Readings on Black Women’s Internationalism

In recent years, the field of black internationalism has grown in leaps and bounds. Scholars are moving further away from a nation-state level of analysis, paying closer attention to the global dimensions of the long black freedom struggle and drawing parallels between the experiences of people of African descent in the United States and the challenges facing people of color in Africa, Asia, Europe and other parts of the globe. Significantly, these works highlight the myriad strategies black activists deployed in their struggle against global white supremacy, underscoring the shared strategies of resistance and the political exchanges and historical connections between people of African descent in the United States and other nonwhites globally. Although these foundational works capture the global visions of people of African descent in the United States and abroad, many de-emphasize women’s roles and the politics of gender in shaping black internationalist movements and discourses.

Thankfully, scholars are increasingly moving away from male-centric historical narratives, concentrating instead on the gendered contours of black internationalism and foregrounding the voices of black women activists and intellectuals. My own research grapples with these concerns, highlighting the creative and critical ways women articulated black internationalism during the twentieth century. While there is still more work to be done, the following list includes some of the most crucial works in the burgeoning sub-field of black women’s internationalism. Representing a variety of academic fields—including History, English, and Political Science—these works highlight the writings, speeches, performances, activism, and overseas travel of a diverse group of black women activists and intellectuals, thereby moving women from the margins to the center of historical narratives on black internationalism.

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• Adair, Zakiya. “Respectable Vamp: A Black Feminist Analysis of Florence Mills’ Career in Early Vaudeville Theater,” Journal of African American Studies, Volume 17, Issue 1 (March 2013): 7-21.

• Andrews, Gregg. Thyra J. Edwards: Black Activist in the Global Freedom Struggle. Columbia, Mo.: University of Missouri Press, 2011.

• Bair, Barbara. “Pan-Africanism as Process: Adelaide Casely Hayford, Garveyism, and the Cultural Roots of Nationalism” in Imagining Home: Class, Culture, and Nationalism in the African Diaspora, eds. Sidney J. Lemelle and Robin D. G. Kelley. London: Verso, 1994.

• Blackwell, Joyce. No Peace without Freedom: Race and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom 1915-1975. Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2004.

• Blain, Keisha N. “‘For the Rights of Dark People in Every Part of the World: Pearl Sherrod, Black Internationalist Feminism, and Afro-Asian Politics during the 1930s,” Souls, Vol. 17, Nos. 1-2 (June 2015): 90-112.

• ———.”‘We Want to Set the World on Fire’: Black Nationalist Women and Diasporic Politics in the New Negro World, 1940–1944,” Journal of Social History, Vol. 49, Issue 1 (Fall 2015): 194-212.

• Byrd, Brandon. “To Start Something to Help These People: African American Women and the Occupation of Haiti, 1915-1934,” Journal of Haitian Studies, Vol. 21, No. 2 (2015): 127-153.

• Cooke, Claire. “Married to Freedom? The Importance of Marriage for African Methodist Episcopal Missionary Women in South Africa, 1900-1940,” The Australasian Review of African Studies, Vol. 36, No. 1 (June 2015): 84-97.

• Davies, Carole Boyce. Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham: Duke University Press, 2007.

• ———.”Pan-Africanism, Transnational Black Feminism and the Limits of Culturalist Analyses in African Gender Discourses,” Feminist Africa, Issue 19 (2014): 78-93.

• Donnell, Alison. “Una Marson: Feminism, Anti-colonialism and a Forgotten Fight for Freedom” in West Indian Intellectuals in Britain, ed. Bill Schwarz. Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2003.

• Evans, Stephanie. “African American Women and International Research: Dr. Anna Julia Cooper’s Legacy of Study Abroad,” Frontiers: The Interdisciplinary Journal of Study Abroad, Vol. 18 (Fall 2009): 77-100.

• Florvil, Tiffany. “Emotional Connections: Audre Lorde and Black German Women” in Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies, eds. Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broeck. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015.

• Gore, Dayo F. Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War. New York: New York University Press, 2011.

• ———. “From Communist Politics to Black Power: The Visionary Politics and Transnational Solidarities of Victoria “Vicki” Ama Garvin” in Want to Start a Revolution? Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle. New York: New York University, 2009.

• Higashida, Cheryl. Black Internationalist Feminism: Women Writers of the Black Left, 1945–1995. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2012.

• Horne, Gerald. Race Woman: the Lives of Shirley Graham Du Bois. New York: New York University Press, 2000.

• Johnson-Odim, Cheryl. “‘For their Freedoms’: The Anti-imperialist and International Feminist Activity of Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti of Nigeria,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32, No. 1 (2009): 51-59.

• Jordan, Gwen. “Engendering the History of Race and International Relations: The Career of Edith Sampson, 1927-1978,” Chicago Kent Law Review 87 (2012): 512-548.

• Laville, Helen and Scott Lucas, “The American Way: Edith Sampson, the NAACP, and African American Identity in the Cold War,” Diplomatic History, No. 20, Issue 4 (1996): 565–590.

• Mahon, Maureen. “Eslanda Goode Robeson’s African Journey: The Politics of Identification and Representation in the African Diaspora,” Souls, Vol. 8, Issue 3 (2006) 101-118.

• Materson, Lisa G. “African American Women’s Global Journeys and the Construction of Cross-ethnic Racial Identity,” Women’s Studies International Forum 32 (2009) 35–42.

• McDuffie, Erik S. Sojourning for Freedom: Black Women, American Communism, and the Making of Black Left Feminism. Durham: Duke University Press, 2011.

• ———. “‘For the Full Freedom of…Colored Women in Africa, Asia, and in these United States…’: Black Women Radicals and the Practice of a Black Women’s International.” Palimpsest: A Journal on Women, Gender and the Black International 1 (2012): 1-30.

• Mikell, Gwendolyn. “Women Mobilizing for Peace: African-American Responses to African Crises,” International Journal on World Peace, Vol. 17, No. 1 (March 2000): 61-84.

• Okada, Yasuhiro. “Negotiating Race and Womanhood across the Pacific: African American Women in Japan under U.S. Military Occupation, 1945–52,” Black Women, Gender, and Families, Vol. 6, No. 1 (2012): 71–96.

• Paik, Shailaja. “Building Bridges: Articulating Dalit and African American Women’s Solidarity,” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly, Volume 42, Numbers 3-4, (Fall/Winter 2014): 74-96.

• Paisley, Fiona.“From Nation of Islam to Goodwill Tourist: African -American Women at Pan-Pacific and South East Asia Women’s Conferences, 1937 and 1955,” Women’s Studies International Forum, Vol. 32, No. 1 (2009): 21–28.

• Plastas, Melissa. A Band of Noble Women: Racial Politics in the Women’s Peace Movement. Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2011.

• Ransby, Barbara. Eslanda: The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2013.

• Richards, Yevette. Maida Springer: Pan-Africanist and International Labor Leader. Pittsburgh, PA: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000.

• ———. “Race, Gender, and Anticommunism in the International Labor Movement: The Pan-African Connections of Maida Springer,” Journal of Women’s History 11, 2 (Summer 1999): 35-59.

• Rief, Michelle. “Thinking Locally, Acting Globally: The International Agenda of African American Clubwomen, 1880-1940,” Journal of African American History, Vol. 89, No. 3 (Summer 2004): 203-222.

• Rolinson, Mary G. “Mabel Murphy Smythe: Black Women and Internationalism” in Georgia Women: Their Lives and Times, eds. Ann Short Chirhart and Kathleen Clark. Athens, GA: The University of Georgia Press, 2014.

• Sapire, Hilary. “Engendering Segregation: ‘Black Women’s Work in the Urban American South and South Africa in the Late Nineteenth and Early Twentieth Centuries,” Southern African Historical Journal, Vol. 43, Issue 1 (2000): 39-80.

• Savage, Barbara. “Professor Merze Tate: Diplomatic Historian, Cosmopolitan Woman” in Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women, eds. Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, Barbara Dianne Savage. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

• Sharpley-Whiting, T. Denean. Bricktop’s Paris: African American Women in Paris between the Two World War. Albany: SUNY Press, 2015.

• Taylor, Ula. The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001.

• Umoren, Imaobong D. “‘This is the Age of Woman’: Black Feminism and Black Internationalism in the Works of Una Marson, 1928-1938,” History of Women in the Americas 1:1 (April 2013): 50–731.