The panel departs from the unpublished manuscript 140,000,000 Women Can’t Be Wrong by Eslanda Robeson that is likely to have been written in relation to the Congress of the Women’s International Democratic Federation (WIDF) in Copenhagen in 1953, marking a turning point in the organization’s history. The United Nations withdrew the WIDF’s observer status at the UN and accused it of being a communist-dominated organization engaged in subversive activities, and its headquarters was relocated from Paris to East Berlin in 1954 where it remained until 1992. The panel aims for a transdisciplinary reflection on the history and potentiality of Robeson’s text.

Lecture by Barbara Ransby, conversation with Sagal Farah, Yulia Gradskova and Vanessa E. Thompson, moderated by Avery F. Gordon