In our final episode of our bookshelf mini-series, Isabella interviews Black feminist artist-researcher, writer and curator, Nydia Swaby. While often referred to as the first wife of Marcus Garvey, Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives documents Swaby’s work to recover Amy’s life as a political activist, cultural producer and Pan-Africanist in her own right. In the podcast, she reflects on her expansive journey through Amy’s fragmented and dispersed archives, engaging in historical research alongside autoethnographic practice, speculative narrative, and arts-based research methods too. Swaby reflects on the precarity of Black feminist archives and the necessity of preserving these histories through creativity and experimentation.
This episode is part of a mini-series inspired by our latest shado bookshelf season: To Be Loved, Is To Be Remembered: Archiving for Liberation. We explored titles from Lawrence Wishart Books’ Radical Black Women collection, curated in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives to redress erasures of Black British and Black Transnational Feminist Histories. These works shine a light on the lives and activism of Claudia Jones, Gerlin Bean and Amy Ashwood Garvey – three revolutionary figures whose legacies continue to shape global justice movements.
Nydia Swaby’s practice engages archives, autoethnography, photography, the moving image, and the imagination to explore the gendered, diasporic and affective dimensions of Black being and becoming. She is also the author of the book Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives, which traces her journey in piecing together a biography of Garvey from her fragmented and dispersed archive.
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