“Enhancing Human Dignity Here and Around the World”: The Black Sorority as International Uplift Movement

In the second half of the twentieth century, Black sororities began establishing chapters and social programs across the globe, an intentional social action that Aisha A. Upton Azzam conceptualizes as the Black sorority movement (BSM). In this piece, Upton Azzam explores the style and extent of such international engagement. She illuminates the marginalized aspect of the movement’s international activism while clarifying how such activism may have also employed the very neoliberal, neocolonial, and patriarchal ideas and practices that the movement explicitly stated that they wished to resist and overturn.