Sylvia first set foot in Senegal in 1966 thanks to a personal invitation from the country’s president, Leopold Sedar Senghor. Originally from Washington D.C. and a graduate from Dunbar High School, Sylvia went to Trinity College for women in 1954 just months after the Brown v. Board of Education decision integrated the college, making Sylvia one of the first four African American women to attend the school. At Trinity, Sylvia’s scholarly interests in French and Latin flourished, sending her on a path to becoming a Fulbright scholar in France, a Woodrow Wilson Fellow, and PhD candidate at Fordham University. However, Sylvia’s life transformed one night in 1966 when meeting Senegalese President Senghor at a Howard University happy hour. Sylvia impressed President Senghor with her scholarship on his poetry, the subject of her dissertation, and he invited Sylvia to teach in Senegal for one year. One year became thirty years, and Sylvia Washington became Sylvia Washington Bâ. This presentation shares Sylvia’s story as an African American woman in independent Senegal’s cosmopolitan capital city of Dakar. She taught comparative French and African literatures, Black feminism, and the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade at the large public university in Dakar before many American universities had such classes. While Sylvia’s story is singular in its uniqueness, she fostered a community of numerous other African American female expatriates in Senegal, many of whom did important work to bring both sides of the Atlantic together through professional life, academia, and kinship. Following the questions posed in the first part of this series on female expatriates in Paris: how did race, nationality, and gender morph the experiences of African American women living in Dakar, Senegal since 1960? What epistemologies did these women create that put life as African Americans and colonized Africans into conversations? How did their private lives, marriage to Senegalese men, and blended families transform their expatriate experience? This talk forms part of a two-part Women’s History Month series, Women in Migration: Epistemologies and Expatriation from the United States to the Francophone World. Julia Woods is a Ph.D. candidate in the joint program between the History Department and the Institute of French Studies at New York University. She received a B.A. in French and History with a concentration in African Studies from Kalamazoo College (2020) and an M.A. from NYU’s Institute of French Studies (2022). As a doctoral candidate, Julia studies Senegal as a political foothold to West Africa for France and the United States between colonialism and the Cold War. In her dissertation, she brings her research close to home by asking how Midwesterners came to know about Africa and Africans in the 20th century, and vice versa. Originally from Michigan, Julia traces generations of individuals in migration between the unlikely geographies of the American Midwest and the Senegambia...
