Trans-Atlantic Affinities: Post-Ferguson Freedom Dreams and the Global Reverberations of Black (Feminist) Struggle

All over the world, Black women are in the process of examining who we are: What are our differences? What are the ways in which we do not see each other? How can we operate together better as a unified front? These are questions of survival, and we must expend our primary energy on these questions at the same time as we recognize that without coalition we will always be more vulnerable.

– Audre Lorde¹

The present moment’s urgencies demand a reckoning with the global project of anti-Blackness and its varied manifestations across Black women’s social, economic, and geographic locations.² Further, an understanding of the central roles that Black women have historically played within global Black struggle stands to greatly inform current and future organizing and strategizing against white supremacy, racial capitalism, and the end of the earth’s viability. In this way, we can greatly expand the terrain in which we conceive of transnational Black feminist liberation. Writing from the context of living, working, writing, and organizing in Canada, in this article I use a local experience of Black struggle as a point of departure for examining Black feminism from a transnational lens.

“I Woke up When They Put Trayvon to Sleep”: On the Global Reverberations of Black Struggle³

Like spoken word artist Shanice Nicole, parts of me were woken up when Trayvon Martin was executed by self-appointed neighborhood watch vigilante George Zimmerman. But not so much by his death alone, horrific as it was. Too many Black people have been killed in this manner, and so that my outrage, while always present, was tempered by the kind of raw numbness that accompanies old wounds that never fully heal. Instead, I underwent a waking up period that emerged from the series of events that followed Trayvon’s death.

The possibility of Black liberation felt closer, more tangible, amidst the subsequent uprisings in Ferguson after Michael Brown’s killing, by the birth of the #BlackLivesMatter hashtag and network, the global displays of solidarity, and the increased visibility of a multitude of #BlackLivesMatter-affiliated and autonomous Black grassroots organizations.

To say that trans-Atlantic Black freedom struggles have been nourished by the recent resurgence in United States-based Black emancipatory politics is not, though, to say that our communities were not always-already conscious of, and rebelling against, the intolerable conditions that face and unmake Black lives everywhere. Instead, this moment, or more accurately the series of post-Ferguson moments that reverberated worldwide, encapsulated more than a renewed collective recognition of a shared condition of unfreedom. It also helped shed light on the cacophony, across borders and oceans, of Black subjects undertaking a refusal and rejection of the status quo, and so exposing a glimmer of the possibility of a new world always-already underway.

While Black people’s trans-Atlantic struggles have been nourished by the recent resurgence in United States-based Black emancipatory struggles, in this article I attend to the epistemic and organizing ties across global Black resistance – especially those led by Black women – and the dialectical relationship among diasporic Black communities. Instead of reifying a unidirectional relationship in which United States-based Black struggles inspire Black struggle elsewhere, I am interested in the ways in which the global resonance of the Ferguson uprising was a tipping point for better witnessing and exploring the global project of anti-Blackness, as well as the deeply transnational and transversal influence of Black organizing and strategy over time.

If the Ferguson uprising – and the queer Black feminist organizing that exploded in the months and years afterward – reinvigorated already present diasporic Black desires for freedom, it is because it resonated so strongly with local (un)freedom and already present liberation work. I have experienced this reinvigoration and feeling of cross-border affinities on a personal level. Living in Montreal, Canada, I have contributed to countless organizing meetings, strategy sessions, vigils, and rallies over the past decade, and alongside a wide assortment of committed community members have participated in the largely unglamorous labor that is organizing against racist policing and incarceration of all kinds. But we are far from the first to undertake struggle in defense of our extended kin. In the year that I was born, 1987, seventeen-year-old Anthony Griffon was shot and killed by the Montreal police, galvanizing an uprising and community-led response that rocked the city and reverberated for decades to come. The political and intellectual terrain of the present labors, while deeply inspired by United States-based queer Black feminist movements, have been laid for us by prior generations of Black communities within (and beyond) Canada. Despite their deliberate erasure from (white Canadian) public memory, groups like Halifax’s Black United Front, Montreal’s Also Known as X, Toronto’s Black Action Defence Committee and Women’s Coalition against Racism and Police Violence, and the queer Black revolutionary feminism of the Toronto Black Women’s Collective, among others, set the stage for those now engaged in collective organizing within Canada’s Black diaspora.

At the same time, the large proportion of Caribbean- and African-born Black people in Canada means that the fabric of collective diasporic memories of struggle also holds lessons learned on the ground, for example, amidst antiapartheid struggle in South Africa, in the Grenadian revolution, and in Trinidad’s Black power movement. Black struggle here has always been linked to struggle elsewhere. This was seen in the fallout of the 1969 takeover of the administrative officers at what was then Sir George Williams University in Montreal, in what came to be known as the “computer riots” led by Black students, many of whom were Caribbean nationals who were deported afterward. Let the Niggers Burn!, an anthology named after the vitriolic taunts of white passers-by after a fire broke out in the student-occupied offices, brings together the voices of many Black activists involved in the student uprising and makes clear that there was a crisis of anti-Blackness in Canada. The contributors within denounce the role of Canadian banking in disruption and control of Caribbean nations’ economies, and Canada’s complicity within the project of Western empire.⁴

The works of feminists in Canada’s Black diaspora consistently and radically attend to the transnationality of anti-Blackness and of global Black struggle well beyond the boundaries of the Canadian nation-state. Dominican-born Marlene Green founded the Black Education Project in the late 1960s, organized against police violence, and conducted anti-apartheid work from Grenada during the US invasion in 1983. Beyond her paradigm-shifting and award-winning novels and poetry, Trinidadian-born Dionne Brand went to Grenada after the revolution and witnessed the invasion, writing “Nothing out of Egypt” on the experience.⁵

My interest in the diasporic nature of Black freedom struggles emerged organically as the outgrowth over a decade of personal experience of community organizing with and alongside Black communities. Although I was born in Canada, my father was born and raised in Barbados and a sense of Caribbean-ness permeated my own life more than any “Black Canadian” identity. Working, over many years, with Black people and people of color facing deportation from Montreal required a firm understanding of the racial and gendered dimensions of state violence. Just as importantly, it also required an understanding of the forces of displacement – poverty, lack of opportunity, and postcolonial conflict – that cause people to flee their homes in the global aftermath of slavery, imperialism, and neocolonialism. Fighting past and present imperialism, for those many Black folks who hold one foot in each place, is to uphold a solidarity not with an abstract “other” abroad, but with one that binds family and extended kinship relationships. This involves, at times, living and working in the heart of empire, but sending remittances back home. Diaspora lives and breathes back across oceans, as does Black struggle. People come to here, and through here, and go on to live and organize elsewhere – or, at times, are deported and forced to begin their lives anew elsewhere. Researching my first book, Policing Black Lives highlighted not only the systemic forms of institutional harm – slavery’s afterlife – facing anyone raced Black in Canada, but also highlighted the massive linguistic, religious, and national differences within Canada’s Black diaspora.

This heterogeneity of Black life in Canada is not new. The birthplaces of enslaved Black populations in pre-Confederation Canada stemmed from the African continent as well as from Canada, the United States, Africa, the Caribbean, and possibly South and Central America, demonstrating a “heterogeneity within blackness” that is relatively distinctive compared to the broader Black diaspora.⁶ Later waves of Black migration, despite ongoing state and populist hostility, produced twentieth-century Black populations made up of descendants of formerly enslaved and longstanding free Black communities in Nova Scotia and Ontario and displaced Black Oklahomans who made lives amidst racial hostility in the prairies. In the 1960s and onward, Caribbean migrants like my own father arrived in increasing numbers, followed by waves of African refugees from Somalia and other East African nations since the 1990s.⁷ In 1990s Toronto and later, Somali women, living at the intersections of anti-Blackness and Islamophobia, became involved in activism against police brutality and racist children’s aid societies and their work “continues to echo that of their foremothers in Somalia.”⁸ This legacy of activism indicts the anti-Black violence of the Canadian state both at home and abroad, including violence by Canadian United Nations “peacekeepers” in Somalia or in the Canadian occupation of Haiti in 2000s.

Today, Black feminist movements, led largely by queer trans and cis women and gender nonconforming folks, including Black Lives Matter-Toronto, BLM-Montreal, and many more, have brought Black liberation back into the national spotlight in response to the recent police killings of Abdirahman Abdi, Bony Jean-Pierre, and Pierre Coriolan in Canada.⁹ At the same time, Black young people in Canadian cities were out en masse to grieve for Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and Sandra Bland – deaths whose effects were felt well beyond the border. There is no contradiction in these forms of collective and diasporic mourning: if anti-Blackness knows no borders, neither do expressions of Black outrage, solidarity, and freedom-making. Rinaldo Walcott refers to these cross-border experiences and actions as making up a “transnational political identification”¹⁰ across the Black diaspora. Yet if the Black diasporic identification is transnational, the same cannot be said for the broader public, where a clear hierarchy of outrage is easy to witness.

In Canada, the non-Black population remains carefully attuned to issues of racial injustice in the United States and continues to disregard Black lives at home. The deaths of Alton Sterling and Philando Castile – and the subsequent community responses in the United States – were covered, every hour on the hour, on Canadian national news. Yet after police killings within Canada, the labors of Black activists nationally receive comparatively muted visibility. The erasure of Black life and death in Canada is significant given two centuries of slavery and ongoing widespread structural and state-sanctioned violence. This is the case despite major intellectual and political contributions made by Black communities, activists, and scholars across generations, including Afua Cooper, Sylvia Hamilton, Dionne Brand, Rinaldo Walcott, David Chariandy, Katherine McKittrick, Angela Robertson, Akua Benjamin, Sherona Hall, Beverly Bain, Monica Forrester, Joan, Rocky and Lynn Jones, Marie-Célie Agnant, and many more. Within dominant Canadian discourse, each egregious instance of anti-Black violence is represented as an individual act unconnected from the last, rather than as part of an accumulation of uninterrupted dispossession. It is clear that despite continually rejecting the conditions of persistent unfreedom, our claim to a life is continually dismissed by simple notions that it is not as bad as the United States.

Toward a Global View of Anti-Blackness

The minimization of local Black suffering – alongside continual (favorable) comparison to the United States – is not only a Canadian phenomenon. Worldwide, viewing the United States as the pinnacle of anti-Black state violence and resistance has long allowed states to deny and minimize their own histories of slavery as well as to disavow ongoing conditions of institutionalized anti-Black racism. The same US-centric discourse that contains anti-Blackness within the boundaries of the United States serves as a political and state tool to delegitimize Black liberation struggles from Canada to Mexico¹¹ to the United Kingdom¹² to other nations with historic involvement in the Trans-Atlantic slave trade and the colonization of Africa. Some segments of the US Black left leave this exceptionalism unchallenged and see the plight of Black Americans as the epicenter of racialized injustice – and resistance – worldwide.¹³ But as long as the United States is represented as exceptional, not only will the political consciousness of global Black subjection be more successfully stifled, but larger challenges to what Vilna Bashi calls a “globalized anti-Blackness”¹⁴ will remain out of view.

This is not to dismiss the global significance of Black struggle in the United States, but to extend a broader analysis of its significance. Trayvon Martin’s death – and the Ferguson uprisings that propelled Michael Brown’s killing into the international spotlight – resonated across the global Black diaspora not only out of sympathy for the conditions that Black communities face in the United States. Instead, his death resonated as another reminder that our lives remain devalued everywhere. Ferguson reverberated transnationally precisely because the crisis that confronts Black lives transcends the boundaries of the nation-state. In the words of Ghanaian author, poet, and playwright Ama Ata Aidoo, “Wherever they are and from whatever causes, / My God, / Black peoples still / Die / So / Uselessly!”¹⁵ While this text was published in 1977, we continue to accumulate ancestors tragically, uselessly, and long before their time across a vast expanse of space that spans the Atlantic Ocean, the Sahara, and the jail cells and street corners of Toronto, London, Dessau, Khartoum, Port-au-Prince, Soweto, Baltimore, and Rio de Janeiro.

Looking to the global conditions imposed upon Black subjects, it is clear that Black life is structurally and epistemically marked as disposable. Given the accumulated weight of an ever-increasing assemblage of premature ancestors, it is always necessary, when possible, to name and pay tribute to our dead. Yet this tribute must extend beyond the borders that were never drawn to protect us. We hold, at our fingertips, the names of those stolen from us recently by racist violence: Trayvon Martin, Sandra Bland, and Eric Garner. Yet beyond the United States, stolen, too, is Nancy Motsamai, a Black South African woman who collapsed during an attempted deportation from the United Kingdom in winter of 2018. She was accused by immigration officers of feigning illness to avoid deportation and died five days later. Stolen, too, in Brazil, in the same year that Eric Garner was killed, is Cláudia Silva Ferreira. Viral video footage showed she died as a result of being dragged two hundred and fifty meters by a police car. While this made headlines for four weeks in Brazil, it was hardly covered in Canada or the United States.¹⁶ Stolen, too, was Oury Jalloh, a Black asylum seeker from Sierra Leone who was burned alive in a police cell in Dessau, Germany, in January 2005 – the fire is now believed to have been set by the German police, who left Jalloh in his cell with his hands and feet cuffed together.¹⁷ Structural forms of neglect and inaction, globally, follow the same logic of Black disposability. This is most clear in the drownings of over 33,000 migrants, largely continental Africans, attempting to cross the Mediterranean sea into Europe, and the lack of international support in the massive death toll after Haiti’s 2010 earthquake: nearly 10,000 lives lost to cholera after it was introduced by the United Nations during its earthquake response.¹⁸ Beyond its most spectacular iterations, Black unfreedom exists across a spectrum of harms and extends well beyond harm to the body.

Informative as the contrasts between different nations can be, the continuities are far more telling. Globally, Black lives remain in peril and the conditions in which Black people live and die produce an ongoing state of emergency.¹⁹ Given these stakes, it remains, as Lorde illuminates in the epigraph to this article, an issue of survival to confront the ongoing dangers that Black women and people face on a global scale. To ask if Canada, Mexico, Brazil, or Germany are “as bad” for Black subjects as the United States is to pose the wrong question. Instead, we must ask: are we willing to accept the global position occupied by Black life, in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism, or are we willing to commit, on no uncertain terms, to building the world anew?

If we are to effectively intervene in the violence of the status quo to create freer Black futures, we can gain much from a historical perspective that helps make sense of the crisis of the present. Christina Sharpe’s spatiotemporal invocation of Black life as existing “in the wake”²⁰ of slavery interrupts a teleological progress narrative that brings to light the global “non-event” of Black freedom in a nominally post-emancipation world. Sharpe, while never erasing Black peoples’ enduring world-making capacities and attention to care, brings to view how modes of Black subjection transcend geography. Yet she also articulates that the globalized emergency of the present emerges from an accumulation of anti-Black catastrophes that span half a millennium.

Well beyond the horrors of Mississippi and Georgia – often seen as emblematic of the most excessive of its brutalities – the violence of chattel slavery was foundational to the Americas and to Europe’s industrial revolution. We only need to look to the distribution of the population of enslaved Black adults and children to see the depth of slavery’s violence on and off of plantations. Out of the approximately 10.7 million captured and enslaved Africans who survived the journey from Western Africa to the so-called New World, around half were sent to the slave plantations on the Caribbean islands, including St. Domingue, Barbados, Jamaica, Cuba, and others.²¹ In St. Domingue, for example, the number of enslaved Africans was almost 780,000 by the time of the start of the Haitian revolution in 1791, which at that point possessed the largest number of enslaved Africans laboring in the Caribbean.²² According to the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, just under 400,000 enslaved Africans were brought directly from Africa to the shores of North America.²³ By way of comparison, 4 million adults who were captured from Africa were enslaved in Brazil, where slavery was practiced until 1888.²⁴ The barbarism of white violence against Black life was not exceptional to the American South, given that the mortality rates on Jamaican sugar plantations were so high compared to the birth rates that newly imported captive Africans were required to replace the dead. What Hortense Spillers identifies as the “ungendering” of Black women in America²⁵ was part of a globalized architecture of Black women’s subjection.²⁶ Referencing the globality of “useless” death, Aidoo, an anticolonial feminist thinker, was likely also referencing the genocide of ten to fifteen million Africans in the Congo between 1885 to 1908 under Belgium’s rule, and the genocide committed by German troops between 1904 and 1908, which saw tens of thousands of Namibians tortured, starved, shot, and forced into the desert or death camps.²⁷ It was the lack of humanity attributed to Black life transnationally that allowed for these centuries-long practices of genocide and captivity.

Racial violence spanned continents and made the “modern” world. Walter Rodney in How Europe Underdeveloped Africa and Eric William in Slavery and Capitalism address, for example, how the colonization of Africa and trans-Atlantic slavery provided the looting of peoples, labor, and wealth that funded Europe’s industrial revolution, its colonial expansion (including settler outposts) as well as its twentieth-century global dominance.²⁸

It is in the interests of states the world over to render anti-Black racism exceptional to the United States. Denial of the material realities that states, globally, inflict on Black subjects abdicates them of culpability and allows for a disavowal of the resultant ethical demand: to remedy massive structural inequalities and redress ongoing state-sanctioned violence of all kinds. Mobilizing an understanding of a global complicity interrupts national and international pretensions of innocence or benevolence. Social and historical amnesia and the collective denial of present realities disguise widespread complicities in perpetuating both historic and ongoing harms. It is in the interest of Black freedom to recognize the fact that our oppression has, since its inception, been global. Yet it is not only the transnational nature of Black subjection that has been absented. Despite being occluded within dominant frames, generations of Black women’s rebellion, refusal, and insurgency has long transcended the boundaries that empire and the nation-state set in place.

Trans-Atlantic Affinities: The Past, Present, and Future of Transnational Black (Feminist) Liberation

Black women’s intellectual and political contributions are often left out or sidelined in writings on Black resistance, regardless of place.²⁹ As the Black diaspora has labored both across and beyond the colonial borders of the nation to eradicate the violence of anti-Black racism, slavery, capitalism, and imperialism, Black women have always played central roles in resistance efforts as well as in Black oppression and liberation in theory and practice. Yet both Black women’s day-to-day involvement in organizing, as well as their political and intellectual contributions to the Black radical tradition, have been largely written out of most historical accounts until recent Black feminist recovery projects.

Black feminist historians like Ula Y. Taylor and Rhoda Reddock draw attention to, and challenge, how histories of trans-Atlantic Black resistance having long-centered the contributions of “an elite entourage of African American men.”³⁰ Attending to Black women’s role in emancipatory struggle illuminates the nuances that their involvement required. Not only did they challenge institutional racism, but they had to work – whether within or outside of male dominated radical movements – to challenge male-centric versions of liberation that conflated racial justice with an elevation of patriarchal (Black) manhood and the nation.³¹

Largely sidelined, for example, is the participation of many “forgotten women” in Haiti’s successful slave rebellion of 1771–1804.³² In Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados, Hilary McD. Beckles notes that within Caribbean resistance to slavery, Black women faced the greatest material deprivation and social vulnerability on slave estates, yet they participated in slave revolts and marronage and were “not only in the vanguard of the blacks’ anti-slavery movement” but “central to the reproduction of anti-slavery ideologies.”³³ Aidoo notes that often left of the history of colonization and Black struggle in Africa is the legacy of over five centuries of women who fought European rule as leaders, soldiers, and military strategists.³⁴ This history includes Yaa Asentewaa, who led a major war against the British in what was then the Gold Coast in 1911, and Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti, a Yoruba socialist and anticolonial activist who organized women against colonial and domestic gendered oppression in Nigeria for decades until she died of injuries obtained when she was thrown out the window by Nigerian soldiers in 1978.³⁵ Throughout the early to mid-twentieth century, as Keisha N. Blain uncovers, Black women played key roles within national and transnational liberation organizing that also challenged, with varying success, prevailing gender norms.³⁶ In Costa Rica, a hotbed of UNIA (Universal Negro Improvement Association) organizing in the 1920s and 1930s, Caribbean women – largely Jamaican – outnumbered men. Beyond numbers, and despite patriarchal constraints on women in leadership positions, they drew connections between lynchings in the United States, the American occupation of Haiti, British empire in the Caribbean, and Ethiopian resistance to Italian fascism, demonstrating a critical and transnational analysis.³⁷ Before her assassination in 1928, Ghanaian priestess Princess Laura Kofey’s political and intellectual work within the UNIA displayed a trans-Atlantic vision for Black diasporic freedom. Notably, she challenged prevailing colonial attitudes held by many male UNIA leaders who, despite advocating for global Black solidarity, held paternalistic views on Africans and saw it as their mission to “assist in civilizing the backward tribes of Africa.”³⁸

Looking beyond the UNIA, Claudia Jones, a leading Trinidadian communist feminist activist and public intellectual, organized in the United States in the mid-1930s and, following her subsequent politically targeted deportation in 1955, in the United Kingdom.³⁹ As Boyce Davies discusses, Jones’s political analysis was staunchly anti-imperial, highly transnational, and anticapitalist. To Jones, Black women had the potential to play a crucial role in opposing apartheid in South Africa and US and British imperialism in the Caribbean. In her work, she argues that Black women’s “special oppressed status” meant they had a particular capacity to oppose “Wall Street imperialism,” fascism, and domination in all forms.⁴⁰ Another key and overlooked transnational figure is Suzanne Césaire, an anticolonial thinker who was born in Martinique but traveled between Martinique, France, and Haiti. Césaire contributed to the surrealist anti-imperial arts movement, as well as avant-garde theorizing of pan-Caribbean and Antillean identity that extended, in her analysis of freedom, well beyond the scope of the nation-state.⁴¹

While the above represents only an abridged survey, still focused more substantively on the diaspora than on the continent, it nonetheless demonstrates how Black women not only participated in Black liberation work but also challenged prevalent gender norms and forwarded analyses that transcended national boundaries in their pursuit of emancipation.

I now turn toward more contemporary diasporic movements for Black lives, in the spirit of addressing, if still only partially, liberation struggles in formerly enslaved and colonized spaces beyond the global North. I by no means provide a comprehensive global portrait of Black women’s resistance, if such a thing is even possible. Yet each case offers unique insights into and lessons from the often-unrecognized struggles for Black liberation that resonate well beyond national borders. It is clear that struggles waged against anti-Blackness, informed by a gender, class, and anti-colonial analysis, do not center or pivot around the United States or the global north more broadly (even as US and Western imperialism impacts Black lives everywhere).

In Brazil, Black resistance emerged against the brutality of the institution of slavery. This includes organized communities of those who escaped slavery in the seventeenth to nineteenth centuries, as well as multiple abolitionist efforts, and continued throughout the twentieth century.⁴² Today, Black Brazilians are subject to a wide assortment of state-sanctioned harms.⁴³ Two thirds of Brazil’s prison population are Black, as are the vast majority of people killed by police, with Black women experiencing increasingly high rates of homicide and poverty.⁴⁴ Poor Black women have led neighborhood-based social movements against land grabs and have organized against violent policing, arbitrary home and neighborhood demolitions, expulsions, and other racially targeted displacements.⁴⁵ In recent years, Black activists and scholars have illuminated the ongoing issue of rampant police brutality and the de facto state-sanctioned violence, increasingly described as a genocide, against Black communities.⁴⁶ In 2015, for example, Afro-Brazilian women organized a March against Racism and Violence and in Favor of Living Well (Bem Viver) in the nation’s capital to attend to the intersections of anti-Black racism, sexism, and classism, which 50,000 Black women from across Brazil attended. According to research assembled by Black feminist organization Geledes Instituto da Mulher Negra, former soldiers and ex-military officers threatened and shot at attendees, who received little protection from on-site police.⁴⁷

Even as these struggles are local, they reverberate across the diaspora and are informed by cross-border affiliations. There are multiple moments in which Black activists have visited and learned from one another across Columbia, Brazil, the United States, and France.⁴⁸ Such cross-pollinations likely contributed to the solidarity protests in New York, Paris, and Buenos Aires, after Marielle Franco, a Black lesbian city councillor, LGBT and anti-police brutality advocate, was assassinated in 2018.⁴⁹

Militant women in Haiti continue to inform and inspire global struggles for the Black freedom has not yet been actualized despite centuries of formal (legal) freedom. While also part of the resistance to slavery, after the successful revolution Haitian women fought gendered discrimination that entrenched their roles as lesser subjects within the Haitian state, protesting, for example, the unequal pay they received as compared to their male counterparts.⁵⁰ They organized against the American occupation of Haiti (1915–1934), and later formed the Ligue féminine d’action sociale, Haiti’s first formal feminist organization, in 1934. Since the US-supported Duvalier regime that oversaw the torture, rape, and brutal repression of Haitian people who opposed them, Haitian women displaced to North America organized against both the Duvalier regime as well as racist policies in the United States and Canada.⁵¹ In the 1970s, many of them advanced socialist and anti-imperialist analyses that traveled between New York, Montreal, and Haiti, and were at the forefront of movements against gender discrimination and economic oppression that eventually helped topple the Duvalier regime in the 1986.⁵² Today, Haitian feminists continue to play an important frontline role in organizing the massive street protests waged by the Petro-challengers against state corruption and ongoing Western imperialism in the impoverishment of everyday Haitians.⁵³ In the words of Haitian feminist, journalist, and podcast producer Fania Noël, “Is it not the feminist movement in Haiti, where enslaved Black women fought French domination in Saint Domingue, that can shed light on how we think about ending patriarchal oppression, given that we are being, still, weighed down by imperial (and racist) domination?”⁵⁴

The hearts of the major former slave-trading empires are another location from which to think through diasporic resistance. Black women in the metropole have continually challenged politics of national belonging, imperial violence, and European claims to innocence, and have created visions of Black liberation that extend well beyond the limitations of nation-states. On 6 September 2016, Black Lives Matter United Kingdom stopped flights at London City Airport to protest the unequal distribution of wreckage being caused by climate emergency around the world. The organization noted that “climate crisis is a racist crisis. 7/10 of the countries most affected by climate change are in Sub-Saharan Africa” and that “the UK is the biggest per-capita contributor to temperature change & among the least vulnerable to its effects.”⁵⁵ Advocating for open borders, and against the ongoing global hierarchy in which Black people continue to be “first to die,”²⁴ this action drives home the reality that for countries in the global North, Black suffering everywhere is caused not only by domestic policies, but by international actions (and inactions) from the heart of the former British empire. Transnational identification is also seen in some Black anti-police brutality organizers in France chose to do activism under #FerguesoninParis,⁵⁶ drawing clear links to the globality of Black disposability in name and analysis.

We are living post-Ferguson. We are living post-Yonge Street riot (1992),⁵⁷ post-Soweto uprisings (1976),⁵⁸ post-“Rodney riots” (1968),⁵⁹ and post-Haitian revolution (1804).⁶⁰ If the freedom sought across these liberation-oriented struggles is not yet present, Black peoples’ consistent refusals to submit to the epistemological demands of an anti-Black world nonetheless continually refashion human life.

Solidarity is not necessarily abstract. The kinship that unites the diaspora is often that of blood relation and extended, cross-border families, as well as a more general transnational identification and solidarity.

Still, in attending to diasporic Black feminist solidarities, particularly within the global North, there is always the risk we will lose the necessary specificity of place, time, class location, and political differences, and will instead over-homogenize experiences and histories under the rubric of “Black womanhood.” It is grossly unethical, for example, to use the rubric of “Black womanhood” to equivocate Condaleeza Rice’s political work and aspirations with Marielle Franco’s.

Racial capitalism has resulted in unequal “development.” It has resulted in the impoverishment of Black peoples everywhere, but especially in the global South, and it has highly gendered implications to the distribution of harm and exploitation.⁶¹ Those living outside of the (limited) protections of the empire are most impacted by structural adjustment and the ravages of climate change, even as some of us have extended families in the places torn apart by the twenty-first-century scramble for Africa and the Caribbean’s resources. The works of Caribbean and African Black feminist scholars – M. Jacqui Alexander, D. Alissa Trotz, Dionne Brand, Ama Ata Aidoo, M. NourBeSe Philip, Oyeronke Oyewumi, Wambui Mwangi, and Keguro Machharia – ask us to complicate the meaning of Black womanhood to investigate historical and ongoing legacies and intimacies of and between imperialism and neoimperialism, colonialism and neocolonialism, that both separate and bind Black women’s pasts, presents, and futures together. Indeed, transnational Black feminist subjects challenge us to view how Black diaspora is continually made and remade due to the ongoing relationship between Western imperialism and dislocation impacting the Caribbean, Africa, and the rest of the global South.

For Black peoples born in the West, the protections of citizenship are limited given the ongoing vulnerability to premature death and gratuitous violence. Still, the fact of Western empire presents an ethical demand. It demands an outright refusal to be the (Black) handmaidens of imperialism, a rejection of the false promises of “Black capitalism” as freedom, and a rejection of the policies of Western nation-states that continually unmake the lives of Black subjects across the global south. In the words of Mwasi, an anti-imperialist, queer Black feminist Afroféministe collective based in France: “As Black subjects living in the metropole we profit from the exploitation of our Congolese brothers and sisters: we owe them our support against the ravages of capitalism.”⁶² All of this complicates the meaning of global “Black freedom,” yet it also stands to greatly expand the terrain of abolition and a still-unfinished emancipation.

The historical failure to see across the multiplicity of differences that face Black women – different geopolitical locations, access to passports, and class mobility, among others – does not mean that doing so is an impossibility. In “Remembering this Bridge, Remembering Ourselves,” M. Jacqui Alexander speaks to the often-fraught relationships between the formerly colonized and formerly enslaved Black women across class, sexuality, and national borders by saying, “we have recognized each other before.” She articulates: “We have been neighbors, living in the raucous seams of deprivation. We have healed each other’s sick, buried each other’s dead. We have become familiar with the swollen face of grief growing large in that stubborn space between love and loss.”⁶³ How to recognize and move and work toward new forms of organizing human life remains for Black women a question of survival, even if the answer(s) are, at times, elusive.

Conclusion: Toward a Transnational Black Feminist Liberation

What is an ocean between us, we know how to build bridges.⁶⁴
– Claudia Jones

While all struggle must be grounded in local realities and histories, Black liberation movements can only be enriched by an understanding the history of Black dispossession as, in some ways, shared and collective, despite the necessity of attending to clear differences across location and class. In the words of Carol Boyce Davies, “progressive feminist thinking in the context of globalisation, cannot help but be transnational.”⁶⁵ While not all Black activism is enacted under the formal structure of the Black Lives Matter Global Network, such activism has certainly been a source of inspiration – and collaboration – from Palestine to London to Rio de Janeiro. Black Lives Matter is an ethical and transformative call that asserts the possibility of a different world. In a world structured such that Black life matters little, if at all, in the global order, to say, believe, and act as if it does is to will into being the possibility of an entirely different world. To say that, to believe that, and to act as if Black lives matter is, in effect, to hold a Black radical epistemology that poses a direct challenge to global grammar and logic at least half a millennium old. To insist on the value of Black lives and humanity is to require, imagine, and create a new world where Black lives are liveable without the constant threat and fact of enclosure. Indeed, the entire organization of the planet’s wealth, resources, and populations would be inalienably altered in a world in which Black life, worldwide, was considered to hold value.

To use the words of Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, author of #BlackLivesMatter to Black Liberation, “the challenge, of course, will be going from recognizing black humanity to changing the institutions responsible for its degradation.”⁶⁶ Where this becomes even more of a transformative call is, of course, once we prioritize all Black lives, regardless of nationality or geographic location.

1. Quoted in Pratibha Parmar and Jackie Kay, “Frontiers: An Interview with Audre Lorde,” in Stella Bolaki and Sabine Broek-Sallah, eds., Audre Lorde’s Transnational Legacies (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2015), 74–84, 77. [↩]
2. This article is based on a few talks given in 2017, including the Invisible No More conference at Barnard College. Thanks to Rachel Zellars, Andrea J. Ritchie, and the anonymous reviewers for their crucial feedback. This manuscript was greatly enhanced by the bibliographic knowledge shared with me by W. Chris Johnson. Thanks also to Andrea J. Ritchie for her continued friendship and support. Any errors or shortcomings are my own. [↩]
3. This is the opening and refrain of an unpublished poem called “Deep Sleep” written by Black feminist Montreal-based spoken-word artist Shanice Nicole, whose work can be found on Instagram as @ThatsWhatShaSaid. [↩]
4. Dennis Forsythe, ed., Let the Niggers Burn: The Sir George Williams University Affair and Its Caribbean Aftermath (Montreal: Our Generation Press, 1971). [↩]
5. Dionne Brand, Bread out of Stone: Recollections, Sex, Recognitions, Race, Dreaming, Politics (Toronto: Coach House Press, 1995). Brand also cofounded Canada’s first Black women’s newspaper, Our Lives, in the 1980s, and coedited the first anthology about Black women’s history in Canada, We’re Rooted Here and They Can’t Pull Us Up (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997). [↩]
6. Charmaine Nelson, Slavery, Geography and Empire in Nineteenth-Century Marine Landscapes of Montreal and Jamaica (London/New York: Routledge, 2016), 7. [↩]
7. See Robyn Maynard, Policing Black Lives: State Violence in Canada from Slavery to the Present (Black Point: Fernwood, 2017). [↩]
8. Hodan Ahmed Mohamed, “The Activism of First Generation Somali Canadian Women within a Neoliberal Multicultural State,” master’s thesis, OISE, University of Toronto, 2016, 144. [↩]
9. Maynard, Policing Black Lives. [↩]
10. Rinaldo Walcott, Black Like Who?: Writing Black Canada (Toronto: Insomniac Press, 2003). [↩]
11. Mónica G. Moreno Figueroa and Emiko Saldívar Tanaka, “‘We Are Not Racists, We Are Mexicans’: Privilege, Nationalism and Post-Race Ideology in Mexico,” Critical Sociology 42.4–5 (2015): 515–33. [↩]
12. David Olusoga, “The History of British Slave Ownership has Been Buried: Now its Scale Can Be Revealed,” 12 July 2015, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jul/12/british-history-slavery-buried-scale-revealed. [↩]
13. W. Chris Johnson critiques Black left studies in the United States as frequently “venerating the United States and US nationals as muses for all revolutionaries everywhere all the time” rather than looking to the omnidirectional means by which radical thought traveled across continents (662). W.C. Johnson, “Guerrilla Ganja Gun Girls: Policing Black Revolutionaries from Notting Hill to Laventille,” Gender & History, Special Issue: Gender, Imperialism and Global Exchanges, 26 (3, 2014): 661–87. [↩]
14. Vilna Bashi, “Globalized Anti-Blackness: Transnationalizing Western Immigration Law, Policy, and Practice,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 27 (4, 2004): 584–60. [↩]
15. Ama Ata Aidoo, Our Sister Killjoy: Or, Reflections from a Black-Eyed Squint (London: Longman, 1994), 108. [↩]
16. Christen Smith, “For Cláudia Silva Ferreira: Death and the Collective Black Female Body,” Feminist Wire, 5 May 2014, http://www.thefeministwire.com/2014/05/for-claudia-silva-ferreira-death-black-female-body/. [↩]
17. Ben Knight, “New Evidence Contradicts German Police in Oury Jalloh Death,” DW, 16 November 2017, https://www.dw.com/en/new-evidence-contradicts-german-police-in-oury-jalloh-death/a-41413442. [↩]
18. Pan American Health Organization, “Epidemiological Update, Cholera,” 27 May 2016, http://www.paho.org/hq/index.php?option=com_docman&task=doc_view&gid=34811+&Itemid=999999&lang=en; Jonathan M. Katz, “U.N. Admits Role in Cholera Epidemic in Haiti,” New York Times, 17 August 2016,
    https://www.nytimes.com/2016/08/18/world/americas/united-nations-haiti-cholera.html.
    [↩]
19. Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of US Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010); Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being (Durham: Duke University Press, 2016). [↩]
20. Sharpe, In the Wake. [↩]
21. David Eltis, “Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database: Sources and Methods,” The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database, 2010, http://www.slavevoyages.org/voyage/understanding-db/methodology-2. [↩]
22. David Sowell, “The Problem with Slavery Studies Today: ‘How Many? Where? When? And Why: The Numbers Game,” Juniata College, 2004, https://www.juniata.edu/offices/juniata-voices/media/2004-david-sowell.pdf. [↩]
23. Eltis, “Construction of the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database.” [↩]
24. Ibid. [↩] [↩]
25. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, 2 (1987): 64–81. [↩]
26. In Barbados between the 1640s and 1660s, white women no longer worked as field hands, marking what Beckles calls the “beginning of a long-term attempt to elevate white women and degrade Black women.” Hilary McD. Beckles, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2000), 29. [↩]
27. Namibians are still fighting for reparations and German descendants continue to own disproportionate land and resources of the country today. Elizabeth R. Baer, The Genocidal Gaze from German Southwest Africa to the Third Reich (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2017); Jason Burke and Philip Oltermann, “Germany Moves to Atone for ‘Forgotten Genocide’ in Namibia,” Guardian, 25 December 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2016/dec/25/germany-moves-to-atone-for-forgotten-genocide-in-namibia. [↩]
28. Eric Williams, Capitalism and Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1944); Walter Rodney, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (Washington: Howard University Press, 1982). [↩]
29. I have addressed the importance of Black feminist resistance outside the United States elsewhere. See Robyn Maynard, “Making Black Lives Matter: Race, Resistance and Global Movements for Black Liberation,” Globalizing Gender, Gendering Globalization (Oxford University Press, forthcoming). [↩]
30. Ula Taylor in Vivian M. May, “It Is Never a Question of the Slaves: Anna Julia Cooper’s Challenge to History’s Silences in Her 1925 Sorbonne Thesis,” Callaloo 31, 3 (2008): 903–18, 903. [↩]
31. Johnson, “Guerrilla Ganja Gun Girls”; Beverly Bryan, Stella Dadzie, and Suzanne Scafe, Heart of the Race: Black Women’s Lives in Britain, 2nd ed. (London: Verso Books, 2018 [1985]). [↩]
32. Cécile Accilien, Jessica Adams, Elmide Méléance, and Ulrick Jean-Pierre, Revolutionary Freedoms: A History of Survival, Strength and Imagination in Haiti (Coconut Cree: Caribbean Studies Press, 2006), xxiii.
    Beckles, Natural Rebels, 3, 172.
    [↩]
33. Beckles, Natural Rebels, 3, 172. [↩]
34. Ama Ata Aidoo, “Literature, Feminism and the African Woman Today,” in D. Jarrett-Macauley, Reconstructing Womanhood, Reconstructing Feminism: Writings on Black Women (New York: Routledge, 1996). [↩]
35. See “Funmilayo Ransome-Kuti,” African Feminist Forum, http://www.africanfeministforum.com/funmilayo-ransome-kuti-nigeria/. [↩]
36. Keisha N. Blain, Set the World on Fire: Black Nationalist Women and the Global Struggle for Freedom (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018). [↩]
37. Asia Leeds, “Toward the Higher Type of Womanhood,” Palimpsest 2, 1 (2013): 1–27. Leeds also documents how Black women, despite higher rates of participation and key leadership roles, were nonetheless encumbered by institutional patriarchal views of their role in racial uplift, which imposed norms of respectability and chastity. [↩]
38. Natanya Keisha Duncan, “Princess Laura Kofey and the Reverse Atlantic Experience,” in Brian Ward, Martyn Bone, and William A., eds., The American South and the Atlantic World (Link: University Press of Florida, 2013), 224. [↩]
39. Carol Boyce Davies has carefully assembled research on the legacy of Jones’s political labor and her commitment to transnational anti-imperial thought, as well as her Caribbean roots. Carol Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008), 91. [↩]
40. Claudia Jones, “An End to the Neglect of the Negro Woman,” Political Affairs, June 1949, 19. [↩]
41. Annette K. Joseph-Gabriel, “Beyond the Great Camouflage: Haiti in Suzanne Cesaire’s Politics and Poetics of Liberation,” Small Axe 20, 2 (50, 2013): 1–13. See also Maryse Condé, “Unheard Voice: Suzanne Césaire and the Construct of a Caribbean Identity,” in Adele S. Newson Horst and Linda Strong-Leek, eds., Winds of Change: The Transforming Voices of Caribbean Women Writers and Scholars (New York: Peter Lang, 1998). [↩]
42. Alexandre Ciconello, “The Challenge of Eliminating Racism in Brazil: The New Institutional Framework for Fighting Racial Inequality,” Oxfam International, 2008, 7. [↩]
43. Kia Lilly Caldwell, Negras in Brazil: Re-envisioning Black Women, Citizenship, and the Politics of Identity (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2007). [↩]
44. Ciconello, “The Challenge of Eliminating Racism in Brazil,” 3; Amnesty International, “You Killed My Son: Homicides by Military Police in the City of Rio de Janeiro” (Rio de Janeiro: Amnesty International, 2013), https://www.amnestyusa.org/files/youkilled_final_bx.pdf; Geledes Instituto da Mulher Negra, Criola Organização de Mulheres Negras, “The Human Rights of Black Women in Brazil: Violence and Abuse,” 5, 11. See also Meryleen Mena in this issue. [↩]
45. Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). [↩]
46. Describing state violence in Brazil as “genocide” was addressed in Abdias Nasciment and Elisa L. Nascimento, Mixture or Massacre?: Essays in the Genocide of a Black People (Buffalo: Afrodiaspora, 1979), also see Smith, 2017 for her research on Brazil’s Reaja ou Será Mortx! (React or die!) campaign. [↩]
47. Geledes, “The Human Rights of Black Women in Brazil,” 39. [↩]
48. Larnies A Bowen, Ayanna Legros, Tianna Paschel, Geísa Mattos, Kleaver Cruz, and Juliet Hooker, “A Hemispheric Approach to Contemporary Black Activism,” Nacla Report on the Americas 49, 1 (2017): 25–35. [↩]
49. Kiratiana Freelon, “Say Her Name: The Assassination of a Black Human Rights Activist in Brazil has Created a Global Icon,” Quartz Media, 18 March 2018, https://qz.com/1231910/brazils-marielle-franco-murder-has-made-her-a-global-human-rights-icon/. For more discussion of Marielle Franco’s assassination, see Meryleen Mena’s contribution to this issue. [↩]
50. For a longer historical consideration of the evolution and complexities of feminist developments in Haiti, see Carolle Charles, “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti: The Duvalierist State, Transnationalism, and the Emergence of a New Feminism (1980–1990),” Feminist Studies 21, 1 (1995): 135–64. For a historic overview in addition to a more contemporary analysis, see Fania Noël, “Les féministes haïtiennes de tous les combats,” Revue Ballaste, 5 March 2019, https://www.revue-ballast.fr/les-feministes-haitiennes-de-tous-les-combats/. [↩]
51. Charles, “Gender and Politics in Contemporary Haiti,” 148. [↩]
52. Ibid., 150, 153. [↩]
53. Noël, “Les féministes haïtiennes.” [↩]
54. Ibid. Translation mine. [↩]
55. Matthew Weaver and Jamie Grierson, “Black Lives Matter Protest Stops Flights at London City Airport,” Guardian, 6 September 2016, https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/sep/06/black-lives-matter-protesters-occupy-london-city-airport-runway. [↩]
56. Ferguson in Paris, “My Ferguson in Paris – Paige,” 15 February 2016, https://fergusoninparis.wordpress.com/2016/02/15/my-fergusoninparis-paige-fip/. [↩]
57. The Yonge St. Riot began as rally organized in Toronto by the Black Action Defense Committee to protest both the Rodney King verdict and the police killing of Raymond Lawrence a few days prior. See It Takes a Riot, directed by Howard Grandison, Akua Benjamin Legacy Project. [↩]
58. Noor Nieftagodien, The Soweto Uprising (Athens: Ohio University Press, 2015); Keisha-Khan Y. Perry, Black Women against the Land Grab: The Fight for Racial Justice in Brazil (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2013). [↩]
59. The Rodney Riots of October 1968 took place in Kingston, Jamaica, after Guyanese Black power activist and intellectual Dr. Walter Rodney was barred from returning to Jamaica and to his lecturing position at the University of the West Indies. Michael O. West, “Walter Rodney and Black Power: Jamaican Intelligence and US Diplomacy,” African Journal of Criminology and Justice Studies 1, 2 (2005). [↩]
60. C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York: Vintage Books, 1989). [↩]
61. D.A. Trotz and B. Mullings, “Transnational Migration, the State, and Development: Reflecting on the ‘Diaspora Option,'” Small Axe (41, 2013): 154–71. [↩]
62. Mwasi Collectif Afroféministe, Afrofem (Paris: Éditions Syllepse, 2018), 91. Translation mine. [↩]
63. M. Jacqui Alexander, “Remembering This Bridge, Remembering Ourselves: Yearning, Memory, and Desire,” in Gloria Anzaldúa and Analouise Keating, eds., This Bridge We Call Home: Radical Visions for Transformation (New York/London: Routledge, 2002), 81–103, 93. [↩]
64. Cited in C. Boyce Davies, Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 118. [↩]
65. Carole Boyce Davies, “Pan-Africanism, Transnational Black Feminism and the Limits of Culturalist Analyses in African Gender Discourses,” Feminist Africa 19 (2014): 78–93, 41. [↩]
66. Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, From #Blacklivesmatter to Black Liberation (Chicago: Haymarket, 2016), 15. [↩]