{"title":"A Black Belt-ocene","authors":"LaKendrick Richardson","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063795","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063795","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Popular conceptualizations of the Anthropocene tend to blur and blend humanity into a singular lump and task it with combating anomalous climate change. This essay questions the dominant narratives of the Anthropocene by excavating the author’s life in the Alabama Black Belt. Through a blend of autoethnography and historical research, it explores life in the Black Belt as an example of the ways in which Black and brown people, and their narratives, are erased in the Anthropocene. The Black Belt is home to rich advocacy movements led by those most impacted. This activism demonstrates that Black people are not passive in the climate movement. In fact, the Black Belt has engaged with ecological injustice movements throughout its modern history. Guided by Kathryn Yusoff’s conception of “a billion Black Anthropocenes,” this article aims to encourage praxis that is guided by inclusive and honest historical accounts of humanity and ecological injustice.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48075593","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Ilana Cohen, E. Crow-Willard, Tanaya Dutta Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Guerline M. Jozef, Steven T. Sacco, Kristina Shull, Angela V. Walker, Aly Wane, Daniel Watman, C. Wheatley
{"title":"A Roundtable on Environmental Injustice and Border Abolition","authors":"Ilana Cohen, E. Crow-Willard, Tanaya Dutta Gupta, Jamila Hammami, Guerline M. Jozef, Steven T. Sacco, Kristina Shull, Angela V. Walker, Aly Wane, Daniel Watman, C. Wheatley","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063887","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063887","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article posits border abolition as a radical alternative to the Anthropocene. It convenes a group of eleven activists, organizers, scholars, practitioners, educators, and storytellers to discuss their work building cross-border solidarities along the US-Mexico border and in US immigration detention, Puerto Rico, Ghana, and the Bengal Delta. Participants provide critical analysis of the origins of environmental injustice and border violence and discuss how a confluence of ecological crisis, environmental racism, and border militarization since the 1980s disproportionately impacts BIPOC and queer/trans communities and exacerbates migrant precarity and displacement worldwide. Participants share ways they have built alternatives to border and ecological violence through migrant accompaniment, legal and policy advocacy, divestment activism, storytelling, education, and sustainability projects. The discussion is organized around three key themes: environmental injustice, racism, and borders; strategies adopted by organizers to build environmental and migrant justice; and visions of border abolition.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46710269","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Urban Iconographies","authors":"Dawn Fulton","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847844","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847844","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines literary evocations of Afropolitanism in French, with particular attention to millennial works by Black women writers. Narratives and portraits by Lauren Ekué, Léonora Miano, and Rokhaya Diallo reject the Afro-pessimism of twentieth-century visions of urban migration by foregrounding the consumerism and cultural capital of their female protagonists. Rethinking Paris as a stage rather than a site, these works present new models of Afropolitan iconography, featuring women who are eminently alert to the contradictions and contingencies of contemporary Black experience. In teasing out the links among presentism, hip-hop culture, and the European beauty industry, these explorations generate a unique brand of performed consumerism that forges a dialogue between Black female cosmopolitanism and historicity.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43317542","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Domesticating the Unfamiliar”","authors":"E. A. Fretwell","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847788","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847788","url":null,"abstract":"This article examines the sartorial culture of an African elite as a form of Afropolitanism in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century West African kingdom of Dahomey. Dahomean elites embraced cultural borrowing to layer styles and materials from European and African sources. Combining textiles and accessories associated with mobility and outsiders, elites asserted authority, power, and privilege within a local framework. Their dress practices also served as an expression of elite inclusion in a larger Atlantic world, in which Dahomey was a major participant in the transatlantic trade in African captives and, later, cash crops produced domestically by enslaved labor. By exploring the political, economic, and social contexts of elite Dahomean dress, this article reveals the deep historical roots of Afropolitanism on the continent and how the domestication of global and African commodities has long distinguished African elites from the masses. In doing so, it also shows how violence, systems of enslavement, and the accumulation of wealth fueled a Dahomean Afropolitan aesthetic of worlds-in-movement, which served to distinguish elites as citizens of Dahomey and as humans of the Atlantic world more broadly.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42884484","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Vashambadzi","authors":"David Schoenbrun","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847872","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847872","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 It is conventional to think that people other than Africans explored the continent we know today as Africa in a dynamic interplay with African interests. In responding, Africans’ understandings of their continent took shape, leaving African understandings of “home” fundamentally reactive. Afropolitanism shifts the subject to urbane and literate mobility, exploring how race, gender, and identity inform a lexicon of Africa created after the seventeenth century. This periodization centers individuals but cuts off earlier practices of cultured mobility largely because individuals are so difficult to find in Africa’s historical sources before the eighteenth century. Creative nonfiction, tethered to linguistic, archaeological, and oral textual evidence, returns to individuals creating geographical knowledge of African worlds and of Africa in the world. The story told here unfolds in fourteenth-century Southern Africa. Afropolitan writing may now sample deeper practices of cultured mobility than those generated by enslavement, capitalism, colonialism, and the Anthropocene.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47391561","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
R. Carrasquillo, Melina Pappademos, Lorelle Semley
{"title":"Theorizing the Afropolitan Past and Present","authors":"R. Carrasquillo, Melina Pappademos, Lorelle Semley","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847774","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The term Afropolitan—evoking the image of mobility, cultural production, and consumerism in Africa and the African diaspora—has enjoyed some salience in popular culture. However, much of the scholarly debate has focused on the elitism associated with the concept. Linked initially to short reflective pieces by Taiye Selasi in 2005 and Achille Mbembe in 2007, Afropolitanism has rarely been analyzed in historical contexts. The contributors engage the concept of the Afropolitan across a broad time and space that spans the fourteenth to twenty-first centuries and locates the Afropolitan in Africa, the Americas, Europe, and Asia. This introduction analyzes their written and photographic essays along three themes: visual culture, narrativity, and intersectionality, recognizing that their work also pushes against and expands on these frameworks. By engaging with the Afropolitan as a historical phenomenon, the issue highlights new methods and theories for analyzing global diasporas—past, present, and future.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48576237","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Oral Histories in the Black Pacific","authors":"Antonia Carcelén-Estrada","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847816","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847816","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article examines women’s erasure from the Spanish colonial imagination in South America. While Black women are completely absent in the official colonial narratives about the various frontier expeditions to Esmeraldas featured in documents housed at the Archivo General de Indias in Seville, Spain, they are certainly present in testimonial records in court archives in the American colonies, and often appear demanding their freedom. Meanwhile, in the Black Pacific, a territory always conceived as free despite the lack of written records, the African diaspora prospered with a river economy that still depends today on the health of rivers, mangroves, and the ocean. In the Chocó, women carried ancestral knowledge in chants, by planting, through cooking, praying, or fishing, sustaining the memory of a territory that conceived itself as outside master-slave relations. Yet Black women’s role in shaping national history is hard to trace. Oral history projects in Bojayá and Esmeraldas are trying to change that by bridging the digital archive, by using memory and orality as shields of truth, and by using traditional methods such as song and prayer to access the knowledge for resistance and re-existence that is needed today in the defense of the Chocó against deadly extractivist development. The encoding of women’s legacies in the Black Pacific serves as an example of how Blackness and freedom continue to be political concepts in this important diaspora that is developing decolonial methodologies that do not neatly fit in the confines of the Afropolitan, especially when it comes to class and migration.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46491159","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Black Englishmen of Old Calabar","authors":"Ndubueze L. Mbah","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847802","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847802","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article recovers the Afropolitan histories of Liberated Africans by examining their mobility and freedom politics. Liberated Africans enacted Afropolitanism when they returned from Sierra Leone to Old Calabar and fashioned themselves into Black Englishmen. Their Afropolitanism incorporated a dissident mode of Anglo-cosmopolitanism, thereby undermining orthodox British visions of imperial subjecthood. In using petitions to British authorities to assert their identity as British subjects, they secured their precarious freedom but challenged British monopoly of the Bight of Biafra’s transatlantic palm oil trade. Rather than being mere recipients of abolition, Liberated Africans refashioned abolition. They used forged “freedom papers” to emancipate, repossess, and traffic slaves from Old Calabar society while defending their behavior as “redemption” of slaves. Contrary to imperial fixity of African subjects, Liberated Africans evinced an Afropolitan vision of belonging. They simultaneously claimed to be natives of Sierra Leone and Old Calabar. Their contradictory ideologies and practices mitigated their marginality and confounded African elites and British imperial agents.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49106658","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"A Needle in the Desert","authors":"Héctor Mediavilla","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847886","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847886","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In his photo essay A Needle in the Desert, photographer Héctor Mediavilla poses the question: “Can fashion be a vector for development in a poor country?” Documenting FIMA (the International Fashion Festival in Africa), his work captures the environment, planning, and staging of the festival, focusing specifically on the relationship between people and place.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49282412","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Blackness out of Place","authors":"P. Marcos","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847830","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847830","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article explores how historical narratives and aesthetic models configuring Portuguese imperial visuality produced the absented presence of Africa and its diasporas. Despite centuries of interconnected histories of colonial domination and enslavement, but also marronage and resistance, Black subjecthood was reduced in Portugal to a “foreign” presence. These silences ossify a regime of imperial visuality premised on the hegemonic overrepresentation of white masculinity—rendered through depictions of “navigators” as paragons of historical agency. Through the analytic countervisual quilombismo, this essay confronts such elisions by engaging with Achille Mbembe’s Afropolitan call to “produce new images for thought.” Focus on countervisual maroon (quilombismo) methods of refusal and fugitivity reveals the enactment of Black sovereignty and affirms Blackness as being. By affirming Black life and autonomy, diasporic artists, performers, and everyday people interrupt colonial frames, refusing the ethnographic reduction of Blackness to a body and its classificatory markers, thus revealing possibilities for different pasts, presents, and futures.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":" ","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47990482","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}