Imaobong D. Umoren. Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles.

Abstract

The field of Black internationalism has rapidly grown in the last several decades—with scholars in various fields interrogating the diverse ways people of African descent have linked their political struggle with other nonwhite people across the globe. Historians have played a significant role in this effort, producing books and journal articles that shed new light on the interplay between national and global affairs. Most recently, scholars have worked to center women’s voices and experiences in the Black internationalist story. At the heart of this scholarship is a close gender analysis—not solely focusing on women’s ideas and activism but also thinking deeply about how women’s lives compare to and contrast with their male counterparts. Imaobong D. Umoren’s Race Women Internationalists: Activist-Intellectuals and Global Freedom Struggles joins this growing body of scholarship. Drawing on a diverse body of primary and secondary sources, Umoren highlights the travels of three Black women—Paulette Nardal, Eslanda Robeson, and Una Marson—to document how these women helped to form a “transnational black public sphere” (2). Describing these women as “race women internationalists”—a term that in this reviewer’s assessment is no different from the more frequently used label “Black women internationalists”—Umoren argues that travel fundamentally shaped these women’s political work and visions. According to Umoren, it allowed them to practice “interconnected internationalisms” (3). Along these lines, she interrogates several fields of inquiry, including feminism, antifascism, conservatism, radicalism, liberalism, colonialism, and Pan-Africanism.