Race Women Internationalists

Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles

Imaobong D. Umoren

• Publisher: University of California Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780520968431
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Social History
• Index: History

Race Women Internationalists explores how a group of Caribbean and African American women in the early and mid-twentieth century traveled the world to fight colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Based on newspaper articles, speeches, and creative fiction and adopting a comparative perspective, the book brings together the entangled lives of three notable but overlooked women: American Eslanda Robeson, Martinican Paulette Nardal, and Jamaican Una Marson. It explores how, between the 1920s and the 1960s, the trio participated in global freedom struggles by traveling; building networks in feminist, student, black-led, anticolonial, and antifascist organizations; and forging alliances with key leaders. This made them race women internationalists—figures who engaged with a variety of interconnected internationalisms to challenge various forms of inequality facing people of African descent across the diaspora and the continent.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Race Women Internationalists
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• CONTENTS
• List of Illustrations
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Preface
• Introduction
• 1. Black and Feminist Internationalism in Interwar Europe, 1920–1935
• 2. The Italian Invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, and Anti-fascist Internationalism, 1935–1939
• 3. Internationalisms during and after World War II, 1939–1949
• 4. Continuities and Changes, 1950–1966
• Conclusion
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index