Publications and Outputs
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Five black researchers explore what it means to be made black in contemporary Australia, Jamaica, South Africa, the United Kingdom and the United States. Together, we are attempting to critically interrogate blackness transnationally, recognizing its relationship to whiteness and the challenges that exist to uncouple one from the other.
Through multiple theoretical frameworks that seek to preserve the complexity of blackness, its meanings, effects and implications, this project will examine dimensions of blackness guided by the following questions:
- How do we understand varied forms of blackness, their distinctions and intersections with other forms of difference within and across global contexts?
- How is blackness both similar and different across the globe and what are these differences and similarities in relation to forms of classism, nationalism, patriotism, globalization and transnational capitalism?
- How does the market shape blackness to form the basis of popular culture (specifically music)? What are the effects of this on civic institutions and how are we are constituted, as black, by these structures?
- How do we understand the multiple ways of being black and experiencing blackness? Given that blackness continues to be primarily associated with inferiority what are the psychosocial and affective implications for this subjectivity? How are affects of blackness racialized and in what ways are these affects more than simply reactive responses to the imposition of whiteness?
- How do black bodies move in the world as embodied subjects? Do different geographic locations shed light on how location and majority/minority status impact our sense of self? How do collective traumatic experiences of black bodies endure to inform subjectivity?
- How do black activism and standpoints shape, claim and perform blackness? How do these experiences and ways of knowing, doing and being implicate whiteness, everyday multiculturalism and belonging?
- In what ways is whiteness shaped by expressions of blackness? What is the dynamic between deconstructing whiteness vs. reconstructing/reclaiming blackness?
- For people made black, what is the experience of a sense of self outside of a black identity? What are the meanings of our lives that exceed blackness (i.e. are excluded from culture that racializes bodies)? What are the possibilities and impossibilities for thinking about a post-racial society?
By troubling the idea of blackness, by going below its received meanings, this investigation aims to contribute to theories and praxes of decoloniality from a global south perspective.
Linked to Research:
Keeping it Real? Applied Critical theory research and Community arts activism
Making Education a Priority (MEaP)
Back to the International Research Page, here.