Black Movement Research Articles

A QUESTÃO RACIAL BRASILEIRA: APONTAMENTOS TEÓRICOS PARA COMPREENSÃO DO GENOCÍDIO NEGRO

Racism in our society has structured a pattern of normality that naturalizes racially unequal relations established in the social production of space. We are a country of colonial formation that has been historically structured by racially unequal relations. The purpose of this article is to understand the relationship between racism and necropolitics as devices that generate the extermination of the black population and culture in Brazil. Our hypothesis is that the silence of the debate on the Brazilian racial issue in tackling social inequalities has created difficulties for the construction of anti-racist policies and intensified the black genocide. Thus, we understand that the struggles of the Brazilian black movement are one of the ways of confronting the necropolitical.

A Religious Movement on Trial: Transformative Years, Judicial Questions and the Nation of Islam

The Nation of Islam (NOI) is one of the most controversial political-religious groups in the United States. Some define it as an exclusionary race-based group, while others see it as a genuine empowerment movement. Although it has been viewed as an unconventional fringe group, NOI represents an important syncretic movement of its time. Its approach to Islam was marked by a range of currents from the anti-colonial interpretive framework of the Ahmadiyya to Marcus Garvey's Universal Negro Improvement Association forging a highly dynamic narrative to explain the racial injustices and individual and collective requirements of future emancipation. Despite its strong anti-establishment discourse, NOI operates within the parameters legal and judicial system and seeks to reach out to new groups. As NOI faces the challenge of balancing its clashing inner currents rooted in its commitments to orthodox vs. vernacularized Islam or anti-systemic vs. accommodationist policies and often stigmatized by outside observers, it constitutes one of the most promising and precarious black movement.

Prioritizing Black Self-Determination: The Last Strident Voice of Twentieth-Century Black Nationalism

Black self-determination, like the movement for civil rights, has long been a struggle on both the national and international stage. From the Black consciousness campaign of South Africa to the Black Power crusades of the United States and Caribbean, and the recent global affirmations of Black Lives Matter, Black nationalist ideology and desires for equity and independence seem ever more significant. While marginal characteristics of Black nationalism clearly persist in the calls for justice and equality, only one voice of twentieth-century Black nationalism remains committed to the full dimensions of the Black nationalist agenda. This essay documents the one leader and movement that has remained committed to a Black nationalist platform as a response to persistent white supremacy. The author reflects on the valuable contributions of twentieth-century Black nationalism and what form, if any, Black nationalism will take when this last Black nationalist movement leader is gone.

From a Hashtag to a Movement: Black Women Movement Actors’ Challenges to Leading a Radical Movement in a “Postracial America”

There is limited literature on the connections of local political organizations affiliated with M4BL, led and facilitated by black women movement actors (BWMA). To address this gap in the literature, I conducted five focus groups in Maryland and the District of Colombia in 2016 to identify the challenges facing BWMA (i.e., leaders, organizers, and protestors) in local organizations connected to the Movement for Black Lives. Theoretically grounded in intersectionality and Black radical social movement theories, themes emerging from these focus groups identify a deep racial capital, but challenges a broader vision for movement work rooted in a global analysis. Findings also reveal the challenges presented to BWMA are the following: social media activism as a dominant participation mode, participants’ goals toward colorblind reform policies, and challenges to class-consciousness and coalition-building that signal a racial consciousness among these focus groups and healthy skepticism toward national and global coalitions. This research provides a nuanced discussion of the struggle to build a global working-class movement in local anti-racist organizations which would outline the schism from theory to action. The disconnection between global and local goals is a persistent theme. Implications for future research are discussed.

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: Agricultural resistance and the Black freedom movement

Private Arms and Civil Unrest: Lessons from the Black Freedom Movement

The turmoil of 2020 amplifies the American conversation about the utility and legitimacy of firearms during periods of civil unrest. This article engages that conversation through the lens of the Black American experience. The principles drawn from this treatment help frame a sphere of legitimate gun use during periods of civil unrest and underscore the enduring importance of firearms as a resource for individuals whom the state cannot protect. These principles emerge from a considered philosophy and practice of arms developed by a people who have a long history of confronting violent threats that the state has been unable or unwilling to stop.

Black/Africana Studies and Black/Africana Biblical Studies

Abstract In this study, Abraham Smith introduces the nature, history, and interventions of two theoretical-political cultural productions: Black/Africana studies (the systematic and rigorous study of Africa and African descendants) and Black/Africana biblical studies (a biblical studies’ subfield that analyzes and appraises the strategies of reception and the historical and contemporary impact of the Christian bible for people of African descent). Both cultural productions were formally introduced in U.S. educational institutions in the late 1960s as a part of the Black Freedom movement. Both have long and deep intellectual antecedents on the one hand and ever-evolving recent interventions that challenge a narrow politics of identity on the other. Through the interrogation of keywords (such as race, family, and Hip Hop or cartographies, canons, and contexts), moreover, the study examines how these two theoretical-political projects question the settled epistemologies or prevailing intellectual currencies of their respective times.

Between Protest and Politics

Abstract This article examines the official Black Lives Matter Movement (the Black Lives Matter Global Network) as a point of departure to argue that Black Lives Matter (BLM) in general expands our epistemological framework for thinking about black freedom movements, black freedom dreams, and black freedom strategies. By analyzing the movement’s explicit refusal to be likened to civil rights movement organizations as a concurrent attack against intraracial sexism, heterosexism, and transphobia, the article insists that BLM deprivileges heteronormativity to show that black freedom dreams must include gender and sexual liberation. By considering BLM’s rejection of capitalism as a broader critique of neoliberalism’s forceful role in maintaining black dispossession, the author posits that BLM desires to disrupt the state’s tendency to use the black middle class to enact, enforce, and reinforce an economic order that relies upon race and racism to codify and cement black inequality. Finally, the author posits that the movement’s tactics and goals provide a framework through which to enact short-term change, while pushing to dismantle the larger system of antiblack racism that is refracted through global capitalism.

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: agricultural resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

Monica M. White: Freedom farmers: agricultural resistance and the Black Freedom Movement

The devil finds leisure

ABSTRACT In 1976, James Baldwin’s The Devil Finds Work is published, a scathingly telling piece of cinematic critique at the height of exploitation and the ongoing efforts of the Black Liberation Movement (BLM). Prior to that in 1963, Baldwin had published The Fire Next Time, a poignant letter to a nephew on the state of America in the midst of eventual civil unrest. What is presented is a fictionalized letter to a family member that takes the reader through a day-in-the-life of a racialised self within a society that does the work of racialising through forms of leisure entertainment, all in the midst of a pandemic and global civil unrest. Within that day, Baldwin’s work serves as the inspiration for this recollection and criticism, as very little has been discussed about fiction as entertainment for consumption and the implications of this consumption. Here, the devil finds leisure as much as work.

Black Women’s Activism in Brazil: Black Genocide, Anti-Blackness and Racial Apartheid

Este artigo enfoca as mudanças na militância das mulheres negras, particularmente em Salvador, Bahia, Brasil, de 1995-2015, comparando duas marchas nacionais. Organizações negras em todo o país se uniram para organizar uma marcha nacional em Brasília, capital do país, em Novembro de 1995. Vinte anos depois, em Novembro de 2015, as mulheres negras organizaram uma marcha nacional para abordar a interseção do racismo e do sexismo. Durante esses vinte anos, militantes negras trabalharam incansavelmente contra o genocídio negro, o anti-negritude e o apartheid racial no Brasil, e as mulheres negras estiveram na linha de frente dessas lutas. A interseccionalidade de raça, classe e gênero foi e permanece crítica para a militância das mulheres negras e a produção do conhecimento e da pesquisa. O artigo examina as mudanças na militância no movimento negro ao longo de vinte anos que marcaram o crescimento das organizações e redes de mulheres negras.

Os Quilombos e a Superação da Colonialidade Moderna

Este artigo expõe o envolvimento da Faculdade Mineira de Direito (PUC Minas) na luta do movimento negro e quilombola para a efetivação dos direitos conquistados na Assembleia Nacional Constituinte de 1987/1988 e que foram positivados na Constituição da República Federativa do Brasil de 1988 (CR/88). Os direitos antidiscriminatórios, os direitos culturais dos povos de matriz africana e os direitos étnicos e territoriais das comunidades quilombolas representam a tentativa de superação do racismo estrutural da sociedade moderna/colonial, que nega as liberdades básicas e o acesso aos recursos e oportunidades sociais aos povos de matriz indígena e de matriz africana. A construção de uma sociedade livre, justa e solidária, que ainda é uma mera promessa constitucional prevista no artigo 3º, inciso I, da CR/88, e cuja efetividade se mostra ainda distante da realidade excludente e marginalizadora da sociedade brasileira, pressupõe a superação do racismo estrutural da sociedade moderna/colonial, especialmente na dimensão da negação de direitos e recursos/oportunidades às raças construídas socialmente como inferiores ao longo do processo de surgimento e expansão do capitalismo. Os inúmeros projetos de extensão, que foram propostos e executados pela Faculdade Mineira de Direito, ou que contaram com a sua participação, mostram o compromisso da universidade na construção de um conhecimento jurídico emancipador e decolonial, que, a partir do diálogo com o movimento negro e quilombola, busca superar o racismo estrutural da sociedade brasileira e construir uma realidade na qual as subjetividades não europeias possam encontrar condições de ter uma vida digna e decente.

‘Black Fire’

The article describes the multiple discursive and actual connections between ideas of a ‘Black Aesthetic’ in both the South African and the US-American contexts during the mid twentieth century. It is centred on knowledge produced between 1965 and 1985, when the Black Power/Black Arts and Black Consciousness movements gained prominence among urban intellectuals. Specific debates and argumentations that focused on black and African aesthetics and the respective groups of actors involved are depicted. The article follows the development of the discussions to the early 1990s, to conclude on actual similarities and differences and the factors that arguably produce them. Throughout, the study follows an actor-centred approach and ultimately counters the broad narrative of a ‘United States–South Africa’ connection that is circulating in academic and public spheres and questions more generally the focus on geographical locations to understand Black and African ideologies and their entanglements. By doing this, the article wants to contribute to the question how we can approach engaged or radical views of black and African aesthetics comparatively and the presence of those legacies today.

‘Reclaiming our time' in African Studies: conversations from the perspective of the Black Studies Movement in Germany

A group of scholars of African heritage convened in Berlin in December of 2017 to found a collective named ‘Network for Black Perspectives in Research and Teaching’. One of its foundational tasks is to bridge the divide between Black Studies and African Studies in Germany. This text is one of the manifestations of this collective engagement. In a reflexive rather than normative exercise, our text explores how Black Studies scholarship and African Studies scholarship are impacted by the ‘coloniality of knowledge and power’ and by the ‘violences of modernity’. We aim towards understanding our own entrapment, freedoms, complicity and solidarity as complex and layered realities. We draw on concepts of social cartography to conceptualize our embeddedness in the academy and to envision ways of navigating it in a decolonial mode. Borrowing from transnational decolonial scholarship, we attempt to map out the violent landscape we are faced with in African Studies and how we experience or endure harm in these spaces. We discuss four spaces of engagement, entrapment or reclamation within the wider institutional ecosystem of the University: The ‘Everything is Awesome’ space, the ‘Soft-Reform’ space, the ‘Radical-Reform’ space and the ‘Beyond-Reform’ space. Our collective text is generated from structured conversations around amplifying the voices of those who inhabit the shadow side of modernity in the context of transnational African Studies.

O PENSAMENTO DE ABDIAS NASCIMENTO E ANTÔNIO BISPO DOS SANTOS ACERCA DOS VALORES CIVILIZATÓRIOS QUILOMBOLAS: PROPOSTAS PARA UMA RECONFIGURAÇÃO DA SOCIEDADE BRASILEIRA

In this work, we intend to focus on the concepts of "Quilombo" as a space-territory of resistance and construction of black identities based on the interpretations of the works of two important black leaders in the anti-racist struggle: Abdias do Nascimento and Antonio Bispo dos Santos. For that, we use the works in which they conceptualize and present another look at the quilombola territories, a script marked by a decolonial perspective, very articulated with the historical demands of the black movements, especially the Quilombola black movements. Thus, we analyze the narratives of Abdias do Nascimento in "Quilombismo" and the dialogical writing of Antônio Bispo dos Santos in "Colonization, Quilombos: manners and meanings" and we demonstrate how they call the reader in addition to supporting the quilombola struggle to rethink their social and cultural values.

OS ESTUDOS DA NEGRITUDE EM MIDIATIZAÇÃO

This paper aims to make notes on the performance of the media and the Black Movement in the intersection of emancipatory knowledge that directly reflects on the construction of the identity of the black people. To discuss this assumption we start from a theoretical-methodological perspective to dialogue about the relations and influences of the media in the fields that act on the construction of the identity of the black subject, and to discuss the theme we will present propositions about the forms of uses of the internet. To conclude we will think about how the relations and experiences of the black subject that will be determinant for the occupation of the academic and social spaces.  

AS CRIANÇAS PEQUENAS DA MANGUEIRA (RJ): CORPOREIDADE, TERRITÓRIO E A EDUCAÇÃO PARA AS RELAÇÕES RACIAIS DESDE A EDUCAÇÃO INFANTIL

This article is interested in demonstrating how the legal documents dealing with education for ethnic-racial relations, produced both from the political struggles of the black movement and through academic debates, reach young black children and collaborate in the fabrication of new practices in the daily life of an early childhood education institution in Mangueira, a black territory located in Rio de Janeiro (RJ). For this purpose, we analyzed the laws and documents that we believe to be the most important for guaranteeing the right to education for ethnic-racial relations since the daycarecenter, tailoring these analyzes to the presentation of the pedagogical work of a group of young children. We consider that it is possible, therefore, that the legislation collaborate so that the pedagogical actions for babies and young children are built from their references of their ethnic-racial belonging.

LÉLIA GONZALEZ

Lélia Gonzalez was a memorable black activist and intellectual. He studied and fought racism and sexism, studies that today are called intersectionality, but were already treated by Lélia before the word appeared. Lélia graduated in History and Geography, was a Master in Communication and a PhD in Political Anthropology. She was also one of the founders of the Unified Black Movement against Discrimination and Racism (MNUCDR) in 1978, which today is known as the Unified Black Movement (MNU). In addition, Lélia published numerous works that contributed and contribute to the discussions on the racial issue and black women in Brazil.

Harlem Renaissance Literary Productions: Context, Role, Philosophy and Objective In “The Negro’s Tragedy”

This paper aims to show and analyze how through “an outstanding poetic creation”, Claude McKay describes clearly the context, role, philosophy and objective of the Harlem Renaissance literary productions while describing his own role and vocation as an African American writer. Indeed by describing his own role as a pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance Movement, “this assertive poem” is actually a précis and paradigm of the motives and chart gathering all those black pioneer writers engaged in this literary movement. This paper provides, through the hermeneutic study of this symptomatic sonnet about the Negro’s tragedy; an analysis of the context in which the Harlem Renaissance literary productions had been produced, the role of those literary productions, the main philosophy surrounding the literary productions of this Black Movement and finally the objective targeted by those literary productions. The hermeneutic approach is sustained by the socio-criticism, African American criticisms and stylistics theories to better characterize the semantic and social scope of this poem.

National Socialist Black Metal: a case study in the longevity of far-right ideologies in heavy metal subcultures

ABSTRACT National Socialist Black Metal (NSBM) emerged in the early 1990s as a subsidiary genre of the broader black metal movement. NSBM is distinguished by thematic content that promotes Aryan superiority, pagan spirituality and opposes globalization. Buesnel’s article explores the history of the early NSBM movement through an analysis of the bands Graveland (Poland) and Absurd (Germany), which have both played vital roles in the establishment of the NSBM genre. Buesnel highlights the current state of National Socialist ideology within metal subcultures and concludes with observations about the future of far-right extremism in heavy metal.