{"id":268648,"date":"2020-09-14T02:24:12","date_gmt":"2020-09-14T06:24:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/?p=268648"},"modified":"2020-09-14T02:24:12","modified_gmt":"2020-09-14T06:24:12","slug":"black-lives-matter-but-slavery-isnt-our-only-narrative","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/canadianinquirer.net\/v1\/2020\/09\/14\/black-lives-matter-but-slavery-isnt-our-only-narrative\/","title":{"rendered":"Black Lives Matter but slavery isn’t our only narrative"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>
lavery\u2019s afterlife is central to Black Lives Matter\u2019s important call for racial and structural justice and equality. (Photo by Maria Oswalt\/Unsplash)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Our historical understanding of Blackness is most commonly shaped by the story of the Atlantic slave trade \u2013 the forced movement of Africans to the West, in particular to the Americas. But this is a linear narrative that is dominated by American voices. It\u2019s not just potentially exclusory; it doesn\u2019t adequately take into account the diversity of black people worldwide. The same is true of Blackness<\/a> studies, which continue to be dominated by and serve the interests of Western scholarship. Aretha Phiri asks Michelle M. Wright, professor and author of Becoming Black<\/a>: Creating Identity in the African Diaspora, about her work in disrupting the slavery narrative.<\/em><\/p>\n

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Aretha Phiri:<\/strong> To start with a recent development, the Black Lives Matter movement<\/a> appears to have gained global momentum. And yet its impact seems to be mainly in the global North. Does this suggest that black people\u2019s experience of race and racism is not universal?<\/p>\n

Michelle M. Wright:<\/strong> The fight for freedom is important, but it really has to include everybody. This requires some radical rethinking. We have to ask who gets to access contemporary spaces. Who has the time (and money) to join in the fight according to the times and places set by the leaders? Who speaks the language we have chosen to communicate in, and who is left out? Black folks are astonishingly diverse in their cultures, histories, languages, religions, so no single definition of Blackness is going to fit everyone. When we fail to consider this, we effectively leave many Black people out of the conversation.<\/p>\n

Aretha Phiri:<\/strong> Slavery\u2019s afterlife is central to Black Lives Matter\u2019s important call for racial and structural justice and equality. Yet, in your paper<\/a>, Black in Time: Diaspora, Diversity and Identity, you trouble the dominance of a corresponding \u201cMiddle Passage\u201d epistemology as racially reductive. What is broadly meant by \u201cMiddle Passage\u201d thinking and how is it disseminated by US-based scholars?<\/p>\n

Michelle M. Wright:<\/strong> In most US (and European) academic conversations, the \u201cMiddle Passage<\/a>\u201d \u2013 also known as the Atlantic slave trade \u2013 is used interchangeably with the African \u201cdiaspora<\/a>\u201d \u2013 the dispersal of Black and African people from their \u201coriginal\u201d, typically (West) African locales to North America. This linear mapping is not just convenient, it is false. Ninety-five percent of enslaved Africans were transported to South America and the Caribbean, not the US; not to mention the millions of slaves who were transported east to places like Turkey and India. Reinforced by a linear timeline which is understood to \u201cprogressively\u201d track history, this mapping further distorts history in service to the West. That is, because (West) Africa is the starting point, the tendency is to view it as embedded in \u201cthe past\u201d and the West as aligned with \u201cthe future\u201d.<\/p>\n

In my book<\/a>, Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology<\/em>, I call this particular mapping of Blackness the \u201cMiddle Passage epistemology\u201d. It\u2019s a specific form of knowledge or way of knowing (the world) that is oriented to the West, specifically to America. This is problematic not just because it hierarchises or \u201cranks\u201d Blackness, but also because (transatlantic) scholarship on Black African diaspora is often imagined through historical and cultural parameters in which \u201cMiddle Passage Blackness\u201d is the norm, often the only representation of Blackness.<\/p>\n

Aretha Phiri:<\/strong> Building on your observation, I am struck by the continued influence in South African universities of Paul Gilroy\u2019s seminal text The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness<\/em> in particular and US-based Black Atlantic<\/a> studies in general. Where these foreground the global influences and contributions of Black peoples, they also unfortunately disseminate \u201cMiddle Passage\u201d thinking which situates Africa in the past. What are the other challenges presented here?<\/p>\n

Michelle M. Wright:<\/strong> Not only is what is typically represented in Black Atlantic scholarship narrow, it is almost always heterosexual and masculinist. It struggles to imagine race and racism outside of the threat of emasculation and racial futures and racial pasts outside of a heteropatriarchal norm.<\/p>\n

Most recently, the famous 1619 Project<\/a> in The New York Times<\/em> aimed at documenting the impact of slavery on the US. But it focuses almost exclusively on Black men in African American history, eliding the achievements of women and queer folks. This leads to the assumption that it is heterosexual Black men who played the major contributory roles. But our earliest abolitionist<\/a> movements were started by Black women, our first Presidential candidate was a Black woman, and it was Black queer activists like James Baldwin and Bayard Rustin who were central to the Civil Rights Movement<\/a>. So yes, part of the ethical challenge, then, is to recognise that some Black people have much more privilege than others.<\/p>\n

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\nRead more:
\nOn decolonising teaching practices, not just the syllabus<\/a>
\n<\/strong>
\n<\/em><\/p>\n

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Aretha Phiri:<\/strong> I am struck, again, at how your analysis is relevant to Black African scholarship, where considerations of women and queer bodies have also historically been obscured or omitted\u2026<\/p>\n

Michelle M. Wright:<\/strong> Racial metanarratives are inherently limiting. It\u2019s very difficult for Black Africans, much less Black Europeans and Black peoples of the Pacific and Central and South America, to read themselves through the dominant (US) framings of Blackness. For example, if you are a Kenyan living in Mombasa, chances are high that your greatest preoccupation is not racist white cops, but violence from Black Kenyan policemen<\/a>. And here we are, one scholar Zimbabwean\/South African, the other a US citizen born and raised in Western Europe, both women, myself queer. The \u201cMiddle Passage\u201d epistemology fails because it dictates that you belong to the past and I belong to the present and future. But history, nationality, gender, class and sexuality intersected us here at this exchange even as we came through different paths and bring different experiences, outlooks and philosophies.<\/p>\n

This article is part of a series<\/a> called Decolonising the Black Atlantic in which black and queer women literary academics rethink and disrupt traditional Black Atlantic studies. The series is based on papers delivered at the Revising the Black Atlantic: African Diaspora Perspectives<\/a> colloquium at the Stellenbosch Institute for Advanced Study<\/a>.<\/em>\"The<\/p>\n

Aretha Phiri<\/a>, Senior lecturer, Department of Literary Studies in English, Rhodes University<\/a><\/em> and Michelle M Wright<\/a>, Professor of African Diaspora Studies, Northwestern University<\/a><\/em><\/p>\n

This article is republished from The Conversation<\/a> under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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