This presentation is drawn from "La vie bohème and Vagabond Feminism in Wallace Thurman's The Blacker the Berry… and
Claude McKay's Banjo," the second chapter of Wilks' book project Diasporic Carmens. One of the most striking components of the
novels, which were both published in 1929, is that their respective citations of Carmen leave the figure's emblematic rebellion
largely inaccessible to the primary women of color characters. Instead, it is their white female and black male counterparts who
embody or otherwise benefit from the transgressive spirit of transatlantic modernism. It is in between the gendered, racialized
boundaries of la vie bohème and vagabond internationalism (after Brent Hayes Edwards) that Wilks locates "vagabond feminism"
as a strategy through which women of color resist the constraints placed upon them. Although only intermittently available to
Emma Lou and Latnah, it is through their respective stories, and the manner in which these stories intersect and contrast
with Carmen, that vagabond feminism emerges as a vision of what might have been and, given the endurance of the world's most
famous Roma woman, what might yet be.