Print Networks and Cultural Strategy in the Archives of the National Alliance of Black Feminists, 1976-82
A talk by Hayley Toth
March 7, 2025 at 9AM CT | 8.30PM IST| 3PM GMT
[Zoom link to follow shortly]
Based on archival research at the Vivian G. Harsh Research Collection in Chicago, this talk looks at the print activities and cultural logic of an explicitly political organisation, the National Alliance of Black Feminists. Officially founded in Chicago in 1976, the National Alliance of Black Feminists does not possess the cultural legacy of Black feminist contemporaries such as the Third World Women’s Alliance (which published a regular newspaper named Triple Jeopardy [1971-75]), or the Combahee River Collective, whose manifesto has been thoroughly canonised, if selected read, by women’s studies as “an evidentiary object in the search for intersectionality’s true meaning” (Bloodgood 2020, p. 29). Nor does its cultural influence compare to that of Chicago-based contemporaries like the Organization of Black American Culture (OBA-C), which coordinated local artists and writers in the struggle for racial justice and equality. However, despite its self-definition as a political group rather than an arts organisation, the National Alliance of Black Feminists engaged in collaborative cultural activities both strategically and informally to further the causes of racial justice and gender equality.
At least at one level, arts programming was viewed by the organisation as a way to gain access to different kinds of federal and state funding that weren’t available to political groups. But, drawing on archival materials, I show that the National Alliance of Black Feminists possessed a recognisable theory of aesthetic value that animated its programming, from its local consciousness-raising groups to its representations on behalf of Black writers and creatives. I proceed to suggest that this theory of aesthetic value informed the individual and organisational relationships that the organisation nurtured. Under the tenacious leadership of co-founder Brenda Eichelberger, the National Alliance of Black Feminists made use of the distribution networks of larger print and non-print media outlets to promote membership and the dissemination of Black feminist ideals. The group’s distinctive engagements with Black periodicals like Ebony, Essence and The Chicago Defender, and feminist journals like Quest, together with its misrepresentation by local newspapers and the hostility of some commercial publishers, reveals much of the difficulties of Black women-centred print activism. At the same time, the National Alliance of Black Feminists’ (albeit short-lived) success in establishing spaces and print networks to serve the politicisation of Black women draws attention to the affordances of Chicago’s historic ‘Black Belt’ and informally segregated print industry.
Biography:
Hayley G. Toth is a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Newcastle University. Working under the mentorship of Neelam Srivastava, her three-year research fellowship investigates the proliferation of collective forms of literary production, consumption, and performance between 1976 and 1982. Her project, ‘Collective Form,’ analyses how Black activists theorised and exercised cultural collaboration as a practice of organised resistance against systems of cultural, material, and political dispossession. She is the author of Reading Postcolonial Literature: From Professional to Non-Professional Practices (forthcoming with Liverpool University Press).