5/2/2023 0 Comments Ask amy archiveĪs of 2009 she had sold more than 30 million albums worldwide, won six Grammy Awards, 22 Gospel Music Association Dove Awards, and had the first Christian album to go platinum. She has been referred to as "The Queen of Christian Pop". She began in contemporary Christian music (CCM) before crossing over to pop music in the 1980s and 1990s. Visual narratives related to this work, which forms part of my ongoing visual think piece, Becoming with Archive: Blackness, Gender, Diaspora, include ‘A Living Archive for Amy Ashwood Garvey’ and ‘Pan-Africanist, Feminist and Mrs.Amy Lee Grant (born November 25, 1960) is an American Christian and pop singer-songwriter, and musician. I use the dispersed and fragmentary nature of Ashwood Garvey’s archive and how I have accessed material to ask questions about the future of Black feminist archives and archival research. So rather than present a traditional biography, I engage Black feminist epistemologies and auto/ethnography, critical theories of archival power and form, creative writing and arts-based research methods to examine and contextualize archival fragments of her life and activism. Without funding to support research at different archives in multiple locations, I have had to rely on the research of others, which has fostered new collaborations and ways of reading Ashwood Garvey’s archive. There could also be material in Liberia and Ghana, given the time she spent in both locations and the people she visited while there. Fragments of Ashwood Garvey’s archive are held by Yard’s family in Brooklyn, New York and in several repositories, across several collections in the Caribbean, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Ashwood Garvey abandoned her home in London for financial reasons, leaving behind a trove of personal papers that were later recovered by her friend and first biographer Caribbean studies scholar Lionel Yard. Yet despite her many connections, money was always tight. This is not a biography but a study of a Black radical feminist whose archive, life, and activism reflects the kinds of difficulties I have faced in undertaking Black feminist research, namely limited funds and access to resources.Īshwood Garvey’s travels and projects often relied on the financial support of her friends and benefactors. Ashwood Garvey also ran a boarding house at her home in Ladbroke Grove that became a community center and networking hub for African and Caribbean migrants to Britain.Īmy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives (Lawrence Wishart, Summer 2022) will add to what we know about Ashwood Garvey by reflecting upon what the conditions of her archive tell us about her life and activism. Local and international Black celebrities often visited the club, among them jazz musician Fats Waller and Olympic athlete Jesse Owens. She was a good friend of Communist activist and journalist Claudia Jones and also called London home.Īshwood Garvey ran a popular restaurant and social club in London’s Soho neighborhood that was frequented by the likes of Pan-African leaders Jomo Kenyetta, George Padmore, and CLR James. During her travels in Ghana, where she was formally recognized as Ashanti and adopted the name Yaa Boahimaa in a lineage ceremony, Ashwood Garvey wore kente, a practice she continued for the rest of her life. She was well-travelled, embarking on historic tours of West Africa and the Caribbean, where she helped to spread the tenets of Pan-Africanism. These works have shown that Amy Ashwood Garvey was a prominent Pan-African feminist who attended the 1945 Pan-African Congress held in Manchester, England, where she called for a resolution attending to the specific needs of Black and African women. She has been the subject of posts on social media and at least one art installation. Ashwood Garvey has featured in a growing number of academic books and journal articles, on history websites and blogs. But references to her life and activism independent of Garvey and Garveyism have increased in recent years. Amy Ashwood Garvey (1897-1969) is often referred to as the first wife of Pan-African leader Marcus Garvey and the co-founder of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA).
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