Tatsiana Shchurko

This research project explores the transit of US Black women’s intellectual traditions to Soviet East Europe and Eurasia. Specifically, it revisits Black internationalist women’s journeys and engagements with Soviet Eurasia to expand and challenge their legacy within US transnational feminist studies as well as knowledge production and activism in Eurasia. The project centers on the trips and writings of Louise Patterson, Eslanda Robeson, Claudia Jones, Alice Childress, Shirley DuBois, Audre Lorde, and Angela Davis and explores them from an anti-colonial postsocialist perspective. While re-reading the archive, the project focuses on the lost connections between US Black intellectual women and Eurasian communities for their resonances in contemporary struggles against gender violence, right-wing politics, and carcerality in the US and the post-Soviet region. It shows how Black internationalist women’s experiences with Eurasian communities open up possibilities for contemporary East/West cooperation.