In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

3 Building Black Diaspora Networks and Meshworks for Knowledge, Justice, Peace, and Human Rights Faye V.Harrison I f intellectuals, especially those based within academic settings, attempt to align their scholarship with the dismantling of racism in its multiple modalities and entanglements with other inequalities, then it is imperative that they collaborate in building alliances. Grassroots activists, practitioners within nongovernmental organizations, philanthropists, and other parties with varying stakes in racial justice can potentially work together in coalitions of knowledge and mobilization promoting human rights and patterns of development based on principles of economic and environmental justice. Scholarship for transformations of this sort cannot be limited to conversations in which academics talk mainly to themselves, invoking the most recent theoretical trends in endogamous and, largely, elitist terms. Appropriating a language of power and change when largely disengaged from the high-stakes, life-and-death struggles around the world does nothing to bring about substantive change. The particular struggles with which this chapter as well as the others in this book are most immediately concerned are those among people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The cultural and political-economic geography of this part of the Americas is a dynamic zone of historicity, pluriculturality, power, and intellectual engagement that informs our thinking about both the usefulness and the limitations of “Diaspora” and “Black Atlantic” (Gilroy 1993) as conceptual and intercommunity organizing tools. Faye V. Harrison 4 EXEMPLARS OF ACTIVIST-ACADEMIC PARTNERSHIPS Inspring2010,theUniversityofSouthFlorida’sInstitutefortheStudyofLatinAmerica and the Caribbean hosted the international conference “Reexamining the Black Atlantic : Afro Descendants Still at the Bottom?” That dynamic meeting was organized aroundtheparticipationofactivists,developmentpractitioners,andphilanthropists. It emphasized the importance of developing a sustainable academic–community partnership through which research would service the capacity-building needs and objectivesofgrassrootscommunities,organizations,andmovements.Thisapproach to concerted action speaking louder than words alone made the conference and its follow-upactivitiessomewhatakintoparticipatoryactivistscholarshipprojects,such as the following exemplars: • The Global Afro-Latino and Caribbean Initiative (GALCI), based at Hunter College and the Caribbean Cultural Center in New York and organized “to foster cross-border Afro-Latino initiatives . . . and facilitate contact with multilateral agencies and progressive private foundations” (Turner 2002, 32). • TheCaribbeanCentralAmericanResearchCouncil(CCARC),aninterdisciplinaryconsultancynonpro fitorganizationlinkedtotheUniversityofTexas,Austin’s activist anthropology program, specifically the collaborative, activist research that Edmund T. Gordon, Charles R. Hale, and their interdisciplinary associates have undertaken along the Atlantic/circum-Caribbean coasts of Nicaragua and Hondurasamongindigenous,Afro-indigenousGarifuna,and(Afro-descendant) Creoleorganizationstodocumentandgain“legalrecognitionof”theircommunal land claims (e.g., Gordon, Gurdián, and Hale 2003). • The collaborative “decolonial” and “undisciplinary” framework-building work that has emerged from the approach to development and social movements in which University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill’s Arturo Escobar (2008) is a pivotal figure—exemplary of a critical mode of knowledge production and application with significant epistemological as well as practical implications. A leading proponent of “world anthropologies” (Ribeiro and Escobar 2006) that arenotsubjugatedormarginalizedbytheNorthAtlanticmetropolitanregimeofsocial sciences, Escobar has partnered activist research with Pacific Coast ethnic groups, notably Afro-Colombians. This paradigm-shifting project has placed subaltern, Afro-diasporic ontologies and epistemologies in the foreground as legitimate and necessary sources of knowledge that can inform interventions against the assaults of Build ing Ne tw o rks a nd Me shw o rks 5 state, corporate, and insurgent-sanctioned violence; and against unjustly conceived and implemented mega-development projects. Mismanagement and environmental degradationarenotuncommonlyintegraltotheseprofits-over-peopleenterprises.In thoseexploitativecontexts,therightstofreeenterpriseandfreemarketsbyanymeans necessary are effectively elevated over the purportedly universal rights of human beings .Whenthepeopletargetedareracializedasblack,and,hence,havebeensubjected toahistoricallydeepregimeofradicalalterityor“otherness,”theirlives,cultures,and knowledges are too often devalued in terms of a categorical infrahumanity (Bogues 2006; Wynter 2002, 2003). Moreover, their lives are subjected to the realpolitik of what João Costa Vargas, drawing on Nancy Scheper-Hughes’s thinking on the everyday expressions of violence and genocide, has described as the genocidalcontinuum characterizing Black diasporic predicaments (Vargas 2008; Scheper-Hughes 2000, 2002; Bourgois and Scheper-Hughes 2004). All three of these projects, exemplars of sorts, draw upon skills and resources withinuniversities,butbeyondthese, they areorganizedaroundepistemologicaland political partnerships designed to further the objectives of Afro-descendant (and in some cases indigenous) social movements. Although projects such as these are not altogether new, within the past decade or so they have assumed greater salience and urgency. Race-conscious identities, social action, and political mobilization have proliferated and intensified throughout the Americas, and, in fact, all over the world (Harrison 1995, 2005; Mullings 2005). This is in large part an outcome of deepening human-rights crises around the globe—a trend, I...

Share