“Unofficial America goes to the conference”:

a missed seminar on Eslanda Robeson

Contributors

• Avery F. Gordon
• Lama El-Khatib
• Doreen Mende
• Katharina Warda

This research panel addresses an anticolonial women’s internationalism for our contemporary urgencies through the black radical practice of Eslanda “Essie” Goode Robeson: anthropologist, writer, photographer, chemist, pan-africanist, communist, Paul Robeson’s manager and spouse. We will listen to the sounds and images of Eslanda Robeson, following the traces of her travels from Harlem and London to East-Berlin, Leipzig, Prague, Moscow, Capetown, Mobassa and Brazzaville, and the South-East connections these travels intimate. Why we don’t know more about Robeson? Why is she absent in the narratives of a black feminist tradition that appeared in the East in the 1960s?

The research conversation with Avery F. Gordon, writer, educator, radio producer, Doreen Mende, curator and theorist and Katharina Warda, sociologist and literature scholar, moderated by Lama El-Khatib, philosopher, takes place in the context of The Whole Life Congress at House of the World Cultures, Berlin, from 24 to 26 March 2022.