Black Lives, Green Books, and Blue Checks

The Negro Motorist Green Book was a publication that offered resources for the Black traveler from 1936 to 1966. More than a directory of Black-friendly businesses, it also offered articles that provided insights for how best to travel safely, engagement with readers through contests and invitations for readers to share travel stories, and even civil rights advocacy. Today, a contemporary counterpart to the Green Book is Black Twitter, where people share information and advocate for their community. By conducting qualitative open coding on a subset of Green Book editions as well as tweets from Black Twitter, we explore similarities and overlapping characteristics such as safety, information sharing, and social justice. Where they diverge exposes how spaces like Black Twitter have evolved to accommodate the needs of people in the Black diaspora beyond the scope of physical travel and into digital spaces. Our research points to ways that the Black community has shifted from the physical to the digital space, expanding how it supports itself, and the potential for research to strengthen throughlines between the past and the present in order to better see the possibilities of the future.

Imaginations and Speculative Writings: Reinvesting Post-Colonial Possibilities and Subjectivities in Kaie Kellough’s Dominoes at the Crossroads

Recent studies on speculative literature emphasise the narrative presence of postcolonial thinking that proliferates within the genre. It is the case in the collection Dominoes at the Crossroads (2020) by the African Canadian writer Kaie Kellough, which attempts to re-imagine and tell the story of the black diaspora in Montreal, other than under a colonial spectrum. The short stories use a variety of speculative strategies: whether it is reinvesting a marginalised figure of a classic Quebecois novel or imagining the setting of Montreal’s future in which marginalised populations own a majority of the properties. The analysis of these stories will allow us to show how speculative literature is fertile ground for postcolonial potentialities, by allowing us to project elsewhere. Since speculative literature is a broad genre whose definition is not circumscribed, we will see how reflecting on the alternative postcolonial imaginings through such narrative allows for a rewriting that makes it possible to go beyond the colonial paradigms.

Phantom Pains: The Effect of Police Killings of Black Americans on Black British Attitudes

What effect does black politics in the United States have on the attitudes of black citizens in other national contexts? Literature on the black diaspora and transnationalism has characterized cultural and political linkages between black communities in North America, the Caribbean, and Europe, especially during the mid-20th century. In this article, I exploit random timing in the administration of a public attitudes survey to demonstrate that such linkages persist and that the police killing of Eric Garner in 2014 negatively affected black Londoners’ attitudes toward the Metropolitan Police. Notably, I find the effect was largely concentrated among black Londoners: estimates of an effect on white and South Asian Londoners were small and largely insignificant. The evidence presented here demonstrates that racial violence in the United States can affect racial politics in other national contexts and helps frame the emergence of Black Lives Matter chapters and protests beyond the United States.

Suspicion

In 2014 Barbados introduced a vaccine to prevent certain strains of the human papillomavirus (HPV) and reduce the risk of cervical cancer in young women. Despite the disproportionate burden of cervical cancer in the Caribbean, many Afro-Barbadians chose not to immunize their daughters. In Suspicion, Nicole Charles reframes Afro-Barbadian vaccine refusal from a question of hesitancy to one of suspicion. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork, black feminist theory, transnational feminist studies and science and technology studies, Charles foregrounds Afro-Barbadians' gut feelings and emotions and the lingering trauma of colonial and biopolitical violence. She shows that suspicion, far from being irrational, is a fraught and generative affective orientation grounded in concrete histories of mistrust of government and coercive medical practices foisted on colonized peoples. By contextualizing suspicion within these longer cultural and political histories, Charles troubles traditional narratives of vaccine hesitancy while offering new entry points into discussions on racialized biopolitics, neocolonialism, care, affect, and biomedicine across the Black diaspora. Duke University Press Scholars of Color First Book Award recipient

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>

Hollywood Forever: Exploring The Digital African Diaspora In Poetry

<div>Abstract from First Paragraph:</div><div><br></div><div>This essay exclusively examines Holiday’s ebook Hollywood Forever. The e-book is non-traditional and includes a variety of media and performative elements that might otherwise be experienced in art exhibits or installations. The e-book is uniquely crafted to display a blend of visual and auditory features like posters, news reports, and podcasts. Moreover, the multimedia production adds layers of meaning, complexity, and emotion to the text. Holiday’s inclusion of historical materials from American Black culture is a recreation of the Black diaspora archives. Through the unity of old and new media, Holiday weaves together a complex narrative that combines past historical oppression, racial injustice, and intergenerational trauma to recontextualized contemporary social issues. The e-book embodies afropresentism, the combination of digital archival materials, to empower the Black voice. By reshaping history to create space for Black identities, digital texts can participate in the making of their own social and archival construction. The process of rememory uses archival material to reconstruct the narrative of a previously marginalized group. Holiday’s text uses rememory to investigate cultural biases and rearticulate the reader’s approach to racial injustices. </div>

Black Lives Matter in Brother: A Postcolonial Perspective

This study aims to examine how the lives of blacks are reduced and eliminated in Brother (2017) by David Chariandy. Black Lives Matter is a hash tag that appears after the killing of Trayvon Martin (17 years old African American) in 2012 by the savage hands of George Zimmerman (white person). This hash-tag has become a social movement that calls for equality in order to stop the violence against black people because their live is as valuable as white’s. The movement comes into being to highlight the “hypocritical democracy in service to the white males whose freedom are openly depended upon the oppression of blacks” (Lebron, 2017, P. 1). Those who have started this movement try to redeem a state and its arbitrary actions against black who are exterminated since the slavery. Alicia Graza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi have established this movement to reveal the suffering of the blacks who have no rights to live their life. Chariandy is a Canadian writer who specialized in Caribbean literature, black diaspora, and postcolonial studies. The novel is analyzed through Kimberlé Crenshaw’s concept (intersectionality) to show how the race, gender, and class are intersecting together to emphasize how the human beings will be treated accordingly.