Contributed by Constance Holden
My dissertation examines gender, Blackness, and visual culture in modern Argentina. As my research links popular representations of Blackness to how African-descended women charted their own destinies, I became curious about the specific experiences of African-descended women scholars of Latin America. It was at this juncture that I learned about Black anthropologist Ellen Irene Diggs, who studied African-descended political and social lives in Latin America. In 1946, Dr. Diggs became the first Black scholar to receive a U.S. State Department Fellowship to study the African Diaspora in Latin America. Using the fellowship to research in Montevideo, Uruguay, Dr. Diggs’ work intervened in an ongoing community dialogue about the meanings of equality, inclusion, and freedom. Dr. Diggs, who offered alternative interpretations of Black belonging, disrupted monolithic representations of Black political cultures.
My research into Dr. Diggs resulted in an experimental biographical essay published in the first issue of the Journal of Black Educology. While most of the scholarship on Dr. Diggs focuses on her professional relationship with sociologist W.E.B. Du Bois, who she met as a student at Atlanta University, my article recontextualized Dr. Diggs as a scholar within her own right and centers her experience in Uruguay as foundational to her academic career. I used Morgan State University’s newly digitized collection of Ellen Irene Diggs personal papers and the University of Massachusetts Amherst’s online archive of the W.E.B. Du Bois Papers to reconstruct her history. I situated her time in Uruguay as one element of her lifelong intellectual formation, tracing her journey from her hometown of Monmouth, Illinois, to her studies at Georgia’s Atlanta University where she met Du Bois, and to her doctoral program at the University of Havana, where she worked with Cuban anthropologist Fernando Ortiz. After securing the State Department Fellowship, Dr. Diggs arrived in Montevideo in September 1946. Although initially, they embraced the arrival of a Black scholar from the United States, African-descended journalists later criticized Dr. Diggs, who characterized their political activism as incoherent in an interview with an Argentine newspaper. In my essay, I argued that the debates that unfolded in the Black Uruguayan press in the aftermath of Dr. Diggs’ limiting analysis illustrated diasporic anxieties around racial progress, collective activism, and class mobility. In telling an intertwined story of the politics of Dr. Diggs and African-descended communities in Uruguay, my work examines the terms of communal and self-representation.
My essay understands Black women’s biography as a central methodology for exploring the processes of data collection about Latin America, how that information translates into knowledge production, and how representations of that knowledge shape divergent understandings of race, nation, and power. Ultimately, my research demonstrates that histories of representation and identity formation reveal the varied responses to liberal promises of racial inclusion across and within national contexts. Writing about Ellen Irene Diggs, and thanks to funding support from El Instituto, inspired me even more to write a dissertation about how African-descended women in Latin America represented their own lives and experiences.