New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid

327 Pages·2009·1.398 MB·English

by  Leith Mullings

New Social Movements
in the African Diaspora
The Critical Black Studies Series
Institute for Research in African American Studies
Edited by Manning Marable
Columbia University
The Critical Black Studies Series features readers and anthologies examining challenging topics
within the contemporary black experience—in the United States, the Caribbean, Africa, and
across the African Diaspora. All readers include scholarly articles originally published in the
acclaimed quarterly interdisciplinary journal Souls, published by the Institute for Research in
African-American Studies at Columbia University. Under the general editorial supervision of
Manning Marable, the readers in the series are designed both for college and university course
adoption, as well as for general readers and researchers. The Critical Black Studies Series seeks
to provoke intellectual debate and exchange over the most critical issues confronting the politi-
cal, socioeconomic and cultural reality of black life in the United States and beyond.
Titles in this series published by Palgrave Macmillan:
Racializing Justice, Disenfranchising Lives: The Racism, Criminal Justice, and Law Reader
Edited by Manning Marable, Keesha Middlemass, and Ian Steinberg
Seeking Higher Ground: The Hurricane Katrina Crisis, Race, and Public Policy Reader
Edited by Manning Marable and Kristen Clarke
Transnational Blackness: Navigating the Global Color Line
Edited by Manning Marable and Vanessa Agard-Jones
Black Routes to Islam
Edited by Manning Marable and Hishaam D. Aidi
Barack Obama and African-American Empowerment: The Rise of Black America’s New Leadership
Edited by Manning Marable and Kristin Clarke
New Social Movements in the African Diaspora: Challenging Global Apartheid
Edited by Leith Mullings
New Social Movements
in the African Diaspora
Challenging Global Apartheid
Edited by Leith Mullings
Series Editor, Manning Marable
Palgrave
macmillan
new social movements in the african diaspora
Copyright © Manning Marable and Leith Mullings, 2009.
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 2009 978-0-230-62139-8
All rights reserved.
First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a
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ISBN 978-0-230-62149-7 ISBN 978-0-230-10457-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1057/9780230104570
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data.
New social movements in the African diaspora : challenging global apartheid /
edited by Manning Marable and Leith Mullings.
p. cm.
Includes index.
1. Social movements. 2.
African diaspora. 3. Race discrimination. I. Marable, Manning, 1950– II. Mullings,
Leith.
HM881.N49 2009
305.896009—dc22 2009017780
A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library.
Design by Scribe Inc.
First edition: December 2009
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
Contents
Introduction: Reframing Global Justice: New Social Movements in the
African Diaspora 1
Leith Mullings
I Latin America 11
1 Contesting Politics as Usual: Black Social Movements,
Globalization, and Race Policy in Latin America 13
Tianna S. Paschel and Mark Q. Sawyer
2 Multiethnic Nations and Cultural Citizenship: Proposals from
the Afro-Descendant Movement in Ecuador 33
Jhon Antón Sánchez
3 The Black Movement in Panama: A Historical and Political
Interpretation, 1994–2004 49
George Priestley and Alberto Barrow
4 The Liberation Imperative of Black Genocide: Blueprints from
the African Diaspora in the Americas 79
João H. Costa Vargas
5 Transnational Black Feminism in the Twenty-first Century:
Perspectives from Brazil 105
Kia Lilly Caldwell
6 The Emergence and Evolving Character of Contemporary Afro-
Bolivian Mobilization: From the Performative to the Political 121
Sara Busdiecker
7 Afro-descendant Struggles for Collective Rights in Latin America 139
Juliet Hooker
II The Indian Ocean World 155
8 Indians of African Descent: History and Contemporary Experience 157
Beheroze Shroff
9 Taking on Empires: Reparations, the Right of Return, and
the People of Diego Garcia 171
David Vine
v i Contents
III Europe, Canada, and the United States 193
10 Fightback: The Movement Against Racial Profiling in Europe 195
Clarence Lusane
11 Rethinking Global Justice: Black Women Resist the
Transnational Prison-Industrial Complex 213
Julia Sudbury
12 Reconstituting Political Genealogies: Reflections on Youth,
Racial Justice, and the Uses of History 233
Ana Aparicio
13 New Forms: The Political Potential of Hip-Hop 247
Raymond Codrington
14 Eco-apartheid and Global Greenwaves: African Diasporic
Environmental Justice Movements 263
Melissa Checker
15 Sista’ Friends and Other Allies: Domestic Workers United and
Coalition Politics 285
Premilla Nadasen
16 Barack Obama and the Contours of African American Social
Protest Movements 299
Manning Marable
IV Back to Africa 311
17 New Social Movements in Nubian Identity among Nubians in
Egypt, Sudan, and the United States 313
Carolyn Fluehr-Lobban and Richard A. Lobban
List of Contributors 325
Index 331
I
NTRODUCTION
Reframing Global
Justice
New Social Movements
in the African Diaspora
Leith Mullings
In the last few decades, collective actions among people of African descent
have emerged and intensified. The defeat of apartheid in South Africa and the elec-
tion of the first African American president of the United States—forty years after the
civil rights movement toppled legal segregation—signified powerful global transfor-
mations in how race is lived. Why have collective actions among African-descended
people expanded at this time? What questions do these actions raise about how we
think about coalitions, transformations, and social movements?
The title of this volume, New Social Movements in the African Diaspora, carries a
great deal of scholarly baggage: a host of theoretical issues concerning what consti-
tutes a social movement, the extent of these movements’ “newness,” and the utility
of the diaspora framework. My concern here is to not get bogged down in these
debates but rather to highlight the complexity of these resistance activities. Too often,
claims on the basis of racialization have been relegated to, or sometimes castigated as,
“identity politics,” and some observers of antiracism question the perceived contra-
dictions of racially based mobilizations. Yet the complex reality of racism as “a set of
practices, structures, beliefs, and representation . . . that work though modes of dis-
possession . . . [and are] interwoven with other forms of inequality, particularly class,
gender, sexuality and nationality”1 belies easy distinctions between “identity politics”
and movements based on class interests.
This volume is designed to call attention to these recent initiatives among people
of African descent as they arise in the context of contemporary global processes.2 The
social movements described here, for the most part, have emerged to address the con-
sequences of racialization—the social, economic, and political process of transforming
2 Leith Mullings
populations into races and creating racial meanings.3 “Racialization from below . . .
the emergence of counterhegemonic movements framed in the language of race and
racism to signal dispossession”4 embodies strategic efforts to redistribute resources
along racial lines. The chapters in this volume constitute a sample of such initiatives
in various parts of the world. The authors represent a diversity of disciplines and are
scholars, activists, and scholar-activists.
Chapters 1 through 7 focus on Latin America, currently the home of approxi-
mately one hundred fifty million people of African descent, comprising thirty percent
of the total population.5 Of the estimated nine to eleven million enslaved Africans
transported to the Western Hemisphere during the transatlantic slave “trade,” the
overwhelming majority ended up in Latin America, with approximately forty per-
cent going to Brazil alone.6 Though in some countries black-identified movements
have a long history, many of the contemporary movements have only recently taken
shape. Intensified mobilization around racialization is particularly significant in Latin
America, where, unlike North America, racial segregation was rarely enforced by law.
In addition, multiple and sometimes fluid racial categories were often the norm, and
several nations adopted national ideologies glorifying mestizaje, or race mixture. These
differences contributed to obscuring racial inequality and inhibiting antiracist mobili-
zation despite pervasive discrimination.
Tianna S. Paschel and Mark Q. Sawyer provide an overview of Afro-descended
social movements in Latin America, assessing developments in Brazil, Cuba, Puerto
Rico, Colombia, and parts of Central America. Jhon Antón Sánchez and George
Priestley and Alberto Barrow present detailed accounts of the social movements in
Ecuador and Panama. With reference to Brazil, João Costa Vargas describes a collab-
orative project between black U.S. and Brazilian activists to combat police violence,
and Kia Caldwell traces the development of Afro-Brazilian women’s transnational
feminist and antiracist movements. Sara Busdeiker analyzes the recent organizing
efforts of Bolivia’s small black population, while, charting a direction for Afro-descen-
dant movements in Latin America, Juliet Hooker identifies the difficulties these
movements face in developing a “legitimating narrative for collective rights.”
Initiatives of African-descended people in the region around the Indian Ocean are
not as well known as those in Latin America. Beheroze Shroff describes the history
and contemporary conditions of Sidis, Indians of African descent, and David Vine
provides an account of the thirty-year struggle of the Chagossians, descendants of
Africans, to regain their island homeland in the Indian Ocean.
In the global north, disproportionate criminalization and incarceration of Afri-
can-descended people has become an important site of struggle. Clarence Lusane
describes the development of antiracist movements against police violence in Europe,
and, across the Atlantic, Julia Sudbury examines the role of Canadian and U.S. black
women in building a movement to address racialized incarceration. Ana Aparicio
documents projects initiated by New York City black and brown youths to confront
police brutality, the prison-industrial complex, and other consequences of discrimina-
tion, while Raymond Codrington addresses the international significance of hip-hop
as a cultural form of youth organizing. Melissa Checker examines the challenges to
environmental racism by the U.S. environmental justice movement, Premilla Nadasen
focuses on the organizing efforts of women in Domestic Workers United in New York
Reframing Global Justice 3
City, and Manning Marable analyzes the growth of new grassroots movements, the
emergence of postracial politics, and the election of Barack Obama. Finally, Carolyn
Fluehr-Lobban and Richard Lobban chronicle the emerging relations between Afri-
can Americans and Nubians.
Why Now?
Though several of the social movements described in this volume have recently gained
traction, they are linked to a long history of local and global resistance projects rooted
in slave rebellions, maroon communities, and anticolonial and civil rights struggles.
The new transnational networks are the successors to such international projects as
Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), which established
more than seven hundred branch organizations throughout the United States and sev-
eral hundred more across the Caribbean and Africa in the 1920s; W. E. B. Du Bois’s
Pan-African Congress movement, beginning in Paris in February 1919 and culminat-
ing in the Fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945; and the Bandung Conference in April
1955. The anticolonial revolutions, the civil rights movement in the United States,
and the struggle against apartheid in South Africa have provided models and inspi-
ration. Unlike some of the earlier movements, the current initiatives function in a
world that is no longer bipolar. European socialism and the noncapitalist model that,
however flawed, inspired earlier initiatives by presenting an alternative to capitalism,
no longer exist. At the same time, some regions of the world, such as Latin America,
are experiencing an expansion of democracy.
Economic restructuring promoted by the apparent consolidation of global capital-
ism and its attendant ideology of neoliberalism have detrimentally effected people all
over the world, but they also have specifically racialized consequences. In postindus-
trial countries, the legacies of colonialism, international debt, and structural adjust-
ment policies have accelerated all forms of dispossession, and, in industrial countries,
African-descended populations are disproportionately affected by the continuing cri-
ses of rising unemployment and the precipitous decline in the redistributive functions
of the state through social services.
Struggles against displacement and for land rights are a major feature of Afro-
descendant populations. In Latin America, where often land is the only form of
wealth and transferable assets for Afro-descendants,7 there are intense conflicts to
retain, obtain, and protect land, communities, and the environment. Throughout
the world, Afro-descendants contend with national and international concerns. For
example, Afro-Colombians, who have historically occupied land on the Pacific coast
that is rich in biodiversity, natural resources and minerals, clash with national and
international forces as they fight to retain their land (Chapters 1 and 14). The Cha-
gossians have confronted both British imperial reach and U.S. military hegemony in
their thirty-year attempt to regain their homeland, now one of the most important
U.S. bases, strategically located in the Indian Ocean (Chapter 9).
Similarly, urban populations, in countries as distinct as the United States and
Panama, experience eviction from their neighborhoods through foreclosure, gentrifi-
cation, and neglect during national disasters, sparking the development of neighbor-
hood, community, and tenants movements (Chapters 3 and 16). As the siting of toxic