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On a rather cold and wet Tuesday morning in June the inaugural meeting of the Black Female Intellectual in Historical and Contemporary Context network took place.

Meeting at the Oxford Research Centre for the Humanities, the network’s broad aim for the day was to consider what was “an intellectual”? Indeed, what do we mean when we cast this term around both for popular audiences and those of a more specialist nature? We wanted to explore what politically was at stake for these women by naming them as an “intellectual,” even if they did not consider themselves under this term. Central to this discussion was the difference between “activist” and “intellectual” and how those who should have been understood as “intellectuals” alongside their black male counterparts have often been termed as “activists” at the community level.

Central to the discussion that morning was the precarity of the archive – because of their relative powerlessness in a racially structured patriarchal society, these women were not considered as “worthy” enough to create an archive for nor wealthy enough or have been considered notable enough in terms of their work and ideas to have family members or patrons create an archive and gift it to a particular University or library. Many of the black women I am researching for my new project on black female intellectuals of the early 19th century do not have archives of their own and researchers are required to excavate fragments of these women’s lives through other archives, scattered across newspapers, private letters, and public records. Kate Dossett (University of Leeds) talked about how this issue was central to her latest book, Radical Black Theatre in the New Deal (University of North Carolina Pres, forthcoming February 2020). Kate’s research concerns Black theatre in the United States, 1935-39, looking at black theatre manuscripts from the Federal Theatre Project where black theatre directors, actors, and stagehands worked together collectively on creative projects. The collection had been discarded when originally collected and left in a disused aircraft hangar in Baltimore which is where it remained until researchers at George Mason University, Virginia excavated the material and rehoused it in their collections. As Kate said, “‘The Federal Theatre Project’s archive reveals the unacknowledged collaborators, often women, who were at the heart of black performance communities which devised and staged black theatre manuscripts in the 1930s.” In different ways to Kate, Imaobong Umoren talked about the public and private lives of Mary Eugenia Charles, the first (and to date, only) female prime minister of Dominica, from July 1980 through to June 1995, who forms the focus of her new research project. While the public life of Charles was relatively easy to unearth through usual governmental archives, Imaobong spoke to the difficulties of excavating the personal life of this intensely private women and Charles’s supposedly neoliberal perspective on certain aspects of governance including anti-corruption and individual freedoms, earning her the moniker, “The Iron Lady of the Caribbean”.

Another important element of the conversation was the importance of collaboration between black female intellectuals and the possibilities of this given the limitations of travel and privilege for many. Anne-Marie Angelo (University of Sussex) discussed the collaborative momentum she had discovered in her most recent research on the Black Power movements in Israel and the UK, Black Power on the Move: Migration, Internationalism, and the British and Israeli Black Panthers (University of North Carolina Press, forthcoming spring 2020). Although many people don’t realise it, the British Black Panther Movement was founded and led by a woman, Trinidadian physician and research scientist, Altheia Jones Lecointe. Lecointe joined other women in the movement such as Beverly Bryan, Olive Morris, Suzanne Scafe, and Elizabeth Obi, often writing and working collectively to further the cause of black rights in the UK. Indeed, Obi and Morris founded the Brixton Black Women’s Group while Scafe and Bryan co-edited the award winning 1970s collection, Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain. London: Virago, pb:1985.

Both Jenny Woodley (Nottingham Trent University) and Fatma Ramdani (University of Lille) expressed real interest in memorialisation and legacy as key aspects of their work in relation to black female intellectuals. Jenny reflected on how important black women have been to memorialising the lives of other black women, thinking particularly of Dorothy Height’s campaign to erect a statue of the founder of the National Council for Negro Women, Mary Mcleod Bethune. The Bethune Memorial, in Washington D.C’s Memorial Park was the first to honour an African American women on federal land when it was dedicated in 1974 (see more here). Importantly, the lasting memories of such women in the national and international context is vital for where they are placed in the nation’s consciousness and national and international histories of civil rights. Fatma looked to how black women may have preserved these memories – reflecting on the scrapbook as a means to consider the more feminised and so-called “private” spaces of memory and memorialisation that many women engaged in.   

The morning of the first network meeting was by all accounts a most wonderful opportunity to engage with each other about our research and the ideas informing our research. It led to important and significant realisations about the importance of this network not just for further collaborative projects but of and in itself.

Written by Dr Rebecca Fraser, University of East Anglia