Asking hard questions about Black folks in Black places. See below….
"It is a space of memory, of negotiation between past and present, as much as it is, in the Americas, a space in which European, African beliefs confront each other and congeal into new, syncretic concepts and rituals." - Myriam J. A. Chancy on lakou/yard consciousness in Autochthonomies: Transnationalism, Testimony, and Transmission in the African Diaspora, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2020).
Edwidge Danticat - WRITING HOME | https://www.writingho.me/2021/06/09/season-02-ep-02-more-joy-edwidge-danticat/
This article has y’all feeling really spicy huh? Catherine Porter et al., “The Root of Haiti’s Misery: Reparations to Enslavers,” The New York Times, May 20, 2022, sec. World, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/20/world/americas/haiti-history-colonized-france.html which includes this tidbit - “The bank that benefited most from an 1875 loan to Haiti was Crédit Industriel et Commercial, a French institution that helped finance the Eiffel Tower.” If you like that, you should also check out:
This thread by Yarimar Bonilla on what is really at stake for those of us who are Haitians or students of Haiti (I identify as the second):
BALGUY JESSICA, INDEMNISER L’ESCLAVAGE EN 1848 ? DEBATS DANS L’EMPIRE FRANCAIS DU XIXE SIECLE (Paris : Aubervilliers: KARTHALA, 2020). (A Black woman and a graduate student who has done work on this)
This database of indemnities paid by Haiti (and others, if I’m not mistaken): https://esclavages.cnrs.fr/ressources/esclavage-indemnite/ (Thank you Ana Lucia Araujo for putting me on to Balguy and this database over at Cottias shop)
Black Puerto Ricans
Puerto Rico Population Declined 11.8% From 2010 to 2020 (i.e. the census returns are now live with some interesting infographics see ): https://www.census.gov/library/stories/state-by-state/puerto-rico-population-change-between-census-decade.html
About 6 million U.S. adults identify as Afro-Latino https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2022/05/02/about-6-million-u-s-adults-identify-as-afro-latino/
Posting this again and again:
And this again:
Ku Klux Klan
Images via the Louisiana Digital Library: “April 29, 1868. The Ku Klux Klan. Published in the Louisiana Democrat. Sheriff of Rapides Parish summons 200 African American men to chase away the Ku Klux Klan in Alexandria Louisiana. The Klan was threatening death and destruction to all "Radicals." The article seems to allude to a drawing or sketch not found in the WPA's transcription.”
“What sort of politics does ‘the region’ as a contingently produced space offer for an understanding of Caribbean futures? In his book, Development Arrested (2017 [1998]), the late Clyde Woods weaves together a magisterial account of one particular Caribbean region, the lower Mississippi Delta, forged through indigenous genocide and removal, slave labor and soil mining via cotton (and rice) production. Plantation production consolidated a power bloc that has long mobilized racism and racial violence, massive projects of environment-making, and alliances with northern finance and industrial capital to reproduce its power and with it, the coherence of this ‘underdeveloped’ region. Woods’ notion of a Blues epistemology focuses our attention not only on how the plantation bloc has reproduced itself in the face of economic, environmental and social crises, but also how it has long been resisted by rural, African-American working classes and their cultural traditions. Villanueva et al.’s recent reading of San Juan as a ‘fragile city’ extends Woods’ framework to Puerto Rico’s beleaguered capital in the face of financial meltdown and hurricane-wrought devastation (2018). The authors develop a compelling account of how local elites -- the white ‘Criollo bloc’ -- maintain their status through asset-stripping practices that reinforce race/class divides on the island, while inflating public debt and reinforcing mainland industrial-cum-financial value extraction. In both these accounts, Caribbean spaces articulate race and class struggles that are historically rooted and never entirely local; they are formed through cyclically repeated, often brutal, space-making projects as well as temporary socio-spatial compromises.”
Marion Werner, “The Archipelago And Politics Of Possibility,” Society and Space (blog), January 9, 2019, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/the-archipelago-and-politics-of-possibility.
TBR List
Stephanie Jo Shaw, W.E.B. Du Bois and The Souls of Black Folk (UNC Press Books, 2013).
Finally….