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Clenora F. Hudson-Weems (born July 23, 1945)[1] is an African-American author and academic who is currently a professor of English at the University of Missouri.[2] She coined the term "Africana womanism" in the late 1980s, contending that women of African descent have always been Africana womanists by their very nature, dating back to Africana women in antiquity, even before the coinage of the word itself. Africana Womanism, a family-centered paradigm, observed this phenomenon, then proceeded in naming and defining a paradigm relative to who Africana women are and how they go about their daily lives in both the home place and the workplace.
Hudson-Weems wrote a research paper entitled "The Tripartite Plight of the Black Woman—Racism, Classism and Sexism—in Our Nig, Their Eyes Were Watching God and The Color Purple" during her first semester as a Ph.D. student at the University of Iowa in 1985.[3] She set up a panel on the need for prioritizing race, class and gender for Black women and presented it at the 1986 National Council for Black Studies Annual conference, which was later published in the Journal of Black Studies in 1989.
Hudson-Weems has written many papers concerning the distinctions between Africana womanism, earlier called Black Womanism, Womanism and Black feminism. She believed that Black Feminism was lacking some crucial ideas in its concept, which motivated her to come up with Black/Africana Womanism. She was concerned about how the already existing concepts such as feminism, black feminism, womanism, did not include an authentic agenda for Africana women.[3]
Her book Africana Womanism: Reclaiming Ourselves was released in 1993 even though several publishers were hesitant to take on the manuscript due to the controversial issues surrounding black women's rejection of "mainstream" feminist ideology.[3]
Hudson-Weems took a strong position that black women should not have to rely on Eurocentric feminism for their liberation when they have a rich history and legacy of women of African descent. [Hill 1811][3] She believed that many people viewed Africana Womanism as risking their professional security and also as invalidating their years of research from the Black feminist perspective.[3] She wished people viewed the concept as "a natural evolutionary process of ideological growth and development" from Black feminism to Africana womanism (Hudson-Weems, "... Entering the New Millenium" 36).[3]
Hudson-Weems criticized Black feminists because they did not acknowledge Africana feminism's essential and underlying foundation "nommo", its name.[3] She discusses Africana Womanism and compares it to other branches of feminism and explains what they are lacking in her book Africana Womanist Literary Theory in 2004.[3]
Hudson-Weems is also the author of Emmett Till: The Sacrificial Lamb of the Civil Rights Movement (1994).[3]
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