Abstract
Abstract This article considers the internationalisation and institutionalisation of the fight against European and global racism and sexism within the World Council of Churches in the 1980s and 1990s. It presents the ways in which the Women Under Racism sub-programme, the SISTERS network that emerged from it, as well as their respective coordinators—the Afro-American activist Jean-Sindab and the Afro- Brazilian activist Marilia Schüller –facilitated encounters between Black-European women. In turn, this paper analyses Black-European women’s agency within these institutional and transnational antiracist and gendered spaces. I argue that the WUR and the SISTERS network were used by Black-European female activists to meet each other and other women of colour, and to voice and share their experiences publicly. These international gatherings also stimulated a transnationalisation and a Europeanisation of their activism, while being spaces where they affirmed multiple and overlapping identifications.
Highlights
A growing number of historians of the Black and African diaspora in Europe (Bressey; Florvil 88; Perry and Thurman; Kelly and Tuck 3-4; Angelo 18-19; Campt 64) are stressing the need to consider the connected and transnational dimensions that shaped the lives and agency of Black people, including the impact of the European integration
This article considers the internationalisation and institutionalisation of the fight against European and global racism and sexism within the World Council of Churches in the 1980s and 1990s. It presents the ways in which the Women Under Racism sub-programme, the SISTERS network that emerged from it, as well as their respective coordinators—the Afro-American activist Jean-Sindab and the AfroBrazilian activist Marilia Schüller –facilitated encounters between Black-European women
I argue that the WUR and the SISTERS network were used by Black-European female activists to meet each other and other women of colour, and to voice and share their experiences publicly
Summary
A growing number of historians of the Black and African diaspora in Europe (Bressey; Florvil 88; Perry and Thurman; Kelly and Tuck 3-4; Angelo 18-19; Campt 64) are stressing the need to consider the connected and transnational dimensions that shaped the lives and agency of Black people, including the impact of the European integration. A number of scholars of women’s contemporary history (Florvil 88; Nijhawan 12-13; Sluga 61; Barthélémy 18; Johnson-Odim 51; Materson 36; de Haan 179; Rupp 1571-72) have demonstrated how and why women—both White and of colour—internationalise and institutionalise gender issues, as well as the impact of such activities on their activism and collective identifications Within this particular scholarship, Florvil’s research on Afro-German women’s organising the Fifth CrossCultural Black Women’s Studies Summer Institute in 1991 is, to this day, one of the few historical accounts on continental Black-European women’s politics of belonging and organising transnational political spaces tackling racism against Black women in Europe in the late 1980s and 1990s.
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