Search

Myles Crescendo, a jazz bassist and high school student in Detroit, is always running—to class, to band rehearsal, to public transit. When Myles’s father, the director of the school’s highly successful music program, suddenly dies at the start of their senior year, they ride the sonic waves from their father’s record player to search for him in the stars. Myles’s epic pilgrimage leads them to learn their African diasporic musical heritage, dialogue with deities, liberate a celestial lover from purgatory, prepare for their Southern grandmother’s imminent death, and perform their senior recital. Jazz, journey & cosmology collide in The Book of Myles. Had they ever been asunder?

Kente Gentlemen is one of several influential contemporary African fashion brands contributing to the expanding landscape of global Black Diaspora fashion. Founded by Aristide Loua in Abidjan, Côte d’Ivoire (2017), the brand’s contributions demonstrate a distinctive creative statement in fashion while also advancing new concepts of African image and its future economic growth. Deep examination of both the brand and its creative director support methods for determining long-term value and unique cultural contributions of emerging Black designers across the globe in relation to the broader fashion industry and supporting trade networks. This thesis explores the style aesthetic and cultural impact of Kente Gentlemen and utilizes several methodological frameworks of Black scholars, including Carol Tulloch’s style-fashion-dress narrative of the Black diaspora (Tulloch, 2016). Further analysis aims to incorporate the life journey and design practices of the Loua, who plays a significant role in expanding the style range of African fashion across the continent and in the broader global fashion industry.The clothing itself plays one part. Music, history, entertainment and popular culture intertwine to inform the way people of the African diaspora can come to know and style themselves to assert a particular brand of agency. Through the exploration of the designer’s vision, inspiration and styling, this paper surveys untold social histories inspired by Kente Gentlemen’s collections, namely the Fall/Winter 2022-23 Collection entitled The Birth of Cool. By examining these unique contributions to global fashion, the inherent and long-term value of the brand is illuminated, supporting the cause for further development of economic and organizational infrastructure necessary for the continued success for global fashion brands like Kente Gentlemen to thrive for generations to come.

Due to the awareness of how visual technologies have historically functioned as hostile and violent forces that render Blackness as aberration, this dissertation pays special focus to the creative practices of Black women and queer image-makers who are invested in decolonizing the ways in which we see. Through a careful examination of films and photography that spans from South Africa, and across the African diaspora, this dissertation is able to explore the edgeless connections between slavery and colonialism as ongoing histories that continue to rupture contemporary Black visual cultures. By orientating towards Black feminisms and queer theories to examine film and photography, this project inaugurates an interdisciplinary avenue that is able to reveal how the field of vision has continued to make marginal assessments on the compounding intersections between race, gender and sexuality. To further decolonize the process of knowledge production, this project recognizes the creative work of image-making, as an aesthetic practice that theorizes in its doing. Thus, I further draw from my positionality as a media practitioner and the experiential knowledge I have garnered in order to offer a methodological intervention that centers Black feminist creative praxis.As a prevailing enquiry in each chapter of this project, I interrogate how Black women and queer image-makers subvert the use of the camera as an institutional apparatus and technology of capture. In an anti-Black visual culture that is often calibrated by abject representations of Black women and queer identities, I believe that there is something bold and subversive about positioning Black women’s visual productions as constituting counter-hegemonic historiographies and archival repositories. Thus, I consider that due to the institutional neglect and erasure of Black women in hegemonic visual history, a decolonial approach to scholarship ought to contend with questions of materiality to contemplate the role played by Black film and queer photography in producing narratives that are able to collapse colonial framings of histography and archive. Therefore, I postulate that the films and photography examined in this dissertation, serve as revolutionary and decolonial visual archives of an otherwise due to the ways in which the hegemonic visual histories are challenged and subsequently refused.

This dissertation examines dance at FESTAC ’77 - The Second World Festival of Black and African Arts and Culture. This dissertation is a historiography of FESTAC ’77, a significant festival that has been shrouded. Using theoretical frameworks on the body from Critical Dance Studies and on precolonial African dance from anthropological research, the dissertation forwards the conception of the body, a body of culture filled with divine sovereignty. FESTAC ’77 enabled the sovereign body. From the ’60s through the ’70s, long after the experiences of chattel slavery and colonialism, Black and African people were still confronted with stereotypes, and, in Africa, many countries had just gained independence and sought acceptance in the international sphere. FESTAC ’77 served as a critical way for Black and African people to peacefully convene and address ideological anti-Blackness. FESTAC ’77 created a space that would enable the sovereign body, an agentive body at the center of its own reality. This dissertation also considers the way the festival was a dance-critical event in which dance was used as a vehicle of diplomacy, and an archive of identity, and Indigenous African epistemologies. African-rooted dances placed identity in situ during the oppressive eras, and FESTAC harnessed them. My methodology was multi-pronged and involved oral history interviews from US dance delegates who attended FESTAC ’77, video archives of FESTAC ’77 dance performances, anthropological archival scholarship of precolonial cosmologies of African diaspora dance, and information from African-rooted dance and drum specialists. As an embodied researcher, having been an African and African Diaspora dancer for over 25 years, I enter this inter- and multi-disciplinary work from an emic understanding and with personal immersion in several African and Diaspora cultures that are discussed in this dissertation. This dissertation also celebrates the US dance delegates who attended the festival, as they have become progenitors of African-rooted dance as we know it today in the US. The topics discussed are relevant not only to Dance Studies but also to many Humanities sub-fields like Black Studies, African Diaspora Studies, Gender Studies, and a wide variety of international audiences.

This dissertation evaluates the William Sheppard Collection of African Art at Hampton University. Assembled by Sheppard, a Black missionary to the Congo from 1890 to 1910, this collection comprises the oldest example of Kuba art in the United States and among the oldest intentionally assembled collections of African art outside of that continent. Unlike African artworks that were displayed in predominantly white institutional contexts, the Sheppard Collection is noteworthy for its early acquisition by an institution with a majority Black audience: the campus museum of the Hampton Institute, a historically Black college. The first primary audience for Sheppard’s exceptional collection of African art were students of the Hampton Institute. In that singular context, the works from the Sheppard Collection functioned as object lessons, a type of visual pedagogy that encouraged learning based on observation and experience from direct contact with an object or work of art. This teaching method presupposed a connection between the material world and moral development. Therefore, this dissertation argues that the Sheppard Collection constituted a visible and tangible basis for African Americans to establish a cultural connection to Africa, resonating with the contemporaneous intellectual pursuit of African Americans. Object Lessons: The Hampton University Sheppard Collection of African Art approaches the Sheppard Collection from a diasporic lens. Locating William Sheppard and the Sheppard Collection within African diaspora frameworks, I evaluate the implications of artworks in the Sheppard Collection for the analysis of race and representation in the United States, and the utilization of the Hampton collection in performance and pedagogy.Through analyses of dramatic performance, collections histories, photography, and the paradigms and protocols of museum display, this dissertation contributes to knowledge of the African diaspora, Atlantic world relations, art at historically Black colleges and the history of modern art and architecture. In the context of a historically Black college, the artworks of the Sheppard Collection took on different meanings from their original contexts. Like the African peoples who were forcibly enslaved and relocated to various places around the Atlantic, these cultural objects carry histories and memories with them. I analyze the Sheppard Collection according to this paradigm and evaluate its artworks as cultural objects that perform diaspora over centuries of Atlantic world relations.

This is an Afrofeminist Cultural Studies analysis of blackness and belonging in Denmark. The study is situated within African Diaspora Studies, specifically the theoretical branches in and of Europe. Simultaneously constructed as marginal to hegemonic Europeanness and dominant conceptions of blackness, I seek to carve out space for Afropean and European Black perspectives. With attention to genealogical distinctions between European-based Afrofeminisms and Black Feminisms of the USA, this dissertation is a contribution to a grounded theory of blackness in a larger European context. Specifically, this is a step towards writing the much under-theorized conditions of the African diasporas in the Nordics into the archives (McEachrane 2016).The study centers first-person narratives. I focus on first-generation African diaspora Dan-ish people, i.e., those with experiences of being raised and socialized in Denmark while Black as the first in a family. Situation myself as a researcher within this very life experience, I examine how others have navigated that experience before the era of the Internet and with a scarcity of racial mirroring. But particularly, I examine the condition of being racialized as Black in an alleged post-racial European context, dominated by a ‘raceless’ discourse of Denmark and its ‘other’ (El-Tayeb 2011; Boulila 2019). And more precisely within a regional discourse of Nordic Exceptionalism (Habel 2011). Positioned as apparently a paradox within an exclusive nationalist narrative, Afropean existence becomes unspeakable and Black Danish people constructed as always already foreigners, having just arrived. Part of the Black Danish experience, as across the Nordic region, is thus characterized by a lack of language to name one’s reality (Adeniji 2016; Diallo 2022). And importantly, a language to understand and resist racism, and to develop a political consciousness (Essed 1991; Kelekay 2019). I analyze how these circumstances affect Black Danish people’s subjectivity.The study’s first chapter builds on a reading of Crucian-Danish Victor Cornelins’ autobiography From St. Croix to Nakskov from 1976. This is supplemented by material from the Nakskov Local History Archives in Denmark. Here, I offer feminist analyses centered in African diasporic care and consideration of historical representations of blackness in Denmark as well as archival silences. Reading Cornelins as an early theorist of blackness in Denmark, the contours of a primary formative condition emerge: racial isolation.The second and third chapters are based on original data from semi-structured interviews during a seven-month stay in Copenhagen in 2020-2021. The second chapter sketches out the scattered collective of a post-WWII generation of so-called ‘brown babies.’ Being of Black American and white German parentage, thousands of individuals were deemed ‘better off’ outside of Germany due to their blackness and ‘mixedness.’ At the beginning of a post-racial discourse in Europe and a decolonization moment globally, a generation of ‘brown’ children were adopted into the intimate sphere of the post-racial Danish nation-state. An obscured, misrepresented part of Danish history, this chapter seeks to humanize people of this generation and identify their agency in constructing themselves as whole.The final chapter gives context to the current moment and growing up Black in Denmark. Imagined as outside of the Danish nation, yet also outside of dominant immigration discourse, analyzing the particularity of racialization as Black proves highly pertinent. The taxing reality of experiencing racism in a post-racialist culture become clear, especially the fact of being the only one in many social contexts. Yet this chapter also illuminates people’s ambivalence, disidentification, and dissociation from concepts of collective blackness or minoritarian solidarity. There is a complex relationship between assuming one’s own racialized social position as Black and understanding oneself as Danish.Black racial isolation runs through the three chapters as a common condition for African diasporic Danish people who have come of age in Denmark between 1905 and 2021. I therefore of-fer Black racial isolation as a core concept to better understand how Danish Black people make sense of themselves and their relationship to African diasporas and Black (political) collectivity. As a Black experience the Danish is version an articulation of racialization within a Westernized con-text historically shaped through binaries of Black/white. What sets this apart from other theorizations of blackness in the West, is that it experienced alone, rather than in community. My findings suggest that such isolation can results in internalization of binaries and a splitting of the self. In conclusion, I meditate on conditions for creating connection – with self and others – as a path to-ward sustainable, humanizing futures for Danish African diasporic blackness and belonging. As such, this dissertation contributes original, grounded theory of blackness, race, and racialization in Europe with deep appreciation for Afrofeminist and decolonial feminist genealogies from which this study could grow.

Yemaya’s Children (YC) is a Black community-based education organization that facilitates international travel for low-income youth in Baltimore. The two Black women co-founders of YC were inspired to found the organization in 2014 after encountering Black students from Africa, Latin America, and the Caribbean attending Escuela Latinoamericana de la Medicina (ELAM) outside of Havana, Cuba. In their words, the organization is grounded in “heal[ing] Black people.” For the co-founders, if Black youth are to survive and thrive in Baltimore, they need to heal. Drawing on qualitative data collected over four years in collaboration with YC, including participant observations during program events and international excursions, content analysis of program material, and interviews conducted with youth and adult leaders, I conceptualize YC’s curricular framework as emphasizing healing, unlearning, and extending. This curriculum re-orients focus on the future through imaginative exercises, demonstrating one of the ways that contemporary Black travel moves away from the past-oriented engagements that roots tourism allowed for and emphasizes collaborative future-building. Youth participants extend what they have learned beyond the organization such as by collaborating with city government to pass legislation that addresses the unique experiences of Baltimore youth. Yet working with organizations and institutions that are not focused on Black liberation can present unique challenges for youth. I find that they navigate these challenges by implementing lessons learned from the YC curriculum, especially those pertaining to healing. I conceptualize the ways in which one of YC’s central productions – a poster that Mayah and Ari commissioned to illustrate Carlota Lukumi – acts as a visual representation of the organization’s curricular framework. As a maternal archetype of fugitivity, Carlota emphasizes the role of fugitivity within the process of achieving Black liberation; circulates revolutionary ideals throught the diaspora; and attends to the maternal as a mode of feminist boundary-crossing to recognize the ways in which people and spaces contain the capacity for multiplicity. Carlota’s image signifies the YC curricular framework as constituted within Black feminist and decolonial praxes that generates fugitive imaginations for the future. Ultimately, this curricular framework, aided by the incorporation of international travel, presents ways for youth to understand themselves as capable of creating the future they need to thrive.

"Fugitive Authorships: Social Contracts and the UndocuBlack Everyday" is an interdisciplinary project that engages discourse analysis, auto-ethnography, memoir-writing, poetry, affect theory, and Black performance theory, alongside textual analysis to critically examine literary and visual culture produced by undocumented Black immigrants (“undocuBlack”) living and producing work in the United States between 2005-2020. The research asks: what are the social contracts that undocuBlack migrants must abide by in the United States despite their lack of political representation and legal protection? Through this question, I examine what I term the undocuBlack everyday, and read for moments of undocuBlack nonperformance, described as acts that dislocate and unsettle the nonconsensual performance contracts of meritocracy, innocence, patriotism, “good moral character,” compulsory heterosexuality, monogamy, and binary gender roles that undocuBlack migrants are measured against. This dissertation often takes the form of the cultural artifacts analyzed. "Fugitive Authorships: Social Contracts and the UndocuBlack Everyday" contributes to the fields of undocumented studies, Black and Indigenous cultural studies, settler-colonial studies, and transgender studies.

This dissertation explores the racialized politics of crime control in Sweden and the impact of the policing practices they justify on Afro-Swedish communities. Drawing on two years of ethnographic fieldwork alongside Afro-Swedish activists, organizers, and engaged community members, I examine how Black life is policed in Sweden. Employing a qualitative mixed-methods approach, I ask three related questions: 1) how people of African descent are targeted by Swedish politics of crime control? 2) how racialized policing practices manifest in the lives of Black people in Sweden? and 3) how Afro-Swedes organize against punitive policing and other forms of racialized subordination? I illustrate how Black spaces are policed, surveilled, and contained through increasingly repressive, militarized, and privatized policing practices targeting Sweden’s urban peripheries, how Black bodies are disciplined for transgressing racial boundaries, and how Nordic exceptionalism is weaponized to repress Black activism and community organizing. I also highlight how Afro-Swedes mobilize against their subjugation through everyday activism, community organizing, and the carving out of politically and socially insubordinate spaces for the nurturing of dignity, creative expression, and belonging. As such, the mobilizations under the banner of the Black Lives Matter movement must be understood within the larger context of Afro-Swedish organizing, as well as the decades-long social, economic, and political developments that have culminated in the aggressive over-policing of communities of color. Furthermore, I argue that Black life is hyper-policed in Sweden not because of the failures of the welfare state, but because the welfare state relies on a racial welfare order wherein the well-being of some depends on the subjugation of others.

This dissertation examines enslaved people’s navigation of the spatial power that shaped New York slave society between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. From their inception into the Middle Passage until their deaths in the New York area, enslaved people experienced a panoply of intense violence, surveillance, coercion, and punishment, more pervasive than scholarship has previously suggested. By the mid-eighteenth century, I argue that European ideas about gender informed how enslavers, officials, slave merchants, and non-slaveholders pursued and policed the colony’s racial hierarchy. My sources including letters, wills, journals, court documents, coroners’ inquests, half-freedom grants, land deeds, and newspapers, which provide evidence for the ways gender divisions of labor became significant mechanism for policing the bodies and mobilities of African-descended men and women. Each of the four chapters in this dissertation centers around one of four spaces (slave ships, the domestic sphere, public punitive spaces, and death) where enslaved people, enslavers, and non-slaveholding overseers defined the contours of power in New York City and the Atlantic world. African-descended people entered New York City shaped by surveillance, discipline, and punishment suffered in the Middle Passage, thus a close analysis of slave traders’ representations of carceral strategies in the transatlantic slave trade opens this dissertation. Once in New York City, an enslaved person’s ability to escape their enslavers’ oversight hinged on the time, place, and the productive and reproductive labor they performed. Gender divisions of labor undergirded enslavers’ ability to control the movement and activities that enslaved men and women pursued in households, taverns, bawdy houses, and other leisure spaces. Enslaved women suffered increased legal and social oversight on their mobility compared to enslaved men because they worked in much closer quarters with enslavers and overseers. Indentured and enslaved servants were also informants for officials who wanted to surveil enslaved people’s activities, as testimony given during the 1741 Slave Conspiracy Trials reveals. Furthermore, this episode demonstrates the critical role that non-slaveholding white women like Mary Burton played in uniting white inhabitants across class lines to police, surveil, and prosecute enslaved and free people of color. The racial hierarchies and social alienation that characterized New York slavery in life shaped the deaths of African-descended people. Coroners’ investigations into untimely deaths and early modern anatomists’ dissections helped crystalize white supremacy through the criminalization of both enslaved people and Black cadavers culminating in the Doctor’s Riots of 1788.Taken together, these chapters foreshadow the rise of carceral culture and the penitentiary system that arose in the post-Revolutionary North as slavery declined. In colonial New York, enslavers, officials, and non-slaveholders participated in creating and managing a system that sought to confine, surveil, and impose control over the bodies and movements of enslaved people in multiple spaces of captivity. Enslavers’ and slave merchants’ tight management of enslaved people in households and slave ships, colonial lawmakers’ deliberate restrictions on slave mobility, manumission, and free(d) people owning land; officials’ encouragement of non-slaveholding whites to inform on enslaved people; and the criminalization of African-descended people and cadavers during periods of social turmoil in New York City suggest that aspects of urban slavery were revitalized under the penitentiary system.

This dissertation examines how the rise of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora in the United States through genetic genealogy has become crucial to managing and transforming postcolonial sovereignty in Cameroon over the past decade. In 2010, 17 African countries celebrated 50 years of independence. Cameroon distinguished itself by marking the anniversary by inviting 54 DNA-identified African Americans of Cameroonian ancestry back “home.” This first genetic reconnection program would not be the last — neither in Cameroon nor in West Africa more broadly. As genetic ancestry takes on a new life beyond the American genetic genealogy industry, this project examines the ongoing problem of racialization through this technology as a problem of biocapital at a global scale. I consider the ways that genetic ancestry has catalyzed new modes of belonging beyond individualistic desires of American test-takers. The emergence of a genetic Cameroonian diaspora has enabled Cameroonians to repurpose the ambivalent relationship between the African American diaspora and Africa to recoup African Americans as a form of social capital. Through multi-scalar processes of disalienation, I argue that genetic reconnection programs create an ethic of sharing ancestry based on reciprocity. African Americans’ ability to be reunited with their genetically-identified ancestral homeland is authorized insofar as their return can be repurposed to simultaneously to reclaim the promise of independence that the postcolonial nation-building project has been unable to provide by ensuring those who share ancestry are invested in being dependable on and for each other. As this technology of the past is reoriented toward the future in Cameroon, the social, political, and economic pressures that genetic reconnection programs attempt to manage and that simultaneously set the limit for whether and how genetic reconnection’s utopian potential can come to fruition.By conducting nearly two years of multi-sited ethnographic research and archival research in Washington, D.C. and Cameroon from 2010 to 2018, I use this dissertation to intervene in critical discussions on the 21st century biologization of race through insights drawn from feminist kinship studies, biological citizenship, and historical repair. In the postgenomic era, where ethics is the currency driving the value of genetic information, I showcase how the politics of life itself has less to do with genetic determinism than how life chances are being differentially defined so as to make DNA a final frontier for a viable life from the scale of the nation-state to intimate kin. Rather than reifying a genetically-determined ancestry in Africa, genetic reconnection between Cameroonians and African Americans is inextricably linked to a reconfiguration of postcolonial sovereignty where the racialized prospects of life are opened up anew. This, however, requires attention to Africa as a contemporary space where scientific knowledge production processes unfold, rather than an ahistorical place either captured by science or where science is applied. Genetic reconnection not only links the related, but distinct, racialized histories of colonialism and slavery binding African Americans and Cameroonians. It also illustrates how these histories are being reassembled under 21st century modes of empire that racialize in ways that are neither undermined nor replicated entirely by DNA alone.

This dissertation explores the lives of Afro-Mexicans who lived in the Port-City of Veracruz and its hinterland, known as Sotavento (Leeward), during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century. It focuses on the understudied Afro-Mexican population of Veracruz and uses it to reframe the historical and historiographical transition between the colonial and national period. It argues how Afro-Mexicans facilitated, complicated, and participated in multiple socio-political processes that reshaped Veracruz and its Atlantic and inland borderlands. This dissertation’s interventions are twofold. First, Kin of the Leeward Port resituates Mexico’s socio-political, cultural, and economic networks with the Atlantic World and the Greater Caribbean; and second, it dissects and problematizes those networks by centering the Black and Afro-Mexican experience. Blacks and Afro-Mexicans shifted the late-colonial political landscape, inserted Mexico into nineteenth-century Atlantic revolutions, and altered the political texture of Veracruz and its connections to Mexican society and the larger Atlantic World. This dissertation centers Afro-Mexicans to do more than recover lives and stories often excluded from the Mexican national narrative; it seeks to reframe the larger history of liberal politics in nineteenth-century Mexico. It seeks to do so by tracing the long, intellectual, ideological, and political traditions of Afro-descendants in Veracruz and connects them to the Black Diaspora. Through vast primary source research, including notarial records, censuses, episcopal formal visitations, Inquisition files, cartography, trade records, travel accounts, and correspondence, both personal and military, this dissertation brings together traditionally distinct historiographical periods in the history of Mexico and Latin America. It also joins three very well-developed historiographical traditions that often overlap but seldomly intersect: Atlantic World History, African Diaspora History, and Latin American History. This dissertation interrogates and subverts archival silences that have sought to erase Black and Afro-Mexican agency from narratives of identity and nation-state formation, seeking to diversify these narratives by foregrounding the voices, perspectives, and actions of Afro-descendants.

Circular Metafictions: what remains unbound is gathered is a hybrid-documentary that conceptualizes a trace from the Middle Passage toward biographical historiography to examine nuanced portraits of ordinary black life. I introduce my developing concept, Black Noetic Theory (BNT) to consider how blackness, interiority and performance are embedded in modes of production, for which to imagine black existence otherwise in audiovisual space. The thesis is divided into three parts to reflect upon the relationships between black life, the incoherencies of black life and artistic production. Part one, situates colonial history and resulting fragmentation. Part two, explores the Henrietta Marie slave ship and speculating a maternal origin. Part three, observes personal history to locate continuities between the spirit and physical worlds.

In a conjuncture of Brazil’s growing economy and increasing presence at the world stage, private companies in collaboration with the local government started a billion-dollar renovation of Rio de Janeiro’s port area, aiming at reviving an allegedly decadent and deserted district. According to the proposal published by the public-private partnership, the re-urbanization of the conveniently-located area could foster the development of real estate enterprises and leisure sites for a city ahead of the 2014 World Cup and 2016 Olympic Games. The novelty of the operation, however, would soon contrast with the uncovering of an old slave wharf and adjacent structures, which were part of a global slave trade hub between the second half of the eighteenth century and the first half of the nineteenth century. While the Valongo Wharf complex has since then become a significant site for Black activists, scholars and locals, having gained global notoriety with its classification as a World Heritage Site by the UNESCO in 2017, efforts toward its memorialization have not only been overshadowed by the neighboring private-sponsored enterprise, but also by the broader, long-lasting and often denied structural racism that permeates different levels of Brazilian society. This thesis examines the significance of the Valongo complex in the context of Brazil’s racial history and I argue that ruins have served as an incentive for the re-reading of history from the perspective of marginalized Black populations as well as a stage for current-day social activism against social and racial inequality, serving as an alternative archive that articulates grassroots organizations which memorialize the site. By doing it so, I also examine the diasporic contours of the Valongo case, which allow not only a transnational analysis on Black solidarity, but also the examination of the local tensions between the State and Afro-Brazilians. Methods-wise, this work includes ethnographic research descriptive of subaltern voices which attempt to affirm and preserve the site’s history, while promoting the alternative repositories of history that support their claims. As examined on this thesis, the ruins of the Valongo not only constitute a historical site but also stimulate the acknowledgement of centuries of struggles of Afro-populations, which have been subjected to enslavement and, after abolition, lack of access to services, housing, among other fundamental rights, being to this date targeted by institutionalized racism, often denied and neglected by discourses of colorblindness. As a site of history and memory, the Valongo is one of the many pieces of the African Diaspora, contributing to a transnational global diasporic imaginary that seeks to challenge Eurocentric discourses and histories, while centering the agency of Afro-Brazilians and Afro-Latin Americans in the formation of present-day societies, in spite the challenges arising from their structural and historical marginalization.

This study addresses the enslaved and free people of African descent in colonial Oaxaca between the 1650s and 1820s. The presence of African captives and their descendants in Oaxaca has long been silenced in the historiography of the Valley of Oaxaca, Latin America, and the broader African Diaspora. By cross-referencing notarial, judicial, and Inquisition records with censuses and marriage registers, I reconstruct the populations of free-coloreds and slaves in Antequera and its surrounding regions from 1650 to 1829. My notarial investigation involves an analysis of bills of sale, manumission letters, wills, and property inventories produced between 1650 and 1740. Likewise, I examine civil and criminal cases and Inquisition records to reveal the everyday lives and cross-cultural contact between African descent people and other ethnic groups. Based on these records, I find that enslaved people arrived in Oaxaca from areas across the Atlantic and Pacific worlds, including Africa, Europe, Asia, and the Americas. Free-persons and slaves met the labor demands of wealthy Spaniards in Oaxaca, and they worked in the city of Antequera as skilled and unskilled laborers, artisans, and professionals during the colonial period. By the eighteenth century, Antequera became a diverse society comprised of multiple ethnic groups, including Spaniards, Africans, Indians, and mestizos. In the early eighteenth century, the population in the Valley of Oaxaca grew because the indigenous populations had recovered from a series of epidemics during the Conquest. Likewise, the mixed-race populations increased significantly due to a rise in mestizaje. Thus, these inter-ethnic unions contributed to the diversity of this colonial society. By the late colonial period, the definitions of social status changed to include status markers based on race, occupation, property ownership, and access to power. Free coloreds made up the middle and lower classes of this social hierarchy, and they often lived and worked alongside other casta groups who belonged to the same social classes. Although the Spanish colonial state implemented several measures to control casta groups, free and enslaved people used multiple strategies to contest elite expectations of race, forge ties with ethnic others, and construct their own experiences and identities in Oaxaca.

This dissertation seeks to comprehensively refocus the analytical frameworks dealing with black modern subjectivity through an in-depth examination of “Culturalism,” or the regime of meaning-making in which Blackness is culturally specified and abstracted from material, political economic, and structural conditions of dispossession through state technologies of antiradicalism. Cold War liberalism institutionalized the hegemony of cultural politics and Culturalism by foregrounding cultural analyses of African retention and syncretism, cultural continuity, and comparative diasporic cultures. As the Cold War instantiated the bifurcation of the world and influenced the direction of decolonization, the African diaspora as an analytical framework became reduced to its cultural aspects. It essentially framed connections among African descendants in terms of culture; asserted Black modernity and claims to equality on cultural grounds; and constructed culture as the domain of struggle. Culturalism divorced Blackness and the African diaspora from the material realties of governmentalized, transnational state projects that sustain racial and class hierarchies.The hegemony of Culturalism in contemporary theories of the Black condition and the African diaspora diverge significantly from those of the Black radical structure of feeling that conceptualized Diaspora (thought not explicitly named at this time) through a nexus that included political economy, cultural formations, and nationalism. Conditions of Black abjection were seen to permeate both the base and the superstructure such that mobilization on both fronts was necessary to combat white supremacy. The result has been a turn away from the political economy/structural critique that, in the interwar period, provided a theoretical framework to challenge American antiblack statist discourse. The marginalization of Black radicalism and political economy produced the politicization of culture as the dominant mode of organizing for Black equality, and the primary intellectual focus in African diaspora studies. Anticommunism entrenched this move away from structural critique by criminalizing and disciplining critiques that opposed the racialized social order, the spread of empire, and capitalist accumulation. Instead of challenging their exclusion from the state based on economic dispossession and maldistribution of resources, Black people in the United States began to mobilize around cultural specification, for inclusion based on liberal civil rights discourse, and/or to assert international linkages based on mutually recognized cultural enunciations of blackness. In other words, the Cold War curtailed the possibilities of challenging the state in terms of the political economy of exploitation, thus Blackness came to be understood in nationalist and cultural terms of exclusion. At the same time, decolonizing countries that sought equality in the world-system asserted their willingness and ability to adopt the culture of development, modernization, and anticommunism. This was notwithstanding the fact that their insertion into the global political economy as sovereign nations continued relations of unequal exchange, declining terms of trade, and neocolonialism.Culturalism is thus a function of antiradical and antiblack statist pedagogy, and after World War II, it became entangled with anticommunism as an instrumentality of surveillance and violence. Culturalism institutionalized the erasure of radical political economic critique in the theorizing of the black global condition, the disciplining of Black radicalism, and the cultural specification of African diaspora studies examined in the dissertation. The cultural specification of blackness and the forms of Culturalism that it takes are integrally related to statist technologies that facilitate the accommodation of black intellectual and practical challenges to the capitalist state while, at the same time, ensuring their cooptation. These are the bases for the surveillance, disciplining, and punishment of black radical critique.

This dissertation examines the concept of the African Diaspora by focusing on four post-colonial Maroon communities of Jamaica, the oldest autonomous Black polities in the Caribbean, which were established by escapees from slave-holding authorities during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In exploring the Maroons as a Black community, the work looks at how they employ diaspora in making linkages to other communities of African descent and for what purposes.Maroons are being positioned in relation to the amorphous concept of diaspora, which is normally used to refer to people who have been dispersed from their place of origins but maintain tradition and connections with kin in other countries. However, I complicate the definition, arguing that diaspora, specifically the African Diaspora, is the condition that produces the collective consciousness of sameness rooted in the idea of common African origins based on a common experience of Black abjection. This understanding of diaspora opens the way to see that the uses of the concept are varied. This approach to diaspora challenges conventional debates in the humanities and social sciences on whether the concept is either a grouping of peoples, a process, or a method, making it possible to simultaneously engage all three modes along with their conceptual and theoretical contributions to the field of Diaspora Studies. Most importantly, the study permits us to see how the critical practice of diaspora is articulated in communities of African descent. Here, “critical practice” refers to acts or utterances that critique, challenge, and re-position distorted understandings of particular peoples and communities. The African Diaspora seen as a critical practice ultimately challenges Western understandings of Black people. Another important concept is “articulation,” as in enunciation and making linkages, which highlights the significance, aim, and utility of the critical practice of diaspora for different Black communities. This approach to diaspora as a critical practice that explores articulation is crucial for understanding the varying responses of Black peoples to global inequality and exclusion. It creates a nuanced approach to diaspora and shows how different Black communities may engage it in their own way. In addition, this study demonstrates how diaspora, not race, as a unit of analysis for understanding the connection of peoples who are considered Black. I view race here to be a social construct that has no biological basis. Thus, in its articulations, diaspora is not a matter of subscribing to an essentialist racial agenda, but incorporates significant differences across diverse Black peoples to fully understand their lived realities and experiences. Furthermore, this view of diaspora permits an interdisciplinary approach to engage the fields of history, anthropology, literature, and political philosophy in the study. Such a comparative and interdisciplinary approach helps to explore systematically the significance of diaspora to Black peoples in general and at site-specific locations. In this case, it de-centers Americo-centric analysis by focusing on the Caribbean. Overall, the dissertation, through an innovative approach, explores how Black communities, particularly Jamaican Maroons, engage diaspora. Undeniably, diaspora, as a critical practice, has contributed much from its earliest articulation and will undoubtedly continue to contribute to an enhanced understanding of Black peoples. Arguably, exploration of the critical practice and articulation of diaspora demonstrates the significance of communities of African descent engaging in endeavors for Black autonomy and sovereignty against the discourse of Black inhumanity.

My dissertation examines the historical and archaeological traces of the rural Black farmsteads we call our Homeplace, from approximately 1840 to the 1920. In it, I argue that these archaeological, architectural, and textual material resonances make visible the actions of resistance in Black communities by signifying the labor of persistence. Displacement and disenfranchisement are unfortunately a consistent and threatening theme in the history of the African-American experience in the United States. As such, holding on to and securing private space is a difficult and often futile process. In a society that systematically displaces people of color, persistence through land ownership and rural self-sufficient farming allows for the occupation and cultivation of the Homeplace; a private, decolonized space which becomes a quintessential site of resistance for Black Americans in the nineteenth century.To illustrate these points, I draw on theories of memory and materiality to examine the ways in which racialization is itself a dimension of materiality. I argue that this means racialization has a physical reality that is socially constituted, historically contingent, embodied and yet dispersed in its enforcement. At the same time, I examine my positionality as a Black descendant of these farmsteaders and as a member of the community undertaking a community-centered archaeological project. I explore the process of excavation as an act of historical resistance and empowerment, creating a moment for community members, stakeholders, and descendants to re-remember and memorialize pasts that are discursively recorded only in our memories and these materials. I assert that our best understanding of disenfranchised pasts must come from an engagement not only with African Diaspora scholarship, but also with the stakeholders and communities who are the stewards of these pasts.

The appearance of Nancy Cunard's 1934 massive Negro: An Anthology represented a significant rupture in the literary and socio-political worlds of the interwar era. This collection of over 150 Black voices from around the world, along with a few notable white contributors, symbolized an important breach in Black radical literature at that time. Describing her work as a "brief outline of the history of the black race,"1 Cunard emphasized her personal desire to counter what she believed to be the racial superstitions of her day. That an heiress of old British wealth would produce an anthology of writing on the Black condition written primarily by Black people may, at first glance, appear incongruous, or yet another example of white bourgeois fascination with the Other. However, Cunard's interest in Black people and culture occasionally adopted a slightly exotic cast, and her investment in Negro: An Anthology was essentially political. She saw her work as a political intervention in defense of the Black world in a moment of crisis. Cunard rejected her aristocratic privilege and spent much of her life fighting fascism, imperialism and racism, through writing and various forms of political activism. This thesis attempts to situate the anthology within a broader context of global contingencies and historical convergences of the 1930s, with the understanding that Cunard was indeed a product of the networks of power of that time. Today, Negro: An Anthology is considered a major contribution to the intellectual and cultural history of 20th century African diasporic history.

This dissertation is an example of community-engaged scholarship. Working with descendant communities in Bocas del Toro, I have conducted ethnographic and oral historical accounts, archival research, and archaeological excavations. My work combines these sources to trace how identities are created, maintained, and change over time. I argue for the importance of social context in identity formation and explore how identity in Bocas del Toro is often expressed through foodways.Today Bocas del Toro, Panama is a diverse racial and ethnic gumbo that has produced a unique Afro-creole culture. The culture area primarily consists of self-identified Afro-Antilleans, but with important contributions from Latino, Chinese, indigenous Panamanians and wealthy White European and American retirees and adventurers. Within the written history of this fascinating culture there are many silences and unanswered questions regarding the early Afro-Antillean inhabitants. My research offers insight into the chronology and components of the present-day culture and explains current demographic trends as well as the local culture history. My research further offers insight into the interactions and trade spheres that developed and supported the early post contact inhabitants during a time when neither the Spanish nor the English had firm control over the region.

Author(s): Fabbri, Giulia | Abstract: In this article the author explores the cultural movement called Afrofuturism, tracing its origins, features, simbology, and its historical and political meanings. Starting from the (supposed) discoursive gap between African and African American people on one side and technology and science fiction on the other, this paradigm addresses themes related to the intersection of African Diaspora and African cultures with technology and science fiction, with the aim to recover the history of slavery and racism through the projections into alternative space-time contexts. In particular, the author explores the feminist afrofuturism perspective in order to examine the specific oppression and cultural production of African and African American women. In doing so, the author analyzes the development of afrofuturism in Italy, focusing on the work of the singer and beatmaker Karima 2G.

This study addresses the emergence, rapid development and gradual decline of chattel slavery in the city of Puebla de los �ngeles during the early and mid-colonial period. The presence and exploitation of African slaves in Puebla has been ignored in the historiography of colonial Mexico (New Spain), Latin America, and the greater African Diaspora. By crossreferencing extant municipal, notarial, parochial and judicial records with Spanish- and Nahuatl-language colonial chronicles, I reconstruct the history of African slaves and their descendants in Puebla from 1536 to 1708. My notarial investigation focuses on bills of slave purchase, letters of manumission, apprentice contracts and loans produced between 1600 and 1700. I find that during the seventeenth century, 20,000 slaves were bought in notarized transactions in the Puebla slave market. The city's large and wealthy Spanish population demanded large retinues of skilled and unskilled slaves to labor as domestics, water carriers, wet nurses, textile workers, etc. The owners of sugar plantations (ingenios) in nearby Iz�car, Cuautla, and the Cuernavaca basin also required large numbers of enslaved workers in the context of extreme Indigenous depopulation. By the 1620s, a series of epidemics, combined with exploitative labor practices, reduced the Indigenous population of Central Mexico and the greater Puebla-Tlaxcala Valley to 10% of its pre-Hispanic levels. In response, the Spanish Crown authorized the implementation of a sophisticated slave trading system, led by Angola-based Portuguese merchants, to operate in Puebla de los �ngeles. These Lusophone networks relied on the encomendero de negros, a locally-based merchant to regulate the entry and sale of all new African arrivals to the city between 1616 and 1639. Yet African slaves had already begun to erode the foundations of chattel slavery well before these dates. Although theoretically reduced to human property under Spanish law, Afro-Poblano slaves actively resisted their bondage by exercising their religious rights as practicing Catholics. In particular, male slaves established numerous formal unions with free women (of all races) through the sacrament of matrimony. In turn, children born of these unions were legally free, leading to numerous generations of free Afro-Poblanos by the end of the seventeenth century.

This dissertation examines African and African Diaspora concert dance in Montreal in relation to Canadian multicultural policies and Québec nationalism. The multiple layers of colonization and various waves of immigration to Québec have made the province a unique nation with its own complex history of racial construction, quite unlike the racial histories of the U.S. or the rest of Canada (though still greatly informed by these racial paradigms). In the debates that arise in Québec over multiculturalism, language is often seen as the main cultural component in need of preservation. However, this focus on language often masks other elements at play in these cultural debates, in particular, how "race" informs notions of cultural belonging in Québec. A focus on African Diaspora dance in Montreal (Québec's largest and most demographically varied city) helps bring racial construction to the fore for two reasons. First, language differences do not distinguish Québec's Black community from the white French-Canadian majority as Québec's Black population is comprised mainly of French-speakers, and accordingly, studying Montreal's African Diaspora reduces the significance of linguistic difference. Second, concentrating on dance practices helps identify how the Montreal public interprets bodies and their cultural meanings. By analyzing the public support and critical reception of African Diaspora dance practices in Montreal, this dissertation examines how racial difference is constructed through multicultural rhetoric, policies, and debates about dance; it also suggests that dance practitioners have the ability to change and inform these constructed identities and the social landscape that frames them. To conduct this research, I use archival material along with personal interviews and participant-observer ethnography to examine: the early visits of Les Ballets Africains to North America (with a particular focus on Montreal); the Montreal-based company Les Ballets Jazz; the 1999 Montreal festival Afrique: Aller/Retour; and the work of Contemporary African dance choreographer Zab Maboungou. With these subjects, my projects contributes a partial history of African Diaspora dance in Montreal and analyzes the effectiveness and the shortcomings of Canadian Multiculturalism on this community.

This study examines the correlation between the expansion and collapse of the Oyo Empire, the ethnolinguistic configuration of the migration from the Bight of Benin to Cuba and transformations in the conceptual meaning of Lucumí. Much of the historiography assumes the coherence of Lucumí culture was the result of the "transculturation" or "creolization" of Oyo-centric socio-cultural repertoires in the first third of the nineteenth century, but undervalues symbolic idioms which had already consolidated in Cuba from earlier migrations largely due to Oyo expansionism. The central argument is that a smaller, but more diverse mixture of ethnolinguistic groups - directly or indirectly victimized by Oyo imperialism - established basic Lucumí socio-cultural paradigms in the mid-to-late eighteenth century which were then reinforced and transformed with the massive influx of Yoruba-speakers during Oyo's collapse (c. 1817 - 1836). The two main objectives of this study are 1) to verify that an infusion of Oyo-centric cultural repertoires into pre-existing Lucumí socio-cultural paradigms coincided with Oyo's collapse and a dramatic increase of the Bight of Benin migration to Cuba; and 2) to demonstrate that by the early-1830s Lucumí cultures of resistance in the Atlantic World helped set in motion the ethnogenesis of a transnational "pan-Yoruba" identity. In order to demonstrate this significant transformation, which is at the root of modern-day practices and beliefs of the Afro-Cuban religion commonly known as Santería, this study incorporates theoretical approaches and methodologies deriving from a diverse array of academic disciplines, including: history, anthropology, sociology, ethnology, ethnomusicology and linguistics. Primary and secondary sources include a variety of published and unpublished written and oral data originating from West Africa, Europe, the Caribbean and the Americas. In particular, documented African names of people from the Bight of Benin can be used to evaluate the likely ethnolinguistic composition of the migration to Cuba; as well as the conceptual meaning of Lucumí between 1826 and 1840. A database of nearly 4,000 names (and their interpretations) has been included with this thesis as a supplementary file.

Dancing Africa, Making Diaspora concerns the industry of West African dance in the United States. Considering the relationship between dance, diaspora, and belonging, Dancing Africa works to reveal the power of dance in shaping participants' individual and collective identities through the premise of African connectedness. In other words, this dissertation considers West African dance as a meaning-making practice. Through the study of multiple West African dance and drum contexts - a Broadway show, dance classes in one Californian community center, a dance "homecoming" workshop in Guinea - it interrogates the ways everyday people (those typically excluded by the field's privileging of textual archives) conceptualize, embody, and make use of the African diaspora. Ultimately, this dissertation shows how dance links the symbolic and physical dimensions of diaspora: the imaginative work that fosters diasporic connectedness and the physical movement through and across space that has, and continues to, yield variegated African diasporic communities. This dissertation examines U.S. evocations of Africanness through West African dance in an effort to raise and answer questions about the performative capabilities of West African dance and to investigate the processes by which African diasporic communities are shaped because of and through this dance form. Based largely on ethnographic observations and interviews with West African dance participants, Dancing Africa, Making Diaspora shows how West African dance influences how participants understand what the African diaspora is, and how they see their own raced and gendered bodies in relation to it. This project reveals the bearing that West African dance has on participants' lives by asking the following questions: In what ways did diaspora play a role in the career of West African dance as a formal practice in the US? Why do people take part in West African dance and what "work" does it do for them? How does gender and nationality affect one's positioning in these various communities? And finally, how has the commodification of the form impacted meanings of diaspora, blackness, and Africanness? Dancing Africa reveals the operations through which this dance economy both widens the circle of African diasporic "we" and continues to police its ever-shifting boundaries of belonging.

AbstractbyElizabeth FarfánJoint Doctorate of Philosophy in Medical Anthropology with the University of California San Francisco University of California BerkeleyProfessor Nancy Scheper-Hughes, ChairAfrican ancestry and collective resistance to slavery play a central role in access to constitutional rights for Brazilians living in rural black communities denominated comunidades remanescentes de quilombos. In the effort to repatriate lands to the descendants of quilombolas or fugitive slaves, the Brazilian government, together with the Brazilian Anthropological Association, and Black Movement activists, turned rural black communities into national patrimony through a series of public policies that emphasize their ethnic and cultural difference by connecting them to quilombo ancestors. Article 68 of the 1988 Brazilian constitution declared that any descendants of quilombos who were still occupying their ancestor's lands should be recognized as owners and granted land titles by the federal government. With the help of NGOs, rural black communities are re-learning their identity and becoming quilombos in order to obtain the land and social rights they need to continue surviving. While the quilombo clause may seem like an important historical change in the ability of black Brazilians to use the constitution to their advantage, it is important to ask what the stakes are of becoming a quilombo for the residents of a community. Here I explore the ways in the quilombo recognition process has significantly impacted the lives of a community in São Francisco do Paraguaçu in the Recôncavo of Bahia. Engaging with scholarship that questions multiculturalist policies, new forms of citizenship, and the re-construction of colonial subjectivities into modern political identities, I argue that the quilombo clause, and the bureaucratic system built to support it, recycles a romanticized and nostalgic story of slavery and resistance in colonial Brazil through a process I call (re)membering. Here, I illustrate the ways in which the once colonial "quilombo" has been re-imagined into a new differentiated community (the comunidade remanescente de quilombo) rooted in ethnic and cultural difference for the purpose of distributing collective rights to black citizens. I contend that by focusing on the cultural difference of rural black communities, the quilombo clause ignores the racialized political and social discrimination that these communities have faced historically and continue to face. Although the quilombo clause was meant to address the history of discrimination and exclusion of black communities, it has actually led to social confusion and conflict surrounding the validity and authenticity of a differentiated identity for quilombo descendants.

AbstractLes ombres noires de Saint Domingue: The Impact of Black Women on Gender & Racial Boundaries in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century FrancebyRobin MitchellDoctor of Philosophy in HistoryUniversity of California, BerkeleyProfessor Tyler Stovall, ChairThere were few black women on French soil in the nineteenth century, yet images of and discussions about them are found in political, artistic, scientific, and various social milieus. This paradox is explored for its symbolic and nationalistic significance by investigating how public discourse about them fostered specific aspects of French national identity. The loss by revolution of the black colony of Saint Domingue (Haiti) created an influx of refugees that haunted France. Specific types of representations of black women helped mitigate this national trauma.Using data collected from archives, art, literature, and legislation, as well as social, scientific, and political discourse, the lives and public representation of four very real black women from late eighteenth-century Saint Domingue through the abolition of slavery in 1848 - including the ancien régime, the Napoleonic era, and the Restoration of monarchy - are examined for their role in the construction of French social, sexual and racial identity. The opening overview examines racial policies important for keeping whites and non-whites legally distinct - exacerbated by the loose control of mores in colonial Saint Domingue. The legal case of Henriette Lucille tested the claim that slavery did not exist on French soil, exposing how individual attitudes were undermining royal authority. Sarah Bartmann, the Hottentot Venus, was used by the scientific community to quantify race, as well as by the white French public to witness its superiority over blacks. Ourika was a very young black girl given to an aristocratic woman as a house pet. She was, however, raised in the household as an aristocrat. Though she died young, her reputation became the subject of literary and theater works that emphasized the impossibility of her marrying a white French man of her own class. Last, Jeanne Duval, common-law wife of Charles Baudelaire is seen through the record of her life left by him and their contemporaries as well as his later biographers - an ugly portrait of a mulatto of base behavior unworthy of the poetic genius whom she inspired.Exposed is the way that race was utilized - along with gender, sexuality and class - to encourage unity amongst white French men and women, highlighting why these black women were such important tools in that national quest. Regardless of who they were or where they came from, the overarching narrative was the reinforcement of the inauthentic Frenchness of black women. Yet the representations of them also reveal the fissures in the definition of what it meant to be French that challenged existing gender and racial boundaries within white French society.

Author(s): Lensing-Sharp, Dinah | Abstract: Review of Priscilla Layne's White Rebels in Black: German Appropriation of Black Culture, 2018.

Author(s): Krueger, Molly; Sandberg, Michael; Michael, Theodor; Rosenhaft, Eve | Abstract: Book Review for Professor Eve Rosenhaft's English-language translation of Theodor Michael's memoires: Deutsch sein und schwarz dazu: Erinnerungen eines Afro-Deutschen.