Black Women and the Complexities of Internationalism

Abstract

This introductory essay offers a broad overview of the history and scholarship on black internationalism and examines the significance of employing a gender analysis and centering women’s ideas and activities. In so doing, it engages two central questions: (1) how was black women’s engagement in internationalism similar to or different from their male counterparts?, and (2) To what extent did black women merge internationalism with issues of women’s rights or feminist concerns? It also highlights the book’s interventions and provides a roadmap for the individual essays in the book, arranged thematically and chronologically.

“We Bring Home the Roots”: Black Women Travel Influencers, Digital Culture Bearing, and African Internationalism in Instagram

“…Recent renewed interest in the Negro Motorist Green Book , which New York City postal worker Victor Hugo Green published along with his wife Alma Duke Green from 1936 to 1966 as a guide for Black road-trippers in the United States, has illuminated domestic travel history (New York Public Library, n.d.). Also, much research exists on Black internationalism “as the political, intellectual, and artistic movement of Black people, many of whom were and are engaged in a collective struggle to topple white supremacy in its many forms” (Blain et al, 2019 p. 9). Travel stories about Mary McLeod Bethune, Maya Angelou, Lorraine Hansberry, Audley “Queen Mother” Moore, Nina Simone, June Jordan, Audre Lorde, and so on, have created a powerful collection of Black women–centric travel artifacts.…”

“…Despite the BTM’s rise and academic research on Black internationalism, studies exploring travel among Black women is slight though not nonexistent. Research focalizing Black movements “often deemphasize the crucial role [B]lack women have played in the long history of internationalism” (Blain et al, 2019, p. 10).…”

The world is upside down: seeing IR from below

“…She proclaimed that if more black women embraced this vision they could 'turn the whole world over'. 24 Bethune was articulating a vision of the unity of black people irrespective of national borders. She claimed that it wasn't just black women, but women of all races, who embraced an affinity with women worldwide.…”

Critical World-Systems Analysis

“…James (1969), understood the necessity for global-local organizing against oppression. More recently, the Combahee River Collective (which theorized interlocking oppressions that were racial, economic, and gendered in scope and that lead to new forms of marginalizations) called for Third World women to resist the colonial, imperialist domination of the West (Combahee River Collective 2014) along with contemporary Black scholars like Taylor (2016), Keisha N. Blain (2018Blain ( , 2019 among many others.…”