Critical Perspectives on Black Diaspora Identity and Struggle
I. Maafa: The Scope of the Transatlantic Slave Trade
Gomez, Exchanging Our Country Marks, Chapter 1: “Time and Space”
Summary: Gomez explores how African identities were preserved, adapted, or transformed in the Americas. He challenges the idea that Africans lost their cultural roots during enslavement and instead argues that memory, kinship, and religion helped sustain African identities.
Key Concepts:
- Maafa: A Kiswahili term meaning “great disaster,” used to describe the transatlantic slave trade and its impact.
- Cultural Retention vs. Creolization: The debate about how much African culture survived in the Americas.
- Ethnic Heterogeneity: Africans came from diverse backgrounds; “African” was not a unified identity until shaped in the Americas.
- Time and Space: Constructs through which African worldviews operated differently from European models.
Hurston, Barracoon, pp. x–50
Summary: Hurston presents the life story of Cudjo Lewis (Oluale Kossola), one of the last known survivors of the Middle Passage. His testimony is a firsthand account of life in Africa, capture, the Middle Passage, slavery, and emancipation.
Key Concepts:
- Barracoon: Holding pens for enslaved Africans before shipment.
- Middle Passage: The brutal journey from Africa to the Americas.
- Oral History: Hurston uses narrative ethnography to convey Kossola’s story in his voice and dialect.
Barracoon, pp. 51–69, 132–137 & Gomez, Chapter 7: “Talkin’ Half African”
Summary: These sections deepen Cudjo’s story and illustrate the transformation of language and identity during and after slavery. Gomez explores how enslaved Africans communicated using a mix of languages and how “seasoning” attempted to strip African identity.
Key Concepts:
- Seasoning: The process of breaking down enslaved people physically and psychologically to make them “fit” for slavery.
- Creole Languages: Result of language blending in the Atlantic world.
- Cultural Transmission: How culture survived even through trauma.
II. Politics of the Project: Race, Nation, and Knowledge Production
Gordon, “The Austin School Manifesto”
Summary: Gordon outlines an intellectual framework for studying the Black Diaspora through the lens of lived experience, political struggle, and transnational solidarity. Emphasizes theory grounded in community.
Key Concepts:
- Austin School: A collective of scholars centering Black voices and experiences.
- Diaspora as Method: Studying Black life across national boundaries.
- Engaged Scholarship: Academic work with political and ethical commitments.
Whitten, “The Longue Durée of Racial Fixity”
Summary: A dense anthropological analysis of how racial categories endure and evolve over centuries. Whitten explores the tension between racial “fixity” and fluidity across Latin America and the Caribbean.
Key Concepts:
- Racial Fixity vs. Blending: Some systems emphasize rigid categories, others mestizaje (racial mixing).
- Longue Durée: A long historical perspective from Braudel’s historiography.
- Conjuncture: Key historical moments that shift the social meaning of race.
Haitian Declaration of Independence & African American Support
Summary: The Haitian declaration (1804) asserted Haiti’s independence from France and rejected colonialism and slavery. African American support documents reflect solidarity and shared struggle.
Key Concepts:
- Black Internationalism: Solidarity among people of African descent across borders.
- Revolutionary Rhetoric: Use of Enlightenment ideals in Black liberation.
- Anti-Colonialism: Foundational theme of the Haitian Revolution.
The Ransom Project (NYT)
Summary: This project exposes how Haiti was forced to pay reparations to France for its own freedom, crippling the economy for generations.
Key Concepts:
- Colonial Debt: Financial punishment for emancipation.
- Imperial Exploitation: Economic legacies of slavery and colonialism.
Pierre, “Haiti as Empire’s Laboratory”
Summary: Pierre critiques how Haiti has been treated as a site for experimentation—militarily, economically, politically—by global powers.
Key Concepts:
- Neocolonialism: Continuation of colonial exploitation through indirect means.
- Sovereignty: Haiti’s struggle for political and economic self-determination.
- Racial Capitalism: The entanglement of race and economic systems.
III. Shades of Citizenship: Colorism in the Diaspora
Simmons, “Navigating the Racial Terrain”
Summary: Explores how Dominicans and African Americans experience blackness differently due to national histories. Simmons shows how mixedness complicates racial categories.
Key Concepts:
- Colorism: Discrimination based on skin tone within racial groups.
- Mestizaje: Latin American ideology of racial mixture.
- Diasporic Blackness: Black identity shaped differently across contexts.
Goudreau et al., “The Lessons of Slavery”
Summary: Ethnographic study of how Puerto Rican schoolchildren are taught about slavery, revealing contradictions in national identity and racial ideology.
Key Concepts:
- Blanqueamiento: Whitening ideology in Latin America.
- Hidden Curriculum: Implicit lessons about race and history in education.
- Racial Denial: National mythologies that erase African heritage.
Caldwell, “Women In and Out of Place”
Summary: Caldwell highlights Afro-Brazilian women navigating both racial and gender marginalization in urban spaces. Focus on resistance and spatial politics.
Key Concepts:
- Intersectionality: Overlapping systems of oppression.
- Spatial Politics: How race and gender shape access to space.
- Afro-Brazilian Identity: A complex interplay of race, culture, and nationhood.
IV. We Like It Like That: Power and Queer(ed) Sexual Practice
Allen, Chapter 3: “The Erotics and Politics of Self-Making”
Summary: Allen examines how Black Cuban men use sexuality and performance to construct identity and community, challenging Western notions of queerness.
Key Concepts:
- Erotics of Self-Making: Using desire and intimacy as tools for identity.
- Diasporic Queer Theory: Centering Black and Caribbean sexualities.
- Cubanidad: National identity shaped by race, revolution, and sexuality.
Wekker, Chapter 5: “The Mati Work”
Summary: Explores same-sex relationships among Afro-Surinamese women. Wekker challenges Western binary notions of sexuality.
Key Concepts:
- Mati: Women who form romantic/sexual bonds with other women.
- Sexual Fluidity: Non-Western models of sexual identity.
- Gendered Labor: Emotional and economic roles in mati relationships.
V. State Violence and Community Resistance
Williams, Sex Tourism in Bahia, Introduction
Summary: Williams discusses how sex tourism in Brazil intersects with race, gender, and class. Bahia becomes a site where Blackness is commodified and resisted.
Key Concepts:
- Erotic Capital: The sexualization of race and exoticism in global tourism.
- Resistance: Women’s strategies to subvert and navigate exploitation.
- Globalization: International flows of people, money, and desire.
Working Class Kings in Paradise
Summary: This likely refers to the visibility and self-styling of working-class Black men in Bahia as powerful figures despite marginalization—resistance through aesthetics and performance.
Key Concepts:
- Performance of Masculinity: Reclaiming dignity through public identity.
- Resistance Aesthetics: Using fashion, swagger, and visibility as power.
1. Is the Black Diaspora constituted by difference or sameness?
Argument Option: The Black Diaspora is constituted by both sameness and difference, but the most important defining element is shared struggle against anti-Blackness and colonialism.
Use These Sources:
- Michael Gomez (1998): Africans arrived with different ethnicities, religions, and languages, but formed a shared diasporic identity through the experience of enslavement and racialization (Gomez, 1998).
- Zora Neale Hurston (2018): Cudjo Lewis’ story in Barracoon reveals difference (Yoruba identity, African cultural memory) and sameness (becoming “Negro” in the U.S.)—his individual experience becomes part of the collective Black history (Hurston, 2018).
- Edmund Gordon (2007): Emphasizes that the diaspora must be understood through the shared material conditions and political struggle, despite cultural and geographic variation (Gordon, 2007).
- Jafari Allen (2011): His study of Black queer Cubans illustrates both the local specificity and shared sense of being “Black” through the politics of self-making (Allen, 2011).
Key Concept: Diaspora as unity in difference — not one identity, but many identities forged through shared experience.
2. Are racial categories fixed or fluid in the Americas?
Argument Option: Racial categories are fluid in theory but operate with fixed consequences in practice, depending on national context and history.
Use These Sources:
- Norman Whitten (2007): In Latin America, ideologies like mestizaje suggest racial fluidity, but structural racism persists. Racial blending is a myth that masks inequality (Whitten, 2007).
- Kimberly Simmons (2008): In the Dominican Republic, blackness is denied even among visibly African-descended people. Racial identity is context-dependent but policed by social norms (Simmons, 2008).
- Kia Caldwell (2007): In Brazil, the idea of a racial democracy claims fluidity, but Afro-Brazilian women are still marginalized by both race and gender (Caldwell, 2007).
- Isar Goudreau et al. (2008): In Puerto Rico, racial categories are supposedly fluid, yet schoolchildren are taught narratives that erase Black history and reinforce whiteness (Goudreau, 2008).
Key Concept: Racial fluidity as ideological cover — in many places, race is officially “mixed” or ambiguous, but racism remains entrenched.
3. Are gender and sexuality a source of agency or a site of harm for Black communities?
Argument Option: Gender and sexuality are both a site of harm and a source of agency, depending on historical context and individual/community strategies.
Use These Sources:
- Gloria Wekker (2006): The mati relationships in Suriname reflect agency—Afro-Surinamese women create supportive relationships outside of patriarchal norms (Wekker, 2006).
- Jafari Allen (2011): Black queer men in Cuba reclaim agency through performance, intimacy, and aesthetics—transforming how they are seen and how they see themselves (Allen, 2011).
- Erica Williams (2013): In Bahia, Brazil, sex tourism commodifies Black women, creating harm, but some women strategically navigate this system to gain economic power (Williams, 2013).
- Historical Context (Barracoon/Hurston): Enslaved Black women experienced gendered violence, showing the long history of harm tied to race, gender, and power (Hurston, 2018).
Key Concept: Intersectionality — Black gender and sexual identities are complex sites where oppression and resistance coexist.
4. Should Haiti receive reparations?
Argument Option: Yes—Haiti should receive reparations, particularly from France and global institutions complicit in maintaining its economic oppression.
Use These Sources:
- The Ransom Project (NYT): Haiti paid an indemnity to France for over a century, resulting in massive debt and underdevelopment. France extracted wealth from Haiti’s freedom (NYT, 2023).
- Haitian Declaration of Independence (1804): Haiti declared not just independence, but a break from colonialism and racial domination. Reparations would acknowledge that legacy.
- Jemima Pierre (2023): Argues Haiti has been a testing ground for neocolonial interventions—debt, disaster relief, military occupation (Pierre, 2023).
- African American Solidarity Letters: Early Black American leaders understood Haiti as a symbol of shared liberation. Reparations could extend this legacy of transnational solidarity.
Key Concept: Reparative Justice — addressing historical exploitation through material compensation.
5. Describe the significance of language in the development of the Black Diaspora.
Argument Option: Language was a survival tool and a method of community formation. Across the diaspora, new forms of communication—Creoles, Africanized English, oral storytelling—enabled resistance and identity-building.
Use These Sources:
- Gomez, Chapter 7 (1998): Africans created new languages through the Middle Passage and seasoning. Language helped forge community across ethnic lines (Gomez, 1998).
- Hurston (2018): Barracoon preserves Cudjo Lewis’s distinct speech—his African identity is remembered through language. Oral history preserves Black memory (Hurston, 2018).
- Jafari Allen (2011): In Cuba, language, music, and performance blend Spanish with Black cultural references to create new queer diasporic identities (Allen, 2011).
Key Concept: Language as Resistance — beyond survival, language shaped memory, politics, and collective identity.