Black Liberation Research Articles

Elasticity in twentieth-century sculpture

How can elasticity be applied as an analytical category for the study of sculpture, here especially of the 1970s? The aim of this article is to circumvent binary, gender-bound approaches to materials. It discusses how elasticity moves from representation (Germaine Richier, Olga Jevrić, Naum Gabo) to materiality and medium, such as nylon and rubber/latex (Rosemary Mayer, Senga Nengudi, Eva Hesse, Claes Oldenburg), leaving behind the paradigm of minimalism in favour of eccentric, bodily and sensuous objects. Rosalind Krauss emphasized how in post-war American art, ‘sculpture and painting have been kneaded and stretched and twisted in an extraordinary demonstration of elasticity’. This breaking out of categories can be seen as a sociopolitical figure of thought, for example in Nengudi’s sculptures, where the (female) body is restrained by the material and enmeshed in a social web of heteronormative ideas, but also in the sociopolitical context, such as the Black Liberation Movement and demonstrations against the Vietnam War.

Decolonising archaeology in South Africa: two decades after the National Heritage Resources Act of 1999

Twenty-four years ago, the National Heritage Resources Act, No. 25 of 1999 (NHRA) was enacted in South Africa. This was a moment of change, when the heritage of those marginalised during the colonial and Apartheid eras would finally be given its rightful place on the national heritage list. There was a sense of optimism amongst politicians that the African past was finally to be recognised in an inclusive and representative future. This was echoed in archaeology, given its central role in uncovering and telling the story of precolonial South Africa. The discipline slowly opened its doors to academics of all ethnic groups and new perspectives were identified. But an examination of the practical consequences and impact of this progressive legislation for transforming officially declared heritage in the past 24 years shows surprisingly little change in the overall body of recognized, listed heritage. Recent studies of transformation in South African archaeology have focussed on institutional transformation; possible transformation of the types and frequency of sites declared as national and provincial heritage sites has not yet been examined. It is this issue which our paper addresses. The paper presents analysis that relies on the South African Heritage Resources Information System (SAHRIS) database covering the period 1936 to mid-2022. Whilst sites associated with European colonialism still predominate, there has been a change in the frequency of types of heritage declared since 1999, with an increase in sites associated with the Black liberation struggle. Yet the list remains very unbalanced, with only a single heritage site connected to the precolonial past of Black South Africans having been declared as a national heritage site since 1999. We discuss and classify the types of heritage declared since 1999 and suggest reasons for the distortion.

American Defender of One Nigeria: James Meredith, the Nigerian Civil War and the Politics of American Intervention in the Global South

Following the Biafran allegations of genocide against the Nigerian government during the Civil War, pro-Biafran groups emerged in the United States to pressure the American government into political intervention in the form of recognizing the Biafran republic. In response, African-American Civil Rights hero James Meredith counter-balanced the pro-Biafran groups, and advocated for one Nigeria in the United States. By analyzing public speech, correspondences, fact-finding mission reports, congressional hearing testimonies, and oral interviews, this paper examines Meredith’s pro-One Nigeria (Pan-African) activism during the Nigerian Civil War, and promotes a nuanced understanding of the international dimension of the Nigerian Civil War. This study proposes an episode of transnational history of the global black liberation movement of the long sixties, and demonstrates that Meredith’s pro-one Nigeria activism during the Nigerian Civil War was influenced by his background as a Civil Rights leader and his pan-African ideology.

Du Bois, Marx, and the Jewish Question Reconsidered

ABSTRACT W. E. B. Du Bois’s groundbreaking scholarship on race and racial prejudice was inseparable from his lifelong struggle for racial justice, Black liberation, and against social and political oppression. Both in his theoretical and in his historical-political work, Du Bois substantially and critically engaged with the “Jewish question”: with Jewish life, history, and politics, with the experiential perspective of an oppressed minority, and with the fight against prejudice and racial hatred. Throughout in life, and in particular in later years, Du Bois was influenced by Karl Marx’s critical analysis of social and economic life; Marx’s own discussion of the “Jewish question,” concerning the difference between political equality and human emancipation, proved substantial to his argument on civil rights and racial justice. In this article, I argue that Du Bois did not only draw from the Jewish experience and from Marx’s work on the “Jewish question” in his work on African American history and politics, but also that he, in fact, reconsidered the “Jewish question” from an African American perspective, offering his own reading and understanding of the “Jewish question,” thus applying his concept of double consciousness for rethinking it as a question of racial identity and racial consciousness, and as relevant and applicable to Black liberation and the fight against racism.

Subversive text as dystopian negative: speculative gesture, prophetic rhetoric, and Helon Habila’s Oil on Water

This paper connects a crucial use of rhetoric in activist texts of the past 175 years to a similar rhetorical structure in the arts. In causes such as African decolonization, Black liberation, revolutionary socialism, and ecocriticism, activist texts vehemently expose injustice and turn swiftly at the end toward emancipatory possibility. Using Fred Moten’s concept of prophesy, I read this rhetorical structure as a vital intervention in the imaginary of the future possible, and I use the term “dystopian negative” to describe artistic uses of this rhetoric. In my reading of Helon Habila’s 2010 novel Oil on Water, I examine how the dystopian negative rejects the alarmism of dystopian narratives, gesturing instead to possible alternatives. Interpreting this gesture as a call to audiences to participate actively in building better futures, this article queries the role of the audience in the interpretive field of dissident expression.

Learnings from Black Liberation System Entanglements Part II: Our experience of system traps

Much of the systems community’s explicit justice work has focused on the ecological crisis of climate, but not as much has been shared about the learnings from other intersectional social justice movements such as racial, gender, disability, LGBTQIA+, indigenous, and economic justice. This is partly because this systems practice work is being done outside of the “expert” systemic design communities. In this paper, I explore an updated understanding of adverse system entanglements, or traps, contextualized to the lived experience and global struggle for Black liberation in conversation with other inextricably entangled struggles (feminist, queer, womanist, mujerista, queer womanist, Latin American liberation, disability, and more). Classical system traps still apply, but they are insufficient to capture our full, lived experience of entanglements. In other words, you can avoid the traditional system traps and still become ensnared in other traps. For there are further, deeper, more insidious traps that work against our justice movements and flows. These shapeshifting traps require that we also are shapeshifting. I highlight learnings we already have, embody, carry, and through which we tell stories to the systemic design community to facilitate inter-ontological and inter-epistemic conversation. This is the second in a short series of papers to explore updated Black Liberation adverse system entanglements (or traps), movements (or interventions), and praxeology (instead of methodology).

Envisioning Abolition in Our Local Asian American Communities

Abstract: The Chinatown Art Brigade hosted a teach-in in 2021 inspired by the uprisings for Black liberation and growing public discussion of abolitionist demands during the summer of 2020. The public dialogue highlighted the myriad ways Asian American leftist movements resist the carceral state through work in housing justice, mutual aid, sex worker organizing, racial justice, participatory defense, and prisoner solidarity.

Enhancing the care experiences of Black women along the breast cancer journey: Meaningfully engaging breast cancer survivors to co-create a targeted, culturally relevant resource hub

There is very little tailored and culturally relevant information available for Black women in Canada around breast cancer. For those who are diagnosed, and who undergo their own breast cancer journey, many feel isolated while navigating care programs that centre around whiteness and perpetuate medical and anti-Black racism. Although it is well-documented that Black women in the United States are often diagnosed with more aggressive forms of cancer and at a younger age, the lack of race-based data in the Canadian context makes it difficult to know for certain how women in Canada are affected. In order to provide trusted, reliable and tailored information, The Peter Gilgan Centre for Women’s Cancers at Women’s College Hospital, in partnership with the Olive Branch of Hope, developed a resource hub that was the first of its kind in Canada, and launched during Black Liberation Month in 2022. Presented in the form of a website and disseminated to over 50 cancer centres and hospitals across the country, components of this resource included, a.) a synthesis of all available evidence on breast cancer disparities for Black women in Canada, mapped to actionable steps b.) representative images and videos of Black clinicians explaining concepts in plain language (from risk factors to reconstruction), c.) community resources compiled from the Olive Branch of Hope and d.) a list of relevant research studies and clinical trials. Guided by principles of Black Feminism and Participatory Action Research, this resource was co-created in partnership with four Black women who were breast cancer survivors (‘co-creators’) who channeled their lived experiences into the project direction. This paper aims to highlight our process with co-creators, discuss key reflections to guide future work and highlight the need for ongoing work in this area.

The Captive New Afrikan Nation, the Politics of Solidarity, and the Ongoing Struggle for Liberation

In 1968, the world was changing. New nation-states were forming as former colonies revised relationships between Africa, Asia, and the “West.” Some fought hard for their liberation, and some were still fighting. From Vietnam to Zimbabwe, bloody struggles against racist settlers and western capital clarified the tenacity of white supremacy and imperialism. Other nations were “peacefully” exchanging white political leadership for parties and personalities rooted in local soil. All excited the US Black left who welcomed the changes as the ideal condition for Black liberation. Among them were activists who, beginning in March 1968, decided to pursue the creation of an independent Black nation-state that would occupy land in the Deep South. Considering Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, South Carolina, and Georgia as the rightful territory of their Republic of New Afrika, those who championed independence sought to replicate the apparent successes of Tanzania and other newly formed states, while contributing to the complete overthrow of western hegemony. This contribution explores the theory of the New Afrikan struggle for land and independence. It considers how New Afrikans negotiated their African ancestry and colonized status with their distinctly North American position within geopolitics. In asserting their right to self-determination, New Afrikans complicated the meanings of captivity and Third World solidarity in ways unique to the Black Power era. Even as they built on their predecessors from the African Blood Brotherhood, UNIA, and even the CPUSA, New Afrikans helped to frame their era’s political ideas in a manner that continues to guide projects of international liberation and solidarity.

The revelation of God: How and to whom does God reveals God self to?

The African world view is not monolithic or homogeneous. However, that being the case, there is a strong metaphysicaland existential leaning in terms of Spirit and the world. The Spirit is the medium whereby revelation occurs for all ofcreation. African indigenous knowledge as episteme and Black liberation theology as a paradigm have something to teach outside Western dualism about the revelation of God not being linear in form. The methodological aspect of this research is a literature study aimed at discussing transmission and reception of biblical discourse in Africa by viewing differently the subject of God’s revelation from a variety of sources. The article seeks to argue that indigenous knowledge and, from the Black liberation paradigm, conceptions of God reveal a God with a social existence in contrast to a Western God who abdicates creation when the majority of creation and her creatures are oppressed by White supremacy.

Rooted resistance: The struggle for Black liberation through food cultivation

ABSTRACT In U.S. cities, distinct regions of wealth and poverty structure the distribution of political power and public resources along racial lines. Black-led urban farms resist these inequitable conditions by using food cultivation as a tool of community resilience building and power shifting. In this study, I propose a framework to describe the roles of Black-led urban farms within low-income Black communities. I assess this framework using a comparative case study and semi-structured interviews with Black urban farmers in Atlanta, Georgia; Detroit, Michigan; and Portland, Oregon. Findings suggest that Black-led urban farms advance Black community survival and wellbeing by instilling local Black placemaking, fostering personal and racial healing, and resisting racial capitalism. I conclude that Black-led urban farms function as “compass institutions” and generate social value that benefits their respective cities. I provide policy recommendations for local governments and prospective funders seeking to advance the social impact of these farms.

Did Marx Defend Black Slavery? On Jamaica and Labour in a Black Skin

Abstract Over the past 40 years a tradition of Marx interpretation has built up around a single passage concerning Black slavery in an 1853 letter from Marx to Engels, in order to demonstrate that Marx’s support for emancipation was conditional on the level of ‘civilisation’ attained by Black slaves. I will argue that this interpretation, which attempts to prove Marx’s racist defence of slavery, is overdetermined by an inattention to historical context and a hypersensitivity to Marx’s nineteenth-century epithets. This is important because the alleged anti-Black racism of Marx and the place Black workers occupy in his historical-materialist vision of class struggle are of the utmost significance for properly conceptualising the relationship between Marxism and Black liberation.

Red Maulanas: Revisiting Islam and the Left in twentieth‐century South Asia

AbstractIn the early 20th century, colonised people across empires rejected their status quo with visions and articulations of different emancipatory futures. The more radical and creative of these projects fused socialist thought with national, cultural or religious traditions. Grounded in ideas of equality, redistribution and common ownership, these visions offered futures of freedom beyond nationalism. Islamic Socialism was one of these revolutionary currents alongside Arab socialism, African socialism and Black Liberation Theology. The article reviews the historical scholarship on the relationship between Muslims and Left politics in 20th century South Asia and proposes Islamic Socialism as a new field of study. Some of the earliest articulations and enduring commitment to the politics of Islamic Socialism emerged from South Asia, yet the topic is not easily located in the existing scholarship on the region or elsewhere. Employing a diverse set of texts, I show how we can approach through three categories ‐ time, space, and ideas– and map out subaltern Islam as a future area of research. Existing studies have treated Islamic Socialism variously as crude readings of Islam and Marxism, an immemorial Islamic tradition, the intellectual product of theoretical congruence, or as a novel and creative experiment. Reflecting on its minor status in historiography, the article argues for the importance of Islamic Socialism in thinking beyond Islamic literalism and furthering our understanding of decolonisation experiments, everyday subaltern politics, and the possibilities for Marxism and Islam in the Global South.

Black Lives Matter Toward Afromodernity: Political Speech, Barbarism, and the Euromodern World

This paper proffers an Afromodern analysis of black liberation, embodied in the Black Lives Matter movement. In doing so, it revisits the historical concept of barbarism as a critical modality for human silencing, in order to make sense of anti-black racism in our extant social order and its re-articulation through systematic discourses of black criminality. The essay explores two dialectically opposing modernities as having differentiated effects on the construction of the human being. Euromodernity barbarizes the black subject as a carceral being, absent political speech. Afromodernity, contrastingly, fashions the black subject as a communicative being endowed with political speech and as such, black politics becomes not a relic of barbarism, but in lieu, embodies a modern re-enactment of political society. The paper concludes that Black Lives Matter functions as an Afromodern displacement of Euromodern anti-black racism by contesting American democracy as a carceral apparatus to ensure a democratic revolution.

Decolonial love as a pedagogy of care for Black immigrant post-secondary students

This paper explores ‘decolonial love’ as a pedagogy of care among 16 first generation Black immigrants enrolled in predominantly White four- year colleges in the United States and Canada. The term ‘decolonial love’ and extensions of this original conceptualization focus on radical self-love and resistance to colonial oppression. Scholars have also connected decolonial love with Black liberation movements. Through a narrative analysis of the Black immigrant student experiences in university, this article uses a decolonial and intersectional approach to explore how higher educational institutions can embrace a radical decolonial praxis. This approach affirms and supports Black identities in a climate of anti-Black racism. The paper will discuss implications for institutions and educators whose aim it is to decolonize their teaching practices.

Making a Case for Afrofuturism as a Critical Qualitative Inquiry Method for Liberation

Afrofuturism as “both an artistic aesthetic and a framework for critical theory” is concerned with racial equity and technological agency to create emergent liberatory [social] systems. Using Afrofuturism as a research method encourages the imagination of new possibilities for Black liberation in a world where racial inequalities persist. Through Afrofuturism, researchers and public administrators can enter empirical and imaginary evidence required for Black liberation into the public sphere. This article provides thick descriptions of a pilot project, the Three Cities project, to demonstrate how Afrofuturism can be used as a research method for gathering empirical and imaginary evidence, particularly for public service design. This article provides an illustrative example of experiences of racism in schools and corresponding solutions with a key finding that Afrofuturism centres Black communities’ knowledge, subjectivities and experiences. The article concludes that Afrofuturism as a critical qualitative inquiry method for liberation can challenge the range of traditions and histories that have shaped public administration in ways that subjugated and marginalised Black communities, but importantly, academic researchers would need to be embedded with Black communities for an extended period in service of their Black liberation agenda.

Make Way for Tomorrow: Documenting the Struggle in Madeline Anderson's Integration Report 1 (1960)

Abstract: In 1960, Madeline Anderson composed Integration Report 1 , a nation-spanning chronicle of desegregation and Black liberation efforts at the dawn of a new and pivotal decade for civil rights in America. Drawing on a new interview with Anderson, this essay details the making of her landmark film (the first of a trio of essential protest documentaries) and analyzes how the director and her collaborators interweave and mobilize various formal elements to cinematically portray the struggle for equality being waged at the time of production.

Love as Method: Tracing the Contours of Love in Black and African Feminist Imaginations of Liberation

What imaginations of the self are evident in Black and African feminist visions of Black liberation? How is love framed as a centring politics of Black liberation across social and political struggles? These two questions address two features of Black and African feminist social justice politics: first, a re-imagining of the self via routes of the communal self and love of oneself; and, second, a centring of love as fundamental to any project of Black liberation. Exploring these two trajectories, the article engages gendered love in terms of its material and affective registers within feminist struggles for justice and healing. To do this, select readings of African and Black feminist theorising, reflections, and activist works are explored including Pumla Gqola, Sharlene Khan, June Jordan, bell hooks amongst others. The intellectual diversity of these feminist contributions connects with reference to a feminist project that is rooted in (re)imaginings of love and self that are simultaneously personal yet also political. In the end, the project of Black liberation must address itself to the place of love in healing. The article explores what some of these features of love liberation could entail.

Existentialism: A Strive for Identity in the Select Poems of Maya Angelou

Existentialism is an approach that emphasizes human existence. It opposes rationalist tradition and culture by emphasizing action, and freedom, and choosing them as important to human existence. This study is an attempt to unveil Maya Angelou’s existential themes in her poems. Angelou, as an African-American poet naturally possess the existentialistic attitude and fought for the freedom of her community. The selected poems for this study are: “Times-Square-Shoeshine-Composition”, “Harlem Hopscotch”, and “Africa”. Most of her poems are found with the themes of pain, hope, quest for freedom and self-love. This paper examines an in-depth analysis of Angelou’s select poems which aids to explore the world of Angelou where she lives with her own perspectives of life and strives for the freedom of humanity. Her writings are the mirror of herself. The paper concludes by showing how Angelou has turned all of her struggles into victories and how she has battled for black liberation and became an icon among the blacks’.

“Rest as resistance:” Black cyberfeminism, collective healing and liberation on @TheNapMinistry

Abstract Tricia Hersey, founder of The Nap Ministry, uses rest as a “healing mechanism” and a form of resistance. With a vibrant social media following, the Nap Ministry builds upon a strong history of Black feminist activism that centers the lived experiences of Black women. According to Hersey, rest is personal and political, a fight against the commodification and exploitation of laboring Black folks from chattel slavery to contemporary grind and hustle culture. This article explores how Hersey builds upon a lineage of Black women’s activism in digital spaces while also exploring rest, “soul care,” and communal healing as ideologies rooted in Black (cyber)feminism. I argue that Nap Ministry constellates Womanism, Black (cyber)feminism, and Black liberation theory by promoting the power of rest, encouraging resistance against what bell hooks describes as the “imperialist white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” that exploits Black women’s labor and renders their voices invisible.