Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles

by Imaobong D. Umoren

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 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. 

210 pages, Paperback

Published May 25, 2018

Reviews

[Caroline Cox · Rating 5 out of 5]

Expertly-woven exploration of the feminist internationalist activism of Eslanda Robeson, Una Marson, and Paulette Nardal and how they interacted with the American, British, and French Empires.