Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary

Abstract

This book sits at the intersection of two historical categories—empire and citizenship—that scholars usually study separately. It does so with a focus on race and racialization in the lives of four outstanding women whose careers crossed national borders between 1880 and 1965. Author Patricia Schechter offers rich and fascinating portraits of Liberian missionary Amanda Berry Smith, author Gertrude Stein, feminist arts impresario and publisher Josefina Silva de Cintrón, and labor activist Maida Springer. These portraits put an individual, intellectual, and female face on transnational topics—from missions to migration, world's fairs to unionism—that are too often recounted as male or mass phenomena.