Remaking Black Power: How Black Women Transformed an Era by Ashley Farmer (review)

Ashley Farmer's Remaking Black Power opens with a mixed-media image of a black woman carrying a bag of groceries and declaring her opposition to the Vietnam war and her support for African liberation and voter registration. This image captures the complex and multifaceted constructions of black womanhood in the Black Power era that Farmer examines in her study. Farmer shows that these conversations on race, gender, and class were not solely controlled by male activists despite the prevailing view of Black Power as a male-dominated movement. Foregrounding artwork, essays, and speeches by black women activists, this volume makes a critical intervention in the study of black activism in the mid-twentieth century by moving "beyond the framework that men theorized and women organized" (Farmer, 14). Farmer situates black women as theorizers of the Black Power movement who engaged with politics both at home and abroad. In doing so, they articulated different models of black womanhood as a political act that by turns reinforced, opposed, and moved beyond white constructions of blackness and patriarchal constructions of womanhood.