Joan Anim-Addo (Grenada/UK)
Caribbean Studies Centre
Goldsmiths College, University of London

Pan-Africanist women of the modernist era: a re-evaluation of Amy Ashwood Garvey

Alert to the warning by Merle Collins that “tales of hunting will always/ glorify the hunter/ until the lioness/ is her own/ hiss-/ -torian” (1992), this paper, arising from a search for black activist/artists of the period (1860-1939), interrogates modernism and the invisibility of black artists indicated in its history. If, as Gikandi argues, a failure to account for the part played by race is significant to studies of modernism, how might the complexity of African-Caribbean women’s position a century after Emancipation redefine modernism itself? Fragmented findings within the research in the UK for ‘networking women’ across Europe during the first decades of the twentieth century indicate a key role for Pan-Africanism in shaping the involvement of black women such as Amy Ashwood Garvey. I am concerned to link Ashwood Garvey’s activism with other modernist black women and to explore some meanings of the Pan-Africanist dynamic in the praxis with which she was involved. What did Ashwood Garvey’s travelling signify in a period when black freedom perceived in Europe was itself a crucial modernist signifier? I consider the meanings subverted and particularly that which Merle Hodge (1990) has referred to as ‘the contradiction between art and activism’.