The AMESALL Distinguished Lecture Series presents “The Subject of Woman’s Rights is Before the World”

The AMESALL Distinguished Lecture Series presents

“The Subject of Woman’s Rights is Before the World”
Advancing Global Citizenship and Leadership Paradigms

by Professor Carole Boyce-Davies

Thursday, February 23, 2023
4:00 - 6:00pm
Rutgers Academic Building | West Wing | Rm. 2400 

15 Seminary Place , New Brunswick, NJ, 08901 (This event is in-person)

In 1901, Catherine McKenzie, a Black and women’s rights activist in Jamaica, asserted that “[T]he subject of “Woman’s Rights” is before the world …a subject which is here to stay, to be discussed, and to be settled.  It may be said to be the progeny of the nineteenth century; but it is to grow and develop into full maturity during the century upon which the world has just entered.” Here we have a fitting women’s rights counterpart to W. E. B. DuBois’s parallel assertion on the prominence and permanence of the color line made a year before, at the first Pan African Conference in 1900 in London, i.e. “The problem of the 20^th century is the problem of the color line” meaning that the problematics of race would be the issue dominating the 20^th century. The fact that we know only DuBois’s assertion speaks to the issues which describe how women’s rights are rarely represented in male supremacist world culture.  Retrospectively, we can just as easily see, through this lens, the 20^th century as one in which women’s rights were going to be centrally positioned and indeed they were. This presentation will address some of the contemporary manifestations which reposition women's rights to leadership. 

Featured Speaker:

Carole Boyce-Davies is the H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters and Professor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English. She is a past-president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016. In addition to over a hundred essays, articles and book chapters, Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published thirteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture including the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia Jones Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume. Her recently published book is Black Women’s Rights and the Circularities of Power (2022). 

View the event flyer here.