Upcoming Teach-In: Black Feminist Marronage in London: The Enduring Legacy of Amy Ashwood Garvey by Dr. Nydia A. Swaby
Promotional flyer for the upcoming teach-in centering the activism of Amy Ashwood Garvey.
Dr. Nydia A. Swaby will lead a teach-in for The School for Black Feminist Politics on the leadership of Jamaican Pan-Africanist and Black Internationalist, Amy Ashwood Garvey.
On Saturday, May 10th from 12:30 PM EST/5:30 GMT +1, join us for the upcoming online teach-in for The School for Black Feminist Politics, “Black Feminist Marronage in London: The Enduring Legacy of Amy Ashwood Garvey” by Dr. Nydia A. Swaby .This teach-in is a part of our “Black Feminist Marronage Series”, which is inspired by the power, self-determination, and activism of Black women and gender expansive communities around the world, and their unrepentant and unyielding fortitude in creating transformative places and spaces of sanctuary, survival, and solidarity for ourselves and posterity.
The teach-in will be held on Zoom. The event will be recorded. ASL interpretation will be provided.
You can register for the teach-in here: https://bit.ly/NydiaASwaby
About the teach-in: “Black Feminist Marronage in London: The Enduring Legacy of Amy Ashwood Garvey” explores Amy Ashwood Garvey’s creation of diasporic social spaces in London as acts of Black feminist marronage. Centering on the Florence Mills Social Parlour and the Afro Women’s Centre and Residential Club, it situates Ashwood Garvey’s activism within the broader history of Black women’s claims to home, safe space, and community-building. In a city structured to exclude Black belonging, Ashwood Garvey enacted urban marronage, creating spaces that transcended their roles as shelters or meeting places to become sites of diasporic refuge and self-determination.
The Florence Mills Social Parlour and Restaurant served as a critical hub for Pan-African activism and intellectual exchange, while the Afro Women’s Centre—Britain’s first Black women’s center—offered radical hospitality, mutual aid, and a base for collective empowerment for newly arrived African and Caribbean women. Recognizing the intersections of race, class, and gender, Ashwood Garvey expanded the center’s reach to include South Asian and white working-class women, forging solidarities across shared struggles for housing, labor rights, and safety. As the Afro Women’s Centre evolved into the Afro People’s Centre, it transformed into a crucial hub for anti-racist activism, broadening its vision of solidarity and empowerment.
By theorizing Ashwood Garvey’s efforts through the lens of marronage, this teach-in highlights how her spatial interventions prefigured contemporary Pan-African and Black feminist organizing in London, positioning Black women as architects of survival, safety, and liberation within the heart of empire.
About DR. Nydia A. Swaby
About the teach-in curator: Nydia A. Swaby is a Black feminist artist-researcher, writer, and curator. Her practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic and affective dimensions of black being and becoming. Nydia is a member of the editorial board for Feminist Review and co-edited its Archives issue. She holds a PhD from the Centre for Gender Studies at SOAS, University of London and has previously worked at the ICA, London and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. Nydia was a Caird Research Fellow jointly based at Royal Museums Greenwich and UCL’s Centre for the Study of the Legacies of British Slavery. She is currently a Whose Heritage Curatorial Fellow at Royal Museums Greenwich and contributes to the advisory board for the Atlantic Worlds Gallery at the National Maritime Museum. Nydia’s artist film, daughter(s) of diaspora, was recently screened at the Singapore International Photography Festival. Her book, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, was published by Lawrence Wishart in October 2024 as part of LW’s Radical Black Women series.