Black Resistance Research Articles

Rebels in Arms: Black Resistance and the Fight for Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic, by Justin Iverson

Rebels in Arms: Black Resistance and the Fight for Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic, by Justin Iverson

The Black Consciousness Movement in Azania (South Africa): A triple heritage

Starting with the 2015 Rhodes Must Fall campaign, there has been renewed interest in the philosophy of black consciousness through popular expressions – on social media and mainstream media articles – and by scholars. This article seeks to revisit the origins of the Black Consciousness Movement (BCM) in Azania (South Africa). Through an examination of primary sources, that is, documents written by the activist writers of the movement and secondary sources by scholars who reflect on the movement and other expressions of black resistance against colonialism and the oppression of black people globally, this article relies mainly on literature review of documents that are in the public domain. The overall findings of the review show that the BCM drew inspiration from and was shaped by the ‘black radical tradition’ influences from North America (specifically the United States), the Caribbean and South American region, and from the African continent, including locally in South Africa. While shaped by these influences the BCM adapted them and responded to the peculiarities of the condition of black people in South Africa and thus formulated a unique brand of black consciousness. The conclusion reached herein is that movements and the ideas that they espouse, are often confluences of views and practices drawn from different sources.Transdisciplinary Contribution: This article contributes to the understanding of the evolution of political movements from a variety of disciplines – political studies, history, sociology of ideas, history of consciousness and political philosophy.

TikTok and Black political consumerism: Investigating how TikTok use is linked to Black Americans’ activism and identity

ABSTRACT Even though TikTok has become a popular yet highly politicized social media platform for social change and mobilization, there is little research providing insights into minoritized TikTok users. By conducting a survey sampling Black TikTok users (N = 311), this study examines how Black people’s TikTok use for information gathering influences their political consumerism (i.e., boycotting, buycotting), Black activism orientation, and racial identity reformation. The results revealed that TikTok use predicted Black people’s engagement in political consumerism, formal Black activism, Black centrality, and Black nationalist ideology. Also, Black TikTok users’ perceived TikTok network environment (i.e., TikTok network politicalness, diversity, and authenticity) was positively associated with various apsects of Black activism orientation and racial identity ideology. This study’s findings on the role of Tik Tok on Black resistance, activism, and identity have crucial implications for intercultural and intracultural communication.

Rebels in Arms: Black Resistance and the Fight for Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic by Justin Iverson (review)

Rebels in Arms: Black Resistance and the Fight for Freedom in the Anglo-Atlantic by Justin Iverson (review)

“In the Name of the God of All Names: Yahweh, Obatalá, Olorum”: The 1981 Quilombos Mass as an Ecumenical Pilgrimage in Brazil

AbstractOn November 22, 1981, thousands of laypeople, along with bishops, priests, and theologians, gathered in Recife to celebrate the Eucharist. Offered during a military dictatorship in a period of popular insurgency, the Quilombos Mass mourned the death of millions in the African slave trade, sought pardon for the Church's past sins, and celebrated the resistance of Blacks in Brazil and beyond its borders. The acclaimed Black Brazilian pop star and activist Milton de Nascimento collaborated with an activist poet and three bishops to produce a multimedia performance; in the spirit of liberation theology, it was marked by striking visuals, dance, music, and the invocation of the sacred. This article draws on reportage, speeches and correspondence, military court and intelligence records, published interviews, and the author's interview with one of its composers. It offers a close textual analysis, with attention to Catholic theological debates, as well as an analysis of the performance itself, drawn from video recordings and bringing attention to aspects neglected by most commentators, who refer only to the album, as it was finally produced. Initially stifled by the Vatican, Milton's masterpiece, issued as an album on vinyl and performed in paid concerts, became a powerful cultural reference for activists, serving as a touchstone for a strategic alliance between Black activists and the liberationist Church.

To Protest for Black Life during the Pandemic: Resistance and Freedom in a Settler State

AbstractThis article reflects on the global uprisings in support of Black life during the early pandemic. The focus is on what the protests reveal about Black resistance to the nation-building project of Canada. Protests during this period are understood here to have included taking to the streets, practicing care, and calling for abolition. Drawing on critical race theory and Black Studies, especially Black feminism, the author claims these forms of protest condemned Black dispossession under Canadian laws, while they simultaneously exceeded Canada’s jurisdiction. In other words, the protests can be understood ambivalently, as occurring under and responding to, but not being of, domination. They refashioned the self and the collective, expressing transient freedom from domination and partial redress, even as settler colonial laws would continue to suppress Black and other subaltern peoples. The article navigates such insights through works by Dionne Brand, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick, among others.

Saint Martin de Porres “The Black Saint of the Afro‐descendant community in Quito‐Ecuador”: Between segregation, racism, and black resistance

AbstractIn the neighbourhood Caminos a la Libertad, located in the north‐western part of Quito, every November, a group of Afro‐Ecuadorian women called the Community of Saint Martin & The Martinas pay tribute to Saint Martin de Porres “the Black saint of the Afro‐descendant community.” This celebration is relevant in a context in which the Afro‐Ecuadorian inhabitants of the neighbourhood suffer segregation, racism, and discrimination. What happens in the microcosm of Caminos a la Libertad is, in part, a reflection of the experience of the whole Afro‐descendant population in the capital: A city which has historically created an image of itself as white‐mestizo, and where the presence of Afro‐descendants has been systematically rejected. Based on ethnographic work, participant observation and semi‐structured interviews, in this article I analyse how this community uses the image of Saint Martin de Porres and his celebration to combat racism, promote social cohesion and ethnic and gender empowerment in the neighbourhood, by creating “places of enunciation” and “spiritual citizenship.”

Jump Nyabinghi: Black Radical Militancy, Rastafarianism, and Jamaican Cultural Influence on Black America

While African Americans were in the midst of the zenith of the Civil Rights Movement, Afro-Jamaicans endured civil unrest, Black militant activism, and political changes that eventually resulted in its independence in 1962. While the global impact and influence of African American activism, especially of leaders like Martin Luther King, Jr., Malcolm X, and Stokely Carmichael, among others, is well known, little has been written on the influence of Jamaican culture, ideology, and nationalism on the global freedom movement. This research article situates Jamaican activism and ideology as central to the transnational, Pan-African Black resistance movements, specifically in the United States, illustrating that African Americans were deeply influenced by and interested in Jamaican activism and culture.

Racist norms until interests converge: a long tradition of egregious educational policy patterns and global implications

ABSTRACT This article contextualises the crisis in Black education and the death of a 100-year-old Black educational system resulting from an unintended consequence of Brown: the excavation of thousands of highly educated and skilled Black educators. This theoretical article advances the literature on Brown using two critical race theory (CRT) tenets, the permanence of racism and interest convergence, to discursively trace the regression of Black education. This article illustrates the myriad ways interest convergence and the permanence of racism contribute to crises in Black educational systems and the death of a 100-year-old Black educational system. A limitation of CRT in education is the homogenous treatment of Black people despite their variations and conditions. Additionally, analysing connections between Brown, ESEA, and NCLB needs further examination. Finally, I advance that Black resistance to the permanence of racism in the US had global interest convergence implications and aligned with decolonial and independence movements.

The Paradox of Visibility

Black America is not present, as it should be, in the literature on US soft power. This paper argues that Black culture exerts a powerful positive attraction abroad. This attraction, grounded in the forms of Black resistance to racial injustice, leads to a reconceptualization of America’s identity, by foreign audiences. A counter claim of what counts as “America” takes shape. The rethinking of America’s identity abroad responds to the appeal of the legacy of Black resistance. However, Black culture is, more often, unavailable to policymakers for garnering desired outcomes. Incorporating Black culture into the study of soft power helps sharpen the concept’s definition and points to when and why some forms of soft power are unavailable to decision makers.

Colonisation and the Genesis and Perpetuation of Anti-Blackness Violence in South Africa

The narrative of the colonisation of South Africa that prevailed and continues to prevail in certain segments of contemporary South African society is that of the white coloniser as an industrious, noble, peaceful and innocent being, divinely tasked with the project of bringing civilisation to the country’s indigenous Black tribal people—people bereft of religion, cognitive competence and incapable of responsible land ownership. In this article, I reflect on the genesis of anti-Blackness over three and a half centuries and argue that despite Black resistance over this period, the systematic orchestration of anti-Blackness through repressive violence, constantly morphing policy legislation and relentless propaganda machinery has imprinted on the psyche of South Africans in particular ways. Black academe in South Africa has been systematically frustrated with Western Eurocentric epistemologies and ontologies and struggle to engage in any substantive epistemological or ontological delinking. Inspiration from decolonial theory is invoked to offer an analysis of the paralysis of the new Black political, economic and academic elite, as they occupy a zone of being co-opted into the stranglehold of white economic and cultural hegemony.

Reflections and Refractions of Black Radicalism

This article discusses collaborative Black study that entails dialogical engagement with a range of texts and podcasts about Black radicalism and is further informed by participation in anti-capitalist, anti-colonial activism. The authors describe their process of examining Black radical thought during the COVID-19 pandemic and the ways in which Black radicalism has been and is now being imagined across contexts. Following the work of Cedric Robinson, the authors understand the Black radical tradition as a negation of Western civilization from within Western society, placing it in hostile relation to the neoliberal university. They discuss Black radicalism as anti-capitalist, anti-colonial, feminist, communally oriented, and opposed to neo/liberal ideologies. They address a range of Black socialist traditions, including those labeled communist, Black anarchist, abolitionist, and antifascist to attend to an ongoing critical-creative practice of Black resistance and collective life-making capable of adapting to and challenging the changing conditions of late capitalism.

Woke

The word ‘woke’ which originated with Black resistance movements in the United States, has in the last few years been weaponized by the right, in the same way that ‘political correctness’ has been in the 1980s and 90s. That weaponization has made it impossible to distinguish critical scholarship from dogma, indeed it has conflated the two. If there is censoriousness on the left, it is nothing to compare with the legal power of the authoritarian right. This censoriousness has to be understood not as something inherent in leftist thought, but as the product of the neoliberal university context from which it emerges.

Revisiting Abolition and the Power of "We"

Abstract: Writing in 2021, as a follow up to the Summer 2020 Special Issue, "Scholarship in a Time of Crisis," I revisit the work of the pronoun "we" in official statements on Black Lives Matter now that the many academic institutions, major corporations, non-profits, small businesses, volunteer groups, social clubs, and Instagram accounts that penned some variation of the statement "We affirm that Black Lives Matter" have largely moved on to other priorities. I contend that 2021, much like 2020, contained several uncanny echoes of the abolition politics of the eighteenth century. The subject position "we" remains slippery and problematic—perhaps even more than in 2020—despite or perhaps because of apparent victories such as Derek Chauvin's conviction for the murder of George Floyd. I discuss the key ways this court case echoes the legal and political contexts of the late eighteenth-century abolition movement before pivoting to a reflection on eighteenth-century Black resistance, grassroots antiracist efforts, and some key takeaways for today's academics.

“Stamping Out Segregation in Kansas”: Jim Crow Practices and the Postwar Black Freedom Struggle

Abstract: This study examines Jim Crow practices and the Black Freedom Struggle in Kansas between 1945 and 1960, focusing at the state level. It proceeds in three sections. First, it examines Jim Crow in housing, employment, schools, public accommodations, and sundown towns. Second, it addresses the enforcement of these practices through mob violence and, to a greater degree, police violence. Third, it investigates the activism of Black Kansans who were, irrespective of age, gender, or class, determined to destroy Jim Crow through public protests, legal strategies, and physical self-defense, even if they represented considerable ideological, methodological, and strategic diversity. The study is based primarily on extensive research in regional and local newspapers, in public and university archives, and in oral histories with contemporary Black activists. Because of the limited time period involved, it utilizes a topical approach overall but, within this framework, addresses change over time. Before proceeding, the study briefly examines the long history of racism against Blacks and Black resistance to it in Kansas before 1945.

Modernity and Counternarrative in Marcelo D’Salete’s Angola Janga and Gayl Jones’s Palmares: Prelude to an Interview with Marcelo D’Salete

ABSTRACT This short article offers some remarks to contextualize the interview that follows with Marcelo D’Salete, a Brazilian graphic novelist known for his works on the history of slavery and Black resistance in Brazil. The article focuses on D’Salete’s great work Angola Janga (2017), about the famous maroon community in seventeenth-century Brazil known to the Portuguese as Palmares, and discusses this work in relation to the six-volume Palmares (2020) by the U.S. writer Gayl Jones.

Connecting the dots in systems of domination and violence: a conversation

This article is an edited version of a conversation between Barbara Ransby and Derecka Purnell, two US-based key Black feminist activists on ‘New lines of Black resistance in the US: undoing racial capitalism and the carceral state’, which took place at the ‘New Circuits of Anti-racism Conference’, King’s College London, October 2022 (IRR50). They discuss their own political journeys, shared by many activists today, which they describe as involving building and re-envisioning a desired future, as well as the role of Black feminism and abolition. The conversation, introduced by Chantelle Lewis of Surviving Society and Sophia Siddiqui of Race & Class, unpacks the workings of the carceral state and the specific racial and class targeting of surplus Black workers. Drawing from their experience on the practicalities of organising today, they discuss their commitment to internationalism, the challenges of building genuine coalitions and the need to connect the dots between different systems of domination and violence to understand the functioning of the carceral state, and the centrality of reproductive justice and the fight for bodily autonomy.

BLACKS' PROTEST SONGS: THE EXPRESSION OF LYNCHING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN THE USA

The protest has become the main, dominant inner-structure, and predominant theme not only in black writings, especially literary works, like; novels and poetry but also in the song writings. The protest is rooted in black slavery and racism has been felt and may continue to be felt throughout U.S. history. This article sought to indicate the mode of racism and ways of black in resisting it reflected in three protest songs written by blacks. Looking at the three decades of protest songs, three are standing out as important examples for this study: “Strange Fruit” (1937), “Say It, I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968), and “Blue Lights” (2018). These protest songs are consistent in messaging the racism in the criminal justice system and black resistance against it over time. Critical race theory enables how racism as a legal, cultural, and political condition is reproduced and maintained, primarily in the US context. Strange Fruit portrays about lynching in the era of Jim Crow. They were tortured and lynched, reflecting how black people were experiencing discriminatory treatments and extrajudicial punishment after the civil war. Say It, I’m Black and I’m Proud portrays racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights Movement. Whites are still privileged and blacks are undervalued. More advances, Blue Lights portrays the concern of black people in facing racism that affects institutions like law enforcement, which leads to arbitrary shooting of black people in crime scenes in the present time. Taken together, the songs reflect the dynamic nature of racism, as well as the shifting mode and attitude of blacks in struggling against racism from the past up to the present time in the US from passive, radical, and subtler

BLACKS' PROTEST SONGS: THE EXPRESSION OF LYNCHING AND CRIMINAL JUSTICE SYSTEM IN THE USA

The protest has become the main, dominant inner-structure, and predominant theme not only in black writings, especially literary works, like; novels and poetry but also in the song writings. The protest is rooted in black slavery and racism has been felt and may continue to be felt throughout U.S. history. This article sought to indicate the mode of racism and ways of black in resisting it reflected in three protest songs written by blacks. Looking at the three decades of protest songs, three are standing out as important examples for this study: “Strange Fruit” (1937), “Say It, I’m Black and I’m Proud” (1968), and “Blue Lights” (2018). These protest songs are consistent in messaging the racism in the criminal justice system and black resistance against it over time. Critical race theory enables how racism as a legal, cultural, and political condition is reproduced and maintained, primarily in the US context. Strange Fruit portrays about lynching in the era of Jim Crow. They were tortured and lynched, reflecting how black people were experiencing discriminatory treatments and extrajudicial punishment after the civil war. Say It, I’m Black and I’m Proud portrays racial inequality in the post-Civil Rights Movement. Whites are still privileged and blacks are undervalued. More advances, Blue Lights portrays the concern of black people in facing racism that affects institutions like law enforcement, which leads to arbitrary shooting of black people in crime scenes in the present time. Taken together, the songs reflect the dynamic nature of racism, as well as the shifting mode and attitude of blacks in struggling against racism from the past up to the present time in the US from passive, radical, and subtler

Black Queer Fugitivity: Agency, Language, and Digital Joy

Abstract Moving beyond axial considerations, we recount the experiences of Black queer educators and the literacies we engage in for survival and thriving (Blockett et al. 2022). In our pointed exploration of virtual and physical, we consider anti-Black and anti-queer moments as sites of fugitivity – a Black resistance formation (Best & Hartman 2005; Givens 2021). For this paper, we focus on non-conventional, un-codified, rule-defying literacies that Black queer people have and continued to engage to resist, subvert, decenter, exist, and create. In doing so we provide insight into the survival and agency of Black queer people, and invite opportunities to consider new possible futures for the experiences of Black queer educators.