Online Forum-Black Women’s Activism in the African Diaspora
September 16-23, 2024
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online forum considering the activism of Black women throughout the African Diaspora. The six-day online forum brings together scholars to discuss how Black women engaged in political and social activism to advocate for the lives of African descendants. The forum begins on Monday, September 16 and concludes on Monday, September 23, 2024. It features essays by Silke Hackenesh; Maria Martin; Heidi Carolyn Feldman; Max Lewontin; Pamela Nwakanma; and an interview of Carmen Hutchinson Miller.
During the online forum, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:00 AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter/X or @AAIHS (@AAIHS23) on Instagram; like AAIHS on Facebook; or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the forum.
About the Organizer
Kiana Knight is a PhD Candidate in Africana Studies at Brown University. Her dissertation, “Translating Racial Uplift: Gender, Language, and Internationalist Politics, 1918-1965,” explores bilingual Black women’s activism in the U.S. and Greater Caribbean. Her work has been featured in Ohio State’s Origins: Current Events in Historical Perspective and Getty Images’ collaborative blog “Picturing Black History” and the African American Intellectual History Society’s award-winning blog, “Black Perspectives.” She received a bachelor’s degree with honors in history from North Carolina Central University and a master’s degree in history from the University of Pittsburgh. Her research has been funded by the Center for the Study of Race and Ethnicity in America and the Joukowsky Institute. Kiana’s scholarly interests include Black Transnational Feminisms, Black Internationalism, African American History, and the African Diaspora. Connect with her on Twitter @kianamknight.
Featured Contributors
Dr. Carmen Hutchinson Miller was most recently a lecturer in the Center for General Studies at the National University in Heredia, Costa Rica. She received her PhD in history from the University of the West Indies in Barbados. She has published scholarship extensively in both English and Spanish on themes related to gender, race, and culture in Costa Rica. Her most recent book publication is “Detrás de la Conmemoración del Mes de la Afrodescendencia en Costa Rica” (Behind the Commemoration of Afro-descendant Month in Costa Rica), which emphasizes the role of Marcus Garvey in the Day of Celebration for Afro-Costa Rican Culture, a holiday in Costa Rica that is celebrated every year on August 31st. Dr. Miller is also the host of two YouTube channels, Aportes Afrocostarricenses y Diasporicos and Afrostry, through which she aims to educate African descendants throughout the diaspora on the history of Afro-Costa Rica.
Dr. Silke Hackenesch is an Associate Professor at the Institute of North American History at the University of Cologne. She specializes in 20th century Childhood and Adoption Studies, African American History, Commodity History, and Black Diaspora Studies. Silke is the author of Chocolate and Blackness: A Cultural History (Campus, 2017). She has published articles in Historische Anthropologie, Food and History, and Comparativ: Zeitschrift für Globalgeschichte und vergleichende Gesellschaftsforschung. She has written chapters for Rethinking Black German Studies, Kinder des Zweiten Weltkrieges (Campus), and Race & Sex: Eine Geschichte der Neuzeit (Neofelis) as well as a chapter on Sojourner Truth for the volume Geschichte des Politischen Denkens: Das 19. Jahrhundert (Suhrkamp).
Her recent publications include the edited volume Adoption Across Race and Nations: U.S. Histories and Legacies with Ohio State University Press as well as book chapters on the contested practice of proxy adoptions, transnational debates on family, race, and civil rights as well as chapters on the construction of German Shepherds as police dogs as well as the history of racialized advertising. Currently, Silke is working on a monograph tentatively titled “Colorblind Love or Racial Responsibility? The Adoption of Black German Children to Postwar America,” which analyzes the contested debates the transnational adoption of Black German children elicited in the (African) American community, from civil rights organizations to social work professionals and individual adoption advocates.
Dr. Maria Martin is a Black Studies Africanist and women and gender studies scholar with a PhD in African American and African Studies from Michigan State University. She is currently in the department of History and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Merced. Her research centers Nigerian women’s activism and intellectual history as well as theoretical development from within the African context. Her publications include Taming Cerberus: Against Racism, Sexism, and Oppression in Colonial Nigeria, More Power to Your Great Self: Nigerian Women’s Activism and the Pan-African Transnationalist Construction of Black Feminism, African Nationalism: Freedom for Men, Women, and the Nation, Locating Africa in Black Studies: Cultivating the Black Studies Africanist, and Self-Identified As Non-political: Locating Characteristics of African Rhetoric in Nigerian Women’s Words.
She is currently developing two works. The article, Legbeism (Leg-bay-iz-em): A Theory of Gender Activism, which presents a theory that she is developing from her research in the African context. Her forthcoming manuscript is We Are Non-Political: Gender, Intellectual Thought, and the Development of Non-Political Nationalism in Nigeria. She is a Bill and Melinda Gates Scholarship alumna and has won several prestigious Fulbright awards in addition to receiving an honorable mention from the Ford Foundation for her research. She was also invited as a panelist for the 65th session of the United Nations Commission on the Status of Women in 2021. Dr. Martin mentors academics in the US and internationally and she co-founded an NGO to support students in Nigeria.
Dr. Heidi Carolyn Feldman is currently writing the first book about the remarkable global career and rhythmic education technique of Black Peruvian cultural icon Victoria Santa Cruz (1922–2014). In conjunction with Santa Cruz’s Centennial in 2023, Feldman contributed forewords to two edited anthologies of Victoria Santa Cruz’s previously unpublished writings. Feldman’s book about the Black Peruvian arts revival, Black Rhythms of Peru: Reviving African Musical Heritage in the Black Pacific (Wesleyan University Press, 2006), won the Woody Guthrie Book Prize (IASPM-US). Her writing has also been honored with the Errol Hill Award (American Society for Theatre Research) and honorable mention for the Vera Mowry Roberts Research and Publication Award (American Theatre & Drama Society).
She has published essays in Theatre Survey, Cuadernos de música peruana, Repercuté, Ethnomusicology, Journal of Popular Music Studies, and e-misférica, and in several edited books. A former journalist, she served as volume editor for the Bloomsbury Encyclopedia of Popular Music of the World and guest editor for The Dictionary of Caribbean and Afro-Latin American Biography. Feldman has presented research talks at conferences in the United States, Peru, France, Greece, Colombia, and Cuba, and she appears as a featured scholar in television and film documentaries and podcasts. With a Ph.D. in ethnomusicology (UCLA 2001), she holds appointments as a Visiting Scholar at UCSD and as an affiliated researcher at the Catholic University of Peru’s Institute of Ethnomusicology.
Max Lewontin is a PhD Candidate in history at Northwestern University. His research interests include social movements, Black internationalism, the twentieth-century Caribbean, and labor history. His dissertation explores Black Power as a transnational movement spanning across the circum-Caribbean in the 1960s and 1970s, shaped by the mobility of people, ideas, and iconography. Max’s writing has appeared in the Journal of Social History, the Organization of American Historians’ Process blog, and the LSE Review of Books.
Dr. Pamela Nwakanma is a postdoctoral fellow at the SNF Agora Institute at Johns Hopkins University and an incoming Assistant Professor at the University of California, Irvine. She earned her Ph.D. in Political Science and African and African American Studies from Harvard University in 2022. She studies international development and politics in Africa and Afro-diasporic communities in the Americas. Previously, she was a Leading Edge Fellow with the American Council of Learned Societies, where she coordinated research strategies for People Powered.
Her work has been published in journals such as Perspectives on Politics and Politics, Groups, and Identities, as well as edited volumes such as the Palgrave Handbook of African Women’s Studies and Routledge’s African Scholars and Intellectuals in the North American Academy: Reflections of Exile and Migration. Her interdisciplinary research thus far has won multiple awards from the American Political Science Association, the Society for the Study of Social Problems, the African Studies Association, and the Lagos Studies Association. Her work has also been featured in public media outlets such as Break the Boxes, Collateral Benefits, and Voyages Africana. She is currently working on a book project that examines the relationship between women’s economic mobility and political stagnancy in Africa’s largest economy.