Afrocentrism: Mythical Pasts and Imagined Homes (original) (raw)
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Bibliography of African and Afro-Diaspora Writings with some Economic Content, 1782-1965
I am interested in authoring a book on 19th century African economic thought and another on modern black economic thought. Unfortunately, primary sources are dispersed, many are non-digitized (and only accessible from physical archives in different countries), and they are written in multiple languages (with most non-English texts not having English translated versions due to very low broader interest beyond their countries of origin). To ease the task for researchers and scholars interested in the topic, I am taking a small and independent step towards a larger project for the aggregation/compilation, digitization, translation and utilization of black writings for scholars interested in reconstructing the history of modern African economic, political and social thought. Please suggest additional primary sources that have not been included in this bibliography.
Introduction Colonial Racial Capitalism
This one is for Cedric Robinson. For every thing he taught me about race, politics, institutions, fighting, and living. I feel blessed to have known Cedric as a friend and mentor for the nine years I was at uc-Santa Barbara. His expansive intellect, his transfigurative po liti cal commitments, his luminous integrity, and his mischievous humor were a gift, teaching lessons I continue to learn. I hope that the work in this volume as well as the work that it took to produce this volume will carry forward the spirit of his work and testify to its horizon-shifting powers. Before this book took shape as a publication, it was an event.
"Networks, Tastes, and Labor in Free Communities of Color: Transforming the Revolutionary Caribbean"
Atlantic Studies, 2017
Scholarship on free people of color in the Caribbean during the Age of Revolutions has focused on themes of mobility and resilience, with emphasis on the few remarkable individuals who pursued their freedom and respectability in imperially visible registers. These themes sometimes mask as much as they reveal. Mobility ignores those individuals who remain in place in families and communities, and resilience elides efforts by some free people of color to secure the benefits of the slave economy for themselves and their descendants. Often figures are assigned subversive motives or subaltern potential they perhaps would not recognize, when in fact their actions sometimes served to legitimate colonial order and strengthen racial divides by distancing themselves from more marginalized groups. Possible displays of respectability complicated revolutionary-era negotiations among the long free, the enslaved, and recently freed. Free people of color frequently defined margins from the enslaved rather than subvert them, including through largely unconsidered realms of taste or conspicuous consumption. This examination raises questions regarding extant conceptions of how Caribbean free people of color acquired and wielded social, cultural, and symbolic capitals. Perhaps more often than operating on socially progressive or latent revolutionary positions they evinced concern for systemic continuity. This essay, which introduces the following research that explores this topic, suggests new avenues of investigating these overlooked complexities in motivations and actions by free people of color, a population of disproportionate importance in the cultural politics of the revolutionary Caribbean. Without this recalibration, we risk underappreciating the legacy of late Caribbean colonialism, minimizing the context of revolutionary change and state formation, and misunderstanding the ambitions and centrality of free communities of color to these processes.
Routledge International Handbook of Cosmopolitanism Studies, 2018
This article evaluates the concept of Afropolitanism, introduced by Taiye Selasi and Achille Mbembe, as a radical break from the political genealogy of Black nationalism. Whereas racialist traditions, such as Pan-Africanism and Négritude, had presupposed a close emancipatory connection between global racial solidarity and a politics of African reclamation, Afropolitanism refers to a cosmopolitan ethos of transcending national and racial differences. It envisages Africa as a conceptual geography of evolving relationships, shaped by migration and multiracialism. This chapter argues that, in refiguring the idea of Africa outside of racially autochthonous terms, Afropolitanism undermines the political elision of Blackness and Africa, and thereby, both racial solidarity and a politics of belonging. The implication is foremost a challenge to the concept of the African diaspora itself, especially regarding ancestors of those dispersed by slavery. The development of Afropolitanism in the mid-2000s occurred due to the need to manufacture an ethos for Africa’s multiracial postcolonies and 21st century migrations. This chapter concludes by arguing that Afropolitanism cannot act as an ethic for the age of global cosmopolitanism until it reckons with the problem of the inverse relationship: that is, the question of diaspora.