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Friday 14 April 2023 14.00 - 16.00
S-11 POL20 From the Age of Revolution to the Age of Decolonization: (Re)Defining Black Freedom in the Atlantic World
Victoriagatan 13, A252
Network: Politics, Citizenship, and Nations Chair: Damian Pargas
Organizer: Damian Pargas Discussant: Thomas Mareite
Debby Esmee de Vlugt : “Uhuru Means Freedom”: Dutch Caribbean Black Power in the Age of Decolonization
Between 1968 and 1973, the Dutch Caribbean were home to three Black Power organizations: the Black Panthers of Curaçao (BPC), Antillean Black Power (ABP), and Black Power Suriname (BPS). Following the example of the African American Black Power movement, these organizations pursued an agenda of four core principles: self-determination, self-defense, ... (Show more)
Between 1968 and 1973, the Dutch Caribbean were home to three Black Power organizations: the Black Panthers of Curaçao (BPC), Antillean Black Power (ABP), and Black Power Suriname (BPS). Following the example of the African American Black Power movement, these organizations pursued an agenda of four core principles: self-determination, self-defense, cultural pride, and racial unity. While each of these organizations followed a different school of thought within the movement, all worked towards the same goal: unconditional Black freedom.
It was no coincidence that the Black Power movement flourished in this region when it did. Encouraged by the formal decolonization of Jamaica and Trinidad and Tobago in the early 1960s, communities all over the Caribbean began to push for full national independence within their own political settings and built an extensive transnational network of intellectual exchange to explore new forms of anticolonial protest. With its many connections within and beyond the Americas, the Black Power movement provided a compelling framework of resistance to the Black inhabitants of these Caribbean territories.
This paper will argue that Afro-Caribbean activists in the Netherlands Antilles and Suriname joined the Black Power movement as an act of decolonization. Believing that the movement could provide them with a political, social, economic, and cultural alternative to Dutch imperialism, they embraced its transnational quest for Black freedom in pursuit of national autonomy and promoted its cause in their own respective societies. This paper will be based on a thorough analysis of the three Dutch Caribbean Black Power organizations listed above. (Show less)

Manar Ellethy : “I Don’t Want What You Think I Want”: Black Visuality Between Freedom and Abstraction in 1960s Documentary Film
The 1960s was a monumental era in American history, marked by significant political transformations in race relations and Black citizenship. It also gave rise to an interest in documentary filmmaking among Black communities, activists, and organizations specifically aiming to complicate, counter, and rectify incorrect, oversimplified, and racist visions of Black ... (Show more)
The 1960s was a monumental era in American history, marked by significant political transformations in race relations and Black citizenship. It also gave rise to an interest in documentary filmmaking among Black communities, activists, and organizations specifically aiming to complicate, counter, and rectify incorrect, oversimplified, and racist visions of Black socio-political issues. Black documentary film practices in the 1960s present a nexus between politics and Black visual culture. They also present a partially forgotten vibrant history of Black film as a form of art, activism, cultural resistance, self-expression, and an investigation of racial identity, in an era defined by the quest for advancing Black truth-narratives.
The film projects in question: Take This Hammer (1964), Dream Deferred (1964), Black Liberation (aka Silent Revolution) (1967), Still A Brother: Inside the Negro Middle Class (1968), Diary of A Harlem Family (1968), I Am Somebody (1969), illustrate a ‘renaissance’ in Black documentary film practices in the 1960s. This wave of films which developed in conjunction with and sometimes as part of ‘Black artistic nationalism’, was facing a Hollywood post-war film industry and a wave federally sponsored ‘conscience-liberal’ documentary films that relied heavily on exploiting, and later in the wake of the civil rights movement, embellishing the so-called ‘Negro Problem’.
My paper explores Black freedom through the lens of Black visuality, as a freedom from abstraction and prescription. Touching upon the historical articulation of the ‘Negro Problem’ and its relation to Black cinematic visibility in the 1960s, the chapter analyzes the abstraction created in the public political sphere about blackness leading to an individualization of racial inequality. This paper examines how the films use substantial visuality to break free from the abstractions found in public political discourse. Refusing to just scratch the surface, the films prioritize visual depths of struggle that are not articulated as emanating from the condition of being Black but from socio-political structures that emanate from the condition of American life. (Show less)

Christine Mertens : “To Live and Die in the Land of their Nativity”: Negotiating Black Freedom & Movement in the Early Republic
For much of American history, struggles over geography have characterized the Black experience. While numerous studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of forced migration and confinement of the enslaved, contestations over the spatial mobility of free African Americans in the founding era have remained far less thoroughly explored by ... (Show more)
For much of American history, struggles over geography have characterized the Black experience. While numerous studies have greatly contributed to our understanding of forced migration and confinement of the enslaved, contestations over the spatial mobility of free African Americans in the founding era have remained far less thoroughly explored by historians.
The late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries witnessed the emergence of legal structures regulating the geographic mobility of free African Americans in states of the Upper South. In Virginia, Maryland, Delaware, and the District of Columbia, state and local authorities enacted registration laws, emigration bans, and expulsion legislation in reaction to the expansion of Black freedom and mobility.
The objective of this paper is twofold: it examines the realities of this legal regime of mobility in the post-Revolutionary Upper South and explores what kind of strategies free African Americans in this region adopted to confront these spatial constraints. The restriction of Black freedom through the racialization of space rendered liberty fragile for emancipated Blacks. From the 1810 onwards, however, free African Americans increasingly employed political and legal practices in protest. Petition testimonies and local court records in particular reveal the extent to which freed people negotiated their right to movement and access to space in the early Republic. (Show less)

Marcella Schute : The African Apprentice Bill: A Covert Effort to Reopen the Transatlantic Slave Trade in Louisiana
The transatlantic slave trade is widely known as the largest forced migration in history, where the phenomenon has been thoroughly studied by historians. A lesser known subject however within this history is the movement in the mid-nineteenth century American South to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, which originated almost fifty ... (Show more)
The transatlantic slave trade is widely known as the largest forced migration in history, where the phenomenon has been thoroughly studied by historians. A lesser known subject however within this history is the movement in the mid-nineteenth century American South to reopen the transatlantic slave trade, which originated almost fifty years after the foreign trade had been outlawed by US Congress. The scholarly literature on this movement is scarce, and heavily focused on the role of South Carolina, where the importance of Louisiana in its history has long eluded scholars.
Due to Louisiana’s distinctive geography and history, the state forms a unique case study within the movement to reopen the transatlantic slave trade. Next to openly advocating to reopen the foreign trade, the state also used a significant covert way to do so. In 1858, Louisiana representatives introduced the African Apprentice Bill into the state legislature. This proposal would allow politicians to import “free” Africans into Louisiana, who would become apprentices and labor for a minimum of fifteen years. Even though this bill never passed the Senate, its proposal and popularity convey a great deal about the way Louisianian statesmen contemplated over the issue of Black freedom in the Pre-Civil War Period.
This paper explores the African Apprentice Bill in greater detail and underscores that the introduction of free Africans into the state reflects an effort by Louisianian statesmen to create a new legal status for “free” yet “bonded” Black laborers. As such, by reconceptualizing notions of Black freedom, this study argues that Louisianian representatives almost succeeded in creating a third legal category into the state, which was meant to exist in between the already established legal categories of slavery and freedom. (Show less)



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