Poster Session: Challenging Historical Narratives and Empowering Historical Voices

Marisa Pickett

Black Art against Misogynoir

This piece will introduce the audience to the British Black Arts Movement of the 1970s/80s. A moment in time when artists from across Britains majority-Black and majority-migrant cities and suburbs found community and kinship within the confines the greater British art scene. The Black Arts Movement saw the foundation of art groups focused on social commentary, such as the BLK Art Group. Founded in Wolverhampton in 1979, BLK was the foundation for any influential artists in the movement, including the likes of Eddie Chambers, Keith Piper, Marlene Smith, and Donald Rodney.

The Black Arts Movement did not end in Wolverhampton, and female artists such as Lubaina Himid and Sonia Boyce also gained recognition roles with their work. Both women used their art to “talk back” against biased representations of Black women in British media, as well as created spaces for British women of color within the greater British art world. Winner of the 2017 Turner Prize, Himid’s use of satire to critique the inherent misogyny and anti-Blackness in British politics and society serves to critique a nation in which female bodies are used as talking points for anti-immigration measures. Boyce’s representations of Black British women under white British scrutiny shows the socio-cultural difficulties faced by Black Commonwealth migrants to Britain, as well as the inherent racial and sexual hegemony of the Britain itself. Boyce is credited with the development of the historicization of British Black Arts, with works like Lay Back, Keep Quiet and Think of What Made Britain So Great (1986).

Together, Himid and Boyce highlight the difficulties of navigating the British art scene during a time of great change in Britain’s social and political foundations as the nation deregulates industry, freeing itself from the confines of imperialist past, but desperately clings to its nostalgia for colonialism and it’s hierarchies.

For more detail about the British Black Arts Movement, see Marisa’s thesis “Color on Canvas in Black Britain and Black Germany”

Marisa’s Portfolio website

Gina Benavidez

The Forgotten Contributors: American Women Medical Volunteers in the Spanish Civil War.

My project - and dissertation topic - focuses on the nearly seventy American women medical volunteers who participated in the Spanish Civil War between 1937 and 1938. In the midst of Spain’s battle between fascism and democracy - Franco’s Nationalists aided by Hitler and Mussolini and the Spanish Republic aided by the Soviet Union’s organization of the International Brigades – nearly fifty thousand volunteers from three dozen countries traveled to Spain in order to fight against the Nationalist forces. Of the 2,800 American men who volunteered, there was also an American Medical Bureau who went to Spain, composed of male dentists, physical therapists, nurses, lab technicians, and ambulance drivers. Though there is a great deal of literature about the American male soldier volunteers, the American women’s experience from the United States has yet to be examined in a scholarly manner.

I analyze the gendered experience of these American women in Spain, and particularly study the utilization of their medical professional participation in the interwar transnational antifascist movement that occurred prior to the Second World War. In a time when women in the United States, many of them recently enfranchised, were working to assert their role in the political and professional arenas, the women of the American Medical Bureau managed to combine both their political ideologies and their professional employment to take action against fascism in Spain.

Once in Spain, their gendered perspective allows us to understand the unique access they had to Spanish civilians and international soldiers during the war, as their position on caretaking was not limited just to Republican soldiers. Through the use of correspondence, personal diary entries, propaganda pamphlets, memoirs, autobiographies, and memorandums, my project seeks to intervene in existing Spanish Civil War, American women’s, and transnational antifascism historiography by telling the stories of the American women volunteers and their valuable contribution to interwar activist history.

Jéssica Pereira

“Look at my skin color; I am not part of your family”: Political Agency of a Domestic Workers’ Union in Rio de Janeiro from the 1970s to the 1980s.

This project examines the struggles of domestic workers in Rio de Janeiro during Brazil’s military dictatorship (1964-1985) through the trajectory of Nair Jane de Castro Lima (1933-Present), a Black retired domestic worker who also worked as a nursing technician and catechism teacher and has remained a union leader since the 1970s. Based on an oral history interview conducted in 2024, the project analyzes how Nair Jane expanded her networks, becoming a mediator between the domestic sphere, the Catholic Church, feminist groups, and the labour movement. These connections permitted domestic workers in Rio de Janeiro build political power and consolidate union organizing during the re-democratization process in the late 1980s.

The project draws on Joan Scott’s definition of gender as a category of power and employs an intersectional framework that connects gender, race, class, and labor to challenge narratives that show domestic workers exclusively as victims. During the 20th century, both the state and the Catholic Church reinforced discourses of morality and the “protection” of Afro-descendant and poor women and girls, framing domestic labor as “non-work” and thereby justifying the denial of labor rights. Although domestic workers remained excluded from full labor rights until Constitutional Amendment No. 72 in 2013, the project argues that legal exclusion did not imply political passivity. On the contrary, Brazilian domestic workers have been fighting for labuor rights like other professionals since the 1930s. By centering Nair Jane’s voice, the project highlights domestic workers as political agents who developed strategies to claim citizenship and labor rights even under Brazilian authoritarian and re-democratization contexts.