Atlantic Affinities

2020 ◽  
pp. 9-34
Author(s):  
J. R. Oldfield
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Personal Risk ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Racial Lines

This Chapter deals with Anglophilia as an animating principle in a lot American anti-slavery thought and practice. It begins with an account of how early anti-slavery activists appropriated Wilberforce, Clarkson and Sharp into their rituals, before moving on to discuss how after 1833 William Lloyd Garrisonian and his supporters deliberately set out to create a continuous link between the British past and the American present, perhaps most evident in the elevation of 1 August (Emancipation Day in the Caribbean) into the American abolitionist calendar. These affinities cut across racial lines. African Americans were just as quick to appropriate figures such as Wilberforce and Clarkson, weaving them into a black protest tradition that elevated abolitionism into a global struggle, even if in doing so they put themselves at personal risk. Anglophilia not only shaped how the American anti-slavery movement should be understood but also how it should be remembered.

Conclusion

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
State Power ◽  
Political Agenda ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Direct Support ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
Economic Ties

This concluding chapter argues that African Americans were part of a broad and multifaceted effort to isolate South Africa in the global political arena. By repeatedly attempting to offer direct support to African liberation movements and calling for America to renounce its political and economic ties with the National Party, their actions made life difficult for white politicians in ways that that would continue to inform the global anti-apartheid movement beyond the Sharpeville massacre of 1960. This argument is not meant to downplay the disruptive influence that anticommunism had on black protest. Rather, it is designed to shift the focus onto the ways in which black activists, with different political visions, responded to state power. Finally, given the broad response of African Americans to the anti-apartheid movement, this concluding chapter suggests that we might need to move towards a more expansive definition of black internationalism – one that accounts for the anticolonial political agenda and transnational solidarities forges by both African American leftists and liberals.

Race and Representation in the United States: the Constitutional Validity of Majority–Minority Congressional Districts

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
ROBERT J. McKEEVER
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
The United States ◽  
Fourteenth Amendment ◽  
Equal Protection Clause ◽  
Congressional Districts ◽  
Constitutional Principle ◽  
Racial Lines

In an effort to maximize the representation of African Americans and Hispanics in the United States House of Representatives, many state legislatures have consciously sought to create so-called “majority–minority” congressional districts. This involves carving out districts in which African Americans or Hispanics constitute more than 50 per cent of the voting age population. The expectation is that such districts will elect a minority member of the House, which in turn will lead to a Congress that is more sensitive and responsive to the needs and interests of America's two largest ethnic minorities. Indeed, this expectation has become an article of faith for the mainstream civil rights movement and its white sympathizers.However, like other forms of affirmative action, majority–minority districting sits rather uncomfortably alongside the Constitutional principle of race-neutrality. In a series of recent cases, the United States Supreme Court has declared that, by subordinating traditional districting principles to the overriding need to draw boundaries along racial lines, states have violated the Equal Protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment.

1865 and the Incomplete Caribbean Emancipation Project: Class Migration in Barbados in the Long Nineteenth century

2019 ◽  
Vol 31 (3) ◽  
pp. 180-199
Author(s):  
Caree Ann Marie Banton
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Social Groups ◽  
Social Classes ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
The Future ◽  
The Usa ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Morant Bay Rebellion ◽  
Everyday Resistance

The year 1865 has served a temporal marker of freedom in both the USA and the Caribbean. For African Americans who sought various means to escape the travails of an American slave society, 1865 symbolized the possibilities for a future secured by legislation. By contrast, instead of optimism, 1865 in the British Caribbean signaled demise, failure, and gloomy prospects for the future of an already 30-year-old emancipation legislation passed by parliament. It thereby came to mark a point of renewed resistance. While the Morant Bay Rebellion played a prominent role in symbolizing the failures of the 1833 Emancipation Act in Jamaica, everyday Barbadians had maintained the quest for liberty in the years leading up to 1865 and after. Indeed, as a point of legislative, economic and political collapse, the 1865 upheaval, by serving as a highpoint, reveals the connections between everyday resistance that flanked both sides. Viewing the failures of the emancipation legislation through the 1865 Morant Bay Rebellion, a temporally specific and spatially bounded phenomenon, would be to dismiss the quotidian efforts of the different social groups as they pushed against the boundaries erected around freedom. By exploring the different motivations and calculations by which different groups of Barbadians came to view migration as desirable after both 1834 and 1865, this essay shows how 1865 instead served as a point of continuity for different social classes in Barbados who had long used mobility to vigorously reimagine and transgress the boundaries around freedom throughout the long nineteenth century.

Children, and Black Children

Gone Home ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 76-100
Author(s):  
Karida L. Brown
Keyword(s):  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Oral History ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Black Children ◽  
Phenomenological Analysis ◽  
Reconstruction Era ◽  
The Us ◽  
American Children ◽  
Racial Lines

This chapter analyzes the emergence of the racial self among this migrant group of “Black Appalachians.” How does a child come to learn that they are a black child? What are the institutions and practices that inform and reinforce one’s understanding of his or her own racialization? What are the ways in which this generation of African Americans affirmed and valued their own lives within the dehumanizing context of Jim Crow? Drawing on the oral history testimony of Brown’s research participants, this chapter offers a phenomenological analysis of the ways in which African American children of that generation experienced, perceived, and made sense of racism, prejudice, and segregation. The chapter argues that while the racial landscape was much different from that of their parents who grew up in post-Reconstruction era Alabama, the structure of feeling that articulates the ‘us and them’ along racial lines is the same.

Black Internationalism, Anticommunism, and the Prison

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grant
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Southern Africa ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Black Internationalism ◽  
South Africans ◽  
Black Protest ◽  
Black South Africans ◽  
White Settler Colonialism ◽  
Global Language

Chapters 5 and 6 both document how African Americans and black South Africans established the prison as a key site of black international protest in the 1950s. Specifically, chapter 5 examines how anticommunism operated as a global language that was employed to bolster white supremacy and limit black protest. However, this section of the book also demonstrates how black activists responded to their arrest and imprisonment by strategically connected white settler colonialism in southern Africa to racism in America. This resulted in political prisoners on both sides of the Atlantic being configured as icons of resistance, heroic figures through which black international solidarities were launched and maintained.

scholarly journals Book reviews

2012 ◽  
Vol 86 (3-4) ◽  
pp. 309-407
Author(s):  
Redactie KITLV
Keyword(s):  
African Americans ◽  
Short Story ◽  
West Indies ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
Cane Sugar ◽  
Post Colonial ◽  
Political Performance ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Spiritual Baptists

A World Among these Islands: Essays on Literature, Race, and National Identity in Antillean America, by Roberto Márquez (reviewed by Peter Hulme) Caribbean Reasonings: The Thought of New World, The Quest for Decolonisation, edited by Brian Meeks & Norman Girvan (reviewed by Cary Fraser) Elusive Origins: The Enlightenment in the Modern Caribbean Historical Imagination, by Paul B. Miller (reviewed by Kerstin Oloff) Caribbean Perspectives on Modernity: Returning Medusa’s Gaze, by Maria Cristina Fumagalli (reviewed by Maureen Shay) Who Abolished Slavery: Slave Revolts and Abolitionism: A Debate with João Pedro Marques, edited by Seymour Drescher & Pieter C. Emmer, and Abolitionism and Imperialism in Britain, Africa, and the Atlantic, edited by Derek R . Peterson (reviewed by Claudius Fergus) The Mediterranean Apprenticeship of British Slavery, by Gustav Ungerer (reviewed by James Walvin) Children in Slavery through the Ages, edited by Gwyn Campbell, Suzanne Miers & Joseph C. Miller (reviewed by Indrani Chatterjee) The Invisible Hook: The Hidden Economics of Pirates, by Peter T. Leeson (reviewed by Kris Lane) Theorizing a Colonial Caribbean-Atlantic Imaginary: Sugar and Obeah, by Keith Sandiford (reviewed by Elaine Savory) Created in the West Indies: Caribbean Perspectives on V.S. Naipaul, edited by Jennifer Rahim & Barbara Lalla (reviewed by Supriya M. Nair) Thiefing Sugar: Eroticism between Women in Caribbean Literature, by Omise’eke Natasha Tinsley (reviewed by Lyndon K. Gill) Haiti Unbound: A Spiralist Challenge to the Postcolonial Canon, by Kaiama L. Glover (reviewed by Asselin Charles) Divergent Dictions: Contemporary Dominican Literature, by Néstor E. Rodríguez (reviewed by Dawn F. Stinchcomb) The Caribbean Short Story: Critical Perspectives, edited by Lucy Evans, Mark McWatt & Emma Smith (reviewed by Leah Rosenberg) Society of the Dead: Quita Manaquita and Palo Praise in Cuba, by Todd Ramón Ochoa (reviewed by Brian Brazeal) El Lector: A History of the Cigar Factory Reader, by Araceli Tinajero (reviewed by Juan José Baldrich) Blazing Cane: Sugar Communities, Class, and State Formation in Cuba, 1868-1959, by Gillian McGillivray (reviewed by Consuelo Naranjo Orovio) The Purposes of Paradise: U.S. Tourism and Empire in Cuba and Hawai’i, by Christine Skwiot (reviewed by Amalia L. Cabezas) A History of the Cuban Revolution, by Aviva Chomsky (reviewed by Michelle Chase) The Cubalogues: Beat Writers in Revolutionary Havana, by Todd F. Tietchen (reviewed by Stephen Fay) The Devil in the Details: Cuban Antislavery Narrative in the Postmodern Age, by Claudette M. Williams (reviewed by Gera Burton) Screening Cuba: Film Criticism as Political Performance during the Cold War, by Hector Amaya (reviewed by Ann Marie Stock) Perceptions of Cuba: Canadian and American Policies in Comparative Perspective, by Lana Wylie (reviewed by Julia Sagebien) Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow, by Frank Andre Guridy (reviewed by Susan Greenbaum) The Irish in the Atlantic World, edited by David T. Gleeson (reviewed by Donald Harman Akenson) The Chinese in Latin America and the Caribbean, edited by Walton Look Lai & Tan Chee-Beng (reviewed by John Kuo Wei Tchen) The Island of One People: An Account of the History of the Jews of Jamaica, by Marilyn Delevante & Anthony Alberga (reviewed by Barry Stiefel) Creole Jews: Negotiating Community in Colonial Suriname, by Wieke Vink (reviewed by Aviva Ben-Ur) Only West Indians: Creole Nationalism in the British West Indies, by F.S.J. Ledgister (reviewed by Jerome Teelucksingh) Cultural DNA: Gender at the Root of Everyday Life in Rural Jamaica, by Diana J. Fox (reviewed by Jean Besson) Women in Grenadian History, 1783-1983, by Nicole Laurine Phillip (reviewed by Bernard Moitt) British-Controlled Trinidad and Venezuela: A History of Economic Interests and Subversions, 1830-1962, by Kelvin Singh (reviewed by Stephen G. Rabe) Export/Import Trends and Economic Development in Trinidad, 1919-1939, by Doddridge H.N. Alleyne (reviewed by Rita Pemberton) Post-Colonial Trinidad: An Ethnographic Journal, by Colin Clarke & Gillian Clarke (reviewed by Patricia van Leeuwaarde Moonsammy) Poverty in Haiti: Essays on Underdevelopment and Post Disaster Prospects, by Mats Lundahl (reviewed by Robert Fatton Jr.) From Douglass to Duvalier: U.S. African Americans, Haiti, and Pan Americanism, 1870-1964, by Millery Polyné (reviewed by Brenda Gayle Plummer) Haiti Rising: Haitian History, Culture and the Earthquake of 2010, edited by Martin Munro (reviewed by Jonna Knappenberger) Faith Makes Us Live: Surviving and Thriving in the Haitian Diaspora, by Margarita A. Mooney (reviewed by Rose-Marie Chierici) This Spot of Ground: Spiritual Baptists in Toronto, by Carol B. Duncan (reviewed by James Houk) Interroger les morts: Essai sur le dynamique politique des Noirs marrons ndjuka du Surinam et de la Guyane, by Jean-Yves Parris (reviewed by H.U.E. Thoden van Velzen & W. van Wetering)

Race, Health, and the African Diaspora

2007 ◽  
Vol 27 (2) ◽  
pp. 161-176 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clarence Spigner
Keyword(s):  
Health Care ◽  
Health Disparities ◽  
African Americans ◽  
African Diaspora ◽  
Health Inequalities ◽  
National Policy ◽  
African Continent ◽  
Racial Stratification ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

Health inequalities exist throughout the African Diaspora and are viewed in this article as largely color-coded. In developed, developing, and undeveloped nations today, “racial” stratification is consistently reflected in an inability to provide adequate health regardless of national policy or ideology. For instance, African Americans experience less than adequate health care very similar to Blacks in Britain, in spite of each nations differing health systems. Latin America's Africana Negra communities experience poorer health similar to Blacks throughout the Caribbean. The African continent itself is arguably the poorest on earth. A common history of racism correlates with health disparities across the African Diaspora.

scholarly journals Migratory Movement: The Politics of Ethnic Community (Re) Construction Among Creoles of Color, 1920-1940

2005 ◽  
Vol 28 (2) ◽  
pp. 37-60
Author(s):  
Andrew Jolivétte
Keyword(s):  
Economic Conditions ◽  
Legal Rights ◽  
Access To Education ◽  
The Social ◽  
Migratory Movement ◽  
The Us ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Creoles Of Color

This article considers the social and economic conditions under which Creoles of Color left the state of Louisiana from 1920-1940.1 Because Creoles in the years following 1920 were legally reclassified as black, many lost their land, social and legal rights, and access to education as well as the possibility of upward mobility to which they had previously had access when they were accorded the status of a distinct/legal ethnic group. Creole families had to make decisions about the economic, social, religious, and cultural futures of their children and the community as a whole. As a form of resistance to colonial and neocolonial rule, thousands of Creoles left Louisiana, following the pattern established by members of the previous generation who had anticipated the advent and implications of the new legal racial system as far back as the mid to late 1800s and had engaged in the first wave of migration from 1840-1890, moving primarily from rural ethnic enclaves to larger urban cities within the US and to international sites such as Mexico, Cuba, Haiti, Brazil, and other parts of the Caribbean and Latin America where racial lines were more fluid (Gehman, 1994).

From Bondage to Citizenship: A Comparison of African American and Indian Lower-Caste Mobilization in Two Regions of Deep Inequality

2020 ◽  
Vol 62 (4) ◽  
pp. 770-809
Author(s):  
Narendra Subramanian
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
African Americans ◽  
Civil Rights ◽  
The United States ◽  
Deep South ◽  
Civic Discourse ◽  
Social Classification ◽  
Racial Lines ◽  
Demographic Patterns

AbstractThe paper explores mobilization to reduce the deepest inequalities in the two largest democracies, those along caste lines in India and racial lines in the United States. I compare how the groups at the bottom of these ethnic hierarchies—India's former untouchable castes (Dalits) and African Americans—mobilized from the 1940s to the 1970s in pursuit of full citizenship: the franchise, representation, civil rights, and social rights. Experiences in two regions of historically high inequality (the Kaveri and Mississippi Deltas) are compared in their national contexts. Similarities in demographic patterns, group boundaries, socioeconomic relations, regimes, and enfranchisement timing facilitate comparison. Important differences in nationalist and civic discourse, official and popular social classification, and stratification patterns influenced the two groups’ mobilizations, enfranchisement, representation, alliances, and relationships with political parties. The nation was imagined to clearly include Dalits earlier in India than to encompass African Americans in the United States. Race was the primary and bipolar official and popular identity axis in the United States, unlike caste in India. African Americans responded by emphasizing racial discourses while Dalit mobilizations foregrounded more porously bordered community visions. These different circumstances enabled more widespread African American mobilization, but offered Dalits more favorable interethnic alliances, party incorporation, and policy accommodation, particularly in historically highly unequal regions. Therefore, group representation and policy benefits increased sooner and more in India than in the United States, especially in regions of historically high group inequality such as the Kaveri and other major river Deltas relative to the Deep South, including Mississippi.

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