Recirculation and Feminist Black Internationalism in Jessie Fauset's "The Looking Glass" and Amy Jacques Garvey's "Our Women and What They Think"

Recirculation and Feminist Black Internationalism in Jessie Fauset's "The Looking Glass" and Amy Jacques Garvey's "Our Women and What They Think" Teresa Zackodnik (bio) Established historiographies of African American feminism, the black press, and cultures of black internationalism position the turn into the 20th century as the pivotal moment signaling that the new has arrived. For black feminisms, the national federation of black women's clubs as the National Association of Colored Women (NACW) in 1896 continues to be cited as the emergence of black feminists into public politics; for the black press, new papers were emerging at a rapid pace hailing what is called a print culture "explosion"—between 1900 and 1909, 344 new black papers were established.1 Scholarship on African American politics and cultures of black internationalism also contends that the 20th century is pivotal for black radicalization and the development "of what Edward Said has called 'adversarial internationalizations' (attempts at organizing alliances to challenge the prevailing discourses of Western universalism)," which together shape black transnational print culture and intellectual exchange.2 These narratives intersect when the 46 black women established as journalists and/or editors by 1905 are said to be "more dramatically political [and] more varied in their activities" than any other group preceding them,3 the most prominent of whom—Anna Julia Cooper, Jessie Fauset, Amy Jacques Garvey, and Pauline Hopkins—pursued internationalist politics. Yet, despite the feminist black internationalism of these famous black women journalists, historiographies of both the black press and black internationalism tend to be strongly [End Page 437] gendered: women are frequently positioned in secondary and supportive roles, if their work is examined at all.4 While recent work has begun to remedy that occlusion of black women in internationalist politics, much of it is centered even later in the 20th century through its focus on black left feminisms.5 Given these scholarly tendencies, I urge us to recall that 19th-century African American feminists, as one such culture of black internationalism, also pursued critiques of capital, empire, and nation and sought adversarial and international affiliations that included, but went beyond, black solidarities. Their work is prominent in the abolitionist and black press at mid-century. During the 1850s, the anti-slavery tours of Ellen Craft and Sarah Parker Remond in the British Isles and Ireland forged links between the conditions and interests of the British working-class, Irish tenant farmers and enslaved African Americans under the forces of empire and capital. At the same time, Mary Ann Shadd Cary's feminist black nationalism rejected the emigration debate's calls for emigration to Liberia and Haiti by urging African Americans to become "part of the Colored British nation"6 by emigrating to Canada West, and to imagine the material site for a black transnation as possible in a colony of empire rather than in a nation that continued to deny them freedom and full rights. In her emigration arguments we see the tension between nation, empire and transnation that Michele Stephens has identified as a driver of Garveyism nearly a century later. Likewise, black feminisms were mobilized if not constituted in and through the black press well before its explosion at the turn into the 20th century. In order to understand the interplay between black feminisms, including black feminist internationalism, and the periodical press, then, we must challenge some of the scholarly lenses we employ that continue to position the turn into the 20th century as a pivotal emergent moment. Rather, we need a longer view that captures the historical use of particular press forms by black feminists and their distinctive mobilization of established journalistic practices. We also need to consider more fully both women's work in black internationalist politics and their feminist critiques of such movements. In focusing on Jessie Fauset's and Amy Jacques Garvey's adversarial internationalisms in this article, I work to cast feminist black internationalism as an older politic than much scholarship allows. In that regard, I join Michael West, William Martin and Fanon Che Wilkins in reminding scholars of black internationalism that its "ideal of universal emancipation unbounded by national, imperial, continental, or oceanic boundaries—or even...

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