Jessica Swanston Baker
Research Project
The Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context
Project Team:
2018 – 2022
Key Question
How do artists and activists help reimagine possibilities for Black citizens in states with colonial legacies?
Project Summary
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.
Topics
Research Team
Project Narrative
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Residue: Film Screening and Discussion
Film Screening
Residue: Film Screening and Discussion
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 old stomping ...
Black Uprisings: The Transnational Struggle for Citizenship
Discussion
Black Uprisings: The Transnational Struggle for Citizenship
Black youth leaders from the U.S., Colombia, and Nigeria discussed transformative visions and new possibilities for Black citizenship.
Blackness and Belonging from Cali to Chicago
Blackness and Belonging from Cali to Chicago
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 ...
Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible
Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible
This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.
Project Topics:
Black Sound Listening Lab: Afro-Asian Island Intimacies
Discussion
Black Sound Listening Lab: Afro-Asian Island Intimacies
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, ...
Black Sound Listening Lab: Sacred and Secular
Discussion
Black Sound Listening Lab: Sacred and Secular
Over the course of 2020-2021, the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context project hosted a series of Black Sound Listening Labs that explored the confluence of popular culture, the ...
The New Black Internationalism
The New Black Internationalism
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 around the ...
Black Citizenship in the Age of Global Authoritarianism
Discussion
Black Citizenship in the Age of Global Authoritarianism
This panel considered the contours of new authoritarianisms from the perspective of Latin America.
Arts in Activism
Discussion
Arts in Activism
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.
Residue: Film Screening and Discussion
Film Screening
Residue: Film Screening and Discussion
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 old stomping ...
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 Uprisings: The Transnational Struggle for Citizenship
Discussion
Black Uprisings: The Transnational Struggle for Citizenship
Black youth leaders from the U.S., Colombia, and Nigeria discussed transformative visions and new possibilities for Black citizenship.
Black Sound Listening Lab: Afro-Asian Island Intimacies
Discussion
Black Sound Listening Lab: Afro-Asian Island Intimacies
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, ...
Black Sound Listening Lab: Sacred and Secular
Discussion
Black Sound Listening Lab: Sacred and Secular
Over the course of 2020-2021, the Contours of Black Citizenship in a Global Context project hosted a series of Black Sound Listening Labs that explored the confluence of popular culture, the ...
Black Citizenship in the Age of Global Authoritarianism
Discussion
Black Citizenship in the Age of Global Authoritarianism
This panel considered the contours of new authoritarianisms from the perspective of Latin America.
Arts in Activism
Discussion
Arts in Activism
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.
Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible
Carmenza Banguera: The Visible, the Laughable, and the Invisible
This exhibition offered a provocative meditation on the meanings of the “resistant” Black body.
Project Topics:
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.
The New Black Internationalism
The New Black Internationalism
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 around the ...
Reading List
M. Jacqui Alexander
"Not just (any) body can be a citizen: The politics of law, sexuality and postcoloniality in Trinidad and Tobago and the Bahamas" Feminist Review 48, no. 1 (1994): 5-23 ReadSaidiya V. Hartman
Scenes of Subjection:Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America Oxford University Press ReadThomas Holt
The Problem of Freedom: Race, Labor and Politics in Jamaica and Britain, 1832-1938 Johns Hopkins University Press ReadMahmood Mamdani
Citizen and Subject: Contemporary Africa and the Legacy of Late Colonialism Princeton University Press ReadTianna S. Paschel
Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil Princeton University Press ReadMark Q. Sawyer
Racial Politics in Post-Revolutionary Cuba Cambridge University Press ReadEdward E. Telles
Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil Princeton University Press ReadDeborah A. Thomas
Modern Blackness: Nationalism, Globalization, and the Politics of Culture in Jamaica Duke University Press ReadExplore
