Feminist Networks and Diasporic Practices
Feminist Networks and Diasporic Practices
Eslanda Robeson’s Travels in Africa
In 1946 African American anthropologist and civil rights activist Eslanda Robeson undertook her second journey to Africa and her first to Central Africa. She sought to document the stories and experiences of Africans in order to counter the dominant discourse on black inferiority that she had encountered growing up in a segregated United States. Robeson’s travels came at a time when women in the African diaspora employed physical mobility as a key strategy of anticolonial resistance. Charting her movements over time, this essay examines both Robeson’s published writings and her unpublished correspondence during her seven-month journey through Central Africa. These documents reveal her engagement with the politics of race and gender in the European colonial context, often refracted through the prism of her American experience.
Keywords: Africa, Central Africa, Eslanda Robeson, Travel, Colonialism, Writing, Politics, Resistance, migration
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