History in the Making – Mabel Williams, Racial Capitalism, and the Archive of Afro-Asian Solidarity (Dr. Zifeng Liu, Assistant Professor, Hong Kong Baptist University)

The transnational and transracial alliances that marked the age of Bandung were often stratified along gender and sexual lines. This presentation will offer a feminist consideration of African American female activist Mabel Williams’s representation in China’s media and state archives. I will not only illuminate the reinforcement of heteropatriarchy in the production of those archival records, which inevitably leads to the circumscription, in historical accounts, of the radical potential of the Afro-Asian solidarities that she sought to forge. Reading against the archival grain to center Mabel Williams’s experiences and contributions, I will also demonstrate that she bumped up against prevailing notions of gender and sexuality, maneuvered to navigate the turbulent waters of international communism and Third Worldism, and fostered an Afro-Asian rhetorical collaboration in China that became an ideological tug-of-war over the complex entanglements of race and class in Black America.

Zifeng Liu is an intellectual historian of the twentieth-century Africana world with specializations in Black internationalism, anticolonial thought, and Afro-Asian solidarity. His current book project traces a history of African American women radicals’ engagements with China in the age of Bandung. He is currently Assistant Professor of History at Hong Kong Baptist University.