Troubling the Grounds

Troubling the Grounds: Global Configurations of Blackness, Nativism & Indigeneity, begins on the basis that indigeneity, diaspora, and migration are racial-ethno-political categories emerging differently across geopolitical contexts. Given these geopolitical differences, participants will contribute to a discussion about the ways in which ideas about race, ethnicity, and history inform our understandings of indigeneity, blackness, sovereignty and mobility, as well as the political claims these categories make possible or foreclose. The organizers are interested in how blackness travels, is mobilized, or is (re)coded within discourses of indigeneity, migration, racialization, and diaspora where recognizable relationships to the state are determined. They understand that overdetermined positionalities (including the triad between the arrivant-diasporic subject-migrant, the native, the enslaved, and the settler/colonizer) shape our political responses. Therefore, it is imperative to develop and continue strategies of solidarity that carefully and critically tend to the ways our narratives of belonging are brought to bear on each other. Conversations will center Africa, the African diaspora, and blackness, while understanding these terms (especially “blackness”) as expansive, intersectional, and mutable depending on how they are geopolitically and historically situated.

Co-organizers: Sandra Harvey (Assistant Professor, African American Studies, UCI), and SA Smythe (Assistant Professor, African American Studies, UCLA and UC President’s Postdoctoral Fellow, UCI)

Keynote speaker: Boatema Boateng (Associate Professor, Communication, UCSD)