This year, the Africana Studies Shirley Graham DuBois Lecture Series features Carole Boyce Davies, Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University, and Natanya Duncan, Associate Professor of History and Chair of Africana Studies at Queens College (CUNY). Carole Boyce-Davies and Natanya Duncan have spent their careers studying how Black women have challenged power and created safe spaces for Black people in the 19th-21st centuries. These Scholar-Activist-Artists will discuss how Black women, at the highest levels of leadership in the United States, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean, created sustainable movements, model innovative and pioneering political action, and offer strategic alternatives to traditional male leadership.
Duncan is the author of An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNC Press). From its inception in 1914 in Kingston, Jamaica, women helped define and shape the Black Nationalist and Pan-Africanist aims of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA). Their efforts, made possible in part by UNIA cofounder Amy Ashwood Garvey, helped sustain the largest social justice organization of the twentieth century. In this deeply researched collective biography, Natanya Duncan documents the complexities of UNIA women as active participants in Black nation-building. Women from both sides of the Atlantic joined the UNIA in pursuit of gender and racial equality, developing a three-tiered activist strategy that Duncan calls “efficient womanhood”: seek equitable partnerships with like-minded persons and organizations, work as peer and intergenerational mentors, and serve as bridge builders between the organization and resources and people in service to their immediate communities and the race at large.
Africana Studies will host lunchtime workshops with students on March 16 and 18.
