Eslanda
The Large and Unconventional Life of Mrs. Paul Robeson
Barbara Ransby
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The first biography of the bold, principled, and fiercely independent woman who defied convention to make her own mark on the world
Eslanda "Essie" Cardozo Goode Robeson lived a colorful and amazing life. Her career and commitments took her many places: colonial Africa in 1936, the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, the founding meeting of the United Nations, Nazi-occupied Berlin, Stalin's Russia, and China two months after Mao's revolution. She was a woman of unusual accomplishment—an anthropologist, a prolific journalist, a tireless advocate of women's rights, an outspoken anti-colonial and antiracist activist, and an internationally sought-after speaker. Yet historians for the most part have confined Essie to the role of Mrs. Paul Robeson, a wife hidden in the large shadow cast by her famous husband. In this masterful book, biographer Barbara Ransby refocuses attention on Essie, one of the most important and fascinating black women of the twentieth century.
Chronicling Essie's eventful life, the book explores her influence on her husband's early career and how she later achieved her own unique political voice. Essie's friendships with a host of literary icons and world leaders, her renown as a fierce defender of justice, her defiant testimony before Senator Joseph McCarthy's infamous anti-communist committee, and her unconventional open marriage that endured for over 40 years—all are brought to light in the pages of this inspiring biography. Essie's indomitable personality shines through, as do her contributions to United States and twentieth-century world history.
"In this incredibly powerful, vital work, Ransby has rescued Eslanda Robeson from the shadows of her famous husband and establishes her as one of the most important activists, scholars, critics and theorists to connect anticolonialism with the black freedom movement in the U.S."—Robin Kelley, author of Thelonious Monk: The Life and Times of an American Original
"Barbara Ransby has produced an insightful, fascinating, and significant biography. Eslanda Robeson has too long stood in the shadow of her remarkable husband, but as Ransby shows she was an important writer and political activist in her own right, whose life illuminates the international dimensions of the 20th-century black freedom movement."—Eric Foner, Columbia University
“Eslanda is more than a biography of a prolific journalist, UN correspondent, anthropologist and writer of novels, plays and essays. It is also an in-depth study of the evolution of African-American intellectual life, the development of Pan-African consciousness and a social history of the major global struggles from the interwar periods of the Vietnam War, all through the personal and public writings of Eslanda Cardozo Robeson.”—Season Butler, Counterfire
Publication Date: February 25, 2014
64 b/w illus.
