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Contemporary shifts in thinking about settler power in terms of its dis/ continuity and in terms of non-white bodies reflect the impetus of the work of the Martinican anticolonial writer Frantz Fanon. ${ }^{3}$ Fanon's anticolonial description of a settler-native dichotomy defines the white French settler and the Algerian native as mutually constitutive products of the colonial system, in which the imposition of settler power refashions continental Africans as 'native' subjects of settler colonial power and its consolidation in the global political economy (Fanon, 1963, p. 36). Unlike the case of Algerians, however, the origin of the transformation of enslaved blacks into 'natives' is not strictly the imposition of white settler power, but of forced labour and forced diasporization onto Indigenous lands. Rather than a strict settler-native dialectic, in the Americas we find a dialectic of settlers: colonizing Europeans and enslaved blacks who function as involuntary settlers when they engage and adapt the techniques of settler power. For Standing Rock Sioux (born Yankton Sioux) scholar Vine Deloria Jr., both would share the same unique encumbrance: 'there is a profound difference between American Indians and all of these other groups. The Indian is indigenous and therefore does not have the psychological
[^0]
[^0]: 2 All figures for the number of enslaved peoples are taken from Nellis, 2013.
3 For these shifts, see Mamdani, 2001; Farred, 2008.
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[^0]
[^0]: 2 All figures for the number of enslaved peoples are taken from Nellis, 2013.
3 For these shifts, see Mamdani, 2001; Farred, 2008.
burden of establishing his or her right to the land [...]' (Deloria, 1973, p. 58). As non-Indigenous, involuntary settlers, Africans brought to the Caribbean and the Americas have had the burden of two labours: their physical labour on the land for white well-being, a labour that is eventually captured by the colonial and postcolonial States, and a more profound labour for their own being and belonging, within which they are transformed into natives. This second labour, along with its manipulation and rejection of the work black bodies do for white humanity, calls for a rethinking of black, New World Indigeneity in terms of its rejections of and 'complicity' with white, settler power and its grounding in Enlightenment humanism, a phenomenon Chickasaw scholar Jodi A. Byrd calls 'arrivant colonialism'. ${ }^{4}$ This complicity encompasses both the hegemonic expressions of black nativity where arrivant native status is consolidated by post/colonial State power (e.g., the Caribbean) and the deployment of a labour episteme, and non-hegemonic ones (e.g., North, South, and Central America) where the episteme is active but foreclosed within the settler State.
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# Resistant labours: the space and time of Black Indigeneity
In the majority of scholarship on black enslavement and freedom in the Americas, the process of black transformation is largely articulated as litigious, cultural, and phenomenological. In the United States of America, it is the process of national becoming and belonging by which the slave/nigger evolved into citizen/subject/African American. In the Caribbean, it is widely interpreted as the process of becoming Creole and a sovereign subject of the postcolonial State. ${ }^{5}$ The cultural and legal dimensions of black transformation obscure the fact that both during and after slavery, blacks underwent a process of active Indigenization that subtends them. In 1970, Caribbean humanist philosopher Sylvia Wynter rejected the singularity of Creolization - the yoking of European and African cultures within the mechanism of the plantation social structure to describe the shift from African cultural to New World belonging, precisely because it obscured the dynamics of black Indigeneity. Creolization, for Wynter, is in fact distinct from what she identifies as the resistant element of black transformation or 'rooting':
[^0]
[^0]: 4 Byrd borrows the term "arrivant" from Barbadian poet Kamau Brathwaite's The Arrivants (1973).
5 This is still true for the roughly one dozen non-independent Caribbean territories.
For the more total alienation of the New World Negro had occasioned a cultural response, which had transformed that New World Negro into the indigenous inhabitant of his new land. His cultural resistance to colonialism [...] was an indigenous resistance. The history of the Caribbean islands is [...] the history of the indigenization of the black man. And this history is a cultural history - not in "writing", but of those "homunculi" who humanize the landscape by peopling it with gods and spirits [...] (Wynter, 1970, p.35).
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This 'total alienation' solidifies black belonging as more entrenched than, and oppositional to, white settler/master becoming. Wynter's assertion that resistance - rather than assimilation or emancipation - grounds blacks' remaking of themselves as 'new natives' alerts us not only to the fact that resistance is a structural component of black becoming, but also to the fact that blacks' anticolonial nativity traverses slavery and its modes of freedom.
Resistance is, however, still located for Wynter in a particular time-space. Her invocation of the Americas as a 'new land' places black Indigenous becoming within the time of European western expansion in the Atlantic and within the space of the plantation, and the global markets and rise of capital it engendered. ${ }^{6}$ While the specific models of religion, culture, and society upon which blacks drew preceded their entry into the New World, enslaved peoples mobilized them only as anticolonial tools rather than antecolonial ones, a significant, but not singular, dimension of First Peoples' Indigeneities in the Americas. By locating the 'humanization' of the land within this time-space, Wynter, too, invokes the land as palimpsest for the black native, which means that specific elements of white settler power undergird this nativity.
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Caribbean letters and criticism develop around this specific transformation of the land from palimpsest to black, Indigenous space. Moreover, Wynter's focus on this transformation as humanization parallels the material analysis in works such as those by Guyanese historian Walter Rodney, who claims that blacks transformed and humanized the Guyana coastline (Rodney, 1981, p. 3). Performed on lands that Indigenous Peoples inhabit or inhabited, the time and space of black Indigeneity place Indigenous Peoples' labours for their own wellbeing in the now Indigenous blacks' past. When black emotive and material labour moves beyond its performance and is written as such, we see its epistemological value and the rise of a modern labour episteme that undergirds black belonging. Within this episteme, the immediate product of black labour was cotton and
[^0]
[^0]: 6 See Eric Williams, E. (1944). Capitalism and Slavery, and Inikori, J. E. (2002). Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development.
sugar for export; however, the land itself is the ultimate product that sutures the gap between labour as alienation and labour as becoming and belonging, or disalienation. In the United States of America, there were arguments in the early nineteenth century, such as David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World (1829), which echoed Caribbean ones and held that not only did enslaved black labour develop (read: humanize) the American continent, but also that because of it, blacks emerge as legitimate inheritors of the land. ${ }^{7}$
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Black Indigeneity is different from that of Indigenous Peoples not because of resistance alone, but because it is grounded in a type of disalienation around which a labour episteme congeals through letters and politics. Within this episteme, upon independence in the Caribbean, the former colony and space of black labour emerged as a patrimony for blacks, the ultimate source of disalienation. For example, Vere T. Daly, in the first post-independence history of Guyana, endorsed by its first post-independence Prime Minister, claims that blacks were the first to 'make' the country a 'home'. The invocation of the colony as home means that blacks reach back to claim a prior time tied to a specific transformation of the land through the productive socioeconomic machine of the plantation, within which their labour accrues teleological value. Black plantation labour as the temporal origin of the home/colony/nation becomes the new time of belonging, which displaces the prior and continuous time of Indigenous Peoples' presence and their non-plantation subsistence labours, making them failed national subjects and market identities. ${ }^{8}$
The twentieth-century achievement of independence across the Caribbean made the labour episteme hegemonic, allowing blacks to assert native belonging as a right to rule, because within it their labour is represented as prior in time to Indigenous and indentured peoples. In the United States of America, the episteme is active in calls for reparations that marginalize Indigenous Peoples as failed market identities whose labour could not be captured by the State and exchanged for full citizenship, and it continues to de-link black and native futures. ${ }^{9}$ Yet the episteme remains foreclosed for blacks in the face of the failure of the Emancipation Proclamation, the Thirteenth and Fourteenth
[^0]
[^0]: 7 For this reading of Walker and other such texts by blacks in the United States in the nineteenth century, see Ben-zvi 2018.
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[^0]
[^0]: 7 For this reading of Walker and other such texts by blacks in the United States in the nineteenth century, see Ben-zvi 2018.
8 The use of market identities here derives from Mamdani, 2001. Mamdani uses this term to make visible the ways in which market forces determine the identities of and relationships among individuals in the postcolonial and colonial State.
9 For a contemporary perspective on reparations, see Ta-Nehisi Coates, 'The Case for Reparations', The Atlantic (2014).
Amendments to the Constitution of the United States, the Civil Rights Act of 1964, and the Voting Rights Act of 1965 to actually remove the requirement of death and privation as a condition of black citizenship.
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# Fetters on belonging: rethinking the master-slave dialectic
For scholars of the African diaspora, the Hegelian dialectic of lordship and bondage, in its reworking from Césaire and Fanon to Susan Buck-Morss and Michelle M. Wright, shapes their conceptualizations of the master-slave dialectic as a material and metaphysical one in which blacks work for the wealth and well-being of the white/settler/master/fully modern/transparent subject. ${ }^{10}$ Wright underscores the fundamentality of the dialectic for black being, identifying 'a twentieth-century intellectual tradition of African diasporic counter discourses' that define 'Black subjectivity as that which must be negotiated between the abstract and the real or [...] between the ideal and the material' (Wright, 2004, p. 3). The tradition of defining black subjectivity as identified by Wright emerges from this excavation of the Other. However, Hegel's dialectic, read across his phenomenology and history, produces the black other and a vanishing native subject.
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In The Philosophy of History, Hegel claims that 'aborigines' $[\ldots$ ] gradually vanished at the breadth of European activity', and that in the New World, 'negroes are far more susceptible of [sic] the European culture than the Indians'. (Hegel, 1991, pp. 81-82). While the focus in black diaspora and postcolonial criticism is on blacks as the ultimate, secular Other after having taken the place of First Peoples, Hegel's dialectic produces two others: an Indigenous one negated entirely through disappearance (although the dialectic of otherness does not work without them) and the black Other, maintained through a greater susceptibility to European culture. Enslaved blacks remain through creolization, or through the place they will come to serve in Karl Marx's materialist dialectic, as a necessary element in primitive accumulation. In Hegel's differing methods of subordination of blacks and natives, the latter are presumed vanished; the former are conceived of as a blank slate, brought in because the latter perished. The idealist dialectic thus makes native disappearance essential for conceiving the black subject in terms of its value for white subjectivity and later, the new, native black self.
[^0]
[^0]: 10 For 'transparency', see Silva (2007).
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[^0]
[^0]: 10 For 'transparency', see Silva (2007).
The Hegelian master-cum-slave dialectic as a process of subordination and excavation from the position of the Other is fundamentally a fetter or constraint for blacks, who re-enact its power relationship with regard to Indigenous Peoples. ${ }^{11}$ It preserves the infrahumanity of Indigenous Peoples as necessary for black humanity to be achieved within the dialectic, which offers the last revolutionary potential for Hegelian Aufbebung, loosely interpreted here as transcendence based on overcoming. Indigenous Peoples, reduced to cultural presence or land, are thus necessarily invoked in the methods blacks use to 'root' themselves in the literary traditions and in black Marxist historiography, which repeats Hegel's claim of disappearance when defining its subjects in terms of their labour and through that labour, the possibility of no longer being the 'exact antithesis of the citizen' (Wright, 2004, p. 43). In the dialectic in which Indigenous Peoples are made to work for black 'being', there is a tension that maintains the native other as a necessary limit on the production of blackness within modernity. At the same time, there is the desire for Hegelian recognition for the achievement of native status, viewed as a future orientation for black identity. ${ }^{12}$
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While it may be convenient to say that Indigenous Peoples are absent from some Caribbean islands and do not matter for black Indigeneity there, the endless discursivity of their absence is the precise reason why they are, in figurative and critical writings, brought into the dialectic of being: not the master-slave dialectic but its iteration as a settler-native one, in which they work for black 'becoming' and new Indigeneities, serving as the new limit/measure of black identity within the settler nation-State. Moreover, what might seem a singular truth for Wynter's 'islands' is often writ large as a regional truth that functions ideologically. Caribbean cultural critic Stuart Hall, for example, outlines three cultural, historical and geographic differences that he claims are the basis of diasporic Caribbean cultural identity: Présence Africaine, Présence Européenne, and Présence Americaine. The first two are largely cultural, but the final one refers to terra incognita or 'the beginning of diaspora, of diversity, of hybridity, and difference' (Hall, 1996, pp. 116-19). Hall's reduction of Indigenous presence to land 'emptied' by Europeans makes it a palimpsest for Creole cultural enactment and labour. Where, however, Indigenous Peoples maintain an active physical presence, the relationship is more complicated.
[^0]
[^0]: 11 The use of the word 'fetter' in this section is adapted from The Communist Manifesto (1848).
12 For more on Hegel, see Jackson (2012). For desire, see Palmer (2011).
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[^0]
[^0]: 11 The use of the word 'fetter' in this section is adapted from The Communist Manifesto (1848).
12 For more on Hegel, see Jackson (2012). For desire, see Palmer (2011).
In the United States of America, there are 567 federally recognized Indigenous 'tribes' in addition to nations that do not qualify for recognition. ${ }^{13}$ In Central and South America, there are hundreds of Indigenous Peoples, with 240 in Brazil alone. ${ }^{14}$ Moreover, as the largest importer of enslaved blacks in the Americas, Brazil has seen a unique relationship evolve between blacks and Indigenous Peoples. ${ }^{15}$ Of the mainland Caribbean countries, Belize has several Maya groups and the Garifuna, the descendants of enslaved blacks who intermarried with Carib and Arawakan peoples, fought the British in Saint Vincent, and have been diasporized in several Central American countries. French Guiana has seven Indigenous groups and three Maroon groups. Suriname has four Indigenous and half a dozen Maroon groups. Maroons are generally viewed in the same manner as Indigenous Peoples in international law.
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In Dominica, there are the Indigenous Kalinago and in Trinidad, the largely mixed descendants of the Caribs still maintain a visible community. Guyana has nine Indigenous groups. As in Belize, in each of the Guianas, Indigenous and/or Maroon groups are at odds with the State: international law has recognized both them and their rights to the land, but States restrict the implementation of international legal rights. ${ }^{16}$ In the Caribbean, not only are there recognizable Indigenous groups, but also DNA evidence in the last 20 years has demonstrated survival beyond just culture, language, and 'pure blood', identifying Indigenous genes in the broader population of islands such as Puerto Rico (Forte, 2006). Moreover, when the ways in which Indigenous Peoples articulate historical continuity and identify are considered, the Indigenous presence is more widespread (Castanha, 2010). In the Caribbean, Indigenous Peoples face dispossession from blacks and Indian descendants of indentured labourers, with whom they negotiate land rights. In the United States of America, where blacks and Indigenous Peoples are subordinate in a white settler nation, blacks claim rights through citizenship, while Indigenous Peoples must pit tribal sovereignty against United States citizenship (Bruyneel, 2007). In both contexts, blacks derive rights from labour in ways that are antithetical to Indigenous Peoples' land-based sovereignties
[^0]
[^0]: 13 United Sates Department of the Interior: Indian Affairs. http://www.bia.gov/WhoWeAre/BIA/OIS/ TribalGovernmentServices/TribalDirectory/
14 http://www.survivalinternational.org/tribes/brazilian
15 See the Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases (http://slavevoyages.org)
16 Kambel and MacKay. References to the number of these communities in Suriname and French Guiana are taken from this study.
and, in different ways, they devalue the role of Indigenous Peoples as a historical and contemporary labouring underclass in the Americas. ${ }^{17}$
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The disconnection of black and native freedoms around labour eclipses the fact that the well-being of the white/Northern/First World is fundamentally predicated upon the death and privation of blacks and Indigenous Peoples. Moreover, the disarticulation was never natural, but engineered legally and socially. It manifested, for instance, in Brazil in the Portuguese distinction between blacks and Indigenous Peoples as Negros da Guiné and Negros da terra, respectively, which eventually became codified in law (see Forbes, 1988). It manifested in colonial Guiana, when Indigenous Peoples were remunerated by the Dutch for recapturing runaway enslaved blacks. It manifested in the United States of America, where the pre-removal Cherokee Nation and other Indigenous Peoples owned slaves, and where, after Reconstruction, blacks reinvented themselves as settlers on Indigenous lands to which Indigenous Peoples responded by 'enacting de facto segregation policies' (see Menezes, 1977; Holland and Miles, 2006, p. 3). It manifests today where black and Indian-led nations in the Caribbean retain colonial policies towards Indigenous groups and in the United States, where the Cherokee nation has 'expelled' the descendants of its enslaved blacks (see Kellogg, 2011). Despite these breaks, blacks and Indians have found common ground during and after slavery. From the Caribbean, we have the example of the present-day Garifuna. During slavery in the United States of America, we have the example of the Choctaws in Mississippi who aided runaway enslaved peoples, and the example of Martin Luther King Jr. who supported Indigenous groups (see Holland and Miles, 2006, p. 3; Bender, 2014). However, just as King's role as a black civil rights leader eclipsed his solidarity with Indigenous Peoples, today's modes of black organizing also eclipse black movements' solidarity with Indigenous Peoples. While there are efforts within the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement to link up with Indigenous and other groups
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, the Native Lives Matter movement has largely been made invisible in relation to the former. Moreover, when Native Lives Matter is read through the lens of the BLM movement, it ignores the fact that the threat of death faced by Indigenous Peoples is not the same as that for blacks. Each plays a particular role in an ongoing settler project for which the lives, bodies and lands of Indigenous Peoples are in fact 'ground zero'. Here, the gains of blacks with regard to freedom and sovereignty are in many ways antithetical to Indigenous People's need for recognition and territorial sovereignty. The grounding of BLM in a kind of black vitalism goes well beyond labour and civil rights organizing, and beyond the failure to affirm and secure black life together with Indigenous life and
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[^0]
[^0]: 17 See for example M. Blanet Castellanos. 2010. A Return to Servitude: Maya Migration and the Tourist Trade in Cancún.
rights. However, it and other movements still need to address 'European colonization of America'as the 'implicit and undertheorized given' of black freedom struggles (Holland and Miles, 2006, p.3).
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# Epistemological lessons
In dominant settler-colonial paradigms, the white settler holds power vis-àvis minority groups. However, we must begin to address how in the Caribbean and within settler States that fit the dominant model, such as the United States of America, those brought in as forced labour or racialized capital contribute to the disenfranchisement of Indigenous Peoples. They do so because of the ways in which they invert diasporic and Indigenous origins, using the timing of the former to make Indigenous Peoples diasporic in their precolonial, colonial and postcolonial homelands (reservations). This work is happening in other settler contexts such as Canada and Hawaii. In the latter, the focus is on how Asians brought to labour in Hawaii starting in the late nineteenth century now function as settlers vis-à-vis the Indigenous Kānaka Maoli. Bonita Lawrence and Enakshi Dua claim that critical race theory and postcolonial theory neglect Indigenous Peoples because they do not recognize how 'the entry of people of color into Canada put them in colonial relationships with Aboriginal peoples' (Lawrence and Dua, 2005, p. 134).
An epistemological turn in Caribbean social and labour history can emerge from a perspectival shift in how we understand the master-slave dialectic, and from sustained engagement with settler, colonial and Indigenous studies, examining how peoples coercively brought into a territory in which Indigenous Peoples existed now hold identities through which settler colonial power works, and thereby extend the colonial subordination of Indigenous Peoples. In black diaspora scholarship, in particular, we must recognize that eclipsing native lives and native sovereignty becomes one way in which we extend the techniques of settler power and constrain our own true freedom. As Yellowknives Dene scholar Glen Coulthard and Michi Saagiig Nishnaabeg artist and scholar Leanne Betasamosake Simpson write,
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When we disappear Indigenous presence from our intellectual endeavors, our movement building, and our scholarship, we not only align ourselves with the wrong side of history, we necessarily negate any form of solidarity and become actors in the maintenance of settler colonial-ism (Coulthard and Betasamosake Simpson, 2016, p. 255).
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# References
Bender, A. 2014. Dr. King spoke out against the genocide of Native Americans. People's World. http://www.peoplesworld.org/article/dr-king-spoke-out-against-the-genocide -of-native-americans/
Benítez-Rojo, A. 1996. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Ben-zvi, Y. 2018. Native Land Talk: Indigenous and Arrivant Rights Theories. Hanover, NH, Dartmouth College Press.
Bruyneel, K. 2007. The Third Space of Sovereignty: The Postcolonial Politics of US Indigenous Relations. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
Buck-Morss, S. 2000. Hegel and Haiti. Critical Inquiry, Vol. 26, No. 4, pp. 821-65.
Burton, R. D. E. 1997. Afro-Creole: Power, Opposition, and Play in the Caribbean. Ithaca, NY, Cornell University Press.
Byrd, J. A. 2011. The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism. Minneapolis, Minn., University of Minnesota Press.
Casas, B. d. 1. 1974 (orig. pub. 1548-1550). In Defense of the Indians: The Defense of the Most Reverend Lord, Don Fray Bartolomé de Las Casas, of the Order of Preachers, Late Bishop of Chiapa, Against the Persecutors and Slanderers of the Peoples of the New World Discovered Across the Seas. S. Poole (ed.). DeKalb, Ill., Northern Illinois University Press.
Castanha, T. 2010. The Myth of Indigenous Caribbean Extinction: Continuity and Reclamation in Borikén (Puerto Rico). New York, Palgrave Macmillan.
Césaire, A. 1983 (orig. pub. 1939). Notebook of a Return to the Native Land. C. Eshleman and A. Smith (trans.), Aimé Césaire: The Collected Poetry. Berkeley and Los Angeles, Calif., London, University of California Press, pp. 32-85.
Césaire, A. 1972 (orig. pub. 1955). Discourse on Colonialism. New York, Monthly Review Press.
Coulthard, G. and Betasamosake Simpson, L. 2016. Grounded Normativity / PlaceBased Solidarity. American Quarterly, Vol. 68, No. 2, pp. 249-55.
Daly, V. T. 1974 (orig. pub. 1967). The Making of Guyana. London, Macmillan Education.
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Daly, V. T. 1974 (orig. pub. 1967). The Making of Guyana. London, Macmillan Education.
Deloria Jr., V. 2003 (orig. pub. 1973). God is Red: A Native View of Religion. Golden, Colo., Fulcrum Publishing.
Deloughrey, E. 2007. Routes and Roots: Navigating Caribbean and Pacific Island Literatures. Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press.
Fanon, F. 1963 (orig. pub. 1961). The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press.
Farred, G. 2008. The Unsettler. South Atlantic Quarterly, Vol. 107, No. 4, pp. 791-808.
Forbes, J. D. 1988. Black Africans and Native Americans: Color, Race, and Caste in the Evolution of Red-Black Peoples. New York, Basil Blackwell.
Forte, M. C. 2004-2005. Extinction: The Historical Trope of Anti-Indigeneity in the Caribbean. Issues in Caribbean Amerindian Studies, Vol. 6, No. 4, pp. 1-24.
Forte, M. C. (ed.). 2006. Indigenous Resurgence in the Contemporary Caribbean: Amerindian Survival and Revival. New York, Peter Lang Publishing.
Fujikane, C. and Okamura, J.Y. (eds). 2008. Asian Settler Colonialism: From Local Governance to the Habits of Everyday Life in Hawaii. Honolulu, University of Hawai'i Press.
Hall, S. 1996. Cultural Identity and Diaspora. P. Mongia (ed.), Contemporary Postcolonial Theory: a Reader. London, Arnold, pp. 110-21.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1977 (orig. pub. 1807). A. Independence and Dependence of SelfConsciousness: Lordship and Bondage. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford, UK, Oxford University Press, pp. 111-19.
Hegel, G. W. F. 1991. The Philosophy of History. J. Sibree (trans.). Buffalo, NY, Prometheus Books.
Holland, S. P. and Miles, T. 2006. Crossing Waters, Crossing Worlds: The African Diaspora in Indian Country. Durham, NC, and London, UK, Duke University Press.
Jackson, S. N. 2012. Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean. Minneapolis, Minn., and London, University of Minnesota Press.
James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd edn. New York, Vintage Books.
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James, C. L. R. 1989. The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution, 2nd edn. New York, Vintage Books.
Kambel, E.-R. and MacKay, F. 1999. The Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Maroons in Suriname. Copenhagen/Moreton-in-Marsh, UK, International Work Group for Indigenous Affairs/The Forest Peoples Programme.
Kellogg, A. 2011. Cherokee Nation Faces Scrutiny For Expelling Blacks.NPR.http://www. npr.org/2011/09/19/140594124/u-s-government-opposes-cherokeenations-decision
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Warner-Lewis, M. 2003. Central Africa in the Caribbean: Transcending Time, Transforming Cultures. Kingston, University of the West Indies Press.
Warren, W. 2016. New England Bound: Slavery and Colonization in Early America. New York, Liveright Publishing Corporation.
Wright, M. M. 2004. Becoming Black: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora. Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press.
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# BLACK STUDIES EPISTEMOLOGIES IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
Charisse Burden-Stelly
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## Introduction: the Black studies movement, pan-Africanism, and cultural nationalism
The black studies movement, inaugurated in the late 1960s by student and community-based demands for a 'more relevant education', represented the intellectual expression of political pan-Africanism in colleges and universities in the United States of America. According to St. Clair Drake, 'Pan-Africanism ha[d] provided a distinct global focus for Black Studies since the programs became a part of the campus scene in the late sixties and early seventies' (Drake, 1984, p. 236). Student agitation for a culturally legible education with utility beyond the so-called ivory tower fundamentally challenged the imperialist, white supremacist, and bourgeois logics of the traditional disciplines. These strivings emphasized economic development of local and global communities, black self-determination and racial equality, and the importance of an internationalist framework to connect African-descendant struggles for liberation in the global North and the global South.
The pan-Africanist ethos undergirding black student militancy was manifested in the characterization of the students' struggles in terms of Third Worldism, with San Francisco State College leading the way by founding the Third World movement in 1968. Black students drew upon the anti-imperial,
anti-colonial, and anti-racist insurgencies in Africa, the Caribbean, and the global decolonizing world more broadly as a metaphor and analogy for their position as an internal colony. Like pan-African movements for independence, sovereignty, and an equal position in the global community, the black student movement asserted itself as culturally and socially equal to the dominant power structure, and thus deserving of recognition, legitimacy, and academic representation of their realities.
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The 'intellectual spirit' of black cultural nationalism also animated struggles for black studies on predominately white and historically black college campuses alike (Cruse, 1969, p. 6-10). The Afro-American studies programme proposal submitted to the Yale University administration in December 1968 conveys the influence of cultural nationalism on the formation of black studies. The document emphasized:
1. The diversity of peoples of African ancestry and their living conditions in the perspective of time.
2. The diversity as well as the unity of the African-American cultural experience, and the similarities and differences among the cultures of people of African origin in the Americas and Africa.
3. The various modes of artistic expression in the literature, art, and music characteristic of black cultures.
4. The philosophies and values of these cultures, with major emphasis on continuity and change among the geographic areas.
5. The interrelationships among these factors (Robinson et al., 1969, p. 227).
Black studies were envisioned as a space in which to confront the cultural apparatus of the United States and to counterbalance the historical effects of white cultural particularism that denied the validity of competing values, standards, and epistemologies.
According to Harold Cruse, who played an essential role in orienting black studies towards cultural nationalism, it was only through a sustained investigation of black history and culture that black students, black intellectuals, and black people generally could understand their position in American society, and could work towards democratic and equitable inclusion (Cruse, 1969, pp. 9-12). Manning Marable, another prominent figure in the formation of the discipline, concurred that the function of black studies scholarship was not to merely celebrate heritage and racial self-esteem in the abstract, but rather to utilize history and culture as tools for the eradication of oppression and the fundamental transformation of society (Gates and Marable, 1983, p. 189). Black
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studies, then, were a means of redefining the dominant narration of American culture and history by prioritizing the fundamental contributions of black people. Stated differently, the excavation of black history and culture would facilitate social uplift, combat white racial chauvinism, and cultivate the cultural resources with which to wage the battle for human rights and self-determination (Fletcher, 1983, pp. 158-59).
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# Black feminism
As black students were picketing, striking, and occupying buildings on college and university campuses, black feminist organizations were burgeoning in response to the marginalization of black women in second-wave feminist and mainstream black movements. The Third World Women's Alliance (1968), National Black Feminist Organization (1973), Combahee River Collective (1974), and Black Women's United Front (1975), for example, sought to organize black women across class to combat forms of social and political subjection that resulted in their triple exploitation. Issues of particular importance included employment, wages, housing, day care, and access to good-quality education. The more radical of these organizations combined anti-racism, anti-sexism, anti-capitalism, and anti-imperialism to articulate a programme that directly addressed the concerns and experiences of black women in the struggle for self-determination, an end to economic exploitation and alienation, and the eradication of racialized oppression. Such activism was concomitant with the introduction of black feminism in American higher education.
The introduction of black feminist thought into black studies aimed to challenge black men's overdetermination of scholarly inquiry into the history, culture, and social problems of black people. The inclusion and centring of black women in discourse and knowledge production aimed to clarify what was obscured by their exclusion, expand often-reductive interpretations of black social life due to the omission of gender analysis, interrogate how certain theories and approaches erroneously and unnecessarily placed black women and men in conflict and competition, and reveal whose interests were served in defining black men as the paramount subject of liberation, on the one hand, and pathology, on the other hand.
Starting in the late 1970s, the study of black women's history and literature promoted the rise of academic black feminism. Historians and literary critics, including Darlene Clark Hine, Deborah Gray White, Paula Giddings,
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E. Frances White, Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham, Mae G. Henderson, Ann duCille, Deborah E. McDowell, Toni Cade Bambara, and Mary Helen Washington were integral to this project. Concomitantly, black women in law and the social sciences sought to expose the racist and sexist underpinnings of the traditional disciplines, reveal the exclusion and marginalization of black women in studies and frameworks of society, behaviour, and the law, and reclaim space for the experiences of black women in research and scholarship. Here, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Patricia Williams, Patricia Bell-Scott, Deborah K. King, and Elizabeth Higginbotham were of paramount importance.
Black women's studies introduced intersectional analyses of power and systems of oppression into black studies. The work of, inter alia, bell hooks, Patricia Hill Collins, Angela Davis, and later Joy James, Ula Y. Taylor, and Carole Boyce Davies, led the way. Such approaches introduced a novel critique of dominant intellectual systems and offered a host of reforms to transform higher education into a space that was more inclusive of, and open and relevant to, black people generally, and black women particularly. Anthologies including All the Women Are White, All the Blacks Are Men, but Some of Us Are Brave: Black Women's Studies (1982), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology (1983), This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color (1983), and The Black Feminist Reader (2000), alongside foundational texts such as Women, Race $\mathcal{E}$ Class (1981), Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center (1984), Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment (1990), Black Women, Writing, and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994), Shadowboxing: Representations of Black Feminist Politics (1999), and The Veiled Garvey: The Life and Times of Amy Jacques Garvey (2002), critically reshaped the generally androcentric orientation of black studies, which too often 'socialized out of existence... black women' (Hooks, 1981, p. 7).
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# Africology
Africology - commonly known as Afrocentricity - became popularized under the leadership of Molefi Kete Asante at Temple University, the first institution to offer a Ph.D. in black studies in 1987. It represented a continuation of the cultural and idealist notions of pan-Africanism articulated by stalwarts, including Paul Cuffe, Una Marson, Martin Delany, Alexander Crummell, Audley Moore, Henry McNeal Turner, Dara Abubakari, Marcus Garvey, and Amy Jacques Garvey. Additionally, Africology built upon debates, starting in the late 1960s,
between scholar-activists, including John Henrik Clarke, Maulana Karenga, and Theophile J. Obenga. Books written by Asante, including Afrocentricity: The Theory of Social Change (1980), The Afrocentric Idea (1987), and Kemet, Knowledge, and Afrocentricity (1990), along with Ama Mazama's The Afrocentric Paradigm (2002), Marimba Ani's Yurugu: An African-Centered Critique of European Cultural Thought and Behavior (1994), and Karenga's Introduction to Black Studies (1982), established the Afrocentric epistemology.
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As a reconstructive and interpretive world-view, Africology was meant to 'pose different terms for the debate around race, culture, and community'(Asante, 1996, p. 526) insofar as Western/Eurocentric theories and methodologies, its proponents claimed, could only serve to distort the authentic experience of African people. As the intellectual arm of black cultural nationalism, it articulated a vindicationist narrative in which the self-determination of African descendants was inextricable from the reclamation of an African past, a system of shared commitments, and an ethics of mutuality. Africology posited that Eurocentrism and white supremacy threatened and conceptually incarcerated the political, economic, social - and most importantly, cultural - conditions of African people on the continent and throughout the world. Africologists asserted that, given the reality of white supremacist exploitation and domination, Africans and Europeans had a fundamentally different experience in the world. The shared reality among dispersed Africans resulted in a pan-African perspective forged through a common heritage, history, and identity rooted in Africa. This set those racialized as black apart from whites. Stated differently, the divide between the 'composite African' and the European, as explicated in Ani's Yurugu, was both ontological and metaphysical.
In his illuminating text, Philosophy of African American Studies: Nothing Left of Blackness, Stephen Ferguson II (2015) offers a distinction between 'strong' and 'weak' Afrocentrism. The strong iteration, represented by scholars including Frances Cress Welsing, Leonard Jeoffries, and Wade Nobles, argued for biological, scientific, and metaphysically exclusivist differentiations between African and European peoples. The weak position, articulated by thinkers such as Greg Carr, Marimba Ani, Molefi Asante, and Ama Mazama, maintained that the differences between the African and the European were sociocultural, ideological, and epistemological.
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Africology has much in common with other forms of black cultural studies that predominate in black studies. At the heart of these linked epistemologies is the premise that despite enslavement and colonialism, black people have
been able to survive and thrive through the retention, creation, and exchange of African cultural forms and practices. For Asante,
the African experience is a global one, and the beliefs and institutions that existed prior to and during the enslavement and colonization by Europe have been able to facilitate our survival on both sides of the West African Ocean despite the incredible brutality of White racial supremacy (Asante, 1996, p. 532).
Conflicts and disagreements between Africology and other articulations of black cultural studies derive from a lack of consensus over the correct or authentic approach to and method for constructing and enunciating blackness, Africanity, and racialized agency. Nonetheless, the purpose of this type of scholarship is to challenge hegemonic epistemologies that assert the dominance and superiority of Europe, whiteness, and the West over all others.
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# Black cultural and literary studies and post-blackness
The cultural and literary focus of black studies can largely be traced to the influence of the Black Arts movement on its ideological and political formation. According to Barbara Christian, the latter helped to shape the discipline into a space for the reclamation of black culture and history, and for the engagement of blackness as an embodied and experiential reality. Literature, art, and expressive culture became politicized as tools to challenge structures of domination - white supremacy and Eurocentrism in particular - through the integration of feeling and knowledge, and the centring of black being-in-the-world. In effect, cultural and literary studies and production became the method by which the discipline could recreate the world.
Black literary and cultural criticism flourished as a means of understanding blackness through textuality. Harvard University scholars Houston A. Baker Jr, Henry Louis Gates Jr, and Kwame Anthony Appiah, along with black feminist critics such as Barbara Christian, Valarie Smith, and Barbara Smith, were paramount in the textual turn. A notorious debate in 1987 between Joyce A. Joyce, Gates, and Baker in New Literary History conveys the ascendance of textuality in black studies, on the one hand, and the ambivalence of alternatively oriented black studies practitioners, on the other hand. With respect to the intersection of representation and black cultural studies, the contributions of Manthia Diawara, Hortense Spillers, and Jacqueline BoBo were indispensable. Additionally, scholars including Harold Cruse, Angela Davis, Cedric J. Robinson,
bell hooks, and Robin D. G. Kelley made up the leftist wing of black literary and cultural criticism.
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bell hooks, and Robin D. G. Kelley made up the leftist wing of black literary and cultural criticism.
The emergence of cultural and literary studies was profoundly influenced by the importation of black British cultural studies (BBCS) into American higher education. Stuart Hall's lectures on popular culture at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign in 1983 were particularly important to the rise of black cultural studies in the United States of America. BBCS was an intellectual project that commenced in the late 1970s to investigate how issues of class, culture, false consciousness, and the state were imbricated with the realities of nation, imperialism, racism, and ethnicity. It challenged the silences around race and ethnicity in British cultural studies characteristic of the work emanating from white leftist scholars like Raymond Williams, Richard Hoggart, and E.P Thompson. It sought to expose racisms that were embedded in economic practice, domestic ideologies, and cultural formations. Works like Policing the Crisis (1978), The Empire Strikes Back (1982), and There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack (1987) shifted the focus of British cultural studies from culture and society to ethnicity and identity. These texts initiated the antiessentialist turn in British cultural studies among New Left scholars.
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BBCS resisted and rejected the homogenizing narratives about black people produced through nation-State discourse and ideologies of black nationalism; concepts including 'translation', 'cultures of hybridity', and 'new ethnicities' thus became important to the turn from racial to ethnic blackness. Thinkers such as Stuart Hall, Hazel V. Carby, Paul Gilroy, and Kobena Mercer helped influence black American scholars to challenge exclusivist cultural formations, majoritarian referential politics, and essentialized black identity, and to take up the politics of representation. Scholars who were uncomfortable with hegemonic (e.g., masculinist, cultural nationalist, American-centred) renderings of blackness or who eschewed notions of authenticity or a composite African personality readily embraced race as representation, post-structuralist discourse, and the performativity of blackness.
Importantly, the accommodation of BBCS into black studies was accomplished with the conspicuous absence of the neo-Marxist critique that was endemic in the work of the Birmingham and London Schools. Consequently, black studies enunciated a study of culture that de-emphasized contradiction, class conflict, and power relations linked to the mode of production. The liberalism and continued retreat from radicalism that characterized the 1980s produced a much more palatable form of BBCS in American colleges and universities, which did not directly challenge the structural conditions of inequality that constituted race
relations. Moreover, as Stuart Hall attested, American black cultural studies was subjected to: extreme professionalization and institutionalization; the formalization of questions of power, reducing them to problems of text and form; and the selective incorporation of aspects of BBCS that approached culture as a way of life without fully accommodating its interpretation of social structures.
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The most recent development in black cultural studies is post-blackness, an epistemology of twenty-first century black aesthetics grounded in scepticism about any fixed notion of black art and culture. Coined in 2001 in the field of black visual culture by Glenn Ligon and Thelma Golden, it builds upon the search of the black arts movement of the 1970s to define and specify black art, and the ambivalences and failures that resulted. Post-blackness combines 'mixed media, abstraction, satire, and sheer experimentation' in literature and visual art to convey a cultural mood of disinvestment from notions of authentic, bounded, or representational blackness. Regarding the latter point, writer and cultural critic Touré argues that the advancement of the black middle class after World War II transformed blacks into an intellectually, economically, and academically diverse community, such that there are innumerable ways to 'embody or wield' blackness. Additionally, every person racialized as black has an 'authentic' black identity that makes it impossible to 'do' blackness incorrectly. Thus, postblackness troubles and complicates blackness, embraces its errancy and excess, and emphasizes its 'stillness-in-motion', without anxieties over 'losing' it.
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Post-blackness deploys Amiri Baraka's concept of the 'changing same' and Kamau Brathwaite's theory of 'tidalectics' to interrogate the interplay of presentism, future possibility, and states of 'suspension' in the translation of black experience into art and other modes of cultural expression. Stated differently, post-blackness inheres in the anticipation of a free, self-determined, 'not-yet-here' blackness that shapes what blackness is at any given moment. It is therefore not a rejection of blackness as such, but rather of imposed ideological fixities that obscure the constant tension between 'being' and 'becoming.' As Margo Natalie Crawford explains, 'after an understanding of post-black as post-ideological blackness, we move to the new understanding of "black" as an emptied but full space of imagining the unimaginable' (Crawford, 2010, p. 218). In effect, post-blackness is the epistemological and methodological manifestation of Carolyn M. Rodgers' (1970) expression of being 'Black/ Blacker/and Blackless sometimes' (pp. 265-66).
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# African diaspora theory
Contemporaneous with the institutionalization of black studies was the popularization of the African diaspora as a heuristic to understand black connection and linkage. The concept helped to explain the condition and future of African descendants against the backdrop of African independence movements. It emerged as both a political and analytic term concerned with the dispersal of African people and their role in building the New World. Early articulations of diaspora emphasized continuity, essentialist notions of Africanness, rootedness, and unity among dispersed groups of African descendants. Consistent themes included violent removal from the homeland, imagined connections among African peoples dispersed throughout the world, and physical or psychological return to Africa. Longing (the psychic and metaphysical yearning based on lack or absence) and memory (the constant reminder of an enslaved or otherwise dominated past that pervades the present) sustained these perceived connections and desires for return. The basis of unity in these conceptualizations was a shared history of white racist domination and exploitation.
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Scholars of this theory posited that the African diaspora was an experience of constantly coping with and resisting white supremacy in its myriad manifestations, which fundamentally affected how diasporic identity was formed. Such usages were profoundly vindicationist because people of African descent outside the continent often constituted a minority group in a host country, had a dubious and tenuous relationship to citizenship, and often faced political, economic, and social injustice. Thus, it was necessary to justify why they were worthy of the full benefits of society. It was also necessary to valorize African cultural retentions and connections that survived in the New World to combat Eurocentric notions that people of African descent had no history or culture worthy of study. As a 'stateless diaspora' - that is, a dispersed group that lacks an independent State because of lack of resources, power, or desire (Sheffer, 2003, p. 74-75) - the African diaspora imagined Africa in myriad ways to construct a site of belonging that could be a place of repatriation, racial revitalization, potential freedom, and return to African roots.
As "globalization" became the term used to reflect the ethos of the post1970 era, the focus of the African diaspora shifted from roots, the nation, and the homeland to fluidity, multiple temporalities, and exchange between sites within the diaspora. According to James Clifford, decolonization, increased immigration, and global communication and transport required
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a more 'polythetic' definition of diaspora, insofar as its constitution moved beyond those who were descendants of enslaved Africans (Clifford, 1997, p. 261-68). Kenneth Warren (1993) assessed these changes in theories of the African diaspora, writing that it was the ambiguities within diasporic thought that made particular imaginings possible - not perceived unity or continuity. Further, Africa was not a static place stuck in time that could only be referred to in retrospect; Africanness was as much imagined as it was real and therefore produced a diasporic double consciousness that did not always translate, leading to forms of misrecognition. This iteration of the African diaspora argued for a 'trans-temporal dialogue' (Gates, 2010, p. 62) that must account for varied ways of seeing, being, and knowing blackness. Insofar as experiences of marginalization, dispossession, and oppression are deployed and reproduced unevenly and disparately throughout the African diaspora, broken histories and divergent temporalities problematized earlier understandings of the African diaspora that emphasized unity and continuity.
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The African diaspora became a way to critique absolutism while keeping the idea of ethnicity intact - what Paul Gilroy (1993) called 'anti-antiessentialism'. Instead of the retention of essential elements from an African past, emphasis was placed on cultures being made and remade, with black identity being constructed from multiple and different sites. Further, instead of being fixed or rooted, African diasporic identity came to be understood as the means by which people of African descent could navigate how they were positioned by and in narratives of the past, and engage in cultural retrieval and reconstruction. The African diaspora became represented as a dialogical site of contestation, negotiation, and refashioning. As such, connections within the diaspora became just as important as ideas of origin, which required the decentring of Africa as homeland. Concepts like 'decalage', 'articulation', 'bricolage', 'the changing same', and 'translation' were used to account for the disunity, misrecognition, differences, and disparities within the African diaspora. These, along with the common experiences of black people, accounted for a more complete picture of how diaspora was lived. Moreover, in an attempt to redress the hegemonic influence which the United States of America and the English-speaking world exerted on African diaspora scholarship, more attention began to be paid to sites within the diaspora that had been marginalized or had received little study.
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# Afro-pessimism
In the wake of pervasive debt crises, structural adjustment, and neoliberalization in the 1980s, Afro-pessimism entered into development narratives about subSaharan Africa to describe a host of phenomena at the intersection of governance, political economy, and representation. These included: the effects of Africa's misrepresentation in the Western media on investment, donor fatigue, and development; the exacerbation of the continent's marginalization and exclusion through the circulation of racist stereotypes and derogatory constructions; the effects of neocolonialism on African governance and development potential; the (in)ability of Africans to govern themselves given rampant corruption and economic stagnation; and the question of whether Africa should be recolonized or excised from the global community because of its alleged political and economic failures. Other considerations included the possibility of internal peace, accountability (or lack thereof), the link between political liberalism and growth, and the necessity of democratization to the success of economic market reforms. Afro-pessimism and its ideological corollary, Afro-optimism (or Africa rising), persisted well into the first decade of the twenty-first century, manifested, for example, in The Economist's conceptualizations of Africa, bookended by the notorious 'Hopeless Africa' article of 2000 and a 2011 article positively entitled 'Africa rising'.
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In black studies, Afro-pessimism came to prominence in the first decade of the twenty-first century, primarily through the contributions of University of California Irvine professors Frank B. Wilderson III and Jared Sexton. Ironically, though both Afro-pessimism as development discourse and Afro-pessimism as black studies epistemology engage issues of structural lack, failure, and incapacity as they relate to African-derived peoples, they are autonomous and unrelated, with distinct genealogies and modes of analysis. As an interdisciplinary project that combines, among other approaches, film studies, literary theory, poetics, critical discourse analysis, critical theory, and political theory, Afro-pessimism aims to theorize within the irreducible 'anxiety of antagonism' the paradigmatic position of the black in a world structured by anti-blackness and Negrophobia the position of ontological death. As a black studies epistemology, it 'theorize[s] for battle, to go to war in theory, to fight without experiencing a breakdown or detour in language'. It is grounded in the argument that undergirding the political ontology of modernity is blackness: the singular commodification of human existence that transforms the body into flesh to be accumulated and
exchanged. Such commodification positions the slave as paradigmatically black, and renders racial blackness inextricable from enslavement. This structuring, coupled with the historical failures of abolition, maintains slavery in the 'here and now', reduces the black to the non-ontology and non-being of the slave, and fundamentally emplaces her outside of the modern conjuncture of civil society, citizenship, and humanity (Sexton, 2016; Wilderson III, 2010).
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Afro-pessimism derives from black feminist theories of scholars including Hortense Spillers and Saidiya V. Hartman; from challenges to and critiques of the neo-Marxism and post-Marxism of theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Giorgio Agamben; and from an engagement with the postcolonial, critical, and cultural theories of, inter alia, Achille Mbembe, Kra Keeling, Ronald A. T. Judy, and David Marriott. It takes as its structuring logic the pronouncement made by psychiatrist and freedom-fighter Frantz Fanon in Black Skin, White Masks: 'ontology - once it is finally admitted as leaving existence by the wayside - does not permit us to understand the being of the black man' (1970, p. 77). As Afro-pessimist philosopher Calvin Warren (2017) argues, this means that the black/slave is a derelict object that has no 'symbolic placement' in the space-time of the modern world, ontologically foreclosed by a semantic field inhered in an enduring commitment to anti-blackness. Consequently, the black/slave, constituted by existential negation, is a sentient being whose unthinkability as person/human/subject scaffolds modernity.
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Blackness, as 'a structural position of non-communicability in the face of all other positions [...] predicated on modalities of accumulation and fungibility' (Wilderson, 2010, p. 58-59) exceeds the logics of sociality, identity, and difference; its grammar of suffering is wholly unintelligible in its evasion of all categories of the human, including alienation, exploitation, recognition, and incorporation. To eschew historical comparisons and imposed relationality that misapprehend blackness, Afro-pessimism is grounded in the structural instead of the empirical and the political ontological instead of the experiential. Concomitantly, for Afropessimists, it is the libidinal economy - not political economy - that subtends modern formulations of power. Moreover, by foregrounding anti-blackness as opposed to white supremacy, this epistemology brings into sharp relief that the zone of being and the zone of non-being are ontological regions of nonblackness/freedom and blackness/slavery, respectively. In the final analysis, as 'an ethics of the real, a politics of the imperative, engaged in its interminably downward movement' (Sexton, 2016), Afro-pessimism, of necessity, rejects the prosthetics of progressive, anti-racist, and multiculturalist discourses that pervade higher education to violently erase and avoid the non-transcendental suffering of the black/slave.
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# Conclusion: Black studies and the elision of political economy
By the late 1980s, when black studies had become more or less institutionalized, there was a noted and distinct absence of Marxist, historical materialist, and critical political economic analysis of blackness in its formulation. The discipline tended to ignore or marginalize the study of economic agency, economic resistance, the failure of the market, the relationship between labour and exploitation, and economic development (or the lack thereof) in black communities in the United States of America and in the black world. The organization of black studies around the analytic of 'diaspora' reified the cultural specifications of blackness through the transnationalization of the study of black sociality and culture.
The shift in global accumulation - that is, the transformation of capital from its liberal to corporate form - precipitated by the 1973 world recession and oil crisis, the declining rate of profit, deindustrialization in the global North, and a looming debt crisis in the global South had homologous, albeit geospatially specific, effects on all peoples of African descent. The emphasis on cultural affinity and connection in black studies neglected the convergence of the material experiences in the structural organization of political economy among blacks in the United States of America, the United Kingdom, Africa, and the Caribbean in the wake of a neoliberal agenda that produced a rollback of the state and its reformulation. This was instantiated through Reaganomics, Thatcherism, and structural adjustment that accompanied the collapse of the socialist/communist alternative. Despite this global restructuring, popular and scholarly understandings of American and 'diasporic' blackness rejected critical political economy. In other words, black studies failed to incorporate a structural and material critique of globalization that could have provided a deeper understanding of the ways in which black people have been linked historically through the global axial division of labour.
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The economists Patrick Mason and Mwangi wa Githinji (2008) pointed to the overwhelming representation of the humanities in black studies and the relative absence of the social sciences, especially economics. This was not always the case; in its early development, political economy and economic development were important sub-foci. However, by 2008, when a special issue of Journal of Black Studies focusing on the role of political economy in black studies was published, only 1.75 per cent of faculty members in the
discipline were economists, and economics courses represented just over 1 per cent of those that were offered. By contrast, faculty members with specialties in literature and history represented a plurality of the core faculty; and these disciplines, along with music, were the dominant fields among faculty affiliated with black studies. Moreover, radical black political economists in, and the contributions of critical political economy to, black intellectual thought has been all but forgotten. According to economist Julianne Malveaux (2008), 'traditional and theoretical disciplinary formulations' of black studies - in other words, its overdetermination by history, literature, and the politics of identity - have been largely influenced by the exigencies of institutional accommodation, which are best served by the field's cultural studies approach.
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The distortions produced by the anti-Marxist and anti-materialist specifications of black studies invisibilize and even negate the structural and material dynamics involved in the production, maintenance, and reinscription of blackness over time and space. Further, the discipline evades and undermines critical political economy by diverting research and scholarship away from the material conditions of black abjection, dispossession, and exploitation. This is notwithstanding the reality that structural and antisystemic modes of critique expose the true conditions of blackness - a revelation that is essential to a sustained anti-capitalist challenge that resists reinscription into the statist project of global accumulation.
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Williamson, J. A. 2003. Black Power on Campus: The University of Illinois, 1965-75. Urbana and Chicago, Ill., University of Illinois Press.
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# CHAPTER 14
## TRANSNATIONAL FEMINISM FOR GLOBAL AFRICA
Amina Mama
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## Introduction
The historic mission undertaken by pan-African and nationalist intellectuals in the last century was to recuperate and re-frame Africa from an Africancentred epistemological perspective. This intellectual task was an integral aspect of anti-colonial movements, providing knowledge that would free Africans from colonial mentality and generate confidence as African nations claimed their place in the community of nations. This epistemological shift was as generative as it was political, as evidenced by aesthetic transformations in the arts, cinema and literature, and push for new research paradigms and theories that could serve African interests and agendas.
In the context of decolonization, the first generation of African intellectuals, most of whom had been trained in the West and experienced racism first-hand, concentrated on historical recovery. A mood of renaissance accompanied the publication of ground-breaking texts, exemplified in the work of Cheikh Anta Diop (1974). Diop's thesis held that Ancient Egypt was an African civilization and that this was the root of all human civilization. His thesis became a classic, powerfully contradicting European claims and their assertions of supremacy, while celebrating the greatness of African civilization.
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Diop typified the first generation of the African intelligentsia to emerge from the colonial order, and this dedicated to rebutting colonial constructions of Africa. Their work still inspires African scholars globally, but from today's vantage point it is clear that the first generation countered imperialism by presenting a grand theory of Africa that did not attend to the internal social dynamics, or the historical processes and contradictions that move societies forward (Mkandawire, 2005, p. 6). ${ }^{1}$ As such, it did not attend to the class, gender or other key features of social organization. While the inattention to gender is often attributed to the fact that the first generation of professors were nearly all men, it is important to note that scholarship of the 1950s to 1970s preceded the spread of feminist consciousness in Africa. Without feminist tools of analysis, even the best of Africa's nationalist and pan-Africanist scholars did not have the awareness required to see the manner in which dynamics of gender and sexuality imbued the processes that were transforming the African world. The philosophical importance of feminism and the African-focused feminist praxis it brings to understanding the past, present and future possibilities for Africa, are the subject of this contribution.
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# Dependent independence
The fact that political independence was not followed by the economic independence Kwame Nkrumah and other nationalist leaders had predicted was to present major setbacks for Africa's position in the world. Even before the new national flags were raised, Cold War ideological contestations and a global arms race were fuelling schisms and proxy wars within Africa's movements for political independence and liberation, militarizing and corrupting African politics and forestalling more revolutionary possibilities.
Over half a century later, Africa's condition is attributed as much to national political and authoritarian regimes which, women observe, have remained dominated by men and their masculine views of the world. During the 1970s to early 1980s it became clear that African nations were being incorporated into the global economy on unfavourable terms. World systems and dependency theories treated imperialism as the global expansion of capitalism. Samir Amin
[^0]
[^0]: 1 Two of Fanon's essays are particularly pertinent here: The Trials and Tribulations of National Consciousness and On National Culture (originally presented in 1959). Both are available in Fanon's The Wretched of the Earth.
(1977) was among the radical thinkers who developed critiques of a world system that had set Africa on a path of neo-colonialism (Nkrumah, 1965). Theories of class struggle turned attention to the dynamics of class exploitation in African societies and to social movement studies that would generate increasingly critical analyses of capitalist modernization and its effects on Africa (Rodney, 1980, pp. 18-41; Padmore, 1971; Shivji, 1974).
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The next section discusses the rise of women in the African intelligentsia and the contribution of feminist ideas to regional knowledge production, before proceeding, in the following section, to identify traces of earlier cultural nationalist and revolutionary philosophical positions in contemporary discourses that are grouped under the rubric of 'African feminism'. The last section considers what today's increasingly transnational feminist perspectives offer to the realization of Global Africa.
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# Women in the African academy
Africanization replaced European men with African men, with little consideration to the fact that colonial regimes had concentrated on drawing men into serving economic and administrative systems, and largely excluded women. There is now evidence pointing to legislative and policy regulations that banned women from cities and imposed other curbs on mobility, and which were enforced through punitive round-ups and fines, and the colonial propagation of discourses that denigrated and pathologized African women (Barnes, 1999; White, 1990). Colonial education for women was minimal, amounting to schooling in domesticity that would add 'a feminine touch' to the empire and produce suitable wives for a Western-style male elite (Mann, 1985; Hansen, 1992; Geiger, 1998). More extensive programmes for women, such as those of the French in Algeria (Lazreg, 1994), were based on a deliberate strategy to undermine the resistance.
Women's 'special treatment' during colonialism emanated from European gender ideologies, but most African leaders did not see this as a problem during the initial euphoric decade of flag independence. ${ }^{2}$ Nationhood was primarily
[^0]
[^0]: 2 There is evidence that women and gender issues were discussed in popular education as far as this was sustained in movements. Left-inclined movements such as the PAIGC under Amilcar Cabral, FRELIMO under Samora Machel and Oliver Tambo's ANC afforded women higher levels of participation during the years of struggle. The legacy of greater involvement is evident in the Southern African nations that record higher levels of political representation: South Africa, Mozambique, Zimbabwe and others. Postindependence movements have campaigned energetically for increased women's political participation.
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envisaged as the opportunity for men to be restored to full masculinity and citizenship, with women installed in their homes as suitable wives. In many nations, women were left with the limited legal status of minors and deprived of basic rights, in the name of 'culture'. Women may not have been explicitly excluded from the new State, or the national universities, but their access was constrained by the persistence of European gender ideologies, no matter how inappropriate to African conditions.
It was not until the second and third generation African professoriate that objections were raised, first to protest the underrepresentation of women, and secondly, the manner in which the purportedly 'neutral' masculine cultures of African universities continued to present particular difficulties for women students and professors. It was not until the 1980s that the epistemological challenges presented by androcentric methodologies in mainstream teaching and research would be addressed, through the establishment of feminist teaching and research.
The development crisis galvanized feminist research in Africa (Mama, 2005). Many of Africa's women professors share women's desires for justice. This may explain their concentration in the related fields of law, political science and public policy, education and international development studies. In this respect, African women, like their male colleagues of the same second and third generations, are predominantly forward-looking, carrying out critical analysis of the injustices and inequalities that continue to divide so many African contexts. However, the trajectories of African epistemologies are not linear, as can be seen from the ways in which intellectual discourses of the present carry traces of the major ideological contestations and debates that shaped earlier pan-African perspectives on the world.
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# Cultural nationalist and Marxist precursors of African feminism
Feminist studies have unearthed a long-standing involvement of women in pan-African and African liberation movements. So for example, Reddock provides evidence of Amy Ashwood Garvey's significant involvement in the Garveyite movement that emerged in the early twentieth-century Caribbean and North America, and the possibility that she co-founded the United Negro Improvement Association (Reddock, 2007). Boyce Davies reminds us of the African-African American women's participation, including the organizing and
sponsorship of the historic 1945 Pan-African Congress (Boyce Davies, 2007). But what was the intellectual environment encountered by Anna Julia Cooper, Adelaide Casely-Hayford, Mabel Dove Danquah and others?
During the 1950s Eric Williams had drawn the connection between capitalism and slavery (Williams, 1944) and Padmore published Pan-Africanism or Communism? The Coming Struggle for Africa to address the tension between cultural nationalist and revolutionary Marxist positions. This tension was manifest in discussions about which be given primacy - race or class (Padmore, 1972 [1955]). Women were not on this agenda, but their involvement allowed them to form transnational interpersonal relationships with each other. Biographical studies show that radical women travelled extensively, coming into contact with others in both pan-African and socialist movements. Una Marson was involved in anti-imperialist work, while supporting West African students in London during the critical years that led to independence. Personal relationships developed among women such as Claudia Jones and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, who both attended the World Congress of Women in the USSR in 1963, and met again in Japan the following year to campaign against nuclear weapons. Several attended meetings of the Women's International Democratic Federation, a left-affiliated organization which provided support to African national liberation struggles. ${ }^{3}$
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Studies also reveal a rich legacy of socialist feminist intellectual and political work on the continent. Among the well-documented examples is Huda Shaarawi, a socialist and nationalist, who led the formation of the Egyptian Feminist Union in the 1920s (Badran, 1995). During the 1940s, Nigeria's Funmilayo RansomeKuti was organizing women across class lines to resist men's abuses of colonial power (Johnson-Odim and Mba, 1997). While Nigeria and Kenya typify African colonies where the forces for independence largely accepted unmitigated capitalist models of development, many African liberation movements embraced socialist principles and received support from the USSR and Cuba. Africa's socialist liberation movements were more inclined to declare that women's emancipation was a necessary aspect of national liberation. ${ }^{4}$ However, over the duration of
[^0]
[^0]: 3 The United States Government banned Mrs Kuti from entering on the basis of her suspected "communism", and the Nigerian Government seized her passport. McCarthyism had more direct effect on Claudia Jones, who was arrested and imprisoned before being deported to London.
4 Amilcar Cabral, Oliver Tambo and Thomas Sankara are among the leaders most associated with progressive gender politics, but there is evidence that they were often ahead of comrades (women and men) in the structures they led. See, for example, Aliou Ly's article: Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau Liberation War: The PAIGC, UDEMU, and the Question of Women's Emancipation, Portuguese Journal of Social Science, Volume 14, Number 3, 2015.
prolonged liberation wars, consciousness-raising work including discussions about the role of women appears to have fallen by the wayside, and the emancipation of women deferred (Nhongo-Simbanegavi, 2000).
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Some of the early studies of gender draw on cultural nationalist discourse to focus on celebrating the power they ascribe to women in indigenous African cultures, attributing the oppression of women to colonialism and rejecting feminism, defined as Western, and thus irrelevant to African societies. Boyce Davies describes this approach as 'culturalist feminism' pointing out the limited evidence for the claim that pre-colonial Africa was less oppressive to women. Drawing on the work of Diop and a number of colonial anthropological studies, the culturalist approach repeats the methodological errors of the cultural nationalist historiography noted in the introduction above. Like first generation cultural nationalism, culturalist feminism takes imperialism as its main protagonist. In order to dismiss 'feminism' it is therefore defined as an aspect of imperialism. ${ }^{5}$ While anti-imperialism has wide currency, subsuming 'feminism' under this rubric has a collateral cost, namely the dismissal of the many decades of continental feminism that have followed and moved beyond the cultural nationalism that characterized the mid-twentieth-century movements.
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Other second and third generation feminists, particularly those emerging from revolutionary liberation movements, are informed by socialist political philosophy. As such they are aligned with male contemporaries also investigating global systems and social and economic class structures. However, feminist scholars have added much to the Marxist political economies of the 1970s and 1980s, moving beyond structural determinism to raise questions about agency, subjectivity, social and personal relationships and kinship networks, as well as the day-to-day livelihoods and material histories of women. Feminists on the continent have used innovative methods to uncover the histories of movements and the life histories of women, recovering a body of knowledge on feminist consciousness and organizing in African and pan-African movements throughout the twentieth century. However, it has not been the African past so much as the challenges of the present and desires for a better future that have provided impetus to feminists mobilizing across the African world.
[^0]
[^0]: 5 Amadiume $(1987,2004)$ pursues the thesis that indigenous African societies were matriarchal on the basis of anthropological study of the Nnobi Igbo community. Oyewunmi (1991) argues that 'gender did not exist' in African societies prior to colonialism, drawing her evidence from the gender-neutral features of the Yoruba language spoken in the Old Oyo Kingdom. Boyce Davies (2015) provides a well-argued and more detailed discussion of the limitations of culturalist feminism.
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# The development nexus
From the crisis of the 1970s onwards, the persisting oppression and marginalization of women came to be identified as a significant factor in Africa's underdevelopment. ${ }^{6}$ The disproportionate burdening and impoverishment of women provided the material conditions for an escalation of feminist consciousness. This was the context in which the Association of African Women for Research and Development (AAWORD) convened in Dakar at the end of the 1970s, with the specific agenda of challenging the gendered effects of development (AAWORD, 1982). The imposition of structural adjustment programmes through the 1980s, and the accompanying divestment of the public sector gave even more salience to the class and gender exploitation at the heart of African economies, as the conditionalities of structural adjustment increased the burdens on the poorest strata across African societies in gendered ways, exacerbating the feminization of poverty. ${ }^{7}$ The 1980s also saw the establishment of the Women's Research and Documentation Project at the University of Dar es Salaam, ${ }^{8}$ and the Women's Research and Documentation Centre founded by historian Bolanle Awe at the University of Ibadan in 1988. By conducting research and advocacy work on the situation of women in the surrounding communities, these early interventions marked a departure from ivory-tower conventions, and faced resistance from colleagues. However, feminists working on women and gender were able to draw modest amounts of development funding into resource-starved universities, so that by the mid 2000s, there were as many as 40 gender and women's studies departments in African Universities. Academic networks were pressured to include women and take on gender analysis by women in their ranks, as well as by external donors. ${ }^{9}$
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[^0]
[^0]: 6 Boserup's seminal monograph "Women's Role in Economic Development" was published in 1970. The "feminization of poverty" became a catch phrase for the complex intersections of class (or more accurately, socioeconomic status and rural locations) with gender that were implicated in underdevelopment.
7 Antrobus, a vocal critic of Structural Adjustment in both the Caribbean and Africa, was also a founder of the Women and Development Network (WAND) at the Cave Hill Campus of the University of West Indies, and of the DAWN network. See Antrobus, P., 2004. The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies. London, Zed Books.
8 Faculty members Marjorie Mbilinyi and Ruth Meena were among the founding group.
9 The Council for the Development of Social Science Research in Africa (CODESRIA) has led the way, holding the first regional workshop on 'Gender Analysis' in 1991, followed by an annual summer institute and annual gender workshops. See Imam, Ayesha, Amina Mama and Fatou Sow (eds) Engendering African Social Sciences (Dakar, CODESRIA, 1996) and CODESRIA's Gender Series.
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The connections between continental and Caribbean feminist activism point to a long historical consciousness. During the early 1990s, feminists on the continent were inspired by the success of colleagues establishing gender and development studies at the University of the West Indies. This informed the establishment of the African Gender Institute (AGI) and its success. Apart from adding women and gender studies to the University of Cape Town curriculum, AGI convened a continent-wide programme to strengthen gender studies and research. The AGI strategy brought African departments and centres into a re-engagement with feminist movements around pedagogic and curriculum work to advance feminist agendas within and beyond the African academy. Relationships between African and Caribbean feminists have been sustained through exchange visits and mutual invitations, and the establishment of the African gender studies journal Feminist Africa in 2002 informed the establishment of the Caribbean Feminist Review five years later, in 2007. ${ }^{10}$
Between the 1980s and the present day, African feminists on the continent and in the diaspora have been able to mobilize resources to establish NGOs and programmes for women. This has enabled the formation of thousands of women's organizations carrying out advocacy, training, information and resource work, and significant outreach to women in remote and disadvantaged communities.
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The impact of so much mobilization cannot be detailed here, but there is now an extensive bibliography of sources detailing some of the advances and gains that have accrued to women through the rise of feminist organizing and its pervasiveness. Indeed, feminism of one form or another has come to pervade many arenas, across civil society and social movements, political and state structures, legal and policy making institutions, religious formations, social and educational spaces, as if it will indeed leave no stone unturned. Perhaps the most celebrated gains have been those evident in gender equality clauses in constitutions and the African Union's policy commitments, as well as in numerous legal reforms by national governments. It is perhaps only on the African continent that the highest level of governance - the African Union has responded to concerted feminist advocacy, with a series of new protocols and commitments. ${ }^{11}$
[^0]
[^0]: 10 Feminist Africa Issue 6 'Diaspora Feminisms' was edited by Trinidadian feminist Rhoda Reddock, and a number of Africans have contributed to the Caribbean Feminist Review.
11 The Protocol on the African Charter on Human and People's Rights and the Rights of Women in Africa (the Maputo Protocol) of 2003 has been signed by 36/54 nations (as at July 2016), and is the most advanced statement on African women's rights. Furthermore, in 2003, a Diaspora Division was established at the African Union.
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The strategic adeptness of women's organizing in African and Caribbean contexts has resulted in significant advances in women's legal rights and political participation, policy discourses and provisions for women. However, the opportunities afforded by development funding have been contradictory. Specific advances in one or more areas have often been accompanied by wider de-politicization that may steer attention away from controversial subject matter and issues, or more radical actions. Often, feminist energy and skills are redirected towards providing skills and services to a development industry concerned by 'mainstreaming gender' in inclusionary ways that serve to maintain the status quo. In this sense, radical feminist agendas tend to remain at the margins, while the mainstream landscape is complicated by new professionals variously referred to as 'gender trainers', 'gender experts' and 'gender consultants' who offer distilled technical skills that are freed from the historical-political ferment that concerned the generations before them.
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New questions arise with every gain. So, for example, what criteria differentiate 'success' from 'appropriation'? What material conditions determine whether the appropriation of feminist concepts becomes a good or a bad thing? With the massive proliferation and dispersal of discourses enabled by digital technologies and facilitated by postmodernism, how do we establish what is 'real' as compared to purely discursive? Pan-African feminism is born of intertwined epistemologies of resistance, which respond to material conditions of African histories and the fact that African women and men live different lives in societies that are more or less segregated by sex and gender. While sex and gender may be fluid and flexible in terms of African cultures, the fact is that with globalization, Western hegemonies of race, gender and sexuality are propagated through the 'global development' industry, as much as by 'global market forces' constricting the historically available possibilities in ways that demand more radical and complex strategies of resistance.
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# Transnational feminism for Global Africa
African feminism, once freed from the burden of proving its authenticity and relevance, embraces a transnational outlook derived from a long experience of transnational contacts across the African world. The example of the PanAfrican Women's Organization (PAWO) reminds us that African women have recognized the merits of continental unity since at least 1962. More than half a century later, the convening of the fourth African Feminist Forum (AFF) in
Harare in 2016 marks a radically different moment and heralds twenty-firstcentury possibilities. The African Feminist Forum has convened four times since its creation in 2016, attended by hundreds of African women on the basis of their identification with feminist politics. The Forums are uniquely designed, self-critically reflective celebrations of continental feminist movements in all their diversity. Pursuing a transgenerational and inclusive mobilizing strategy, the AFF promotes the hosting of national forums to involve and inspire hundreds more women across the continent. ${ }^{12}$
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Transnational feminism can be defined as a contemporary movement that proceeds on the basis of identified common interests that are not bound by national borders and can be better addressed by cross-border organizing. As an epistemological perspective, it offers a methodology for challenging the gendered effects of globalization, including the unfavourable terms under which women from Africa and other Southern contexts are being incorporated into the global market. Transnational feminism is explicitly anti-capitalist and retains an antiimperialist focus on the exploitative features of the global market economy. ${ }^{13}$ Today there is greater engagement with mainstream matters that earlier generations might not have regarded as priorities for women: macroeconomic policies and global trading systems; conflict and security; environmental degradation and climate change, all of which are addressed through transnational organizations and networks and supported by transnational women's funds, ${ }^{14}$ whose modest budgets provide little indication of their global impact.
Finally, the evidence presented here demonstrates connections that have passed the test of time and have the potential to facilitate processes that can contribute to the realization of an inclusive, just and equitable vision of Global Africa that brings freedom to African peoples, wherever they are.
[^0]
[^0]: 12 The founding commitments of the African Feminist Forum are articulated in the Charter of Principles for African Feminists. The assertiveness of the Charter and its far-reaching objectives point to a rising generation of African feminists working in and for Africa, finding the power and voice to address longterm injustices and confront even the most contentious issues. These include action against the multiple forms of violence perpetrated against women, the rights of lesbian, gay, transgender and other sexual minorities, alongside long-term struggles for political, socio-cultural and economic justice.
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13 Many feminist networks remain concerned with all the issues that would conventionally be defined as feminist: sex- and gender-based violence, sexuality and sexual freedom, women's health and reproductive rights, harmful traditional practices, women's education and political participation, women's human rights, domestic labour, the exploitation of women's labour, sexual harassment, constraints on women's mobility and the policing of dress. Feminist movements are at the forefront of such organizing, taking full advantage of new technological tools and levels of mobility.
14 For example, the Global Fund for Women and the African Women's Development Fund.
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# References
AAWORD. 1982. The Experience of the Association of African Women for Research and Development. Development Dialogue, Vol. 1, No. 2, pp. 101-113.
Amin, S. 1977. Imperialism and Underdevelopment. New York and London, Monthly Review Press.
Antrobus, P. 2004. The Global Women's Movement: Origins, Issues and Strategies. London, Zed Books.
Badran, M. 1995. Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press.
Barnes, T. A. 1999."We Women Worked So Hard": Gender, Urbanisation and Social Reproduction in Colonial Harare, Zimbabwe, 1930-1956. Oxford, UK/Portsmouth, NH/ Harare/Cape Town, James Currey Ltd./Heinemann/Baobab/Academic/David Philip Publishers (Pty) Ltd.
Boserup, E. 1970. Woman's Role in Economic Development. Seminal Monograph. London, Allen \& Unwin.
Boyce Davies, C. 2007. Pan-Africanism, transnational black feminism and the limits of culturalist analyses in African gender discourses. Feminist Africa: Pan-Africanism and Feminism, Vol. 19, pp. 78-93.
Boyce Davies, C. 2008. Left of Karl Marx: the Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Diop, C. A. 1974. The African Origin of Civilization: Myth or Reality. New York and Westport, Lawrence Hill \& Co.
Fanon, F. 2004. The Wretched of the Earth. New York, Grove Press.
Geiger, S. 1998. TANU Women: Gender and Culture in the Making of Tanganyikan Nationalism, 1955-1965. Oxford, UK/Portsmouth, NH, James Currey Ltd./Heinemann.
Imam, A., Mama, A. and Sow, F. (eds). 1996. Engendering African Social Sciences. Dakar, CODESRIA.
Johnson-Odim, C. and Mba, N. E. 1997. For Women and the Nation: Funmilayo RansomeKuti of Nigeria. Urbana and Chicago, Ill., University of Illinois Press.
Lazreg, M. 1994. The Eloquence of Silence: Algerian Women in Question. New York and London, Routledge.
Ly, A. 2015. Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau liberation war:The PAIGC,UDEMU, and the question of women's emancipation, 1963-74. Portuguese Journal of Social Science, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 361-77.
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Ly, A. 2015. Revisiting the Guinea-Bissau liberation war:The PAIGC,UDEMU, and the question of women's emancipation, 1963-74. Portuguese Journal of Social Science, Vol. 14 No. 3, pp. 361-77.
Mama, A. 2005. Demythologising Gender in Development: Feminist Studies in African Contexts. IDS Bulletin. Vol. 35, No. 4, pp. 121-24.
Mama, A. 2005. Gender studies for Africa's transformation. T. Mkandawire (ed.), African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development. Dakar/London and New York, CODESRIA Books/Zed Books, pp. 94-116.
Mann, K. 1985. Marrying Well: Marriage, Status and Social Change among the Educated Elite in Colonial Lagos. Cambridge, UK, Cambridge University Press.
Mba, N. E. 1982. Nigerian Women Mobilized: Women's Political Activity in Southern Nigeria, 1900-1965. Berkeley, Calif., University of California Press.
Mbilinyi, M. 1991. Big Slavery: AgriBusiness and the Crisis in Women's Employment in Tanzania. Dar Es Salaam, Tanzania, University of Dar Es Salaam Press.
Meena, R. E. (ed.). 1992. Gender in Southern Africa: Conceptual and Theoretical Issues. Harare, SAPES Books.
Mkandawire, T. (ed.). 2005. African intellectuals and nationalism. African Intellectuals: Rethinking Politics, Language, Gender, and Development. Dakar/London and New York, CODESRIA Books/Zed Books, pp. 10-55.
Nhongo-Simbanegavi, J. 2000. For Better or for Worse?: Women and ZANLA in Zimbabwe's Liberation Struggle. Harare, Weaver press.
Nkrumah, K. 1965. Neo-colonialism, the Last Stage of Imperialism. London, Thomas Nelson \& Sons, Ltd.
Padmore, G. 1971 (orig. pub. 1955). Pan Africanism or Communism?: The Coming Struggle for Africa. Garden City, NY, Doubleday.
Reddock, R. 2014. The first Mrs Garvey: Pan-Africanism and feminism in the early 20th century British colonial Caribbean. Feminist Africa: Pan-Africanism and Feminism, Vol. 19, pp. 58-77.
Rodney, W. 1980. Class Contradictions in Tanzania. H. Othman (ed.), The State in Tanzania: A Selection of Articles. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Dar es Salaam University Press, pp. 18-41.
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Rodney, W. 1980. Class Contradictions in Tanzania. H. Othman (ed.), The State in Tanzania: A Selection of Articles. Dar es Salaam, Tanzania, Dar es Salaam University Press, pp. 18-41.
Shivji, I. G. 1976. Class Struggles in Tanzania. London, Heinemann.
Tranberg Hansen, K. (ed.). 1992. African Encounters With Domesticity. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press.
White, L. 1990. The Comforts of Home: Prostitution in Colonial Nairobi. Chicago and London, The University of Chicago Press.
Williams, E. 1944. Capitalism and Slavery. Chapel Hill, NC, The University of North Carolina Press.
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# CHAPTER 15
## INTELLECTUAL GENEALOGIES OF BLACK/QUEER/DIASPORA
Jafari S. Allen
As we proceed upon the specific and difficult tasks of survival in the twenty-first century, we of the African diaspora need to recognize our differences as well as our similarities. [...] We seek what is most fruitful for all people, and less bunger for our children. But we are not the same. [...] To successfully battle the many faces of institutionalized racial oppression, we must share the strengths of each other's vision as well as the weaponries born of particular experience. First, we must recognize each other. ${ }^{1}$
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## Introduction
Black/queer/diaspora work emerges from radical black and Third World lesbian feminist art, activism and scholarship, and builds upon the scholarly and programmatic practice of black queer studies and queer of colour critique, to consider the state of diasporic black queer projects in the context of various shifts in empires and affiliations. For at least thirty years, activists, artists and scholars have shown the social and poetic co-articulation of blackness, 'queerness' and nationality - putting together how blackness and oppositional
[^0]
[^0]: 1 Audre Lorde, foreword to Showing our Colors (Opitz et al., 1992).
consciousness, and blackness and sexual and gender non-conformity, are lived, albeit uneasily. The conjunction of these various streams of work owes much to the maturation of the literature in black and queer of colour studies, and the current existential crisis in queer studies, and also to the recognition of the presence of the transnational in every moment, even 'at home', and the rapidity of popular forms of (uneven) global exchange. In this short summary of the black/queer/diaspora studies project, I hope to provide a sketch of the salient issues and texts in this emergent field. Today, new South-South conversations from the Caribbean to various regions of Africa, Asia and Oceania, for example - and voices from the North, clarifying their simultaneous British-, American-, Canadian- or Europeanness, are beginning to be heard in a framework that is non-national and 'non-Western'.
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This work thus pursues 'new' sets of questions, conjuncturally related to perennial ones: Do African and Afrodescendent sexual minorities and gender insurgents share common desires, or conditions, across borders and languages? What 'erotic subjectivities' (Allen, 2011b) and insurgent black queer poetics obtain in sites scholars have previously ignored, or spaces that reach 'across', 'through' and 'between'? What political or affective strategies might be effective for one place or space, but not for others? And finally, what methodologies must we use to track all of this? By what means should we convey our analysis and reflection? Black/queer/ diaspora work surfaces at a moment when the terms 'black', 'queer' and 'diaspora' have already begun to be elaborated beyond the metaphors and concepts offered by any one of these constituencies, and beyond false dichotomies of essentialism and anti-essentialism (Hall, 1996; Gilroy, 1993; Mercer, 1994; Carby, 1987; Carby, 1999; Lara, 2006; Glave, 2008a). ${ }^{2}$ Following Rinaldo Walcott's crucial intervention to the effect that a 'diaspora reading practice [...] can disrupt the centrality of nationalist discourses within the black studies project and thereby also allow for an elaboration of a black queer diaspora project' as 'the reconceptualizing of black queer and black diaspora produces both a black queer diaspora and a new black queer theory' (Walcott, 2007), we can thus claim to position black/queer/ diaspora in black studies, queer studies and feminist studies as a 'backbone rather than anomaly' (Johnson and Henderson, 2005, p. xii).
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[^0]
[^0]: 2 We were also profoundly shaped and inspired - from the time we were children and young adults - by the prose of writers like Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, Gwendolyn Brooks, Chinua Achebe, Derek Walcott, Dionne Brand, Toni Morrison and others, who are of course masters of affective and performative writing. For many of us therefore, black/queer/diaspora is as much about the writing - that is, not 'writing up' data, reporting or mimicking the prose style of French theory, but rather attempting to convey feeling as supplement or complement to information - as, and articulated with, theory and methodology.
Here, black identity/identification is understood as hybrid, contingent, relational and no less socially real. That is, 'black' is a useful term for describing the historical, political and affective ties of many individuals to one another, yet we do not attach mystical, transhistorical or essential biological value to this term. The black diaspora is at once about particular locations (actual and imagined), roots/uprooting (principally understood as being from Africa, but equally, in other cases, to and within Africa), and routes along which bodies, ideas and texts travel. By diaspora we mean these conditions of movement and emplacement, and processes of (dis)identification, and also relationality, as Jacqueline Nassy Brown (2005) points out. Afrodescendent groups' (dis) identification as black, Afro-hyphenated, Kréyol, Creole, mixed or other, does not occur in a vacuum, but is conditioned by particularities of place, in relation to discourses and practices within other places. Black diasporic relationality refers to this process. And while actual migration, whether forced, chosen or coerced, continues to be a major factor in making the black world, the diaspora is so deeply constitutive of the fabric of blackness that it is also experienced among individuals who will never leave their own town, but who nevertheless powerfully imagine their own black/queer 'other' identity.
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# Who's 'queer'?/Whose queer?
Black and queer of colour scholars have already pointed to the important contributions of the larger enterprise of queer theory, with respect to its ruthless critique of normativity, and have roundly criticized queer theory's proposition of universal heterosexual privilege, which undermines the importance of intersectional experience and positionality (see especially, Rodríguez, 2011, pp. 331-348; Allen, 2009b, pp. 311-326 (16); Halberstam, 2005, p. 23 (3-4 84-85), pp. 219-233). Sexual minorities and gender variant individuals from the global South who negotiate but do not wholly capitulate to what Cymene Howe (2002, pp. 237-79) has called the 'universal queer subject' discursively fall, in both time and space, outside the narrowly Western and Northern middleclass gay constructions of 'family', 'lesbian', 'gay', 'queer' and 'gay rights'. Not only are black subjects always already queer in terms of normative liberal ideals of the person, but black queers also often seem 'a queer too far' for much of queer studies and gay and lesbian popular culture and politics. Still, 'queer' not only marks one of the constitutive academic discourses and historical moments here, but is also a critical way of seeing and saying. That is, following Muñoz (2009,
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p. 1), for me, 'queerness is essentially about [...] an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world'. And of course, for black queers, survival has always been about finding ways to connect some of what is disconnected, to embody and re-member. Collections such as E. Patrick Johnson and Mae G. Henderson's Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, Jennifer DeVere Brody and Dwight A. McBride's 'Plum Nelly: New Essays in Black Queer Studies' (a special issue of Calalloo: A Journal of African and African-American Arts and Letters) and a number of other works have already drawn the lineages of black queer studies. 'Plum Nelly' and black queer studies each emerge in different ways from the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000), organized by Johnson at the University of North Carolina (Boggs, 2000). Black queer studies more or less followed the parameters of the conference, focusing on blacks in the United States of America, with Rinaldo Walcott's contribution pushing at these borders from Canada, a 'queer place in diaspora'. However, Michelle Wright and Antje Schuhmann's collection Blackness and Sexualities, which emerges from the Europe-based Collegium for African-American Research and was published in Germany, broadens the geographic and thematic scopes of the black queer studies project, to Europe (and Cuba), as well as to themes that are not strictly LGBTQ. Each of these works, characterized by insurgent re-readings of classical or otherwise well-known texts, reclamation of intellectual traditions, and writing into the scholarly record subjects otherwise relegated to the margins, at once cleared and claimed space (Battle and Barnes, 2010; Page and Richardson, 2010).
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More recently, Omise'eke Natasha Tinsley's GLQ article 'Black Atlantic, Queer Atlantic: Queer Imaginings of the Middle Passage' proposed a rethinking of metaphors of ships, oceans as bodies, and performative bodies (offered by Paul Gilroy, Antonio Benitez Rojo and Judith Butler, respectively), arguing that the black queer Atlantic 'churns differently [...] diffracting meanings', leaving black queer diasporic subjects 'whole and broken', 'brutalized and feeling [...] divided from other diasporic migrants and linked to them' (Smith, F. 2011). Apropos of queer of colour critique, José Esteban Muñoz's Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity follows his earlier work's commitment to creating alternative visions of performance and performativity, read through a lens constituted in and through cultural theory that affirms futurity, but with a difference. As more individuals trained in social science methodologies contribute to this work, we are beginning to see new possibilities (McCready, 2010). Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud: Black Pride Survey 2000, Gloria Wekker's The Politics of Passion, Wesley Crichlow's Buller Men and Batty
Bwoys, David A.B. Murray's Opacity, my own work and Juan Battle's Social Justice Sexuality Project, now under way, have begun to provide ethnographic dimensions and empirical data (Decena, 2011; Moore, 2011; Allen, 2011b) for black queer studies and queer of colour critique.
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While commentators have astutely cited the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000) as a watershed moment which provided both a platform for the staging of black queer studies and a foundation for various other related pursuits, like collaboration and mentoring that support the work of black queer studies and black queer scholars and artists, an event that preceded it by five years is just as significant, yet has garnered little critical attention (Alexander, 2000, pp. 1285-1305; DeVere Brody, 2000, pp. 1-1277; Woodard, 2000, pp. 1278-1284). The 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' Conference, documented by Shari Frilot in a film of the same name, was concerned not only with raising questions about the study of black LGBT two-spirited and same-gender-loving black people, across nationality, class, ability, gender and sexual expression, but also with expanding the capacity for critical engagement and political organizing (Frilot, 1995). As Vincent Woodard asserted in his astute review of the Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000), the 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' Conference 'was the first to pose the black queer question in an academic setting'. The interrogative and often contradictory meanings and politics of each term - black, queer and nations - and the articulations instantiated by the stroke (/) make this at once a potentially destabilizing and generative heuristic. In fact, this heuristic sutures (or makes coherent) the in-between idea of black/queer/diaspora. 'Black Nations/Queer Nations?' is thus also an important model for engaged projects, which, like black/queer/diaspora work, attempts to deepen and broaden the ineluctable connections between scholarship, activism and artistry. Even a cursory look at the foundational works of black queer studies - anthologies, broadsides, chapbooks, poetry collections and other non-academic intellectual and political work - demonstrates this connection. ${ }^{3}$ Black queer studies and queer of colour critique is practised not only in scholarly publications
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, but also in teaching at graduate and undergraduate levels, and in panels offered at local and international conferences and symposia. ${ }^{4}$ In addition, a number of critical archival and cultural projects, political organizations and personal connections between individuals
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[^0]
[^0]: 3 See especially Barbara Smith, Audre Lorde and Joseph Beam. Much primary material, including personal papers and ephemera can be found at the In the Life Archive.
4 Caribbean Region of the International Resource Network (Caribbean IRN).
whose networks and texts stretch across the globe, represent a more widespread and democratic circuit of black queer here and there.
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# Genealogical matrices
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While literatures on globalization and transnationalism have tended to highlight the ways in which the State is disappearing or being eclipsed by global capital and new information technologies, even neo-liberal (leaning) States retain their powers and prerogatives of surveillance, severe discipline and in some cases expulsion or extermination of vulnerable persons, even as they continue to disinvest in public health, education and welfare. My own research in Cuba, Trinidad and Tobago and Brazil, and experiences at home in the United States of America, impels us to take seriously the distinctions between socialist and liberal States, post-colonial and imperial nations, North and South. There are crucial historical and political-economic distinctions that condition and structure both the ways in which a State - any State - attempts to regulate particular bodies, and how national belonging is reckoned. Still, it seems the State - seemingly every State, though of course with widely varying scales and intensities - depends upon racialized heteropatriarchy (which is always also classed) to constitute and maintain itself in the global hierarchy of States (Allen, 2009a, pp. 53-62; Allen, 2011b). Since she wrote The Boundaries of Blackness, Cathy J. Cohen has exposed the ways in which the United States of America and black institutions, academics and families construct the dangerous vulnerabilities of the deeply and multiply subaltern - an analytic category she has formulated as 'punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens' (Cohen, 1997, pp. 437465). In her essay 'Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics', Cohen critiques African-American studies' politics of respectability and argues that the reputed deviance of lesbians, gays, transgender and bisexual persons, single mothers and State aid recipients, in the eyes of American policymakers as well as scholars and civil society leaders, marks this group not only as unruly would-be subject-citizens, but also outside of cultural boundaries of belonging and care (Cohen, 2004, vol. 1
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, marks this group not only as unruly would-be subject-citizens, but also outside of cultural boundaries of belonging and care (Cohen, 2004, vol. 1, pp. 27-45). Similarly, M. Jacqui Alexander has argued that some bodies, such as those of the lesbian and the 'prostitute', cannot be included as citizens in former colonies of the Caribbean precisely because they embody sexual agency and eroticism radically out of step with the aspiration of the nation to advertise itself as independent, developed, disciplined and poised to join the number of putatively civilized
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States (Alexander, 1994, pp. 5-23; Alexander, 1991). As she beautifully shows, this same 'erotic autonomy' is the place from which individuals and groups have staged various rebellions. Taken together, the work of Alexander and Cohen illustrates both a set of nettlesome political problems and a theoretical puzzle, across a black diaspora that is at the centre of the black/queer/diaspora project: Is there any place where the benefits and recognition of citizenship can accrue to the unruly - the 'prostitute', homosexual, 'welfare queen', transgender person, or the black? What calculus emerges when these gendered, raced and sexed categories of the non-national, deviant, non-ethnic/racial, non-conforming, or merely 'other' are compounded? One of the major contributions of the black/ queer/diaspora project is to show that 'diaspora' constitutes a way out of the nation State. Failing inclusion as a properly hygienic citizen or subject, where is the place for the black queer? This query also pointedly suggests that the notion of citizenship, with its obvious rules of exclusion and exception, stands in for a wider range of assurances and freedoms, since non-State actors like families, cultural groups and especially religious organizations, often think like a State - making strange bedfellows with repressive State apparatus in their support for projects of respectability. Their shared project is to discipline individuals into local legibility and particular forms of subjectification. An assortment of players, including Muslim clerics in northern Nigeria, Christian fundamentalists governing the Statehouse of Indiana and other areas of the United States of America, and government officials in the Caribbean and East Africa, citing their personal conservative Christian and Hindu religious beliefs, erroneously imagine a moment before the experience of same-sex desire, and support the enactment or continuation of 'anti-gay' legislation. As they perform a celebration of sexual diversity
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, erroneously imagine a moment before the experience of same-sex desire, and support the enactment or continuation of 'anti-gay' legislation. As they perform a celebration of sexual diversity, Western European nations continue to disclaim the black and Afro-hyphenated within their borders.
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Black 'quare' studies in the United States of America have focused on 'making an intervention at home', as Johnson and Henderson remind us. ${ }^{5}$ Recently, examinations of African, Caribbean, Canadian, European and Latin American literature and film have revealed that this theme is indeed global: 'home' as a site of ambivalence and potential 'conflama' (a United States black gay vernacular composite connoting confusion and drama), yet at the same time somehow constituting Hemphill's 'place that will be worth so much effort and love'. It
[^0]
[^0]: 5 'Quare' of course refers to E. Patrick Johnson's important intervention in Black Queer Studies: A Critical Anthology, which first appeared in 2001: "Quare" Studies, or (Almost) Everything I Know about Queer Studies I Learned from My Grandmother'. Text and Performance Quarterly, No. 21, pp. 1-25.
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is just as central in black/queer/diaspora literature beyond America's borders (Walcott in Johnson and Henderson, 2005). Our Caribbean: A Gathering of Lesbian and Gay Writing from the Antilles, edited by Thomas Glave, is just as powerfully read as a diasporic text as an Antillean one, and while mostly from the 1990s and 2000s, includes work from as far back as 1956 that reveals, like much of Glave's own beautifully evocative lyrical writing, that 'home' in (and out of, and returning back to) the Caribbean is also a troubled space. Of course Canadian/Trinbagonian Dionne Brand's critically acclaimed oeuvre also layers (im)migration, diaspora, dispacement and longing. While there is a growing number of works on Africa that sympathetically engage sexuality, including those of Marc Epprecht, Neville Hoad and the working group's own Graeme Reid, the impressive collection edited by Sylvia Tamale, African Sexualities: A Reader (which is more of a comprehensive reader on sexualities rather than specific to homosexualities and trans identities) has opened the way for more work highlighting African sexual minorities and gender insurgents from the perspectives of black African activists. As the work of photographer and activist Ajamu X and the community arts organization rukus! shows, Britain continues to be a hotbed of black/queer/diaspora work. This of course follows the work of British artists like filmmaker Isaac Julien, Nigerian photographer Rotimi FaniKayode, and critical cultural scholar Kobena Mercer, whose work in the late 1980s and 1990s spoke pointedly and engagingly to black queer culture across three continents, before focusing more particularly on visual art. This brilliant and provocative work parsed the political and conceptual consequences of gender, racial and sexual difference, nationality, ethnicity and aesthetics within Britain and beyond. Moreover, popular forms of Africentricity - another iteration of earlier pan-African movements - are also well represented in black lesbian and gay culture in Britain and the United States of America.
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As Cohen notes, truly radical or transformative politics have not resulted from queer theory thus far. In some cases, it has in fact 'served to reinforce simple dichotomies between heterosexual and everything "queer"'(Cohen, 1999, p. 22). Perhaps the transformative politics we have been waiting for will emerge through following and participating in actual political transformations on the ground. As one example, the concept of 'sexual orientation inclusion advocacy', as practised in Guyana and Trinidad and Tobago, may provide fertile ground. This work by and on behalf of vulnerable populations of LGBT persons seeking to be free from violence, harassment and discrimination is far from a singleminded focus on 'sexual rights'; it sees itself as extending participation and protection for minorities and vulnerable persons of all kinds, in these self-
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consciously multicultural post-colonial countries. Thus their queer work, which seeks to redeem the anti-colonial struggle, is, to borrow the title of a recent Arcus Operating Foundation report that surveyed the field, at once about Saving Lives, Promoting Democracy, Alleviating Poverty, and Fighting AIDS (Galst, 2010). Uninvited interventions by radical black feminists in black politics, arts and letters demonstrated that submerged, discredited or 'alternative' knowledges, produced in the interstices of violence, silence, invisibility or forgetting, exposed a wider horizon of possibilities than had been imagined previously (Combahee River Collective, 1986; Ferguson, 2004; Clarke, 1983 [2000], pp. 197-208; Simmons, 1983 [2007]). The black/queer/diaspora project takes up this challenge to develop a synthetic vision and methodology of diasporic black queer futurity. We have taken up the work that Cathy J. Cohen has challenged us to do, shifting research agendas to understand and meet the urgent demands of those who are multiply vulnerable. Furthermore, we are following M. Jacqui Alexander's proposal that the key epistemological aim of our work should be to think/live/write contradictions of genre, discipline, materiality, spirituality and affect, all at once (Alexander, 2007, pp. 154-166).
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# Epistemological lessons
The stakes are, literally, life and death for Afrodescendent nonheteronormative and gender variant individuals - not only in the global South, which is often labelled a homophobic place out of sync with the so-called 'enlightened' North, but also in 'developed' States. In many nations of the world they face the criminalization of 'sodomy' and 'cross-dressing'. In extreme examples, rumour and innuendo - perhaps plastered on the front page of a newspaper - is enough to cause a person to be beaten, jailed or killed for being homosexual or gender variant. Nationalist rhetoric, which cast LGBT rights and recognition as 'foreign' attacks on 'tradition' or sovereignty resonate with fundamentalist religious rhetoric, both in the former colonial world and in the metropoles. Racist and transphobic disenfranchisement, employment discrimination, and the strategic silence of most nation States on the need for targeted public health interventions for LGBTQ individuals whose secondary and tertiary marginalization makes them more vulnerable, is widespread.
Epistemologically, it is important to focus on black/queer studies not only because black people have been viewed through jaundiced lenses, but also because it is now clear that standard scholarly frameworks do not allow us to
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see anyone or anything fully enough, or clearly enough. Black/queer/diaspora is the conjuncture of scholarly literatures, theoretical frameworks and sites of struggle and cultural production. Primary among these is a commitment to the on-the-ground experiences and intellectual, artistic and political legacies of black people in a number of areas. Chief among these is black feminism, and 'acting womanish'. Another important stream is a re-working of other intellectual and activist traditions, like queer theory. The recent emergence of black/queer and queer of colour work points out the limits of queer theory and queer studies. On its own, that is outside of its continued re-working by critical race, decolonial indigenous and disability theorists in the academic world, the arts and activism, 'queer' may never do what some defenders claim it was meant to do: achieve a wider co-articulation of a number of embodied and embodying categories of normativity, like nationality, gender, region, class and ability, as well as sexuality. Nonetheless, despite often important critiques of their provenance and use as merely inaccurate or sloppy shorthand, queer thinking and queer seeing still offer a unique way of pushing past normative assumptions of 'sexuality'.
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# References
Alexander, B. K. 2000. Reflections, Riffs, and Remembrances: The Black Queer Studies in the Millennium Conference (2000). Callaloo, Vol. 23, No. 4, pp. 1285-305.
Alexander, M. J. 1991. "Erotic Autonomy and a Politics of Decolonization: An Anatomy of Feminist and State Practice in the Bahamas Tourist Economy", in Alexander, M. J. and Mohanty, C. T. (eds) Feminist Genealogies, Colonial Legacies, Democratic Futures. New York, Routledge.
Alexander, M. J. 1994. Not Just (Any) Body Can Be a Citizen: The Politics of Law, Sexuality, and Postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas. Feminist Review, No 48, pp. 5-23.
Alexander, M. J. 2005. Pedagogies of Crossing: Meditations on Feminism, Sexual Politics, Memory, and the Sacred. Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press.
Alexander, M. J. 2007. Danger and Desire: Crossings are Never Undertaken All at Once or Once and for All. Small Axe, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 154-66.
Allen, J. S. 2009a. Looking Black at Revolutionary Cuba. Latin American Perspectives, Vol. 36, No. 1, pp. 53-62.
Allen, J. S. 2009b. For "the Children" Dancing the Beloved Community. Souls, Vol. 11, No. 3, pp. 311-26.
Allen, J. S. 2011a. One way or another: Erotic subjectivity in Cuba. American Ethnologist, Vol. 39, No. 2, pp. 325-38.
Allen, J. S. 2011b. ;Venceremos?: The Erotics of Black Self-making in Cuba. Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press.
Allen, J. S. 2012. Black/Queer/Diaspora at the Current Conjuncture. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 18, Nos. 2-3, pp. 211-48.
Battle, J. 2010. Social Justice Sexuality Project. socialjusticesexuality.com
Battle, J. and Barnes, S. L. 2010. Black Sexualities: Probing Powers, Passions, Practices, and Policies. New Brunswick, NJ, and London, Rutgers University Press.
Battle, J. et al. 2002. Say it Loud, I'm Black and I'm Proud: Black Pride Survey 2002. New York, The Policy Institute of the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.
Benítez-Rojo, A. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
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Benítez-Rojo, A. 1992. The Repeating Island: The Caribbean and the Postmodern Perspective. Durham, NC, Duke University Press.
Boggs, N. 2000. Queer Black Studies: An Annotated Bibliography, 1994-1999. Callaloo, Vol. 23, No. 1, pp. 479-94.
Boyce Davies, C., Gadsby, M., Peterson, C. and Williams, H. (eds). 2003. Decolonizing the Academy: African Diaspora Studies. Trenton, NJ, and Asmara, Africa World Press.
Brand, D. 1997. In Another Place, Not Here. New York, Grove Press.
Brand, D. 1999. At the Full and Change of the Moon: A Novel. New York, Grove Press.
Cade Bambara, T. (ed.). 1970. The Black Woman: An Anthology. New York and Scarborough, Ont., New American Library.
Carby, H. V. 1987. Reconstructing Womanhood: The Emergence of the Afro-American Woman Novelist. New York, Oxford University Press.
Carby, H. V. 1999. Cultures in Babylon: Black Britain and African America. London and New York, Verso.
Clarke, C. 2000 (orig. pub. 1983). The Failure to Transform: Homophobia in the Black Community. B. Smith (ed.), Home Girls: A Black Feminist Anthology. New Brunswick, NJ, Rutgers University Press, pp. 190-201.
Clarke, K. M. and Thomas, D. A. (eds). 2006. Globalization and Race: Transformations in the Cultural Production of Blackness. Durham, NC, and London, Duke University Press.
Cohen, C. J. 1997. Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Vol. 3, No. 4, pp. 437-65.
Cohen, C. J. 1999. What Is This Movement Doing to My Politics?. Social Text, No. 61, pp. 111-18.
Cohen, C. J. 2004. Deviance as Resistance: A New Research Agenda for the Study of Black Politics. Du Bois Review: Social Science Research on Race, Vol. 1, No. 1, pp. 27-45.
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Crichlow, W. E. A. 2004. Buller Men and Batty Bwoys: Hidden Men in Toronto and Halifax Black Communities. Toronto, Ont., University of Toronto Press.
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