Women’s Work: Black Women’s Movement through Political Space

Abstract

Women’s Work: Black Women’s Movement through Political Space Kaiama L. Glover (bio) Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill, eds. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2019. 280 pp. ISBN 9780252042317 (cl.); 9780252051166 (ebook). Tiffany N. Florvil. Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 296 pp. ISBN 9780252043512 (cl.); 9780252052392 (ebook). Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel. Reimagining Liberation: How Black Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020. 260 pp. ISBN 9780252042935 (cl.); 9780252051791 (ebook). Quiet as it’s kept, Black women’s work—across oceans and national borders, around kitchen tables and quilting circles, on stages and tour buses, in courthouses and classrooms—has long been a driving force in movements toward social justice on both the grandest and the most intimate scales. Three recent volumes of Black feminist scholarship have sought, successfully, to give voice to such work—to make Black women’s engagements in twentieth century freedom struggles more visible and more legible within the global historical record. Keisha N. Blain and Tiffany M. Gill’s edited collection To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism, Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel’s Reimagining Liberation: How Black French Women Transformed Citizenship in the French Empire, and Tiffany N. Florvil’s Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement are each committed to excavating unheard voices and to identifying Black women’s political communities unbound by the geopolitical borders of the nation-state. All three do the necessary work of affirming such communities retrospectively—that is, of making explicit and coherent in the present the exceptional phenomena that emerged dynamically and organically in the past. While a common motivation for these three volumes is redress—the setting right of a historical record that has been indifferent to or has even actively silenced Black women’s work—these studies do not dwell in a space of reaction or response to that fundamental injustice. Rather, these are works of storytelling and revelation, richly researched and insightful. They take as given the signal importance of recognizing Black women’s contributions to building the postwar world. The inquiries and discoveries that animate every one of these books comprise an adamant unsilencing [End Page 142] of the past. Each of these works presents a series of deep dives into alternative archives and proposes expansive conceptions of the textual, illuminating the histories of a diverse set of protagonists and establishing an inclusive canon of internationalist Black women thinkers, writers, performers, and other social actors. Each of them insists on the gendered and racialized specificity of the obstacles facing the women they bring to the fore, while also fully acknowledging both the intersectional alliances and the intramural conflicts that shaped these women’s visions of the future. Blain and Gill’s volume, To Turn the Whole World Over, brings together an impressive cohort of scholars whose research concerns the internationalist preoccupations and perspectives of Black US-American women in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Without denying the impact or the presence of Black male intellectuals and political figures during this period, the editors compellingly establish Black internationalism as women’s work. Each of the eleven essays articulates the “gendered contours of black internationalism” and highlights the idiosyncratic challenges and expectations Black women contended with as they entered the fray of anti-racist and human rights activism (1). The book is anchored in the geopolitical space of the United States, from which it looks outward to Europe, Africa, Asia, and other parts of the Americas. As such, the matter of mobility—as a condition of possibility for Black women and (consequently) as a threat to the Euro-North American nation-state—is central to the contributors’ collective project. The volume’s first section, “Travel and Migrations,” considers how Black women’s mobility presented opportunities for individual and collective self-fashioning that pointedly implicated sub-Saharan Africa and its diasporas. Both Brandon Byrd’s and Kim Gallon’s essays bring us to historical moments when Haiti mattered crucially to Black US-American internationalism. Byrd chronicles...