How do artists and activists help reimagine possibilities for Black citizens in states with colonial legacies?
This project is examining and comparing cultural practices, ideologies, and forms of resistance associated with social movements in the U.S., Latin America, and the Caribbean.
This interdisciplinary project situates questions of Black citizenship in a transnational and global context. Over the last two decades and particularly in the last five years, social movements in the United States, Latin America, the Caribbean and South Africa have called attention to the limits of legal inclusion in contexts where histories of slavery and colonialism have persistently conceived of Blackness as a marker of non-citizenship. The faculty sponsors of this project examine how colonial and postcolonial states mark and define the boundaries of belonging and theorize the diverse practices citizens, activists, and artists employ to reimagine and rethink Black citizenship. Understanding citizenship as legal entitlement to rights, as belonging, and as political, social, and cultural activity illustrates the multiple terrains on which Black citizenship is contested. Through multi-method and interdisciplinary analyses of vulnerability and resistance to state violence in Latin America, music and cultural practices in the Caribbean, and the ideologies of imperial belonging in Africa and its diaspora, the faculty sponsors’ new research projects challenge contemporary scholarly notions of citizenship and work toward decentering a U.S.-based and binary model of racial inquiry.
Assistant Professor of Music
University of Chicago
Jessica Swanston Baker is an ethnomusicologist who specializes in contemporary popular music of and in the Circum-Caribbean. Her research and critical interests include tempo and aesthetics, coloniality, decolonization, and race/gender and respectability. Her work focuses on issues within...
Visual Artist
Carmenza Banguera is a visual artist based in Santiago de Cali, Colombia. She received a Masters in Plastic Arts from the Departmental Institute of Fine Arts in Cali. Her works have been included in various forums, such as the 45th Salón Nacional de Artistas and independent exhibitions in the...
Professor of Political Science
University of Chicago
Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science and the College at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the...
Assistant Professor of Public Policy
Harvard Kennedy School
Yanilda María González is an Assistant Professor of Public Policy at the Harvard Kennedy School. Her research focuses on policing, state violence, and citizenship in democracy, examining how race, class, and other forms of inequality shape these processes. González’s book Authoritarian...
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Called “a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on Black life in America,” Residue (2020, 90 minutes) tells the story of a man returning to his...
Black youth leaders from the U.S., Colombia, and Nigeria discussed transformative visions and new possibilities for Black citizenship.
This artist-led discussion fostered dialogue about transnational experiences of Blackness, bridging perspectives across two multicultural cities: Chicago and Cali, Colombia. As her exhibition The...
This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.
The Caribbean islands are marked by what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacies of four continents,” a nexus of settler colonization and dispossession, enslavement and indenture, migration and diaspora,...
Over the course of 2020-2021, the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global...
In a critical essay for Dissent, Faculty Fellow Adom Getachew explores the ways the Movement for Black Lives has drawn on the legacy of black internationalism to link anti-imperial forces...
This panel considered the contours of new authoritarianisms from the perspective of Latin America.
Poet Eve Ewing, playwright Kristiana Rae Colón, musician Jonathan Lykes, and members of Sweet Honey in the Rock joined forces for a panel discussion about artistic practice and its role in social...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Called “a fleeting and haunting lament for what is lost to gentrification, and other tolls on Black life in America,” Residue (2020, 90 minutes) tells the story of a man returning to his...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Black youth leaders from the U.S., Colombia, and Nigeria discussed transformative visions and new possibilities for Black citizenship.
The Caribbean islands are marked by what Lisa Lowe calls the “intimacies of four continents,” a nexus of settler colonization and dispossession, enslavement and indenture, migration and diaspora,...
Over the course of 2020-2021, the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global...
This panel considered the contours of new authoritarianisms from the perspective of Latin America.
Poet Eve Ewing, playwright Kristiana Rae Colón, musician Jonathan Lykes, and members of Sweet Honey in the Rock joined forces for a panel discussion about artistic practice and its role in social...
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.
Carousel with 3 slides shown at a time. Use the Previous and Next buttons to navigate, or the slide dot buttons at the end to jump to slides.
In a critical essay for Dissent, Faculty Fellow Adom Getachew explores the ways the Movement for Black Lives has drawn on the legacy of black internationalism to link anti-imperial forces...
