About the Book
This book, contextualized by the violence of globalization, investigates the fungible, fugitive, and untenable experiences of Black being and time through a decolonial poethics of global*Blackness. In so doing it introduces innovative readings of coloniality/decoloniality by threading its meaning and movement through the “problem” of Blackness.
It argues that global*Blackness is the complexly entangled other side of decoloniality, as movement, method, and poethics for radical new worlds. The essays explore this through inter/transdisciplinary, creative, and decolonial standpoints, whether from prison abolitionist demands to Afrofuturist imaginaries, or by seeing through Black mirrors. It emphasizes the paradoxical characteristics of global*Blackness—its spectral quality of being in and out of modernity's self-narrative—to provide a way of dwelling with global Blackness as a force that is neither “properly” constituted by corporeality nor thinkable in ontological terms determined by modern power.
The book will be of interest to academics, researchers, and students in the fields of social sciences, cultural studies, postcolonial studies as well as cultural practitioners, art educators, artists, cultural activists, and those institutions that seek to decolonize imaginaries, thought, practices, and methods. Given its diverse offerings, it will also be of interest to upper-level undergraduates, graduate students, and academics.
Table of Contents:
Introduction: Decoloniality in the Break of Global*Blackness: Movement, Method and Poethics, PART 1: A PLURIVERSAL POLITICS FOR WORLDS OTHERWISE, 1) Whatever Happened to Diaspora, and Why (Not) Global-Blackness? Interrogating Black time-spaces for a Decolonial Agenda, 2) Caribbean Theorizing and/in the Decolonial Turn. 3) Blackness of Labor, Blackness of Migration, 4) A Spectral Decoloniality in the Wake of the Slave Nomos, PART 2: RACE SPACE PLACE- DE/COLONIAL INTIMACIES, 5) Oceanically Black: Decolonial Struggle an Anti-Apartheid Port City, 6) Waves of the Familiar: Black Radicalism, Abolition, and the Carcerality of Civil Rights, 7) Re-Performing Germanness from an Afropean Lens: European Others, Afropean Decolonial Asthetics, and Performances of No-Thingness, 8) From Afro Asian to Outer Space: Speculative Histories of Black Centrifugality, PART 3: DECOLONIAL TIME ON THE MOVE, 9) Spectres of the Aegean: Decolonial Subjectivities in the Long Present 10) Sovereignty, Blackness, and the Promise of Affectable Flesh, 11) Decolonial Notes on The Journey Towards the Future: Negritude, Abject Blackness, and the Emancipatory Force of Spectrality, PART 4: ACT, CREATE, REBIRTH - AN/OTHER UPRISING TO END THE WORLD, 12) Through the Obsidian Mirror: Onto-Corporeal Experimentations at Twilight , 13) Unassuming Bodies: Trans Decoloniality, 14) Blackneese Fungible Errantries: To Expel a Sweet and Savory Substance, Afterword: … After [the] wor[l]d: Blackness
About the Author :
Michaeline A. Crichlow, Professor of Caribbean/Global Studies and senior Fellow at the Kenan Institute for Ethics at Duke University, teaches in the African and African American Studies Department. Her research focuses on the Caribbean as a space and place, constituted within the world economy. She has published extensively on rurality, creolization and development and is interested in studies on Race, Postcolonialism, Decolonialization, Climate Change and Development. She co-directs “Climate Change, Decolonization and Global Blackness”, a Franklin Humanities Institute project at Duke University.
Patricia M. Northover is a senior research fellow at the Sir Arthur Lewis Institute of Social and Economic Studies, The University of the West Indies, Mona (SALISES, UWI). She specializes in the philosophy of economics, race critical theory, decolonial thought, Caribbean and rural studies. She is the co-producer of the films Sugar Cane: Recycling Sweetness and Power in Modern Jamaica, and Ms. Sugga. She has authored and co-authored several articles as well as edited volumes on the philosophy of economics, Caribbean cultural dynamics, abject blackness, economic growth, climate change, and Caribbean futures.
Review :
"This book is an innovative intervention addressing coloniality/decoloniality and re-existence. By using the notion global*Blackness as a political concept intertwined with decoloniality, Crichlow and Northover aim at undoing the untenable and opaque Being-in-the world of Blackness crafted by colonial violence. Read as a process of deracializing life and ontology through praxis, theory and artistic practices, this collective intervention is extremely brilliant and opens paths for new imagined worlds."
Felwine Sarr is the author of Afrotopia and African Meditations.
"Decoloniality in the Break of Global ¨Blackness¨ is a timely and signal contribution to the reorientation of decolonial praxis of living and intellectual work that recognizes the pervasiveness of ‘race’ in the political, economic and cultural structures of dominations. After COVID-19, the Israel genocide of the Palestinian population and the radical shift of the world order, global*Blackness is a potent decolonial concept that at once unmasks the oppressive narratives of Western modernity and advances the principles upon which the decolonial narratives are and shall be constructed."
Walter Mignolo, author of The Politics of Decolonial Investigations.
"Decoloniality in the Break of Global*Blackness offers nothing short of a new geography of the earth. The texts elucidate on how a colonial geography made the material worlds of Blackness planetary and offer instruction (and imagination) on how to break the hold of this deadly embrace. A landmark text to undo the spatial calculus of unjust futures. In short, a template for liberation space and time!"
Kathryn Yusoff, Professor of Inhuman Geography
“Brilliantly argued and impeccably researched, Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness is a timely collective critical examination of how new imaginaries, epistemologies and cutting-edge insight on the notion of race can be shaped despite the impediments in constructing emancipatory and decolonial pathways. A ground-breaking and fascinating volume to ponder on the racial entanglements of our times.”
Anny-Dominique Curtius, author of Suzanne Césaire
"As Crichlow and Northover describe, global*Blackness is to think and unthink the colonial from within the opacity that hovers and undoes the ongoing violence of the colonial disorder and its anti-Indigenous mandate.Through its innovative concept work, its genealogical theoretical reflection, and through grounded study, global*Blackness brilliantly moves us to the other side of the colonial Anthropocene."
Macarena Gómez-Barris, author of The Extractive Zone: Social Ecologies and Decolonial Perspectives
"A passionate anthology of respected voices working to theorize Blackness in our current climate crisis. An important source for those looking to better understand arguments on anti-Blackness and abject Blackness as global phenomena."
Michelle Wright, author of Physics of Blackness: Beyond the Middle Passage Epistemology.
"In its journey as exploration and quest, Decoloniality in the Break of Global Blackness opens optics and renders visible paths of decolonial/decolonizing thinking, imagining, creating, and doing; paths that unsettle settled views, refuse racial normativities, essentialisms, and assemblages, and brings to light global*Blackness as a conduit of, for, and with decoloniality in the making of radically different, deracialized worlds. This work is essential reading, a crucial text that wrestles with the shifting, mutating, and lived reality of global coloniality, racialization, and racial capitalism across the world."
Catherine E. Walsh, author of Rising Up. Living On. Re-existences, Sowings, and Decolonial Cracks (Duke Press, 2023)
