CGIS is excited to host author & Associate Professor of History & Africana Studies, Dr. Tiffany M. Gill, as she discusses her work on "The World is Ours Too": Black Women & Global Activisim in the New Black Travel Movement. Join us Friday, November 16th from 11:30am-1pm in the Michigan League: Hussey (Second floor). Lunch will be provided for all participants. 

While the very history of African Americans is centered around forced and voluntary international journeys, the experiences of blacks during World War II, along with significant changes in American politics and culture in the postwar era gave rise to African American international leisure tourism.

At the forefront of this development were black women who not only traveled abroad in larger numbers than their male counterparts, but helped to establish the economic infrastructure for an international black travel industry. Just as black women in the early years of the Civil Rights Movement built a travel movement, the early 21st century Black Lives Matter movement has witnessed a similar resurgence. In this iteration, it is Black women of the millennial generation who are at the forefront.

Indeed, as public struggles against anti-black violence have increased since 2013, the market share of African Americans in the international travel market has given birth to what the media is widely reporting as the “The New Black Travel Movement.” This essay demonstrates that this movement is not new at all but a continuation of a phenomenon that began in the 1940s and one that has a great deal to teach us about the tensions between political activism, leisure culture, and global freedom struggles.

Dr. Tiffany M. Gill is an Associate Professor in the Department of Africana Studies and the Department of History at the University of Delaware.  She earned a doctorate in American History at Rutgers University in 2003.  Her research and teaching interests include African American History, Women’s History, the history of black entrepreneurship, fashion and beauty studies, and travel and migration throughout the African Diaspora.  She is the author of Beauty Shop Politics: African American Women's Activism in the Beauty Industry (University of Illinois Press, 2010) which was awarded the 2010 Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Prize by the Association of Black Women Historians.  In addition, she has served as a subject editor for African American National Biography, and has had her work published and reprinted in several journals and edited volumes. Before joining the faculty of the University of Delaware, Dr. Gill taught at the University of Texas at Austin and was a recipient of the 2010 Regents' Outstanding Teaching Award for excellence in undergraduate education.  Currently, Professor Gill is at work on a book manuscript tentatively titled, “Intentional Tourists: International Leisure Travel and the Making of Black Global Citizens.”