'Our lives are political!' Afrofeminism in France or the fightback of the granddaughters of empire

To what extent may moral and emotional ordeals, gathered in life trajectories, sustain a set of activities at the root of legitimate political participation? The plural aspects of the afrofeminist experience in contemporary France, unfolding in various and heterogeneous places (whether private, public or semi-public), invite to address this question. Afrofeminism can be defined as a politics of emotional sensibility, considering the recharacterization of subjective and intimate experiences into a common ordeal that women activists critically and reflexively examine. Drawing on a careful study of the variety of afrofeminist political expressions and discourses of activists - in particular the life narrative of one of the Mwasi collective's founders - this chapter calls to temper and complicate mainstream analysis of the working classes' de-politicization or political demobilization in contemporary France. It also shows that, to the 'powerless', politics is in many respects still related to an emancipatory political imagination that crucially challenges equality in ordinary social relations.