Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives with Isabella Kajiwara and Nydia Swaby

Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives with Isabella Kajiwara and Nydia Swaby

From shado-lite by Shado Mag

November 22, 2025 · 47 min · Season 3 · Episode 12

About this episode

The episode features an interview with Nydia Swaby discussing her work on recovering the life and activism of Amy Ashwood Garvey within the context of Black feminist archives.

In our final episode of our bookshelf mini-series, Isabella interviews Black feminist artist-researcher, writer and curator, Nydia Swaby.  While often referred to as the first wife of Marcus Garvey,  Amy Ashwood Garvey and the Future of Black Feminist Archives  documents Swaby's work to recover Amy's life as a political activist, cultural producer and Pan-Africanist in her own right. In the podcast, she reflects on her expansive journey through Amy's fragmented and dispersed archives, engaging in historical research alongside autoethnographic practice, speculative narrative, and arts-based research methods too. Swaby reflects on the precarity of Black feminist archives and the necessity of preserving these histories through creativity and experimentation. This episode is part of a mini-series inspired by our latest shado bookshelf season:  To Be Loved, Is To Be Remembered: Archiving for Liberation.  We explored titles from Lawrence Wishart Books'  Radical Black Women  collection, curated in collaboration with the Black Cultural Archives to redress erasures of Black British and Black Transnational Feminist Histories. These works shine a light on…

People in this episode

Host: Isabella Kajiwara

Guest: Nydia Swaby

Topics covered

  • Black feminism
  • archives
  • cultural production
  • Pan-Africanism
  • historical research
  • autoethnography
  • activism

Keywords

  • Black feminist archives
  • Amy Ashwood Garvey
  • Nydia Swaby
  • cultural activism
  • historical research
  • autoethnography
  • Pan-Africanism
  • Black feminism
  • Radical Black Women

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Lawrence Wishart Books, Black Cultural Archives

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