The Scholar and Feminist Conference 49: Anti-Colonialism, Black Radicalism, and Transnational Feminism
The 49th annual Scholar and Feminist Conference will explore transnational Black feminism in the context of “third world” liberatory movements since the 1940s. At the height of struggles for anti-colonial independence in the African subcontinent and diasporic communities during the 1960s and 1970s, the praxis of Black feminist alliances proved to be foundational to global anti-racist and anti-imperial radicalism. We aim to consider how Black feminist solidarity was forged across a broader geopolitical frame that includes the Indian, Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, strengthening local mobilizations and generating new transnational liberatory possibilities. We will also chronicle the evolution of transnational Black feminism since then, and how the shift from anti-colonialism to neoliberalism impacted the radical possibilities embedded in attempts at self-determination and collaboration across geographic divides.
Friday, March 22
3:00 p.m. | Welcome by Janet Jakobsen (Co-Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women and Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College)
3:30-5 p.m. | Marxism and Transnational Black Feminist Liberation
Charisse Burden-Stelly (Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, Wayne State University)
Dayo Gore (Associate Professor, Department of African American Studies, Georgetown University)
Robyn Spencer-Antoine (Associate Professor of History and African American Studies, Wayne State University)
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor (Hughes-Rogers Professor of African American Studies, Princeton University)
Moderated by Premilla Nadasen (Co-Director of BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College)
Saturday, March 23
9:30 a.m. | Welcome by Janet Jakobsen (Co-Director, Barnard Center for Research on Women and Claire Tow Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, Barnard College) and Premilla Nadasen (Co-Director of BCRW and Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History, Barnard College)
10-11:30 a.m. | Black Women and Anti-Colonialism 1940s-1980s
Lynette Jackson (Associate Professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Black Studies, University of Illinois-Chicago)
Laurie Lambert (Associate Professor of African and African American Studies, Barnard College)
Paula Marie Seniors (Associate Professor of Africana Studies in the Department of Religion and Culture, Virginia Tech)
Moderated by Imaobong Umoren (Associate Professor of International History, London School of Economics)
11:45 a.m. – 1 p.m. | Lunch
1-2:30 p.m. | The Colonial Legacy, Gender, and Economic Empowerment
Yolande Bouka (Assistant Professor of Political Studies, Queen’s University)
Jennifer Fish (Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies, Old Dominion University)
Natasha Lightfoot (Associate Professor of History, Columbia University)
Keisha-Khan Perry (Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies, University of Pennsylvania)
Moderated by Tami Navarro (Assistant Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department, Drew University)
2:30-2:45 p.m. | Coffee Break
2:45 – 4:15 p.m. | Intellectual and Activist Interventions in Contemporary Movements
Layla Brown (Assistant Professor of Cultural Anthropology & Africana Studies, Northeastern University)
Tao Leigh Goffe (Associate Professor of Africana, Puerto Rican, and Latino Studies, Hunter College)
Zifeng Liu (Postdoctoral Scholar in the Africana Research Center, Pennsylvania State University)
Gabriella Muasya (PhD Student in the Department of Educational Anthropology and Educational Psychology, Danish School of Education)
Moderated by Tami Navarro (Assistant Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department, Drew University)
4:30 – 6 p.m. | Keynote
Lorgia García Peña (Professor of African American Studies and in the Effron Center for the Study of America, Director of the Program in Latino Studies, Princeton University)
Tami Navarro (Assistant Professor and Chair of the Africana Studies Department, Drew University)
At the speaker’s request, we will not be livestreaming or recording the Keynote.
Speaker Bios
Yolande Bouka is an assistant professor in the Department of Political Studies at Queen’s University. She is an interdisciplinary scholar and practitioner with deep theoretical and methodological roots in critical international relations. Her research and teaching focus on gender, violence, decoloniality, race and international relations, and African affairs. The key questions driving her multidisciplinary research agenda are how vulnerable groups understand and navigate structural and political violence and how these experiences influence the post-conflict social and political landscapes. Her research has received support from the Fulbright Scholar Program, the American Association of University Women, and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is the recipient of the 2021 International Studies Association (ISA) Feminist Theory and Gender Studies Section (FTGS) Early Career Community Engagement Award. She currently serves on the advisory board of the Diaspora Program of the Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) and as co-editor of the International Political Sociology Journal. In addition to her academic work and service, she has extensive experience with development and security research agencies. Between 2014 and 2016 she was a researcher at the Institute for Security Studies (ISS) in the Conflict Prevention and Risk Analysis Division.
Layla D. Brown is an assistant professor of Cultural Anthropology & Africana Studies and affiliate faculty in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Northeastern University. Brown’s research focuses on Pan-African, Socialist, and Feminist social movements in Venezuela, the US, and the broader African Diaspora. Layla was a 2020-2021 Research & Writing Fellow at the Johannesburg Institute for Advanced Study and a 2021-2022 Senior Research Fellow at the Käte Hamburger Kolleg / Centre for Global Cooperation Research.
Dr. Charisse Burden-Stelly is an associate professor of African American Studies at Wayne State University and a 2023-2024 Visiting Scholar at the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University. She is the author of Black Scare/Red Scare: Theorizing Capitalist Racism in the United States, the co-author of W.E.B. Du Bois: A Life in American History, and the co-editor of Organize, Fight, Win: Black Communist Women’s Political Writings and of Reproducing Domination: On the Caribbean Postcolonial State. Dr. Burden-Stelly has published in peer-reviewed journals including Small Axe, Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, Du Bois Review, Socialism & Democracy, International Journal of Africana Studies, and CLR James Journal. Her words appear in popular publications like Monthly Review, Boston Review, Essence Magazine, The Nation, Teen Vogue, Jacobin, Black Perspectives, and Black Agenda Report. She is a member of the Black Alliance for Peace and Community Movement Builders.
Yvette Christiansë is Professor of Africana Studies and English Literature at Barnard College. She is the author of Toni Morrison: An Ethical Poetics (Fordham University Press, 2013). For some twenty-seven years, she has been researching the stall in a pursuit of complete European and American abolition of African slavery that resulted in almost a century of contest over the fates of liberated Africans—those who were freed from the holds of slave vessels between 1807 and into the early years of the Twentieth Century. Her research has taken her to archives in the Indian and Atlantic Oceans, the US, and within Africa.
Jennifer N. Fish is a sociologist who focuses on women’s labor and migration in the informal economy, with an emphasis on transnational activism and development. As a public sociologist, Dr. Fish has conducted community-based research with students and partner organizations in Nepal, South Africa, Rwanda, Haiti, and Senegal. Her research informs four books, numerous chapters and journal articles, and organizational reports for policy and research organizations worldwide, including the International Labour Organization of the United Nations. Dr. Fish is a member of the Women in Informal Employment: Globalizing and Organizing (WIEGO) policy-research network at Harvard University, and a Research Associate at the Social Law Project at the University of the Western Cape, South Africa. Her work is currently funded by the Social Science and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) of Canada and the Centre for Global Social Policy at the University of Toronto.
Lorgia García-Peña is a writer, activist, and scholar who specializes in Latinx Studies with a focus on Black Latinidades. Her work is concerned with the ways in which antiblackness and xenophobia intersect the Global North producing categories of exclusion that lead to violence and erasure. Through her writing and teaching, Dr. García Peña insists on highlighting the knowledge, cultural, social, and political contributions of people who have been silenced from traditional archives. She is the author of award winning books, including The Borders of Dominicanidad: Race, Nations and Archives of Contradictions (Duke, 2016), which was translated and published in Spanish by Editorial Bonó in 2020; Translating Blackness: Latinx Colonialities in Global Perspective (Duke, 2022), and Community as Rebellion (Haymarket, 2022), translated as La comunidad como rebelión (Haymarket, 2023). Additionally, her work has been covered in several publications including the New York Times, the Washington Post, The New Yorker, Boston Review, and Harper’s Bazaar. She has appeared on CNN, BBC, MSNBC, Univision and Telemundo and is a regular contributor to the North American Congress on Latin America and Asterix journals.
An engaged scholar committed to liberating education and bridging the gaps that separate the communities she comes from (Black, immigrant, working) and the university, Dr. García Peña is also a co-founder of Freedom University Georgia, a school that provides college instruction to undocumented students and the co-director of Archives of Justice a transnational digital archive project that centers the life of people who identify as Black, queer and migrant. She has been widely recognized for her public facing work: in 2022 she received the Angela Davis Prize for Public Scholarship, in 2021 the Margaret Casey Foundation named her a Freedom Scholar, and in 2017 the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) presented her a Disobedience Award for the co-founding of Freedom University. Additionally, her scholarship has been supported by the Ford Foundation, The Johns Hopkins University African Diaspora Studies Postdoctoral Fellowship and the Future of Minority Studies Fellowship, and the Mellon Foundation.
García-Peña received a PhD in American Culture from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor and an M.A. in Latin American and Latino Literatures from Rutgers University.
Tao Leigh Goffe is an award-winning writer, sound artist, and professor specializing in histories of climate, race, empire, and technology. Her story was featured as an experimental short film on Hulu’s Initiative 29 that celebrates Black history, heroes, and futurism. Cookbook writing, curating exhibitions, and producing installation art, she explores the full range of the human sensorium in her research and artistic practice.
Born in London, United Kingdom, she lives and works in Manhattan. She studied English at Princeton University before earning her PhD from Yale University. Dr. Goffe is Associate Professor of literary theory and cultural history at Hunter College, CUNY. Her research is rooted in literature and theories of labor that center Black feminism’s engagements with Indigeneity and Asian diasporic racial formations.
Dr. Goffe is the founding director of the Dark Laboratory, a collective on race and ecology where members develop stories using creative technology. Dr. Goffe is also the Executive Director of the Afro-Asia Group, an advisory organization with the mission of creating spaces of collaboration between African and Asian diasporas on futurity, solidarity, and infrastructure.
Dr. Goffe has held academic positions at Leiden University in the Netherlands and Princeton University. She has been interviewed and quoted in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and by Vice Munchies. Her writing has been published in Artsy, South Atlantic Quarterly, Small Axe, Women & Performance: A Journal of Feminist Theory, and Boston Review.
Dayo F. Gore is an associate professor in the Department of African American Studies at Georgetown University. She received her Ph.D. in History from New York University and has previously taught at the University of California, San Diego and the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Professor Gore’s research interests include Black women’s intellectual history; US political and cultural activism; African diasporic politics; and women, gender and sexuality studies. She is the author of Radicalism at the Crossroads: African American Women Activists in the Cold War (New York University Press, 2012) and editor of Want to Start a Revolution: Radical Women in the Black Freedom Struggle (New York University Press, 2009). Professor Gore’s work has been supported by the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, the Charles Warren Center for Studies in American History at Harvard University, and the Tamiment Library’s Center for the United States and the Cold War. She is currently completing a book manuscript on black women’s radical transnational politics and travels in the long twentieth century.
Lynette Jackson is an associate professor of Gender and Women’s Studies and Black Studies at UIC. She received her PhD in African History from Columbia University in 1997. Dr. Jackson is the author of Surfacing Up: Psychiatry and Social Order in Colonial Zimbabwe (Cornell University Press, 2005) and numerous other articles and book chapters on topics relating to women, the state, and medical and public health discourses in colonial and postcolonial Africa, particularly having to do with the regulation of African women’s sexuality. Dr. Jackson’s current research explores the history of child refugee diasporas from southern Sudan, particularly focusing on two streams of unaccompanied children: The Lost Boys and Girls and the Cuban 600. She has also begun conducting research for a critical biography of Winnie Mandela.
Dr. Jackson is engaged in social justice and human rights activism, with a particular focus on the human rights of women and girls and lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people in Africa. She serves on the Chicago Committee of Human Rights Watch and the World Refugee Day planning committee, and previously held board memberships on Heartland Alliance’s Human Care Services and Vanavevhu: Children of the Soil, an organization that caters to orphans and vulnerable children from Zimbabwe. Dr. Jackson also provides expert witness testimony in gender-based political asylum cases, particularly cases involving female genital mutilation.
Laurie R. Lambert is an interdisciplinary scholar, working at the intersection of literature and history in African Diaspora Studies. She is an associate professor of African and African American Studies at Fordham University. Her first book, Comrade Sister: Caribbean Feminist Revisions of the Grenada Revolution (University of Virginia Press, 2020), examines the gendered implications of political trauma in literature on Grenada. The book analyzes how Caribbean women writers use authorship as a means of expressing cultural sovereignty and critiquing the inadequacy of hierarchical, patriarchal, and linear histories of a Black radical tradition as they narrate the Grenada Revolution.
Her research and teaching interests include Black feminism, Black radicalism, Caribbean and African diasporic literature and history. She was the co-founder and co-convener of Fordham’s Freedom and Slavery Working Group from 2019-2023. Lambert’s writing has appeared in Cultural Dynamics, The Global South, and Small Axe. She is a co-editor for Cambridge Studies on the African Diaspora at Cambridge University Press.
She served as the Secretary of the Association for the Study of the Worldwide African Diaspora (ASWAD) from 2019-2023. Before joining the faculty at Fordham in 2017, Lambert was Assistant Professor at the University of California, Davis, and the 2014-2015 Postdoctoral Fellow in Critical Caribbean Studies at Rutgers University in New Brunswick, NJ.
Lambert received her B.F.A. in Film Studies from Ryerson University in Toronto, Canada, as well as an M.A. in English from the University of Toronto. In 2013 she completed her Ph.D. in English and American Literature at New York University. She is the daughter of Grenadians and grew up between Toronto and Grenada.
Natasha Lightfoot, associate professor, specializes in slavery and emancipation studies, and black identities, politics, and cultures in the fields of Caribbean, Atlantic World, and African Diaspora History. Her forthcoming book focuses on black working class people’s everyday forms of freedom in Antigua after emancipation.
Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the 20th-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. He holds a Ph.D. in Africana Studies from Cornell University and an M.A. in American Studies from Brown University. His current book project, Redrawing the Balance of Power: Black Left Feminists, China, and the Making of an Afro-Asian Political Imaginary, 1949-1976, explores how Black leftist women’s understandings of race, class, gender, sexuality, and empire evolved as they sought Afro-Chinese solidarity within often difficult Cold War geopolitical contexts. His ongoing research has been featured by The Economist and CGTN News, and his essays and reviews in English and Chinese on Black radicalism and African American political culture have been published in the Journal of Intersectionality, Journal of African American History, Journal of Beihang University, The Paper, Initium Media, SINA News, and Sixth Tone. He is currently a Postdoctoral Scholar in the Africana Research Center at Pennsylvania State University.
Gabriella Muasya is a PhD fellow in the Department of Educational Anthropology and
Psychology at the University of Aarhus, based in Copenhagen, Denmark. Her research project explores transnational anticolonial student communities in U.K. universities, who carve out spaces of resistance as they fight against institutional racism and the entrenched legacies of colonialism and Eurocentrism. Researching alongside these movements, she focuses on how they reimagine the material, affective and epistemic foundations of the university. Gabriella is a first-generation academic and holds two MAs: one in Media Practice for Development and Social Change, University of Sussex and another in Anthropology of Education and Globalization University of Aarhus. Her independent PhD study is fully funded by the Graduate School of Arts, Aarhus University.
Premilla Nadasen is the Ann Whitney Olin Professor of History at Barnard College and Co-Director of the Barnard Center for Research on Women. She is past president of the National Women’s Studies Association, the inaugural recipient of the Ann Snitow Prize, a former Fulbright Fellow, and a member of the Society of American Historians. She has been involved in grassroots social justice organizing for many decades and has published extensively on the multiple meanings of feminism, alternative labor movements, and grassroots community organizing. She is the author of two award-winning books, Welfare Warriors: The Welfare Rights Movement in the United States (2005), Household Workers Unite: The Untold Story of African American Women Who Built a Movement (2015), and Care: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (2023). She is currently writing a biography of South African singer and anti-apartheid activist Miriam Makeba.
Tami Navarro is an assistant professor of Pan-African Studies at Drew University. She is a Cultural Anthropologist whose work has been published in Cultural Anthropology, American Anthropologist, Transforming Anthropology, Small Axe Salon, The Caribbean Writer, Social Text, and Feminist Anthropology.
She is a founding member of the Virgin Islands Studies Collective (VISCO) and a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Small Axe: A Caribbean Journal of Criticism. Dr. Navarro is co-host of the podcast, “Writing Home: American Voices from the Caribbean” and the author of Virgin Capital: Race, Gender, and Financialization in the US Virgin Islands (SUNY Press 2021).
Keisha-Khan Y. Perry is the Presidential Penn Compact Associate Professor of Africana Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. Prior to joining the Penn faculty in 2021, she was a professor at Brown University for fifteen years. Her research is focused on race, gender and politics in the Americas, urban geography, and questions of citizenship, intellectual history and disciplinary formation, and the interrelationship between scholarship, pedagogy and political engagement. Her first book, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil, won the 2014 National Women’s Studies Association Gloria Anzaldúa Book Prize. An updated and revised Portuguese translation was just published in September 2022 by the Federal University of Bahia Press. This book includes an analysis of the relationship between environmental justice movements and land and housing rights struggles in Brazil. Perry recently published the co-edited volume Black Women in Latin America and the Caribbean: Critical Perspectives and Research (Rutgers University Press, 2023) with Melanie Medeiros. She is currently writing the book Anthropology for Liberation, which draws heavily from her ethnographic research experience in Brazil with an emphasis on the complexity of doing activist research amidst racial and gender violence. She continues her ongoing research on Black land loss and ownership in relationship to the material articulation of citizenship in Brazil, Jamaica, and the United States as well as a graphic novel project in collaboration with Bahian activists and artists. In September 2022, she edited a special issue of NACLA: Report on the Americas focused on housing justice in Latin America and the Caribbean. Keisha-Khan Perry is part of a team of 16 researchers for the National Science Foundation Grant “Research Coordination Network: Housing Justice in Unequal Cities,” and serves on the board of the Washington Brazil Office.
Paula Marie Seniors is an associate professor at Virginia Tech and the biographer of her family’s legacy, Mae Mallory, the Monroe Defense Committee and World Revolutions: African American Women Radical Activists (University of Georgia Press, 2024). She is the co-author of Michelle Obama’s Impact on African American Women and Girls (Palgrave MacMillan, 2018) in which her chapter “Reconfiguring Black Motherhood: Michelle Obama and the Mom in Charge Trope” appears. She won the Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Prize from The Association of Black Women Historians for Beyond Lift Every Voice and Sing: The Culture of Uplift, Identity and Politics in Black Musical Theater. Seniors is currently working on two manuscripts: African American Women Wept: Police, State, and White Supremacist Violence Against African American Girls and Women Before and During the Grand Global Apocalyptic Pandemic and Scott Joplin’s Treemonisha, A Soul Evening: The 1972 Atlanta, Georgia World Premiere, its Orchestrator T.J. Anderson and The Aftermath, under review.
Robyn C. Spencer-Antoine is a historian who focuses on Black social protest after World War II, urban and working-class radicalism, and gender. Her book The Revolution Has Come: Black Power, Gender, and the Black Panther Party in Oakland was published in 2016. She is co-founder of the Intersectional Black Panther Party History Project and has written widely on gender and Black Power. Her writings have appeared in the Journal of Women’s History and Souls, as well as The Washington Post, Vibe Magazine, Colorlines, and Truthout. She has received awards for her work from the Mellon Foundation, the American Council of Learned Societies, and the Association of Black Women Historians. She is completing her second book on the intersections between the movement for Black liberation and the movement against the US war as a fellow at Harvard University’s Warren Center for Studies in American History. In addition, she is working on biographies of both Angela Davis and Patricia Murphy Robinson. She created @PATarchives on Instagram to spotlight the ways that the items in Black left theorist Patricia Murphy Robinson’s unprocessed home archives reframe the Black Radical Tradition. To learn more visit www.robyncspencer.com.
Imaobong Umoren‘s research interests, publications, and teaching focus on histories of race, gender, activism and political thought in the Caribbean, Britain, and the US focusing on the modern and contemporary period. Dr. Umoren’s first book Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles (University of California Press, 2018) won the 2019 Women’s History Network Book Prize. Dr. Umoren’s research has been supported by numerous bodies including the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Library of Congress, the British Academy, the US-UK Fulbright Commission, and the Leverhulme Trust.
She is currently at work on two new book projects. The first is a trade book exploring the long interconnected relationship between Britain and the Caribbean tentatively titled Empire Without End: A History of Britain and the Caribbean, which received the 2020-2021 British Library Eccles Centre and Hay Festival Writer’s Award. The second is a political biography of Eugenia Charles, the former prime minister of Dominica.
Dr. Umoren studied at King’s College London and the University of Oxford, serving as a postdoctoral fellow at The Oxford Research Centre in the Humanities and Pembroke College before taking up her post at the LSE in 2017. In 2017-2018 and 2019-2020, Dr. Umoren received the LSE Excellence in Education Award.
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor writes and speaks on Black politics, social movements, and racial inequality in the United States. She is the author of Race for Profit: How Banks and the Real Estate Industry Undermined Black Homeownership, published in 2019 by University of North Carolina Press. Race for Profit was a semifinalist for the 2019 National Book Award and a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2020. She is a 2021 MacArthur Foundation Fellow. Her earlier book From #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation won the Lannan Cultural Freedom Award for an Especially Notable Book in 2016. She is also editor of How We Get Free: Black Feminism and the Combahee River Collective, which won the Lambda Literary Award for LGBQT nonfiction in 2018. Taylor is a contributing writer at The New Yorker. Her writing has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, Boston Review, Paris Review, The Guardian, The Nation, Jacobin, and Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society, among others. She is a former contributing opinion writer for The New York Times. In 2016, she was named one of the hundred most influential African Americans in the United States by The Root. In 2018 Essence Magazine named her among the top one hundred “change makers” in the county. She has been appointed as a Distinguished Lecturer for the Organization of American Historians by the Organization of American Historians.
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Image Credit
Elsa Rakoto, “Toutes les féministes en lutte contre l’imperialisme,” 2021.