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The Point is To Change the World
Selected Writings of Andaiye
Radical activist, thinker, and comrade of Walter Rodney, Andaiye was one of the Caribbean’s most important political voices. For the first time, her writings are published in one collection. Through essays, letters, and journal entries, Andaiye’s thinking on the intersections of gender, race, class, and power are powerfully articulated, Caribbean histories emerge, and stories from a life lived at the barricades are revealed. We learn about the early years of the Working People’s Alliance, the meaning and impact of the murder of Walter Rodney and the fall of the Grenada Revolution. Throughout, we bear witness to Andaiye’s acute understanding of politics rooted in communities and the daily lives of so-called ordinary people. Featuring forewords by Clem Seecharan and Robin DG Kelley, these texts will become vital tools in our own struggles to “overcome the power relations that are embedded in every unequal facet of our lives.”
Contributors
Andaiye
Andaiye (September 11, 1942–May 31, 2019) was one of the Caribbean’s leading radical political figures, social and political thinkers, and public intellectuals. She spent all of her adult life in left and women’s politics in Guyana, the Caribbean and internationally. In Guyana, she was a member of the Working People’s Alliance(WPA), serving on the party executive and as party coordinator/editor, international secretary and women’s secretary through the period of political turbulence and anti-dictatorial struggle that culminated in the assassination of Walter Rodneyon June 13, 1980. Part of her political work was editing some of the last writing by Walter Rodney. From the mid-1980s Andaiye’s activism was largely with women in Guyana, the Caribbean, and globally. She was one of the founders of Red Thread, a women’s organization in Guyana, worked with the Women and Development Unit of the University of the West Indies, was attached very briefly to the regional integration organization (CARICOM) as Special Advisor to the Secretary General on Women & Gender, helping prepare Ministers of Women’s Affairs for the 1995 Beijing Conference on Women, and was a member of the Regional Executive of the Caribbean Association for Feminist Research and Action (CAFRA) in the mid-1990s. Internationally, she was associated with the Global Women’s Strike (GWS) and Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike. A cancer survivor herself twice over, Andaiye was a founder of the now defunct Guyana Cancer Society and Cancer Survivors Action Group. For many years, she wrote a weekly newspaper column titled “Woman’s Eye View,” and she has written and published articles and chapters on women in Guyana and the rest of the Caribbean.
Alissa Trotz
Alissa Trotz is Professor of Caribbean Studies at New College and Women and Gender Studies at the University of Toronto. She is also affiliate faculty at the Dame Nita Barrow Institute of Gender and Development Studies at the University of the West Indies, Cave Hill, Barbados. She is a member of Red Thread Women’s Organization in Guyana and editor of “In the Diaspora,” a weekly newspaper column in the Guyanese daily, Stabroek News.
