Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives charts the journey of Black feminist artist, researcher, and curator Nydia A. Swaby as she reconstructs the life of Pan-Africanist and feminist Amy Ashwood Garvey from her fragmented and dispersed archive. In doing so, the book reflects on the future of Black feminist archival practice, offering both a tribute to Amy’s life and a meditation on the politics of preserving and curating Black women’s histories.
Although often remembered primarily as Marcus Garvey’s first wife, Amy Ashwood Garvey’s significant contributions to movements for social justice—particularly Black women’s rights—have largely been overlooked, in part because her archive is spread across the many places she lived and worked. After helping Marcus Garvey establish the UNIA, one of the most influential Pan-African movements in history, Amy moved to New York, where she thrived during the Harlem Renaissance. In the 1930s, she relocated to Britain, where she established the Afro People’s Centre and the Florence Mills Social Parlour, both vital spaces for Black cultural and political life.
Through this book, Swaby recovers Amy Ashwood Garvey’s legacy as an important political activist, cultural producer, and Pan-Africanist in her own right. Retracing her steps across the Caribbean, the U.S., Britain, and West Africa, Swaby pieces together a rich and complex biography.
In addition to traditional archival research, Swaby engages in a series of "curatorial fabulations," creatively imagining into the gaps in Amy’s archive through her own autoethnographic practice. Drawing from the work of contemporary Black feminist researchers, archivists, curators, and artists, as well as her own creative projects, Swaby animates the process of creating and curating Ashwood Garvey’s archive. In doing so, the book reflects on Black feminist archiving as a dynamic practice that bridges the past, present, and future.
Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives is part of Lawrence & Wishart's Radical Black Women Series.