CFR Spring 2022 Roundtable Event

“Thinking with Andaiye’s The Point is to Change the World: Feminism as Praxis.”  
 
Andaiye is a name synonymous with the fight for transformative change in Guyana. She was a champion for women, the working class, the chronically ill, and sexual and gendered dissidents. While a lecturer at Queens College in New York City, between 1972-1977, she became active in what would be known a civil rights, black power, anti-apartheid, and Latin American anti-dictatorial movements. These experiences strengthened and diversified her feminist and anti-imperialist commitments further inspired by revolutions in Nicaragua, Iran, and centrally Grenada. During the 1980’s, she was a guiding force in the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research (CAFRA) and co-founded Red Thread Women’s organization in Guyana, emerging as a key thinker of the international Wages for Housework perspective which evolved into the Global Women’s Strike. The incredible range of her critical thought can be gleaned from her posthumously published collection of writing, The Point is to Change the World, edited by Alissa Trotz. The title comes from Karl Marx’s eleventh and final thesis on Feuerbach (1845): “The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.” This tremendous collection further cements her place alongside pivotal Caribbean thinkers, such as Elsa Goveia, Aimé Césaire, Édouard Glissant, C.L.R. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter, Suzanne Césaire, George Lamming, Stuart Hall, and Walter Rodney, her comrade in the Working People’s Alliance. Please join Kwame Edwin Otu (University of Virginia), K’eguro Macharia (Independent Scholar), Bedour Alagraa (University of Texas), Carole Boyce Davies (Cornell University), Alissa Trotz (University of Toronto), and Shanté Paradigm Smalls (St. John’s University) for a discussion of The Point is to Change the World.

Co-sponsored by the Center for Latinx & Latin American Studies