In the 20th century, black women in the French empire played crucial leadership roles in anticolonial movements. This book harnesses untapped archival documents to highlight the work of Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita and Eslanda Robeson, women who remain relatively understudied in scholarship that continues to privilege male politicians and writers. Examining the literary production and political activism of African, Antillean, Guyanese and African American women, this book argues that black women writers and thinkers articulated multi-layered forms of citizenship that emphasized plural cultural and racial identities in direct opposition to colonialism. Their decolonial citizenship expanded the possibilities of belonging beyond the borders of the nation state and even the French empire to imagine transnational Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices.
