Abstract

From Accra, London, and Brussels, Black German May Ayim was a Black internationalist who pursued diverse projects that drew attention to the lack of civil and political rights for marginalized communities. Traversing borders, she advocated for change in her home country and beyond. Ayim used her personal experiences and embodied knowledge to draw attention to how intersecting oppressions remained omnipresent throughout the twentieth century. I argue that she advanced a cosmopolitan from below that allowed her to practice cultural diplomacy, offering new political ideas and strategies for continental change. While Ayim represents global Black European diasporic politics and resistance, her narrative also reveals that there was no one shape or direction that internationalism took in the postwar period.

Bio

Tiffany N. Florvil is an Associate Professor of History at the University of New Mexico. Florvil has coedited the volume, Rethinking Black German Studies: Approaches, Interventions and Histories(2022 paperback, 2018 hardback) and other articles and chapters. The German translation, Black Germany-Schwarz, deutsch, feministisch-die Geschichte einer Bewegung (Ch. Links Verlag 2023) was recently published. Mobilizing Black Germany: Afro-German Women and the Making of a Transnational Movement (University of Illinois Press 2020) won the Waterloo Centre for German Studies First Book Prize in 2021 among other honors. She is also the founding editor of the “Imagining Black Europe” book series at Peter Lang Press. She is working on several projects, including an intellectual biography of Black German author and activist May Ayim. This spring she was the Anna-Maria Kellen Fellow at the American Academy in Berlin, and next academic year she will be the Joy Foundation Fellow at Harvard’s Radcliffe Institute.