“Unofficial America Goes to the Conference”: A Missed Seminar on Eslanda Robeson

This panel addresses an anticolonial women’s internationalism for our contemporary urgencies through the black radical practice of Eslanda “Essie” Goode Robeson: anthropologist, writer, photographer, chemist, pan-africanist, communist, manager and spouse of US actor and radical activist Paul Robeson. We will listen to the sounds and images of Eslanda Robeson, following the traces of her travels from Harlem and London to East-Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, Moscow, Capetown, Mobassa and Brazzaville, and the South-East connections these travels intimate. Why we don’t know more about Robeson? Why is she absent in the narratives of a Black feminist tradition that appeared in the East in the 1960s? Realized in collaboration with the research project Decolonizing Socialism, Entangled Internationalism.

With Avery F. Gordon, Doreen Mende, Katharina Warda, moderated by Lama El Khatib

Concept: Avery F. Gordon, Doreen Mende, Katharina Warda