Black feminist anthropology has been and continues to be rooted in intellectual engagements with transnational Blackness, transnational feminism, queer politics, global anti-Blackness, anti-imperialism, and anticapitalism. Black feminist anthropology is a global endeavor that applies theory and lived experience to restructure ethnography and praxis that is engaged in an intersectional analysis of various oppressions and strategies for resistance, survival, and freedom. This chapter builds on those studies that identify the importance of including transnational Black feminism in the anthropological canon and supporting scholars who center Black women’s experiences throughout the diaspora. The aim is to encourage the use of a transnational Black feminist analytic to transform anthropological approaches to the study of Africa and its diaspora; constructions of labor, production, and reproduction; racialized identity formation; the performance of those identities across gender and sexuality; and narratives of oppression, resistance, and survival. The author centers transnational Black feminist frameworks that see the formation of diaspora as a site for solidarity that coalesce as a result of, around, and between women-led and gender-based political movements. For Black feminist anthropologists it names what was already possible, while providing an intentional epistemic framework and methodology for collaboration with Black feminists throughout Africa and its diaspora.

This chapter looks at the anthropological contributions to resistance as it manifests itself within people’s everyday lives. It sheds light on the multifaceted ways in which power, in the Foucauldian sense, is renegotiated in the context of everyday relationships and cultural activities. The material discussed in this chapter offers a reflection on how new forms of identities around gender and sexuality, religion, race, and ultimately agency are produced through political and cultural forms of resistance to sexism, patriarchy, Islamophobia, imperialism, and nationalism. In the first part, the chapter sets out the anthropological debates on resistance with a specific focus on Black feminist anthropology and anthropology of law and human rights. In a second part, the chapter examines different samples of feminist practice of resistance including political protest and social movements and everyday bodily performativity. The chapter concludes with a reflection on the methodological implications a feminist-queer anthropological gaze on resistance entails, stressing the need to take the voices and experiences of actors located at the margins as a starting point from where to understand the diverse, and to some extent paradoxical, forms of resistance to hegemonic forms of power.