GSSC Seminar Series
27 May 2025
“Mama Wesson”: Kinship Politics Across Borders
Jacqueline-Bethel Mougouè (University of Wisconsin-Madison)
12:00-13:00
This talk focuses on a chapter of a book project about Black American women who traveled through West Africa from the 1950s to the 1970s. Women like Vivian Wesson gained social, political, religious, and intellectual power as they navigated mid-20th-century West Africa on behalf of the Baha’i Faith, a religion founded in 19th-century Iran that emphasizes racial, cultural, and gender equity. These ordinary Black women from the African diaspora shaped their activism and concepts of gender and racial unity while navigating their transnational identities and experiences within and beyond their faith. I specifically highlight how they employed intellectual agency and kinship—especially the politics of motherhood and sisterhood—to gain racial and cultural respectability during their travels. These women used diverse kinship politics and globalized motherhood to advocate for racial and gender equity, ultimately facilitating various forms of belonging in Africa, redefining their identities, and enhancing their prominence in religion and culture across the Atlantic.
Jacqueline-Bethel Tchouta Mougoué serves as an Associate Professor of African Cultural Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the United States. She is a trained historian specializing in women’s and gender history in mid-20th-century West Africa. Her publication, Gender, Separatist Politics and Embodied Nationalism in Cameroon, has earned several accolades, including the Frances Richardson Keller-Sierra Prize in 2020, the Aidoo-Snyder Prize in 2021, and an Honorable Mention for the Pius Adesanmi Memorial Award for Excellence in African Writing in 2023. In 2022, she was recognized by AMAKA magazine as one of 15 influential African women historians contributing to the understanding of Africa's historical narrative. Additionally, Mougoué co-edits a book series on women and gender in Africa published by the University of Wisconsin Press.