Eslanda Robeson

Abstract

Eslanda Robeson’s transnational anti-imperialist activism brought her into contact with most of the women examined in this study. This chapter therefore takes a broader geographic view of black women’s decolonial politics by analyzing Robeson’s travel journals chronicling her journeys through Southern Africa in 1936 and French Equatorial Africa in 1946. Her Global South project displaces subjection to imperial rule as the imagined connection among the people of Africa, Asia and the Americas. She envisions the Global South as defined by concerted acts of resistance against imperialism, and highlights women’s roles in leading or carrying out these acts of resistance.