Natanya Duncan
Natanya Duncan is the Director of Africana Studies and Research Institute at Queens College City University of New York and an Associate Professor of History. A historian of the African Diaspora, her research and teaching focuses on global freedom movements of the 20th and 21st Century. Duncan’s research interest includes constructions of identity and nation building amongst women of color; migrations; color and class in Diasporic communities; and the engagements of intellectuals throughout the African Diaspora. Her book, An Efficient Womanhood: Women and the Making of the Universal Negro Improvement Association, (University of North Carolina Press 2025) focuses on the distinct activist strategies in-acted by women in the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which Duncan calls an efficient womanhood. Following the ways women in the UNIA scripted their own understanding of Pan Africanism, Black Nationalism and constructions of Diasporic Blackness, the work traces the blending of nationalist and gendered concerns amongst known and lesser known Garveyite women. Duncan’s publications include works that explore the leadership models of UNIA women and include “Now in Charge of the American Field”: Maymie De Mena and Charting the UNIA’s New Course” in Journal of Liberty Hall (Vol. 3 2017); “Henrietta Vinton Davis: The Lady of the Race” in Journal of New York History (Fall 2014 Vol 95 No. 4); “Laura Kofey and the Reverse Atlantic Experience” in The American South and the Atlantic World (University of Florida Press, 2013).
Testimonial Blurbs:
“Brilliantly researched and written, this account is long overdue.”—Ms. Magazine
“A bold intervention in the library of works on Garveyite women, this significant collective biography adds a wealth of new information to our knowledge of how women attained, created, and exercised leadership in the world’s largest Pan-African movement. It challenges the idea that these movements were always and forever male-run and male-dominated.”—Carole Boyce Davies, author of Black Women’s Rights: Leadership and the Circularities of Power
“Natanya Duncan’s seminal work fills a major void in the UNIA’s history, bringing to the fore a new set of women who have fallen through the archival cracks and shifting the history of the movement beyond Garvey himself.”—Ula Y. Taylor, author of The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey
“With this compelling collective biography of Garveyite women in Africa, the Caribbean, and the Americas, Natanya Duncan deepens and expands our understanding of Black nationalism and the global dimensions of Garveyism and the UNIA, the largest black-led political organization in world history.”—Robert Trent Vinson, author of The Americans Are Coming! Dreams of African American Liberation in Segregationist South Africa
“Print culture, and the The Negro World in particular, made the Universal Negro Improvement Association truly universal. Rarely has the newspaper been so edifyingly mined, demonstrating women’s preponderance in Garveyism. This is a veritable manual for how to organize, a testament to [Duncan’s] thorough research and sheer scholarly grit.”—Michael West, coeditor of From Toussaint to Tupac: The Black International Since the Age of Revolution
“A highly original and cogently argued study that details how women contributed to the formation and growth of the Garvey movement and the UNIA; built and relied on a transnational network of activists to advance their Pan-African vision; worked incessantly to democratize the UNIA; and fought against the ideological and personality clashes that undermined many organizations during the New Negro era.”—Claudrena N. Harold, author of The Rise and Fall of the Garvey Movement in the Urban South, 1918–1942