Black Women's 20th-Century Nationalisms

When the sociologist, Chancelor Williams, declared in 1972 that “the history of the race could not be understood if studied in isolation,” he could not have dared to imagine the ways in which his exhortation would inspire a generation of scholarship. Taking the injunction especially to heart was Black women’s studies. Over the past two decades, a proliferation of research in the field has chronicled the formation of internationalist consciousness and Third-world solidarity among black women in the twentieth century. Studies on Claudia Jones, Queen Mother Audley Moore, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Paulette Nadal, to name a few, have shown how black women pushed beyond the boundaries of the nation-state to perform their activism and express their freedom dreams. Whether they operated under the aegis of Garveyism, Black nationalism, the NACW, the Communist Party, or the Black artistic renaissance, black women across the diaspora came together to present collective visions of liberation. Their varying proposals and differing politics of racial equality, economic justice, anticolonial ethics, and gender equality furnish the contents of this paper. Crucially, their histories orient emergent scholars toward novel archival practices that reconceptualize our understanding of the sites and sensibilities of black internationalism.