Panel: Blackness and Activism

Panel Abstract: 

This panel focuses on the intellectual agendas and political networks that have shaped Black activism in various parts of the world. By placing West Africa, Brazil, and the Caribbean in a comparative dialogue, this panel explores how “Blackness” functions as both a site of shared local and global experience and a catalyst for radical liberation, both contemporarily and in the past. Panelists will analyze how anti-colonialism, Black activism, and pan-African frameworks cross-fertilize. The panel also challenges the assumption that Blackness is a modern concept based on the idea of resistance against slavery and oppression, Eurocentricity and whiteness, but as a basis for collective self-identification, social organization, territorial consolidation, military resistance, and group preservation, long before it became a term for activism in modernity.

Speakers:

– Mário Medeiros (Unicamp, Mecila): Acting under domination: Black Coalition for Rights (2019-) and the confrontation with political conservatism in Brazil 

– Ɔbenfo Ọbádélé Kambon (University of Ghana): From Kmt(.y.w) ‘Black People’ to Abibitumi ‘Black Power’: The Classical Origins of Blackness and Activism in Kmt 

– Chika Mba (University of Ghana): Digital Pan-Africanism Against Imperial Borders: Reclaiming Nkrumah’s Vision of Blackness and Resource Sovereignty in the Algorithmic Age 

– Yulexis Almeida (Universidad de La Habana): Cuban Afro-feminist activism: a proposal for emancipation that is woven from the communities in times of polycrisis

– Jochen Kemner (University of Kassel, CALAS): Supranational Institutions as sites of Contestation: From the UNESCO Slave Route Project to the UN Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent

This panel is open to the public.

For virtual participation via Zoom, please use the following link:

https://uni-freiburg.zoom-x.de/j/69399929565?pwd=4CGKym3fLegqadNG2XXIpvgilb76TY.1

Meeting-ID: 693 9992 9565
Code: u013p1P6T