Lisa Lowe: The Intimacies of Four Continents (2015)
Filed under book | Tags: · 1700s, 1800s, abolitionism, asia, black people, capitalism, colonialism, dialectic, governance, history, imperialism, indigenous peoples, intimacy, knowledge, labour, liberalism, marxism, narrative, race, slavery, trade, united states, violence
“In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects the liberal narrative of freedom overcoming slavery to the expansion of Anglo-American empire, observing that abstract promises of freedom often obscure their embeddedness within colonial conditions. Race and social difference, Lowe contends, are enduring remainders of colonial processes through which “the human” is universalized and “freed” by liberal forms, while the peoples who create the conditions of possibility for that freedom are assimilated or forgotten. Analyzing the archive of liberalism alongside the colonial state archives from which it has been separated, Lowe offers new methods for interpreting the past, examining events well documented in archives, and those matters absent, whether actively suppressed or merely deemed insignificant. Lowe invents a mode of reading intimately, which defies accepted national boundaries and disrupts given chronologies, complicating our conceptions of history, politics, economics, and culture, and ultimately, knowledge itself.”
Publisher Duke University Press, Durham, NC, June 2015
ISBN 9780822358633, 0822358638
319 pages
Discussion: Gayatri Gopinath, Alyosha Goldstein, Moon-Ho Jung, Stephanie Smallwood (book roundtable at ASA Conference, Toronto, 2015, video).
Reviews: John Holmwood (Theory, Culture & Society, 2016), Betty Joseph (American Historical Review, 2016), Hossein Ayazi (Qui Parle, 2016), Michael Gaffney (Journal of American Studies, 2016), Adam Nemmers (Women’s Studies, 2016), Marion C. Rohrleitner (Pacific Historical Review, 2016), Lance Bertelsen (Modern Philology, 2017), Harrod J Suarez (Melus: Multi-Ethnic Literature of the U.S., 2017), Jesse van Amelsvoort (Nexus Instituut, n.d.), Hadley Howes (Antipode, 2020).
May Opitz, Katharina Oguntoye, Dagmar Schultz (eds.): Showing Our Colors: Afro-German Women Speak Out (1991)
Filed under book | Tags: · black people, colonialism, feminism, germany, history, race, racism, sexism, women
“ISD (Initiative Schwarze Menschen in Deutschland), ADEFRA (Schwarze Frauen in Deutschland), Neuen Schwarzen Bewegung, all began in the 1980s in Berlin, centred around Freie Universität where Dagmar Schultz was professor. She invited Audre Lorde as a visiting professor from 1984, where May Opitz (from 1992 May Ayim) and Katharina Oguntoye attended her seminars. Out of this came Black History Month in Germany in 1991, and Farbe bekennen: Afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, published in 1986.” (Source)
First published in German as Farbe bekennen: afro-deutsche Frauen auf den Spuren ihrer Geschichte, Orlanda Frauenverlag, Berlin, 1986.
English edition
Foreword by Audre Lorde
Translated by Anne V. Adams
Publisher University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, MA, 1991
ISBN 0870237594, 9780870237591
xxv+239 pages
Reviews: Amina Mama (Feminist Review, 1993), Leslie Morris (German Quarterly, 1994), George Junne (Explorations in Sights and Sounds, 1993), Laura Freisberg (BR, 2020, DE).
Publisher (new ed., 2020, DE)
Publisher (EN)
Wikipedia
WorldCat
Sylvia Wynter: Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World [1970s]
Filed under manuscript | Tags: · black people, body, caribbean, colonialism, critique, human, humanism, politics, resistance, slavery, theory
“Black Metamorphosis: New Natives in a New World is an unpublished manuscript written by Sylvia Wynter. The work is a seminal piece in Black Studies and uses diverse fields to explain Black experiences and presence in the Americas.
Throughout the 1970s and early 1980s, Wynter worked with the Center for Afro-American Studies (CAAS) at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) to complete the project which was to be published by the Institute of the Black World. The manuscript presents early iterations of Wynter’s Theory of the Human and explores how Black experiences are essential to understanding the history of the New World.”
The only part of this manuscript that has been published is Wynter’s 1979 essay “Sambos and Minstrels”, though excerpts of and allusions to many of the other texts she wrote in the 1970s can be found in the manuscript, particularly “Jonkonnu in Jamaica” (1970), “Novel and History” (1971), “Ethno or Socio Poetics” (1976), “The Politics of Black Culture” (1977), and “In Quest of Matthew Bondman” (1981). … In the final 935-page manuscript, the page numbers break at page 251 and resume with page 370. The 120 missing pages correspond exactly to the number of pages in a series of descriptions of revolts by enslaved persons in Jamaica, and it appears that they were meant to be inserted at this point in the text.” (Kamugisha 2016)
Manuscript, written throughout the 1970s
[935] pages (252-369 missing)
Commentary and analysis: Derrick White (C.L.R. James Journal, 2010), Aaron Kamugisha, Demetrius L. Eudell, Greg Thomas, Katherine McKittrick, Tonya Haynes, Nijah Cunningham (Small Axe, 2016).
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