Redefining Black Consciousness and resistance: The intersection of Black Consciousness and Black feminist thought

This article explores Black womxn's self-representations of key experiences in the #RhodesMustFall (#RMF) movement, when the movement explicitly adopts Black feminist theory, such as intersectionality, as an approach for anti-racist resistance in South African higher education. The self-representations of being ‘womxn’ and being ‘Black’ are complemented by a new political consciousness in post-1994 South Africa (SA), which challenges the current dominant masculine ideas of liberation and solidarity. This study uses the #RMF movement as a case study in order to understand new developments in ideologies such as Black feminism and Black Consciousness which emerge from Black womxn's theorisations. These developments in theory emerge in Black womxn activists’ voices, literature and representations of memory; however, there remain patterns of history that repeat themselves in the politics of Black liberation.This article draws its analyses from a conversation of memory-work with four Black womxn activists from the #RMF movement, who experience violence based on their social position and immediate context – the university. Memory-work, as a feminist methodology, allows for individual and collective reflection and theorisations to lead to complex understandings of violence. Violence is understood spatially, linguistically, intellectually, spiritually, and politically and their resistance to that is intersectional and holistic. Through their representations of their experiences, the #RMF Black womxn activists theorise the ontology of Blackness with more nuance and more complex understandings of Black community or collective resistance and liberation. This article enables us to understand the dynamics of either Black feminist, womanist or African feminist discourse and anti-racist discourse in SA – particularly in spaces of activism, and further, how it challenges the purpose and role of a university.