Hiding in Plain Sight: African American Women and the Reclamation of "Space"

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

This panel posits ways that African American women enter into the nation's grand narrative from the colonial period to the present. Although absented and erased by discourses that focused on their visible labor, evidence of their constructions of "real work" done out of the sight of white males demonstrates how these women re-defined the utility of the spaces and places they occupied.

Sub Unit

• ASALH Centennial Annual Meeting and Conference

Chair

• Natanya Duncan, Lehigh University

Individual Presentations

• Ona Judge: The President’s Runaway Slave Woman - Erica Armstrong Dunbar, University of Delaware

• "Half in Shadow: The Life and Legacy of Nellie Y. McKay" - Shanna Green Benjamin, Grinnell College

• “African American Women in the Shadow of Outer Space: Black Women and the making of NASA” - Duchess Harris, Macalester College; Margot Lee Shetterly, The Human Computer Project Inc

Commentator

• Natanya Duncan, Lehigh University