Patricia A. SCHECHTER. Exploring the Decolonial Imaginary

Patricia A. Schechter explores the “transnational lives” of four women: Amanda Berry Smith, a nineteenth-century missionary to Liberia; author Gertrude Stein; Josefina Silva de Cintron, editor of Artes y Letras (a journal that operated between 1933 and 1939 and had readership in both Puerto Rico and New York City); and Maida Springer, a labor activist in mid-twentieth-century United States and Liberia. As she notes, all but Stein have been largely forgotten today, despite achieving some prominence during their lifetimes. Schechter argues that a common thread ties these women together; they “worked against essentialist notions of race and were transnational figures who crossed the Caribbean and the Atlantic with crucial stops in New York City,” and they refused “to abide by the rules of racial boundary keeping” and to “extend racial scripts in their lives and work” (p. 1). This refusal, she argues, hurt “their ability to earn money, social status, or political currency,” and has left them “mostly obscured” today (p. 1). This last part of Schechter's argument is a bit unclear, as it is virtually impossible to prove that the women she treats would be better known today—or wealthier or more politically powerful in their own time—if they had in fact subscribed more to contemporary ideologies of race. This is nonetheless an important book, one which challenges the standard geographical boundaries for U.S. women's history (and American history more broadly) and adds to our understanding of the complex ways in which women have engaged with U.S. imperialism.

Argument (complex analysis) · Essentialism · Ideology · Political science · Politics · Sociology · The Imaginary · Asian American and Pacific Histories · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Race, History, and American Society