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Essential, Yet Expendable: Brazilian Black Women and Domestic Work in the Age of COVID-19
No full textAt the intersection of racial, gender, and class marginalization, Brazilian domestic workers are disproportionately impacted by COVID-19. At the height of the global pandemic, their essential worker status forced this group to commute and work in the homes of their employers instead of sheltering in place. Routinely discriminated against, undervalued, and stigmatized, Black Brazilian women are overrepresented in this profession. Black women employed as domestic workers are exponentially burdened by the political, social, and economic costs of this deadly virus. To meet the demands of these unprecedented times, this article takes on the following format: (1) a survey of the scholarly literature on Brazilian domestic work, with special attention to race and gender; (2) excerpts of a testimonial interview from Creuza Maria Oliveira, president of the national domestic workers’ union (FENATRAD), on the status of this work in Brazil during COVID-19; and (3) an intersectional assessment of Black women’s vulnerability during the pandemic through the lens of domestic work. Domestic workers’ experiences during COVID-19 reflect the ongoing challenges for all Afro-Brazilians, while providing a nuanced example of how gender and class influence the necropolitics of the virus’s impact
Bans, Walls, Raids, Sanctuary: Understanding U.S. Immigration for the Twenty-First Century, by A. Naomi Paik
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Three Films of Yehuda Sharim
No full textWithin our current moment of scripted immigration crisis it is difficult to grasp fully how the delegated punditry of 24/7 news media reportage in the United States has effectively muzzled the actual voices of immigrants and refugees. This is certainly true until one screens three recent films by media artist and filmmaker Yehuda Sharim. I thought a great deal about the art of media silencing while watching Sharim’s films We Are In It (2016), Seeds of All Things (2018), and Songs That Never End (2019). Together this trilogy of feature-length documentaries shows Sharim to be a careful listener of the words spoken by immigrants and an acute observer of the alienating human conditions afforded newcomers in the United States. More disturbingly, his films demonstrate that this verbal silencing and these conditions for immigrants and refugees are systemic, intentional, and institutionalized: expressions of an official, smothering U.S. stance
Clyde Woods: The People’s Prof!
No full textWhen I was a graduate student, Clyde Woods welcomed me to Black studies and the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB). He told me I would be okay, and he made sure to knock me upside the head when I was not paying attention. He also debated with me about the merits of the Wu-Tang Clan. He was not too fond of them. From the day I met him in 2009 to the night I said goodbye in 2011, Clyde was an important part of my intellectual development, and he continues to be part of the organic intellectual I am continuously becoming. 
Blue Pill, Red Pill: The Incommensurable Worlds of Racism and Antiblackness
No full textExamining two foundational texts of Black liberation, Kwame Ture and Charles Hamilton’s Black Power (1967) and the Black feminist socialist manifesto “The Combahee River Collective Statement” (1977), through an allegory borrowed from the 1999 film The Matrix, this article argues that both engage two distinct worlds: the “red pill” world of antiblackness, defined by Black people’s specific, exceptional, and incommensurable ontological and social conditions, including Black strategies of survival and political transfiguration; and the “blue pill” world of racism, that affects nonblacks and Blacks in distinct but related manners. To explore the fundamental difference between racism and antiblackness, the article analyzes the ways in which each world (1) manifests its foundational racial divisions; (2) engenders modalities of progressive political struggle and alliances focused on eliminating, or ameliorating, exclusion based on race and its interlocking forms of oppression; and (3) gestures toward, or demands, horizons of social transformation. It concludes by raising questions, against the backdrop of antiblackness, about the socialist horizons both paradigmatic texts embrace
COVID-19, Life, and Re-existence in an Afro-Colombian Community
No full textCOVID-19 has exacerbated racial violence against the Black population in Colombia. Black communities cannot choose in this context between isolating themselves so as not to get sick and disobeying quarantine so as not to starve. This article invites reflection on the politics of death and life in the Colombian city of Cali. It focuses primarily on the necropolitical dimension of the pandemic, paying attention to the deaths directly or indirectly caused by state negligence of Black lives. Still, it also considers the strategies of resistance by Black communities embracing self-care campaigns and collective care initiatives. If, on the one hand, the pandemic has deepened structural violence and anti-Black racism in Colombia, it has also provided opportunities to reinvent ways of collective survival. Faced with no choices, community organizers have developed actions not only to counteract the biosocial effects of the pandemic but also to create other possibilities of living. These efforts reveal is that Black solidarity, in times of crisis, is part of Black pedagogies of defending life and autonomy and reaffirming Blackness
White Apocalypses, Global Antiblackness, and the Art of Living through and against Death-Worlds
No full textImplicit in what follows is our attempt to answer a complicated question: How do we mourn the loss of Black life globally in a way that does not reproduce the primacy of the Human over Nature or the Global Black Male over all other differentially positioned Black gendered subjects? Or, put otherwise, what happens when Black mourning goes global, who gets to be mourned, what is being mourned, and what do we risk reifying when we mourn Black life through the heuristics of the “global” or when holding grieving fantasies about the Human project, as Sylvia Wynter would have it? To explore these questions, we first frame how it is that we think about Black globality to then geospatialize it in locally grounded and rooted places and temporalities. From there, we reflect on the competing temporal dimensions of global Black life by interrogating how racial capitalism informs our desires for a new normal, sometimes prefigured as a return to the old normal—a mourning for lost time that quickly forgets the colonial ordering that never ceased and therefore always already awaits our return. We end in honoring the dead by listening to the living, amplifying the voices of our contributors, who serve as conduits for our ancestors. We see them engaging in what Sharon P. Holland calls the “ultimate queer act” of “bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death).” In this way, we see our entire issue as a kind of memorial. Accordingly, we chose to forego an introduction to instead reflect upon and re-collect with the reader the offerings provided by the talented group of scholars and activists who made this issue come to life, even as it was born out of global Black death(s)