Promises of Progress: Pakistan, the United States, and Women’s Transnational Activism in the Early Cold War, by Professor Elora Shehabuddin

Monday, 18 July
6:15 - 7:45 pm Berlin time
Virtual talk held via Webex (link below)

Please join us for the final Berlin Global History Colloquium of the Summer Semester 2022.

This talk will discuss some of the ways in which, in the early years of the united Pakistan experiment (1947–71), elite educated Muslim East Bengali women experienced and narrated their relationship to the new Pakistan nation as they navigated the international stage as citizens of a new sovereign Muslim-majority state. In the context of the nascent Cold War and the Pakistani state’s efforts to develop its own relationship with the United States, one that was distinct from that of India and yet motivated almost entirely by concerns about the greater military might of this large neighbor, Pakistani women from both wings were quickly pulled into the orbit of both US- and Soviet-sponsored women’s organizations targeting women around the world. I will focus on the relationship between Pakistani and US women in the 1950s that emerges from the memoirs, biographies, and writings of Bengali Pakistani women active in this period, as well as from the archives of one of the first formal US women’s groups to establish contact with East Bengali women leaders, the New York-based Committee of Correspondence.

Elora Shehabuddin is Professor of Gender and Women's Studies and of Global Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. 

The Webex link for the talk is: https://fu-berlin.webex.com/fu-berlin-en/j.php?MTID=m1d623cdd957bdb730a2da489e09d4d4d

Please direct questions to Sarah Bellows-Blakely at sarah.bellows-blakely@fu-berlin.de.

Warmly, and looking forward to seeing many of you there,

The Global History Colloquium Team
Sarah Bellows-Blakely, Samuël Coghe, Michael Goebel, Sophie-Jung Kim, S. Prashant Kumar, Adrián Lerner, Ian Merkel, Timothy Nunan, Esther Sahle, and Yorim Spoelder