In this talk, I draw on my research experience for my first monograph, Out for Glamour in Africa: A History of Black Urban Femininities in Drum Magazine (University of Michigan Press, 2026), to explore how the archive, in conjunction with a networked matrix of primary and secondary sources, can challenge long-standing negative assumptions about African women’s processes of meaning-making within the urban sphere between 1951 and 1971. I argue that an expansive understanding of African knowledge systems, one that accounts for women’s mediated and material experiences of urban life in modern Africa, offers a generative lens through which to examine the intersections of gender, class, and both colonial and contemporary forces. Specifically, sources such as women’s autobiographical writings and popular literary work create new possibilities for disrupting hegemonic colonial knowledge frameworks while amplifying African urban women’s voices, agency, and resistance.