Kanak Women and the Revolutionary Struggle for Kanak Liberation: Militant Women’s Writing in the Groupe 1878 and the PALIKA

Abstract

This article discusses how radical Kanak women got involved in the revolutionary struggle for Kanak national liberation and some of their theoretical and practical contributions as well as interventions within the movement from the mid-1970s to the early 1980s. Through a close reading of the announcements, editorials, political essays, meeting reports, and speeches written by Kanak women militants in the Groupe 1878 and, later on, the Parti de Libération Kanak (PALIKA), which were published in the Groupe 1878’s political newspaper Nouvelles 1878 Andi Ma Dhô, this article aims to demonstrate the revolutionary character of Kanak women’s protofeminism. It argues that their politics should be understood as a Black Indigenous anti-capitalist feminist praxis, which expanded the scope of Kanak socio-political thought and theory in the 1970s.