“A One-Woman Expedition to Get to Know Tanzanian Women”: State Socialist Women’s Travelogues about Africa in the 1960s–80s

Abstract: From the 1960s onward, global interconnectedness intensified, including the cooperation among women’s movements across political divides. By analyzing travelogues of Hungarian women’s journeys to Africa, the article seeks to discover how they positioned themselves in the course of their cross-cultural encounters and how they chose to narrate and frame their experiences. I compare the way in which these women approached and described gendered and racialized subjects and phenomena in order to link this to socialist internationalism as the supposedly dominant set of ideas underlying their travels. Thus, the article engages with state socialist women’s gaze in these travelogues and shows where the gender of the travelogue writers had a particularly significant impact on the emerging prose. Following these interests, the article seeks to establish a link between socialist internationalism and women’s solidarities.