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":null,"pages":null},"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":"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":null,"pages":null},"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":"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":null,"pages":null},"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":"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
{"title":"Does Afropolitanism Apply to the Americas?","authors":"Aniova Prandy","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847914","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847914","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Afropolitanism, as a concept, is a practice that has been carried out in Abya Yala since colonization. As a term, it is a novelty in the face of anti-hegemonic customs and experiences that have always been carried out to decolonize the continent. In any case, it substantiates or names something that already exists. Afropolitanism is a recognition of the positive of African descent and the result of years of anti-colonial actions.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"42152505","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":"Racial Storytelling in the Classroom","authors":"Paulina L. Alberto","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847858","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847858","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 As awareness of “narrative persuasion” surfaces into collective consciousness in the present-day United States, alongside struggles over whether and how to grapple with histories of slavery and racism, the stakes around racial storytelling in the classroom—around which stories about race and belonging get told or cast aside—have become abundantly clear. The power of stories to shape and naturalize beliefs can be mobilized for racist, dehumanizing purposes. But educators at any level can also harness the power of storytelling for anti-racist purposes. They can teach students to become skeptical of existing racial stories and expose their disempowering mechanisms and effects by envisioning racial storytelling as a subject of historical analysis. Educators can also use racial storytelling as a critical method for historical reconstruction, guiding students in composing new racial narratives grounded in historical methods and anti-racist principles. This essay discusses these dual uses of racial stories in the classroom, drawing on the author’s experience teaching across disciplines, languages, and sources.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46670089","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":"An Afropolitan in South Asia","authors":"E. Okereke, M. Krishnamurthy","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9847900","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9847900","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this photo essay, the authors gather a set of photographs of only partially visible subjects to speak about the tense and unpredictable encounters between different postcolonial histories. Staged as a conversation between an anthropologist and a photographer, the essay touches on the necessary modalities of such encounters, be it surprise, friendship, location and dislocation, or sometimes even invisibility. Central to the essay are conversations about encounters between the authors themselves, mediated by the sights, sounds, and serendipities of the postcolonial city. Using the Invisible Borders Trans-African Project—a decade-long venture bringing together artists, photographers, and writers in road trips across Africa—as a starting point, the essay considers the implications of broadening this imaginary into other borders and postcolonial border beings and whether this might constitute a particular kind of utopian project.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"41958557","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":"“Harvard Scientist Seeks Typical Irishman”","authors":"Ciaran O’Neill","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9566118","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9566118","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In 1870, the Belgian Adolphe Quetelet wrote in his seminal scientific work Anthropometrié that “the average man characterises the nation to which he belongs.” An obsession with the “national” characterized the field of anthropometry, which scientists such as Quetelet pioneered in the Francophone world; their techniques were quickly adopted and adapted elsewhere—by Francis Galton in London and by Aleš Hrdlička, Earnest Hooton, and Franz Boas in the United States. Ireland played a surprisingly central role in this burgeoning new field of international scientific enquiry, which quickly became focused on connecting racial and criminal “degeneracy” under the guise of a scientific search for the “normal,” “average,” or “typical” example of any given ethnic or social group. This article connects two major Irish research projects, the Dublin Anthropometric Lab at Trinity College Dublin (1888–99) and the physical anthropology strand of the Harvard Irish Study (1934–36), to show that Ireland was an important node in the network of scientists and researchers who constructed the discourses of global racial science.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44113650","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 Painful and Tender Sympathy Pervaded Every Class of Society”","authors":"Aoife O’Leary McNeice","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9566188","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9566188","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The Great Irish Famine was a moment of unprecedented global giving. Sympathy for the suffering Irish traversed class hierarchies and vast geographical spaces, with indentured workers in the West Indies donating alongside members of the royal family and attendees at charity balls and galas in New York, Port Elizabeth, and Surrey. This article examines the socioeconomic geographies of this giving. It provides a quantitative analysis that brings together donations from both sides of the Atlantic, approaching these donors as a single global community. This famine giving is also considered within the context of wider traditions of Western humanitarianism. The article suggests that although famine humanitarianism mobilized a vast community of donors and traversed class, gender, and ethnic groups, it was ultimately a conservative force that upheld social hierarchies and replicated the socioeconomic and racial inequalities that characterize Western humanitarianism more generally.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48775960","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":"Undocumented Irish Need Apply","authors":"Sarah L. Townsend","doi":"10.1215/01636545-9566146","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-9566146","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In the late 1980s, amid immigration reform in the United States, legislators and lobbyists secured generous visa allotments for Irish immigrants, whose path to legal residency in the United States narrowed after the 1965 Hart-Celler Act abolished the national origins quota system. Claiming that the new law discriminated against Europeans, Irish advocates framed their campaign as an effort to diversify the post-1965 immigrant pool, which was predominantly Asian and Latin American. By examining the rhetoric deployed in congressional hearings and media appearances, this article considers how groups like the Irish negotiated the terms of their whiteness in the post–civil rights era. It also addresses the global dimensions of this case study, including Irish lobbyists’ coalition with other (nonwhite) immigrant groups, concurrent immigration reform in Australia and Canada, the effect of the Northern Irish civil war and US-Irish diplomatic relations, and its legacies in a newly multicultural contemporary Ireland.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2022-05-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47219409","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}