Claudia Pena
UCLA
Migration and Trauma

Historically, migration from Latin America to the Mexican/US border generally revolved around young men looking for work. In the past decade, and more so in the last few years, we’ve seen more women and children making the trek. They seek opportunity and safety,
both needs resulting from US foreign policy effecting unstable conditions in their home countries. The migrant caravan of 2018-19 consists of at least 5,000 migrants from Honduras, Guatemala, El Salvador and Mexico. Though the destination is the United States, most have been in Tijuana, Mexico awaiting their turn to make their asylum claim. Meanwhile, they depend on the altruism of the locals and generosity of NGO’s. My work focuses on trauma informed lawyering. I’ve conducted trainings to ensure attorneys offering migrants legal services are properly prepared to minimize the re-traumatization of those seeking asylum and also to limit their own vicarious trauma as they bear witness to the often harrowing testimonies. I will discuss a bit about about this work and some of the narratives migrants have shared with me.

Debora Spini
New York University, Florence
Migratory violence

My paper will explore the different forms of violence experienced by migrating women, with a special, although not exclusive, focus on European political discourses. My paper will analyse how migrant women are represented in European social imaginaries as “victims”,
deprived of voice and agency and in need of “salvation”; many myths and assumption focus on their bodies and their sexuality. My paper will define this representations as examples of symbolic violence, to be matched with the reality of phenomena of massive structural violence as it is made evident in the new forms of slavery such as trafficking and forced sexual labour.

Anna Arabindan-Kesson
Princeton University
A Conflicted Terrain: Visualizing War, Imagining Nation

2019 marks the ten year anniversary of the end of the Sri Lankan civil war. This paper examines the legacies of this war and its dislocation in the work of Sri Lankan artists and writers both as a subject and a catalyst for the development of new artistic trends. Drawing on the art works and the personal stories of these artists, my paper will reflect on the narrativization of war in multiple spheres and its continued significance in constructions of Sri Lankanness, at home and abroad.

---

Collaborators

Francille Wilson
University of Southern California
Sojourning for Truth: Black Women’s Movements for Human Rights

This presentation focuses on three key expressions of physical and social movements that capture a century of black women’s expansive interpretations of human rights. We begin with women’s migrations and escapes during slavery spotlighting Philadelphia’s Vigilance Association members work on the Underground Railroad and self-exiled newspaper editor Mary Ann Shadd Cary’s
anti-slavery and women’s rights advocacy. Next at the turn of the 20th century we analyze the search for freedom and peace by lecturers and travelers Ida B. Wells, Mary Church Terrell and Addie Hunton as well as other black women’s migration and travel to Africa, Europe and Latin America. Finally we scrutinize and compare radical activists Vicki Garvin and Claudia Jones’s migrations to China and England in the 1950s with U.S. based ‘moderate’ black clubwomen including Mary McCleod Bethune and Pauli Murray who attempted to utilize the United Nation and alliances with other “women of the darker races” to press for human rights for all women.

Gunja SenGupta
Brooklyn College
Circulating Women: The Personal and International Politics of Slavery and “Freedom” in the 19th Century.

As the nineteenth-century dawned, the blood and toil of human chattel helped knit North America with the Indian Ocean World into international networks of trade and travel, and conquest and colonization, of politics and ideology, and culture and community. This
paper fleshes out on a granular level, the interface among the domestic, international, and deeply personal politics of slavery and freedom, by tracking the circulation of “subaltern” women – African and South Asian – among nodes of commercial exchange stretching from East Africa through the Persian Gulf and the Red Sea, into the Indian subcontinent. The march of abolition and empire balkanized these realms along routes of economic, political, philosophical, and jurisdictional struggles over slavery and the meanings of “freedom.”
“Subaltern” women, in various roles as captive, rebel, or refugee, navigated transnational landscapes fractured along lines of politics, law, and culture. Within these borderlands of contention, otherwise invisible figures became legible in official records maintained by
governments. The testimonies they generated turned slave statistics into names and places, and objects of imperial “benevolence “ into witnesses and mediators among powerful men: sultans, vazirs, merchants, missionaries, and imperial bureaucrats. Elusive stories of women’s migration “from below,” offer narratives of subaltern interaction with formal institutions – whether state, law, police, or church – to define meanings of subjectivity that interrupted linear and universalist narratives of liberty’s progress under the British flag in the
19th century.

Sharon Harley
University of Maryland, College Park
BEYOND GLOBAL MEETINGS AND THE SORBONNE: THE POLITICS OF BLACK WOMEN’S MIGRATION

Two major sites of black women’s transnational migratory experiences are international conferences and schools abroad. It was not uncommon for educated, middle-class black women in the U.S. to attend and deliver papers at international conferences and to attend colleges in Europe and West Africa. While small in number, Anna Julia Cooper was not alone among educated black women when she
studied at the Sorbonne (receiving a Ph.D. in 1925). There were a few other black women who departed the U.S. in the early twentieth century to attend the Pan African conferences in London. Like Cooper, Pan-Africanist/globalist Shirley Graham Du Bois attended classes at the Sorbonne, but her international travels extended far beyond the classroom and Western Europe as she traveled, spoke, and
participated in cultural and political engagements in Eastern Europe, Asia (Japan and China) and in Africa/Middle East (Egypt, Ghana, Nigeria, and Tanzania). The primary focus of my proposed project is to study the meaning and significance of race, gender, and nationality in the migratory patterns and international engagements of twentieth century African diasporic black women. Most
significantly, I explore how conference and scholarly interactions and migrations extend or have resonance for black women travelers and the people they encounter within and beyond conference and campus locations.

Tiffany M. Gill
University of Delaware
“Tour with a Purpose: Black Clubwomen, International Travel, and the Meaning of Freedom during the Cold War”

In 1964, as groups of Civil Rights workers arrived in the Mississippi Delta to battle for voting rights during Freedom Summer, women from the National Council of Negro Women (NCNW) embarked on a freedom summer of their own. However, these women were not sleeping on the floors of sharecropper’s homes, but in four-star hotels across Europe. In a memo sent to all members of the NCNW, Marion Hazel Jackson, the organization’s treasurer who had recently joined the staff of UniTours, the trip’s sponsor, made a bold and compulsory appeal. Jackson wrote, that “the Council’s international project requires YOU as an ambassador abroad,” and explained that black women had an important role to play in promoting “peace and understanding among all the peoples of the world.” Furthermore, such travels, Jackson noted, would “present a positive image of Negro-Americans abroad.” This paper will examine the international travels of black professional women, like those in the NCNW, to highlight the ways that centering race, class, and gender complicates narratives about U.S. foreign policy during the Cold War. Specifically, I will examine the ways international travel gave black women a way to foster global solidarities with oppressed people around the globe.

---

Collaborators

---

Collaborators

Paulette Young
Art historian RobertsonYoung Gallery, New York
Fashion Stories: Migration and Fashioning Identity in America

A Study of the designers Mimi Plange and Wunmi—New York’s fashion industry and the development of New York style have historically and are continually shaped by transnational migration. This paper explores the creative practice of two women designers of African descent whose work is shaped by their international migration experiences. Mimi Plange, Ghanaian born American women’s wear brand is inspired by African art, ritual and architecture. London-born, Lagos raised Wunmi, is a New York based performer and costume designer whose work is steeped in the style of Afrobeat and the Jamaican roots movement. Through oral histories, visual narratives and collected stories, these fashion designers contemplate how their personal journeys and life in New York have influenced their collections and brands. Clients share their fashion stories of acquiring and wearing Plange and Wunmi designs and describe their commitment to the brands.

Cheryl Finley
Cornell University
Contemporary Art of Migration: Joy Gregory’s Grand Tour

West Indian emigrants, such as Joy Gregory’s parents, traveled [to Europe] with the hope that both worlds might belong to them, the old and the new. They traveled in the hope that the mother country would remain true to her promise that she would protect the children of her empire. However, shortly after disembarkation the West Indian migrants of the fifties and sixties discovered that the realities of this new world were likely to be more challenging than they had anticipated. Over five months, Gregory traveled extensively in Belgium, Holland, France, Spain, Portugal, Cuba, Jamaica, Panama, Trinidad, Guyana, Surinam, and Haiti. Probing for evidence of the contemporary and colonial relationship between Europe and the Caribbean, she conducted interviews with people while collecting artifacts, recording sound, and photographing important sites of memory. One of the paradoxes Gregory noticed about the people she met in the Caribbean was their strong connection to, and affinity for, Europe as a motherland, despite the fact that many were the descendants of enslaved Africans forcibly brought by Europeans to the so-called new world to work the sugar cane, rice, and tobacco plantations. The fruits of their labors helped to build Europe while stripping the Caribbean and Africa of valuable natural and human resources. Today, many of the world’s poorest nations are located in these regions, including Haiti and Sierra Leone, to name just two. The continuing effects of the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent ravages of colonial rule have ensured that the familial bond between Europe and the Caribbean is complicated, to say the least. On the one hand, Europe symbolizes the evil stepmother of the Cinderella fairytale; on the other hand, it represents the free, happily-everafter lifestyle that the handsome prince offers. Many Caribbean residents were lured to mother Europe during the postwar era with the promise of employment, better education, and the benefits of being at the epicenter of the empire, even in its decline. For those that remained in the Caribbean, Europe still represents a mythical, faraway place, a fantasyland and an unattainable dream, according to many of the people that Gregory interviewed. She asked them, “Where would you go, if you could?” Many responded with the name of a European country or city: England, France, Spain, and Portugal were the popular countries, while London, Paris, Venice, and Lisbon were the favored cities. The people that Gregory spoke to were very knowledgeable about Europe because of their colonial ties as well as from articles in the press, grade-school history and geography classes, and their relatives who have gone there within the past fifty years.

Sama Alshaibi
University of Arizona
Carry Over

My presentation will discuss the societal burden of unequal power relations between the West and the Middle East, and how that is articulated through photographs of women, particularly those made by Westerners. My latest photography project, Carry Over observes similarities between numerous historical Oriental portraits of MENA women and their contemporary counterparts now suggesting a chaotic existence under threat of displacement. For example, recent Associated Press photographs of Iraqi women standing in lines and stacking containers of petrol and dirty water on their heads reminds me of the shortages they face, yet reductive images fixated on their religious dress and head-coverings recall numerous historical photographs of women from the MENA region dressed in their ethnic attire while carrying vessels of water on their heads. In Carry Over, I restage elements of these photographs, including printing with historic Albumen processes, while disrupting the social exploitation of women’s relationship to security, home, and socio-economic through a feminist and postcolonial perspective.

Deborah Willis
New York University
Carrie Mae Weems’ Roaming Series

Carrie Mae Weems’s photographic “Roaming Series,” reflects on the contradictory instabilities introduced by forced migration, on the one hand, and the lack of mobility resulting from enslavement and incarceration, on the other. The artist’s own freedom and her resulting presence at the sites of imperial power activate memory and reveal the invisible human costs of state and imperial power. Weems’ 2006 Roaming series consists of large-scale photographs created in major locales in Europe as they reference imperial and colonial power. She explores the problems of representation and the interplay between the historical text and contemporary art practices that inform and translate views on gender and race today. By creating a visual memoir that looks at freedom and migration, Weems’ Roaming series is a search for counter-memories haunting classic European imperial sites. Noting and contesting inequities or absences, Weems thus establishes a presence and place for black women throughout the world and throughout history. Roaming is about seeing and being seen. It forces the viewer to see race often obscured or erased in museum exhibitions; beauty denied or accepted when considering the black female body; and potential of the black robed figure that guides us through rugged landscapes, pristine city views, and forbidden class structures.

---

Collaborators

Ellyn Toscano
New York University
A Reflection: Hortense Acton in Florence

I came to understand the consequences of migration and the powerful self-fashioning of transitive identities through the life of Hortense Acton. As the former director of Villa La Pietra, in Florence, the house museum containing 6,000 objects including art, furniture, tapestry and textiles, sculptures, books and photographs, on a thirty-eight acre estate now owned by New York University, I was curious about the life of the owner of the villa. The Villa and estate were previously owned by the Acton family. It was Hortense Mitchell a wealthy socialite from Chicago, who purchased the fifteenth-century estate with the extraordinary fortune amassed by her father, one of the founders in 1874 of the Illinois Trust and Savings Bank in Chicago. In 1903, Hortense married Arthur Acton, the rather less distinguished but socially ambitious adventurer with questionable lineage traced to the nineteenth-century historian Lord Acton. The marriage was unannounced, unexpected and without the fuss of the many society weddings in Chicago in which Hortense served as bridesmaid. Hortense and Arthur settled in Florence and began a life collecting art and entertaining. In July 1904 they started a family. Hortense never returned to live in Chicago. Pictures kept in an archive in Villa La Pietra reveal that Hortense had travelled extensively and adventurously before she married, apparently seeking a different life from that expected of young, rich debutantes of her day. We can cobble together a sketchy understanding of her biography from newspaper accounts of her social life in Chicago and Florence, the treasure trove of photographs in the family archive, and the objects in her home attributable to her alone, such as a carefully selected group of fancy dresses with matching shoes, and her books, all readily identifiable as hers through the beautiful bookplates that depicted a boat traveling at sea. We know nothing about her motivation for uprooting her comfortable existence and emigrating to Florence. What was she leaving when she quit Chicago? What was she seeking?  In her fetishized presence in, and, at the same time pervasive absence from her home, Hortense is an alluring character. Aside from her wealth, was she extraordinary? Was it away from the ordinary that she was traveling? Fascinated by the lives of the large expat community in Florence during the early part of the twentieth century, this presentation will weave a story about the Villa, Hortense, and myself as an ‘expat’, the rather more genteel word for immigrant, the question of why people choose to disrupt their lives, leave behind a regular, knowable and predictable life for an uncertain and precarious existence in an unknown place was increasingly on my mind.

Sarah Khan
Independent Scholar and artist – New York
Cookbook of Gestures: No Fruits for Her Labor

I make visible the often unacknowledged informal labor of women as culinary creators, healers, and culture sustainers. To continue my efforts, I have been researching diverse Fassi (Fez, Morocco) women* cooks and farmers, the seasonal foods they employ, the ways they work to sustain their families and communities, and enhance biocultural diversity. The Cookbook of Gestures is one expression of this body of work. A recipe is not just a written document. It is the result of a series of past and present innovative and improvised sensory gestures. Women conjure dishes, nimbly incorporating old and new ingredients. Combined, gestures and ingredients create what we call taste. In The Cookbook of Gestures series, I isolate agile motions, create delicate multisensory video, and reveal the dance of timeless embodied gestures.

Kalia Brooks Nelson
New York University
Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s Embodiment of race and gender in clay

This presentation will focus on Jennifer Ling Datchuk’s embodiment of race and gender in her recent bodies of work from 2014 – 2018. She uses porcelain to contemplate themes related to identity, otherness and belonging rooted in her mixed Chinese and white American heritage. As such, she has created a lexicon that visualizes the intersection between cultural appropriation, global economy and the
commodification of the human body. Datchuk reorganizes the notion of race and gender within the framework of international manufacturing and consumption of goods. Her artwork challenges the authenticity of identity narratives that are distributed through
commodities, and the impact that has on the reception and appearance of the human body. In so doing, she brings to the foreground the manufactured elements of identity that mediate the arbitrary, yet reified, cultural distinctions between white, black and other.

Arlene Davila
New York University
The LatinX Project

The Latinization of U.S. cities has been accompanied by the rapid displacement of Latinx from their historically stronghold communities. Art and culture have been central to these processes, both to expediting gentrification and to strategies of resistance and Latinx place making. This is evident in the role art galleries and culture-based developments have played in the gentrification of urban cities as well as in the rise of Latinx artistic interventions that place culture and place-making at the forefront of their practice. 

Pamela Newkirk
New York University
A LOVE NO LESS: The Material Culture of Love Letters by Women

African American love letters written are rarely discussed by scholars, Newkirk will share letters by well-known figures and ordinary women that explore travel, the joy and tenderness of romance, and offers glimpses into the social, literary, and political lives of black American women throughout the last two centuries. A LOVE NO LESS will focus on the letters of African American lovers of all walks of life. Newkirk poses A LOVE NO LESS is a testament to black love and to the bonds that endure in the face of physical separation, harsh times, and personal misfortunes. It also provides a peek into the more public arena, as writers tell their lovers about their everyday activities and encounters. Letters from the Harlem Renaissance capture the excitement and vibrancy of that extraordinary period with stories about dinners, theater parties, shows and social outings. In a letter to her new husband written in the 1930s, stage and screen star Fredi Washington describes seeing a stereo for the first time and recounts her negotiations for a role in a Paramount film.

---

Collaborators