Sara Salem

In this talk, Sara Salem focuses on a trip Angela Davis made to Egypt in the early 1980s to explore questions of transnational feminist solidarity and feminist difference. The focus on Marxism and feminism enabled Egyptian feminists to forge solidarity with women across the globe, including Angela Davis, who located gender oppression within the same structures—namely, capitalism and imperialism. Focusing on this trip, Salem shows how the encounters Davis had with feminists during this trip reveal much about the workings of transnational feminism as praxis, as well as the possibilities of feminist solidarity that sees difference as productive rather than divisive.

This event is part of the OSUN Transnational Feminism, Solidarity, and Social Justice series.

Sara Salem is an Associate Professor in Sociology at the London School of Economics. Her research interests include postcolonial studies, Marxist theory, and global histories of anticolonialism. Her recently published book with Cambridge University Press is entitled Anticolonial Afterlives in Egypt: The Politics of Hegemony (2020). She is currently thinking and writing about ghosts and anticolonial archives.