Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063567
Matthew Shutzer, Arpitha Kodiveri
Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of “land” under Benthamite-inspired laws of “real property;” and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to the abstract entity of the postcolonial nation.
{"title":"“A Vast Bed of Combustible Fuel”","authors":"Matthew Shutzer, Arpitha Kodiveri","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063567","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063567","url":null,"abstract":"Does climate change pose a crisis for the concept of nation-state sovereignty? This article explores how contemporary debates about climate and sovereignty are connected to deeper histories of empire and capitalism in the global South. Arguing against recent critical appraisals of sovereignty that emphasize the elision of nature from formal political and legal theory, the article reconstructs a genealogy of sovereign power in the major fossil fuel-producing territories of India spanning the nineteenth century to the present day. It brings to light three historical articulations of sovereignty that undergird contemporary modes of extractive dispossession enforced by the Indian state: the discovery of fossil fuels as subjects of sovereign power during an early colonial project to build prison complexes in Indian coal mines; the juridical remaking of “land” under Benthamite-inspired laws of “real property;” and the politicization of fossil fuels as an underground commons belonging to the abstract entity of the postcolonial nation.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46398283","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063869
Zoe Goldstein
This article reframes the current housing crisis in Oakland, California as environmental injustice and as an ongoing effect of racial capitalism. It also highlights recent examples of citizen-led land reclamation, which it argues retaliate against city-sponsored erasure of precariously housed residents and offer the potential to address economic, racial, and environmental injustice simultaneously. By disrupting the status quo of real estate price gouging and visibly reestablishing community on Oakland’s streets, these movements demonstrate alternatives to the capitalist dehumanization and manufactured scarcity at the heart of Oakland’s housing crisis.
{"title":"If It’s Vacant Take It","authors":"Zoe Goldstein","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063869","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063869","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 This article reframes the current housing crisis in Oakland, California as environmental injustice and as an ongoing effect of racial capitalism. It also highlights recent examples of citizen-led land reclamation, which it argues retaliate against city-sponsored erasure of precariously housed residents and offer the potential to address economic, racial, and environmental injustice simultaneously. By disrupting the status quo of real estate price gouging and visibly reestablishing community on Oakland’s streets, these movements demonstrate alternatives to the capitalist dehumanization and manufactured scarcity at the heart of Oakland’s housing crisis.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46691228","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063488
A. Dawson, A. Paik
The idea of the Anthropocene has spread far beyond its origins in geology, becoming common in contemporary activist and intellectual circles. But who is responsible for the mounting disasters associated with the age of anthropos, and who should be made to pay reparations? What if the onset of the Anthropocene was tenaciously resisted in various different historical moments and parts of the planet? This issue recuperates the alternative worlds, orientations, and subaltern environmental movements that constitute radical historical alternatives to the Anthropocene. We conceptualize these alternatives as seeds of ecological insurrection, sometimes lying long dormant but always ready to rise up again when the time is right. At a moment when elites have intransigently refused to decarbonize society, we must look back to histories of revolt to broaden the repertoire of militant tactics available to face the environmental emergency.
{"title":"Germinations","authors":"A. Dawson, A. Paik","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063488","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063488","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The idea of the Anthropocene has spread far beyond its origins in geology, becoming common in contemporary activist and intellectual circles. But who is responsible for the mounting disasters associated with the age of anthropos, and who should be made to pay reparations? What if the onset of the Anthropocene was tenaciously resisted in various different historical moments and parts of the planet? This issue recuperates the alternative worlds, orientations, and subaltern environmental movements that constitute radical historical alternatives to the Anthropocene. We conceptualize these alternatives as seeds of ecological insurrection, sometimes lying long dormant but always ready to rise up again when the time is right. At a moment when elites have intransigently refused to decarbonize society, we must look back to histories of revolt to broaden the repertoire of militant tactics available to face the environmental emergency.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48416693","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063795
LaKendrick Richardson
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.
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063606
Adam E. Quinn
At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an industrial capitalist order stretched its grasp across the globe, placing control of farms, mines, and forests in the hands of wealthy industrialists. Living through this period of rapid and unequal economic and environmental change, anarchists denounced what they called the monopolizing of the earth and its products. Anarchists were deeply critical of the privatization of the environment and saw restricting access to nature as a core component of inequality and poverty. This article considers the environmental politics of transnational anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With anarchism’s geographically and ideologically diverse participants in mind, it incorporates the natural science-informed utopian visions of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, the revolutionary and anti-colonial food and land politics of Ricardo Flores Magón, and the nature-informed radical sex politics of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It finds that “anarchism” did not just mean the destruction of the state and capitalism to its advocates, but the construction of a new political-economic-natural system that saw the liberation of people and the defense of nature as inextricably connected. The article concludes with a call to both include anarchism as a part of the genealogy of environmentalism and consider anarchism’s environmental politics in ongoing conversations about the relationships between environmental crises and human inequalities.
{"title":"“Abolish the Monopolizing of the Earth”","authors":"Adam E. Quinn","doi":"10.1215/01636545-10063606","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1215/01636545-10063606","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, an industrial capitalist order stretched its grasp across the globe, placing control of farms, mines, and forests in the hands of wealthy industrialists. Living through this period of rapid and unequal economic and environmental change, anarchists denounced what they called the monopolizing of the earth and its products. Anarchists were deeply critical of the privatization of the environment and saw restricting access to nature as a core component of inequality and poverty. This article considers the environmental politics of transnational anarchism in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. With anarchism’s geographically and ideologically diverse participants in mind, it incorporates the natural science-informed utopian visions of Peter Kropotkin and Elisée Reclus, the revolutionary and anti-colonial food and land politics of Ricardo Flores Magón, and the nature-informed radical sex politics of Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. It finds that “anarchism” did not just mean the destruction of the state and capitalism to its advocates, but the construction of a new political-economic-natural system that saw the liberation of people and the defense of nature as inextricably connected. The article concludes with a call to both include anarchism as a part of the genealogy of environmentalism and consider anarchism’s environmental politics in ongoing conversations about the relationships between environmental crises and human inequalities.","PeriodicalId":51725,"journal":{"name":"RADICAL HISTORY REVIEW","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.5,"publicationDate":"2023-01-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"47471700","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}
Pub Date : 2023-01-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-10063887
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
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.
{"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":null,"pages":null},"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9847844
Dawn Fulton
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.
{"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":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":"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9847788
E. A. Fretwell
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.
{"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":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":"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9847872
David Schoenbrun
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.
{"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":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":"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}
Pub Date : 2022-10-01DOI: 10.1215/01636545-9847816
Antonia Carcelén-Estrada
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.
{"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":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":"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}
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