Anti-Fascism and the Development of Global Race Women, 1928–1945

Global race women emerged across Africa and its diaspora from the late-nineteenth century. As middle-class, cosmopolitan, public figures of African ancestry, they regularly travelled around the world, which allowed them to play a role in global freedom struggles against colonialism, fascism, sexism, and racism. Global race women identified as being part of what was termed the “colored world.” They shared multi-racial alliances in their personal and political lives and expressed overlapping racial, national, and global identities. Global race women demonstrated the dynamism of what historians Robin D. G. Kelley and Tiffany Ruby Patterson have called “black globality” as their lives and activism embraced a black world view that overlapped with the larger world (26). Moreover, at the heart of being a global race woman was the creation of and participation in global networks based on friendships, family, and fictive kinship ties. They linked with professional networks of civic organizations, newspapers, universities, and national corporations that were embedded in the transnational black public sphere (Habermas; Squires).

This article sews together two scholarly fields usually considered separately, namely global intellectual history and black women’s history. It maps the lives of three global race women, including Martiniquan Paulette Nardal, Jamaican Una Marson, and American Eslanda Robeson. It argues that the 1935 Italian invasion of Ethiopia and the 1936 Spanish Civil War were turning points because they led to Nardal, Marson, and Robeson’s involvement in global anti-fascism, which was critical to expanding their identities and practices as global race women in multiple ways. This observation is no small point. Transnational history, especially works that explore border-crossing individuals, tends to focus on exceptional singular narratives. By bringing together three women, this piece underscores the range of ways in which travel impacted differently on black women between 1928 and 1945.

Furthermore, as historian Matthew Pratt Guterl has commented, the study of transnational lives is centered on changing “the meanings of old stories . . . not to tell fundamentally new stories” (132). I turn this notion on its head. The experiences of Nardal, Marson, and Robeson tell us new stories that should by now be old stories concerning the role of Europe-based black women intellectuals in the fight against fascism. All of the women were known in their time to be leading figures, but have been overlooked. Their histories are a reminder that recovery and re-interpretive research remains central to integrating women, and particularly black women, into global history.

The recovery of Nardal, Marson, and Robeson offers insight into global intellectual history. In a recent study, Samuel Moyn and Andrew Sartori offer a range of approaches that may be employed in the field, including the study of intermediaries, go-betweens, or translators in the sharing of ideas and knowledge within a larger global sphere, or explorations of the “global” in different intellectual movements. Although multiple meanings and contestations exist within global intellectual history, Robeson, Nardal, and Marson fit within some of its approaches (Gänger and Lin-Lewis 348). As black women intellectuals, they reflect a minimal conception of global intellectual history that challenges the bias in the field that was previously dominated by white Europeans and men (Moyn and Sartori 7). They also characterize the approach that explores meanings about globalism within the public sphere (Moyn and Sartori 17; Gänger and Lin-Lewis 347).

Each of the women led different but entangled lives.¹ While they did know of each other, they were not in direct contact throughout their lives. In their anthropological writings, short stories, newspaper journalism, plays, and poetry; their direct activism in local and international organizations; and their friendships with European, African, and Asian leaders, the women fought to have their opinions heard on a range of topics including cosmopolitanism, anti-fascism, colonialism, feminism, and decolonization in the global arena. The relative freedom the women held in their personal lives allowed them to travel frequently. The act of travelling solo and sometimes in groups symbolized their modernity, fostered their independence, and fueled their activism and thought. As journalists, writers, poets, and playwrights, Nardal, Marson, and Robeson were...