Date: April 16, 2019
Location: NYU – Abu Dhabi
MODERATORS Dawn Chatty
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.
