Elisabeth Armstrong on the Intersections of Asian and Women’s Studies
March 15, 2024
Johnny Bayne
SDG 16: Peace, Justice, Strong Institutions
On February 28, 2024, Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies Ling Zhang hosted Elisabeth Armstrong in the Durst Humanities Theatre to discuss Armstrong’s newest book Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. Armstrong is a Professor of the Study of Women & Gender at Smith College with a focus on transnational feminist movements and feminist political praxis.
Armstrong’s book details the revolutionary work done by women activists at the 1949 Asian Women’s Conference in Beijing. She declared that it is important to understand Asian studies as a deeply international field of study not bound by borders, and the women at the 1949 conference understood that. The Asian Women’s Conference was a collective of revolutionary women activists who fought for women’s rights, peace, and democracy. These women came together internationally in Beijing– the winter after the People’s Republic of China was founded– and crafted a new political strategy in which the only way to stop imperialism was for the citizens of colonial nations to stand with the people of occupied nations. This form of allyship shaped how many feminist anti-colonial movements operate to this day.
The women of the Asian Women’s Conference operated on a very clear order of operations: see the world, define the world, change the world. They set out to create a “theory of the moment,” a manifesto that was all-encompassing of the respective injustices and inequities that were happening globally in 1949. The Asian Women’s Conference stated that in order to be antifascist, you must also be anticolonial. They were one of the first organizations to stand against fascism, racism, and colonialism, with an interest in how loans worked as a form of financial imperialism. Armstrong made it understood that the women’s movement did not happen in a vacuum. Things were changing and word got around. The revolutionary activists understood the importance of international solidarity.
Armstrong was clear that finding the necessary materials to write this book was not easy. She traveled to various places in Asia and Europe, searching through years and years of archived materials. However, she found the heart of her work one afternoon in Germany.
Armstrong had been tirelessly digging through archives, searching for evidence of the Asian Women’s conference when she decided to take a break and find a vending machine for a bottle of water. At the vending machine, she met a woman who overheard her research topic. The woman pointed Armstrong in another direction that she had not considered, wherein she found priceless archived materials that greatly benefited her research. Armstrong used this story to emphasize the importance of teamwork and the relationships people share. She believes we must work together to look for what is hidden and imagine a greater future. It was not easy for the women of the Asian Women’s Conference to find commonalities among their revolutionary colleagues, but they kept working at it because their goal was too exigent. This makes the Asian Women’s Conference a great model for the UN’s 16th Sustainable Development Goal regarding peace, justice, and strong institutions.
In her conversation about her book with Ling Zhang, Elisabeth Armstrong stressed the importance of a united international front and the importance of acknowledging that one cannot understand history without understanding women’s history. Women’s history cannot be treated like a niche subject, something one only finds if the right person hears it is being searched for. Women’s history is our history and the story of the Asian Women’s Conference in the winter of 1949 is important to tell when discussing revolutionary feminist organizations.
Johnny Bayne
2022 Cohort
Armstrong, Elisabeth. Bury the Corpse of Colonialism: The Revolutionary Feminist Conference of 1949. University of California Press, 2023.
