utopias e nos projetando em lugares inimagináveis para o sistema.Somos tão revolucionárias quanto o amor que estamos dedicando a nós mesmas.Por isso, nossa vanguarda ancestral vencerá o retrocesso.Não seremos interrompidas e, do nosso caminhar, brotarão muitas outras.

Introduction

In Black feminist studies across the hemisphere, there has been an upsurge in studies of Black feminism from the 1960s through the 1990s, evidenced by ongoing translations, archival work, and research. The republication of Beatriz Nascimento’s O Negro Visto Por Ele Mesmo in Brazil in 2022, and the 2020 republication of Lélia Gonzalez’ Por un feminismo Afro Latino Americano by Zahar Publications, highlight the ongoing importance of Black feminist contributions from this earlier period. In the United States, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s (2018) publication, How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, points to the legacy of queer and trans Black feminist theory and activism in the United States and to its ongoing relevance today. Alexis Pauline Gumbs’ (2024) recent biography of Audre Lorde addresses the enduring impact of Lorde’s politics and literary contributions. What’s even more interesting for thinking Black feminism in both North and South America are recent projects that bridge these feminist scholars through translation. “The Combahee River Collective Statement,” first published in the United States in 1977, was translated into Portuguese in 2019 and into Spanish in 2020. That same year, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor’s writing on the Black Lives Matter Movement was translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil in 2020 (Taylor, 2016; 2020). These publications demonstrate the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement and U.S. Black feminist politics for the rising repressive regimes in Latin America^[5]. Similarly, the writing of Brazilian Black feminist scholar Beatriz Nascimento was reprinted in Brazil in 2021 and 2022 and an edited volume of this work was translated into English in 2023 by Christen A. Smith, Bethânia Gomes, and Archie Davies, underscoring the ongoing salience of Nascimento’s work transnationally. Today, Black feminist scholars, artists, and activists across the hemisphere continue to draw on the legacy from the late 20th century through book projects, translations, and online platforms.

Here we present a translation of the 2021 “Amefricanifesto,” a manifesto released by the Lélia Gonzalez Vive project in celebration of Black Latin American and Caribbean Women’s Day on July 25th, 2021. This work is meant to introduce a broader readership to the enduring impact of Lélia Gonzalez. Moreover, this project serves as a call to scholars across the Americas to take up collaborative translation and provides an example of how such collaborations function. The manifesto itself calls for Black women throughout Brazil to reevaluate their societal position and affirm their power, emerging from the legacy of Brazilian Black feminist Lélia Gonzalez, who, in the 1980s, developed the concept of amefricanidade, or amefricanity, to recognize and celebrate Afro-diasporic peoples as central to the sociocultural formations of Brazil. The “Amefricanifesto” draws on the legacy of this well-known Black feminist theorist yet was composed by a contemporary Black feminist collective. We argue that this tethering between the individual thinker and the collective draws on a deep legacy of collectivity in Black feminist thought across the Americas and exemplifies how theory from the late 20th century continues to echo throughout liberation movements today. The manifesto genre contains stylistic tendencies that reinforce the power of collectivism and facilitate the movement and reception of liberatory thought. By translating the “Amefricanifesto,” we hope to further hemispheric conversations around Black feminist legacy that continues to inform contemporary abolitionist collectives and cultural production across the Americas today. Collective writing as a practice is central to Black feminist thought, and by engaging in a collaborative writing process and writing about that process, we hope to demystify collaborative practice and inspire others to join this legacy of Black feminist collaboration.

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A Brief Historical Context

The work of Lélia Gonzalez and contemporary Black feminist political and cultural collectives emerged from a period of strengthening Black feminist organizing in Brazil in the 1970s and 1980s. Various overlapping projects were centered on intersectional oppressions within both the Black liberation movement and feminist movement (Bairros, 2000; Carneiro, 2003; Carneiro, 2016). Key activists, including Lélia Gonzalez, Beatriz Nascimento, Sueli Carneiro, Thereza Santos, Edna Roland, Luiza Bairros, Matilde Ribeiro, and Fátima Oliveira, produced work during this era that resulted from activism oriented toward both gender and racial oppression that would later become an autonomous movement led by Black women (Caldwell, 2010).

The manifesto, as a genre, has played an important historical role in Black feminist Brazilian thought. In 1975, feminist organizers gathered at the Press Association for the Congress of Brazilian Women to mark the opening ceremony for International Women’s Year. Black feminist activist and intellectual Lélia Gonzalez and her comrades presented a document that characterized the oppression and exploitation of Black women (Rodrigues and Freitas 2021). The document, titled “The Black Women’s Manifesto,” was the first piece of writing in a series of position papers by Black feminists condemning white feminism. Several Black women's groups were subsequently founded across Brazil, including Nzinga in Rio de Janeiro, Black Women of Espírito Santo, Maria Mulher in Porto Alegre, and Geledés in São Paulo (Freitas, 2018; Rios, 2017; Rodrigues, 2006; Rodrigues and Freitas, 2021). Black feminism in Brazil has been fundamental to creating more humane living conditions for women across the country, shaping the drafting of the 1988 constitution, and leading to public policies focused on gender and racial equality (Carneiro, 1999; Carneiro, 2003; Werneck, 2010).

Since the 2018 electoral campaign, many Black feminist activists have engaged in movements that rejected Jair Bolsonaro’s right-wing political project, as part of a broader wave of Black feminist and LGBTQIA resistance—expressed in initiatives such as #EleNão, which mobilized millions against the conservative candidate and his regressive policies (Biroli, 2018). This engagement increased the visibility of feminist and anti-racist agendas during the elections and in the political opposition to the elected government. During the COVID-19 pandemic, when the federal government minimized the public health crisis and its social consequences, Black feminist movements led solidarity and care campaigns, using social media and direct action to raise funds, distribute food, clothing, and basic supplies, and to denounce state negligence toward vulnerable populations, particularly Black women.

Born in Belo Horizonte to an Indigenous mother and a Black father, Lélia Gonzalez was a Black feminist anthropologist, university professor, philosopher, and activist. Influenced by second-wave feminism, French Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Gonzalez developed a Black feminist framework that critically linked theory and political practice, foregrounding the intersections of race, gender, and culture in her essays and interventions (Rios and Lima, 2020, p. 19). One of her most influential theoretical contributions is the concept of amefricanity, or amefricanidade, which challenges European and U.S.-centered epistemologies and proposes a political-cultural identity rooted in the shared historical experience of the African diaspora across the Americas. A key formulation of hemispheric Blackness, amefricanity has had a lasting transnational impact on American studies and Black studies. The term rejects “Latinidade das Americas” or “American Latinity” as a colonial concept that erases Black and Indigenous people, and “challenges the antiblackness foundational in the construction of the Americas,” (Perry and Sotero, 2019).

On Afro-Latin Caribbean Women's Day, July 25th 2021, the Lélia Gonzalez Vive project published the “Amefricanifesto,” a collaboratively written manifesto inspired by and named after the concept of amefricanity. The manifesto was centered in the Latinidades Cultural Festival in São Paulo, posted on multiple digital platforms, and presented at an event celebrating Black feminist protest art (Geledes, 2021; Nossa Causa, 2021). A partnership between multiple Black feminist collectives, “Amefricanifesto” calls for continued organizing despite structural racism and sexism in Brazil. Our collaborative translation and analysis of the “Amefricanifesto” contributes to an understudied body of work on Black feminist writing and activism emerging in the Global South. The 2021 “Amefricanifesto” arises from this ongoing political context. While the stated author is the “Lélia Gonzalez Vive” project, the work is a collaboration of many voices from across Brazil. The family of Lélia Gonzalez, the Movimento Negro Unificado, the “Mulheres Negras Decidem” movement, the “Tenda das Candidatas” movement, and the Afrolatinos Institute, among others, contributed to this collective project (Lélia Gonzalez Vive, 2021).

This work connects to ongoing initiatives in the United States and Brazil dedicated to the translation, circulation, and reinterpretation of Black feminist writing from this earlier period. These initiatives revisit foundational texts of late 20th-century Black feminism and place them in dialogue with contemporary Black feminist writing projects, highlighting political, methodological, and aesthetic continuities. By linking historical manifestos, such as those produced by Black feminist collectives in the late twentieth century, with current writing projects like the “Amefricanifesto,” we reaffirm the centrality of collective authorship as a form of political and cultural intervention. The Black feminist writing projects we are highlighting here, whether they are authored by individuals or collectives, are part of this rich legacy of collective action and knowledge production. In this way, the work contributes to understanding transnational Black feminism in the Americas as a field in constant formation, grounded in both historical legacies and contemporary collective practices.

Selection and Process

Given the shared interests, goals, and tactics of Black feminist writers and movement workers across Brazil and the United States, and given the current political climate across the hemisphere, we translate the “Amefricanifesto” to highlight connections across movements for racial and gender justice in the Americas, and particularly to emphasize the centrality of Black feminist thinkers in those movements. While the United States empire continues to attempt to expand its hegemony over Latin America, most recently in Venezuela, it is imperative to pay attention to ongoing movements for a more liberatory and peaceful world, even and perhaps especially within countries that control a large portion of land and resources in the hemisphere. Translating a Black feminist manifesto from Brazil also challenges hegemonic Anglophone scholarship and academic hierarchies of language and resource access.

Our decision to engage in this process together and the way we collaborate is also related to our respective positionalities as two scholars writing across the hemisphere. Mariana Felix is a Black Brazilian researcher and activist in Political Science and International Relations. She holds a PhD from the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul and is currently a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of International Relations (IRI) of PUC-Rio. Her work centers on the struggle for racial and gender equality within political and academic structures, a focus that shaped her doctoral dissertation on the omission of racial perspectives in Brazilian political theory. Since the beginning of her academic trajectory, Mariana has questioned why Black scholars and Afrocentric perspectives are absent from the field of International Relations, and her theoretical framework and academic agenda have been consistently grounded in this critical perspective. Central to her work is the argument that the “international” is also constituted by local experience and by the forms of resistance built within a world structured by inequality.

Mariana’s relationship with English has always been one of conflict, difficulty, and estrangement. In Brazil, low-income communities lack access to high-quality English-language education. As a result, communicating in this language has always been a challenge for Mariana. This issue of access is further compounded by Mariana’s critical perspective on how language reinforces power relations. While Portuguese and English, two colonial languages, structure how we think and write across the hemisphere, English has unquestionable dominance in academic publishing worldwide, and Mariana is critical of having to use the language of U.S. empire to share her ideas. Throughout her work with Liz, Mariana has come to understand that translation can be a strategic practice, one that allows our thoughts, experiences, and theories to travel, reverberate, and shift in innovative ways.

Liz Rose is a genderqueer scholar and translator of hemispheric Black feminist and trans theories, working at the intersections of literary criticism, Black studies, and gender studies. They are of northern European descent and live on occupied Tohono Oʼodham and Pascua Yaqui land in the southwestern United States, where the federal government is currently increasing its organized terror against communities of color through ICE raids and ongoing militarization. Liz’s positionality in the United States empire plays multiple roles in this collaborative project. On the one hand, their scholarship is motivated by the belief that we create liberatory presents and futures through the mundane labor of our daily lives, including the labor of writing and translating, and learning how to live in right relation with the land. This belief is inspired by contemporary intersecting movements to dismantle anti-immigrant violence, anti-Black violence, and transphobic violence in the United States. The ongoing terror against immigrants and racialized people more generally is interconnected with the overpolicing of Black neighborhoods, the countless murders of unarmed Black people at the hands of police, and the long history of institutionalized racism and liberation struggles in this country. The ideas and tactics that emerged from the Black Power Movement and Black feminist organizing of the late 20th-century have been central to contemporary liberation work, and Liz continually draws on this earlier period for insights into engaging with political and social struggles.

Liz also writes and translates into English, a hegemonic language in both scholarship and literature worldwide. Their access not only to the English language but also to English-language publications, editors, and academic colleagues means that Liz’s work will receive more visibility than Mariana’s. Translating from Portuguese into English, then, means exposing these power hierarchies and, through the means available to us, subverting them. On a personal level, this means collaborating despite the pressure on early-career scholars to publish single-author work. It also means navigating a collaborative relationship across languages and time zones, power outages, and other demands on our time from our jobs, families, and communities. In a broader sense, engaging in this work serves as a call to scholars in the United States and beyond to consider questions of access, language hierarchies, and power structures within the academy. To be sure, these inequalities are shaped by a deluge of global power dynamics, but moving with the current instead of doing the labor to change its direction also reinforces those dynamics. Translating Black feminist activist writing from Brazil is not just a political act in itself, but an invitation to other feminist scholars to engage with work in translation written by the global majority, to consider what forms of collaborative scholarship are possible, and to shift the structures and expectations of the academy.

Our writing process sheds light on these transnational power dynamics and provides insight into how to do this work. We began meeting in 2023 to discuss this project, and Liz drafted an English translation of the manifesto, tagging words or phrases for discussion. We held Zoom meetings in Portuguese to discuss translation challenges and decide on final translation choices, using a shared document to outline ideas for how and where to present this work. Ultimately, we decided to present at the 2024 Continental Conference on Afro-Latin American Studies, hosted by Harvard and the University of São Paulo. Liz, a literature scholar, had already drafted a short essay on the manifesto as a genre and its position in Black feminist writing. Mariana provided key historical and political context for the collaborative essay, which they initially drafted in English with Liz writing and editing, and then translated into Portuguese in an apartment in São Paulo before presenting it, with Mariana as the lead writer and editor. Navigating this work across languages has required empathy and patience and has been a labor of friendship as much as of linguistic precision.

We write about our experiences and positionalities because they condition this labor. It is from our experiences and respective relationships with liberation movements, language hierarchies, and academic institutions that we theorize, and we have learned to do this from Black feminist theory, queer and trans theory, and the liberation movements we are part of (Cohen, 1997; Gonzalez, 1984; Kilomba, 2008; Lorde, 1984; Stryker, 2013; Taylor, 2018). Lélia Gonzalez joins a long list of feminist writers to argue that lived experience is foundational to knowledge production, particularly when such experiences are situated at the intersection of racism, sexism, queer- and transphobia, and coloniality. By proposing concepts such as amefricanidade and pretuguês^[6], Gonzalez disrupts the notion that legitimate knowledge must conform to white, Eurocentric literary norms. For her, everyday life, orality, the body, and language shaped by the African diaspora and popular experience are themselves forms of theory. Moving alongside and in the legacy of Lélia Gonzalez, we write of our experiences as researchers who live within marginalized realities that position us toward a critical academic perspective. They lead us to understand the political import of translation. While we don’t propose scholarship as the height of political work, we believe that scholarship conditions the world we live in. Collaborative translational scholarship rejects dominant frameworks of knowledge production that actively silence Black feminist abolitionist thought. Collaborative translational scholarship calls for a different world by enacting that world in the present. Our collaborative work brings to the surface perspectives that can transform how we think about culture and politics and how we conceptualize the production of knowledge. In the following section, we will analyze elements of the “Amefricanifesto” and contextualize the piece within the history of revolutionary writing.

The Amefricanifesto

“Nossa ancestralidade é a força e substância para a luta diária. Somos a força das águas que movimenta e nutre a revolução barulhenta das que não aceitam mais o silêncio. Assim como as águas, nossas estratégias de vida driblam pedras e abrem caminhos.”

“Our ancestry is the strength and substance for our daily struggle. We are the force of the waters that move and nourish the noisy revolution of those who no longer accept silence. Just like the water, our life methods carve stone and open pathways.”^[7]

-From “Amefricanifesto” by Lélia Gonzalez Vive

This passage from the “Amefricanifesto,” penned by the Lélia Gonzalez Vive project in 2021, is addressed to Black women of Brazil. The passage weaves this collective address into the body of the manifesto, underscoring the multiplicity from which the text emerges. The SoundCloud edition of the manifesto allows listeners to hear the text read aloud by Ellen Oléria, a Brazilian artist known for celebrating Black feminist thought (de Souza Procópio et al., 2019, pp. 8-9). The performance artist’s pronouncement of the collective pronouns nossa and nossas (our) grounds the text in a collective address and a collective voice, even while the singular Black feminist public figure reads the text aloud. The language of the excerpt above from “Amefricanifesto” reinforces a sense of collectivity across Black feminism. Both the title and the collective address of the “Amefricanifesto” reinforce a collective tone familiar to the genre of manifesto writing yet also signal a dissolution of the individual-collective binary (Caws 2001, p. XX). The subtitle of “Amefricanifesto,” which reads, “por mulheres negras brasileiras” (for Black Brazilian women), and its use of the plural pronoun construct a clear collective voice. Even so, the title “Amefricanifesto” signals the legacy of Black Brazilian feminist Lélia Gonzalez (1935-1994), who in the 1980s developed the concept of amefricanidade^[8], or amefricanity, to celebrate the centrality of Afro-diasporic and Indigenous peoples in the sociocultural formations of the Americas (Gonzalez, 1984). The reference to the political activist Lélia Gonzalez in the title of the manifesto and in the name of the collective that authored the text simultaneously pays homage to the Black feminist figure and troubles proprietary understandings of the Black feminist concept amefricanity, instead signaling the movement of shared ideas across the Black feminist legacy.

This collective voice is central to the manifesto genre, which has a long history of shaping political address in revolutionary movements worldwide. Beyond listing demands or complaints, the manifesto's form underscores the urgency of its call to action, in part because of the genre’s historical role in social movements. The late 19th century saw an upsurge in manifesto writing and the consolidation of texts with similar formal qualities into a distinct genre that became a central icon of communism and other revolutionary movements worldwide (Puchner, 2005, pp. 2-3). The genre itself signals this history, and so “to write a manifesto is to announce one's participation, however discursive, in a history of struggle against oppressive forces” (Lyon, 2019, p. 10). Thus, the genre carries a performative force, not just in its collective address or list of imperatives, but in the history that it conjures and joins through its enunciation. The manifesto doesn’t merely describe a collective; it performs a collective response to oppression (Lyon, 2019, p. 28). The “Amefricanifesto,” then, is a performative act, emphasizing the legacy of movements for social change centered on the experiences of Black women and pointing to a collective already engaged in “decolonizing our imaginaries, creating our own utopias, and projecting ourselves into places unimaginable to the system.” ^[9]

Listening to the digital audio version on SoundCloud, read by Ellen Oléria, highlights the performative nature of the genre and underscores collectivity as a central tenet of the manifesto. The digital context of the “Amefricanifesto” provides distinct opportunities for its movement and endurance, and the audio format also amplifies the manifesto’s accessibility. Manifestos often emerge through accessible and reproducible mediums to ensure their reach and further validate the groups they represent, but past forms, such as pamphlets and fliers, have given way to online forums, social media posts, and other short-form modes in the current digital era (Hanna, 2020; Kuźniarz, 2022). The singular voice of the audio recording doesn’t contrast with the collective message but reinforces a sense of interconnection between Black feminist figures and the transnational movement. The singular reader’s pronouncement of the collective pronoun nossa, nossas gestures to the relationality of Black feminist thought, at once emerging from and reaching out toward a collective^[10]. However, the collective pronouns also signify the relationality of being human as praxis. This conceptualization of the human as collective becoming, rather than a stagnant noun, shifts how we might imagine the afterlife of an individual political thought leader, such as Lélia Gonzalez, and the collective writing projects inspired by her work.

Sylvia Wynter’s writing about co-identification is instructive for understanding this Black feminist concept of the collective. In her 2000 interview with David Scott, she highlights the co-identification inherent to reimagining the human in the context of Black aliveness. Wynter’s description of co-identification across cultures and species elucidates how the “Amefricanifesto” holds a range of voices and temporalities in both its collectively written text and its various references to and manifestations through individual public figures (Wynter, 2003; Wynter, 2015). She describes co-identification as “... a sense that in every form that is being inscripted, each of us is also in that form, even though we do not experience it. So the human story/history becomes the collective story/history of these multiple forms of self-inscription or self-instituted genres, with each form/genre being adaptive to its situation, ecological, geopolitical” (Scott and Wynter, 2000, p. 206, italics from source). Co-identification helps us understand the possibility of identifying with a figure, experience, or cultural practice that emerges in a different spacetime. Yet Wynter concludes her description of co-identification with the following questions: “How can we think outside the terms in which we are? Think about the processes by which we institute ourselves as what we are, make these processes transparent to ourselves?” (pp. 206-207, italics from source). This line of questioning deepens our understanding of how the Black feminist manifesto functions as a meta-discourse regarding received ideas about the human.

The Black feminist manifesto thinks outside of hegemonic terms, creating a present-tense awareness of those terms and alternative collective possibilities that foster life. Even when we can locate this line of questioning in the work of individual theorists such as Sylvia Wynter and Lélia Gonzalez, the manifesto genre also offers an opportunity to collectivize world-building projects that conceive of the human otherwise, beyond anti-Black heteropatriarchal violence. Indeed, the collective Black feminist legacy signaled by the manifesto’s language is not of the past but appears in the here and now of the text: a present-tense current of Black feminist thought in the 21st century. Ancestral legacy appears in the text alongside the present-tense form of the verb ser (to be), which is not relegated to the past but rather forms the pillars of daily struggle. The manifesto then repeats this syntax using the collective pronoun “we” alongside the same verb ser, in the present tense, centering both the present and the collective legacy of the past.

Water is a galvanizing life force and metaphor for Black feminist thought in the manifesto. The text reads, “We are the force of the waters that move and nourish the noisy revolution of those who no longer accept silence. Just like the water, our life methods carve stone and open pathways.”^[11] The use of water here foregrounds both its importance in Black feminist thought and its centrality in Indigenous and Black Atlantic theories more broadly. Ailton Krenak, Indigenous philosopher and environmental activist of the Krenak people, writes of how water illustrates ancestral futures: “The rivers, those beings that have always inhabited different worlds, are the ones that suggest to me that if there is a future to imagine, it is ancestral, because it is already present” (Krenak, 2024, p. 1)^[12]. With water at the center, the manifesto connects with movements worldwide to protect the world’s waters, recognizing water as a life source (Martinez-Cruz, T. E., et al., 2024; Minawi, 2025). The language of Black aliveness, Kevin Quashie tells us, expresses “blackness that gushes with existence” (2021, p. 31). “Black feminist thinking,” Quashie explains, “might be specific in naming [B]lack women, but its ambition has always been the breadth of being alive, the principle that the lived experience of one who is [B]lack and female is comprehensive enough to manifest totality” (Quashie, 2021, p.11). The breadth of aliveness —that animating capacity present in the aesthetics of this Black feminist manifesto— resides in the movement of its present tense grammars, its collective voice, and its ancestral futures (Quashie, 2021, p. 58). Amefricanifesto then, presents not simply a tribute to Lélia Gonzalez, but an accumulation of voices and temporalities moving through the current of Black feminist thought. The aqueous force of this passage in “Amefricanifesto,” contextualized in Black and Indigenous thought across the hemisphere, crafts Black aliveness on the page.

To Translate

Transnational feminism is a vast theoretical-political field that articulates the struggles and aliveness of women, trans, and gender dissident people across national borders in relation to colonialism, imperialism, capitalism, racism, patriarchy, and cisheteronormativity. Feminist of color critique denounces how hegemonic feminism (white, liberal, cis, and rooted in the Global North) has produced homogeneous narratives about women in the Global South, often reinforcing colonial stereotypes (Abu-Lughod, 2013; Mohanty, 2003; Puar, 2017). Hemispheric Black feminism incisively connects arguments for gender liberation to the specificity of the Black diaspora, particularly via the trans-Atlantic slave trade and a rich legacy of maroonage across the Americas (Borges, 2019; Hill Collins, 2000; Hooker, 2017; Gonzalez, 1984, 2020; Nascimento, 2022; Sharpe, 2016; Perry, 2013; Winston, 2023). Recently, Black feminist scholars have built on this earlier work, calling for the abolition of the subaltern-dominant binary and racial and gender categories altogether (Bey, 2022; Mombaça, 2021; Nascimento, L., 2021). Yet without collaborative transnational and translational projects like the one we are undertaking, the scope of this work remains erased.

Such erasure is no accident. The geopolitics of knowledge reinforce global hierarchies: governments, universities, and research institutions pour resources into scholarship in and about the Global North, undergirding structural inequalities in global knowledge production. The wide reach of works written in English results directly from the linguistic hegemony enforced by the United States and Europe. These conditions drive our collaborative work, as do calls from scholars worldwide to decolonize knowledge through translation (Ngũgĩ wa Thiongʼo , 1986; Rizki, 2021; . As Tais de Sant’Anna Machado and Keisha-Khan Y. Perry (2021) argue, “[a] serious Black feminist project must be global.” The translation of work from the Global South is a central axis in the consolidation and dissemination of transnational Black feminism, as it enables the circulation of theories and narratives produced by Black women and femmes alongside scholars engaged in Black feminism as a praxis to move beyond the linguistic, national, and colonial borders that have historically silenced this work.

Translation disrupts the epistemological isolation imposed by colonialism. By translating and disseminating novels, poetry, essays, autobiographies, and manifestos by African, Afro-Caribbean, and Afro–Latinx authors, it becomes possible to recognize shared patterns of oppression—state-sanctioned racism, sexism, transphobia, and economic exploitation—without erasing local specificities. Moreover, such circulation creates bridges of identification, solidarity, and collective political and cultural action, and facilitates the sharing of knowledge and strategies for creating a liberatory world. Translating the “Amefricanifesto” is but one response to global inequities structuring knowledge production. By participating in this collaborative work, we join many other writers and translators across the hemisphere who are engaged with the ever-relevant arguments of late-20th-century Black feminist writing. Our work, together with the writers of “Amefricanifesto,” centers Black feminist writing as central to liberatory politics and points to the enduring relevance of Lélia Gonzalez’s work internationally. To translate is to dispute who produces theory, who is read, and who is cited. To translate is to take a position on whose knowledge matters.

Our goal in this collaboration is to contribute to the translation and dissemination of marginalized Black feminist writing and to expose the marginalization of this type of labor. These collective Black feminist projects foment and come into fruition in the peripheries (periferias). The word periferia in Brazil often refers to the residential outskirts of the urban center, populated by the working class, which in Brazil, like the United States, is highly racialized. The concept, as an adjective, periférica or peripheral, also describes the labor that takes place in the cracks between the 9-5 job, end-of-semester grading, the caretaking of family members, and the manual labor of our lives. For two underemployed, early-career scholars, this labor takes place at the end of our long days, while we are waiting for the bus, over WhatsApp DMs and encouraging emojis as we move through the daily grind. This creative labor taking place in the periphery is actively silenced by the structures of empire across the Americas. For decades, the field of International Relations was thought of as inherently top-down, linked to a very "state-centric" notion of relations without recognizing the contributions and realities of women, Black people, queer and trans people, and the organizations and social movements we foster. Through this work, we prioritize lived experiences that surpass the critical logic of the Global North and South or state-centric projects of internationalism.

We understand translation as a tool for confronting epistemic inequalities and an ally in the collective labor of producing living, engaged, and diverse knowledge. “Amefricanifesto” makes clear the value and centrality of collectivity and collaboration in Black feminist formations from Brazil. Collaborative translation of Black feminist writing is epistemological activism and hemispheric solidarity on the page. By connecting historical manifestos with contemporary activist projects like the “Amefricanifesto,” this article reaffirms a meeting of generations and collective writing as a legacy of feminist resistance. More than preserving a legacy, it is about activating that legacy in the present, recognizing that Black feminist struggles continue to produce theory and knowledge. Black feminism across the Americas should not be understood as an immutable field but as an intense, creative, and living collective process. Choosing to translate Black feminist writing is to decide which perspectives and methodologies traverse borders, which memories are to remain alive, and which political horizons are possible in the future.

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Notes

1. i Corresponding Author, University of Pennsylvania. Contact: [email protected]

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2. ii International Relations Institute, Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro

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3. In her 1988 article “A categoria político-cultural de amefricanidade,” Lélia Gonzalez coined the term amefricanidade, or amefricanity, in order to emphasize the African roots of Brazil’s political and cultural formation via forced colonization and migration of enslaved African peoples by the Portuguese. This term also de-emphasizes an idea of Latinidad, and more precisely in the context of Brazil, of a racial democracy, which erases Black people and Black liberation struggles from the history, culture, and collective identities present in Brazil.

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4. This sentence in quotation is a widely cited quote from Lélia Gonzalez. For a more in-depth discussion of this term, see Perry and Sotero, 2019.

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5. The rise of repressive regimes in Latin America, referred to as the “Red Wave,” is evidenced by the ousting of Fernando Lugo in Paraguay in 2012 and Dilma Rousseff in Brazil in 2016, the elections of Pedro Pablo Kuczynski in Peru in 2016 and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil in 2018, and Sebastián Piñera’s tenure in Chile from 2010 until 2018. Although they have distinct profiles, these regime changes share a common agenda with the rise of the far right in the U.S. and Europe: political repression, increased militarization, and austerity measures dismantling public initiatives that support basic survival needs (Avritzer, 2019; Biroli, Campos Machado and Vaggione, 2020 ). The global response to the murder of Black feminist activist Marielle Franco made even more evident the connections between these rising repressive regimes and the building feminist response (de Araújo, 2018; Gago, 2020).

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6. Lélia González emphasized the word pretuguês to highlight the important and actively invisibilized role that Afrodiasporic people have had in shaping Brazilian Portuguese through the resignification of the language of the colonizers. The word is created by combining the word “Portuguese” and the word “preto,” a word for “Black,” that is both historically derogatory and has been reappropriated by Afrodiasporic people.

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7. From “Amefricanifesto: Por mulheres negras brasileiras,” Lélia Gonzalez Vive, 2021. Our translation.

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8. This term was first developed in her (1984) essay “Racismo e sexismo na cultural brasileira,” presented at the Meeting of the “Temas e Problemas da População Negra no Brasil” working group at the 4th Annual Convention of the Brazilian Association for Social Science Research, Rio de Janeiro, October 31st, 1980.

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9. Lyon (2019) and Puchner (2005) both outline the performative nature of the manifesto genre by citing J. L. Austin’s (1962, p. 5) How to do Things With Words, in which Austin describes performative speech acts as when “the uttering of the sentence is, or is a part of, the doing of an action.”

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10. See Pires (2021) for a discussion on how collectivity is central to both historic and contemporary Black feminist thought in Brazil.

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11. From “Amefricanifesto: Por mulheres negras brasileiras,” Lélia Gonzalez Vive, 2021.

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12. This text is also translated from the Portuguese by Alex Brostoff and Jamille Pinheiro Dias.

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