Dancing the Museum Black: Activist Animations of the Social

This chapter considers concepts of activism and Black presence in experiences of dance in museums. Working through concepts of Afropessimism, Afrofuturism, and the theoretical gathering notion of a Black Commons, I will offer four case studies of dance in the museum that render the space towards collective Black possibilities. The choreographic works Dapline! (2016), fastPASTdance (2017), as well as a reconstruction of Instead of Allowing Some Thing to Rise Up to Your Face Dancing Bruce and Dance and Other Things (2000) and the moving-image object APESHIT (2018) offer evidence of a special possibility for Black dance in the museum space; a creation of social space too-often denied to Black people in diaspora.

O movimento musical LGBT e seus contramovimentos / The LGBT musical movement and its countermovements

Este artigo trata de conflitos culturais e de movimentos contracorrentes que atualmente ocorrem em torno de gênero. Nos últimos anos, observa-se a formação de um movimento musical LGBT brasileiro, liderado por linguagens trans e negras, incluindo artistas como Liniker, As Bahias e a Cozinha Mineira, Linn da Quebrada e, ainda, pop stars, como Pabllo Vittar. Tal movimento articula um impactante campo de agenciamento de gêneros e sexualidades contemporâneas. Neste artigo, analisa-se o seu impacto não apenas a partir de sua linguagem interseccional e de suas políticas LGBT, mas também através da dinâmica conflituosa que o expõe aos chamados movimentos antigênero. Como será mostrado, esses contramovimentos fazem uso de diferentes ataques digitais às cantoras LGBT, que permitem radicalizar o ódio, mais geral, voltado contra supostos traidores da nação.Abstract This article deals with cultural conflicts and countercurrent movements that currently occur around gender. In recent years, a Brazilian LGBT musical movement emerged, including artists such as Liniker, As Bahias and Cozinha Mineira, Linn da Quebrada and also pop stars, such as Pabllo Vittar. Led by trans and black activist discourse, this movement articulates a relevant field of agency of contemporary genders and sexualities. In this article, its impact is analyzed not only from its intersectional language and its LGBT politics, but also through the conflicting dynamics that expose it to so-called anti-gender movements. As will be shown, these countermovements are using different digital attacks on LGBT singers that allow to radicalize hatred towards supposed traitors of the nation.

Religion, Rights, and the Promises of Reconstruction

This chapter investigates how African American activist-artists adopted new strategies to realize the promises of Reconstruction and partnered often with leaders of the African Methodist Episcopal (AME) Church leadership to accomplish these. Black image producers used their reputations and successes to encourage opportunities for, and exercise newly granted rights to, black people after the Civil War. They funded black education, supported black Reconstruction politicians, and celebrated constitutional amendments; one even attained political office. They crafted images that revealed their investment in the visual culture of John Brown, black Union veterans, and the future of Cuba. Just as these black activist artists backed the AME Church, so the AME Church leadership repeatedly encouraged its readers to collect, reflect upon, and draw inspiration from their images and the messages that they communicated.

To be Black, Queer and Radical: Centring the epistemology of Marielle Franco

The aim of this article is to pay tribute to Marielle Franco, a Brazilian LGBTQ+ Black activist from the favela who was brutally executed in March 14, 2018. Taking Marielle’s life and death as a case study, I will demonstrate how she embodied Black feminist theory and practice and how her execution can be better addressed by situating it within the context of spatialities of race and the necropolitical governance of Rio de Janeiro.

Black Trolls Matter: Racial and Ideological Asymmetries in Social Media Disinformation

The recent rise of disinformation and propaganda on social media has attracted strong interest from social scientists. Research on the topic has repeatedly observed ideological asymmetries in disinformation content and reception, wherein conservatives are more likely to view, redistribute, and believe such content. However, preliminary evidence has suggested that race may also play a substantial role in determining the targeting and consumption of disinformation content. Such racial asymmetries may exist alongside, or even instead of, ideological ones. Our computational analysis of 5.2 million tweets by the Russian government-funded “troll farm” known as the Internet Research Agency sheds light on these possibilities. We find stark differences in the numbers of unique accounts and tweets originating from ostensibly liberal, conservative, and Black left-leaning individuals. But diverging from prior empirical accounts, we find racial presentation—specifically, presenting as a Black activist—to be the most effective predictor of disinformation engagement by far. Importantly, these results could only be detected once we disaggregated Black-presenting accounts from non-Black liberal accounts. In addition to its contributions to the study of ideological asymmetry in disinformation content and reception, this study also underscores the general relevance of race to disinformation studies.

Black Empowerment in Jackson

Chapter four traces the intersection between Mississippi’s long freedom struggle and the federally funded war on poverty in the state capitol, Jackson. First, it describes the development of the capitol’s civil rights activism through the 1950s and into the 1960s, with sit-in campaigns drawing on the vibrancy of Tougaloo College, the Jackson NAACP Youth Council, and the leadership of Medgar Evers. The chapter then explores the way in which the class divisions which undermined activism in Jackson fed into the creation of the city’s anti-poverty program, Community Services Association. It traces the way in which one black activist and poverty warrior, Don Jackson, used his position in the Neighborhood Youth Corps to foster the city’s youthful activism. These efforts were, however, quickly undermined by the city’s powerful mechanisms of white supremacy, notably the state sovereignty commission.

Schomburg’s Blackness of a Different Matter: A Historiography of Refusal

This essay uses Vanessa Valdés’s Diasporic Blackness: The Life and Times of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg (2017) to reflect on the different stakes surrounding debates about Schomburg as a historical figure and also as a heuristic for grasping the complex vicissitudes of Afro-Latinx life. It challenges historicizations that presume Afro-Latinidad to be a stable and additive political ontology and that possibly foreclose black Latinx strategies of disidentification or refusal that transcend racial or ethnic nationalisms. It also provokes readers to think of what it would be like to write about Schomburg outside of frameworks that cast him as a heroic rescuer of memory and therefore as an avatar of idealized masculine respectability. Lastly, this essay asks that we consider not just the historical actors and cultural producers that Schomburg devoted himself to illuminating but also how his posthumous heroization cast a shadow over nonanglophone black activist-intellectuals who did not conform to normative early twentieth century US black nationalisms.

‘Lower types of cranks, crooks and racial bigots’? The Universal Negro Improvement Association and black political violence in the United States, 1918–1930

This article examines the involvement of the black nationalist Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA) in black political violence in the early-interwar period in the United States. Evidence suggests that the UNIA was the organisation most often involved in black political confrontations, and the article discusses how the state, the black and white press and other black activist organisations may have both benefitted from and perpetuated the UNIA’s reputation for political violence. The essay argues that the UNIA’s involvement in violence against other black organisations and groups can be explained partly by the intensity of the ‘war of words’ among prominent black leaders in the United States, such as W.E.B. Du Bois and Marcus Garvey. Furthermore, the article suggests that ethnic and gender differences within the American UNIA itself could exacerbate pre-existing tensions between different groups of Garveyites. Contextualising black political violence in these ways allows us to move beyond a reductionist view of grassroots Garveyites as prone to violence. Instead, this approach allows us to better understand the relationship between the famous ‘war of words’ and the kinds of tensions, confrontations and violence that sometimes occurred at grassroots level between supporters of different black organisations and groups. The article contributes not only to the growing historiography about the UNIA at grassroots level, but also to discussions about the militarisation of black protest during World War I and in the 1920s, including the use of self-defence and paramilitary-style tactics by people of African descent in the United States.

FLICKERING BODIES: MAPPING MULTICULTURALISM AND INSURGENT CITIZENSHIP IN WAYDE COMPTON’S BLACK VANCOUVER

We live in a moment of hardening of nationalist discourses against immigration and racial minorities. In this conservative climate, Canada prevails as a benchmark for multicultural integration. However, there are voices within the nation that question this image of harmony. The case of the Black Vancouver community has not yet been studied in depth in this regard. This article of reflection aims to contribute to the debate on the relations of the nation-state and subaltern groups, and how they manifest themselves in the multicultural city. Vancouver has been chosen as a paradigmatic space because of its transcultural character built on indigenous lands. The object of study was the literature of Wayde Compton author and black activist of the city. Stemming from theories of the socio-spatial dialectic of Edward Soja and Leonie Sandercock, this article analyses the connection between the city, its representation in literature and its effects on social relationships. The work of Compton and its parallelism with the geo-history of Vancouver and subaltern ethnic communities were analysed. The result reaches a reading of Vancouver as a (post)colonial city and space of subaltern multiculturalism, regarding the official Canadian model, and colonialism that has made invisible to the Black Vancouver and the indigenous communities.