The first paper explores the emigration experience through the eyes of women in British Guiana. The lives of these women offer a deeper understanding of the emigration experience through the centering of women’s social and political engagement with each other, thereby forming, and adding to, communal networks that would continue to exist for many years to come. The second paper expands upon similar issues related to gender and social control which emerged in the 1860s following the Haitian state’s implementation of an emigration program focused on facilitating the migration of Black Americans to Haiti. Ghana stands out as a site of Black American emigration when the pan-Africanist leader Kwame Nkrumah called on Africans in the diaspora to assist in the institution and nation-building of the newly independent Black nation. Although scholarship has covered civil rights activists, black radical refugees, artists, and intellectuals who found a temporary home in Ghana in the 1950s and 1960s, the third paper will discuss the experiences of Black American middle-class professionals who pursued more individualistic projects of economic and spiritual freedom but who left lasting yet not always acknowledged legacies in Ghana until today.

Each paper puts forth an examination of the experiential dimensions of Black American emigrants at different times and in different places. Through a transtemporal and transnational orientation toward this topic, these papers illuminate the necessity of examining people’s experiences of emigrating outside of emigrationist discourse produced to foster support as the actual act of migrating often reshaped people’s understandings of the meanings of freedom and autonomy. Further, these papers take a dialogic approach when analyzing Black Americans’ reflections on emigration as a tool of liberation in order to consider how their perspectives were shaped and reshaped in collaboration, dialogue, and - at times - contestation with people in the host countries. By arguing for the importance of exploring topics of emigration to include a more expansive view in temporal, geographic, and diasporic frameworks, the panelists use emigration experiences and discourses to display the project of emigration’s attendant influence on conceptualizations of Black nationalism and solidarity formation during the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.