A Review of Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability

Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability edited by Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores (University of Pittsburgh Press, 2022, 242 pp.)

The inky blue of African-American artist Daniel Minter’s Malaga Girl, Navigation of Bones, tells a story about Malaga Island, the small preserve off the Maine coast that was once home to a Black and mixed-race fishing community until it was depopulated, with many of its community members institutionalized, in the early 20th century. When I look at this painted image, I am struck most by the power of the young Black girl at its center, suspended—but firm in her own embodiment – in the liminal space of something like a sea. Her hands wrapped around an unseen force at her middle, her long skirt contains yet another image: ocean waves, on which a small boat holding a skeleton, travels. I see a girl in blue—blue of the Atlantic, blue of Yemaya, blue of grief—who moves with ancestral memory, as a thing she both carries and wields. In this act, she mirrors the real-life descendants of those displaced from Malaga Island, who have, in recent years, been part of a struggle to recover and honor their ancestors’ past.

Although Malaga Island is in North America, its history of Afrodescendant community survival, placemaking, dispossession and descendant memory is a decidedly hemispheric story. Indeed, scholars Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar and Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores make these connections evident in their choice of Malaga Girl as the cover art for their edited collection, Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability (2022). Examining Black and Afroindigenous subjectivity, relationships to land and community, and strategies of embodied mobilization in Latin America, the book chapters trace the diasporic constellations of Black life from “South to North” (17). Here, I want to note, the authors foreground power relations within a hemispheric consideration of Blackness; rather than emphasize “Latin America,” as a regional category, “South” indicates subjugated knowledge.

In this sense, the collection not only decenters the United States, but shifts focus to parts of Latin America often left out of most discourse on Black people in Latin America. Not simply Argentina, Honduras, Venezuela, México and the lesser Antilles, but deeply specific geographies generated by communities of Afrodescendants in each of these places: the transmigrations, for instance, of Garifuna peoples between St. Vincent, the Caribbean coast of Central America, and New York City, the underground gatherings of Afro-Argentines in Buenos Aires, or the “small places” of Jamaica Kincaid’s literary Caribbean.

These chapters also open up analysis outside the theoretical and methodological terms more commonly emphasized in Afro-Latin American Studies. The field’s focus on demographic recovery, histories of nation-making and contemporary political movements has been essential in a context of pervasive erasure of Afrodescendant presence in Latin America. However, this collection’s prioritization of Indigenous spiritual and Black feminist epistemologies make visible other, equally important aspects of Afrodescendant life and political imagination.

The first three chapters examine Black people’s embodied experience as a source of knowledge, showing how “the Black body is used to resist, remake, and rethink its place in hegemonic spaces” (12). In Chapter 1, “Poner El Cuerpo,” University of Nevada sociologist Prisca Gayles highlights the continuity of Afro-Argentine political resistance in Buenos Aires. She argues that the invisibilization of Afrodescendants during the 20th century demonstrates a strategic shift to “survival over inclusion,” rather than the disappearance that the Argentinian state would have us believe (25). Thus, Gayles argues, the contemporary Movimiento Negro marks not a sudden appearance of Black political life, but a public re-emergence.

The chapters in this section generate meaningful dialogue with recent scholarship on fugitivity, performance, and placemaking, which challenges public “legibility” as a consistent goal of Afrodesendant cultural work. In Chapter 2, Elis Mesa, a doctoral candidate at the Federal University of Pelotas, critiques the profound limitations of the Baroness Museum, in Pelotas, Brazil, in representing a public history of slavery that both takes accountability and affirms the self-determination of Black enslaved people. Mesa, in turn, considers the work of the Daniel Amaro Afro Dance Company in reinterpreting and regenerating a past that exceeds the colonial gaze of the Museum through calling on “African-matrix” religious performance.

In Chapter 3, Colby College professor Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores examines Juan Francisco Manzanos’ Autobiografía de un esclavo within the genre of enslaved narratives, highlighting the parts of Manzano’s work that have evaded the reception of white literary audiences. Decentering, too, Black Anglophone enslaved narratives, Ramos Flores reads Manzano’s autobiography not only for its persuasive skill and rhetorical strategy, but as an assertion of artistic selfhood. Chapter 4, though contained in the same section, marks a shift away from performance while continuing the previous authors’ interest in counter-archives. Using “previously unstudied” documents, Silvia Valero of the Universidad de Cartagena encourages us not to take the chronology of Black political movements for granted, and closely follows the work of Colombian intellectual Manuel Zapata Olivella in organizing the first and last Congress of Black Culture hosted in the Americas.

Chapter 5, “We Dance with Existence,” takes the collection to a study of Black and Indigenous intersections. New York University scholar Ashley Ngozi Agbasoga, in what is a particularly beautifully written chapter, examines Afro-Indigenous women’s placemaking and self-articulation in the Costa Chica of Mexico. Her analysis expands considerations of a Blackness not predicated on state recognition, while taking seriously the political stakes of constitutional inclusion. Her opening pages honor an embodied understanding of Black identity, as she reflects on a group photography exercise she participated in at the Third National Meeting of Afro-Mexican Women, in response to the prompt: “what represents your Blackness?” Here, Agbasoga grounds us in an anthropological method that does not pursue distance as the measure of credibility, and reminds us that Afro-Indigenous communities have long sustained other ways of discerning their identities, belonging and ancestry.

In Chapter 6, Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar of the University of North Texas tracks the ethnogenesis of Kalípona/Garifuna people amid attempted genocide, drawing Garifuna indigeneity to Abiayala (the Kuna ancestral term for the Americas) to the center of her analysis. Rather than begin her account with Garifuna deportation from their homeland on Yurumein (St. Vincent), Gómez Menjívar narrates the evolving kinships that formed between Africans and Kalípona speakers on the island, emphasizing a continuity of shared Indigeneity; she notes, “babies and young children who learned Kalípona did so through their unfractured and unenslaved kin networks” (119). Thus, she shows how narratives of ancestral rupture—so foundational to our understanding of Black diaspora in the Americas—may not be universal for all Afrodescendants. This chapter offers a powerful intervention in a historiography that otherwise tends to dismisses Black indigeneity, and moreover, in a political landscape that uses such erasure to disavow Garifuna land rights.

Chapters 7 through 9 further explore the emplacement of Blackness through regional identities. In Chapter 7, “Museo de Quibor,” Robin García of community arts organization WE RISE, zooms in on the archeological practices at a community museum in Lara, Venezuela, using the museum as a case study for the practice of decolonial history within the distinct context of a socialist national project. In Chapter 8, Oleski Miranda Navarro of Emory and Henry College engages Afro-Venezuelans’ festival celebrations of San Benito de Palermo as a practice of resistance to the neocolonial hierarchies that emerged in the wake of Venezuela’s oil boom. In Chapter 9, Washington University professor Karma F. Frierson traces the imagining of Blackness in Veracruz, Mexico, where it has long been treated as a regional trait arguably divorced from Black people and yet valued quite differently than in other parts of Mexico.

Finally, Chapters 10 through 12 attend to very distinct forms of Black self-articulation, linked by a loose throughline of Afrodescendant belonging beyond national inclusion.

In Chapter 10, “A Motherless World,” Alexandra Algaze González, a doctoral candidate in Comparative Literature at Brown University, examines how colonial logics produce “motherlessness” across three of Jamaica Kincaid’s novels. She shows how Kincaid’s protagonists are shaped by both the absence and distortion of mothering, where patriarchal norms and the material conditions of life under empire have dispossessed them of mothers. In dialogue with Black feminist theorists like Hortense Spillers, Algaze González proposes that such a vexed relationship to mothering in fact generates pathways out of colonial subjectivity. As she writes of Kincaid’s character, Xuela, in The Autobiography of My Mother: “[her] only inheritance is alterity” (186).

Chapter 11 follows the trajectory of the Black Brazilian street fair, Feira Preta, narrating it as part of a dynamic shift in popular understandings of “Black culture.” Brazilian anthropologist Mailly da Silva suggests the political meaning of Black cultural production in Brazil has widened in a rapidly transforming economic context, such that Black communities increasingly view participation within “the market…as a political demand” (200). Here, Mailly da Silva gives us useful tools for making sense of the intersections between Black culture, its consumption and broad-scale political change.

In the last chapter, “Garifuzando Afrolatinidad,” Black Studies scholar Paul Joseph López Oro expands the geographic reach of the collection to the United States, while reminding us that the Global North is not a fixed ascription. He begins with a challenge to dominant imaginings of Central America that disappear the precise intersections in which Garifuna people locate themselves—Caribbean, Black and Indigenous simultaneously, and embedded within multiple constellations of migration, asserting, “My Central America is also New York City” (211). Analyzing the digital projects of Garifuna women in New York, López Oro proposes that these works of self-articulation unsettle narratives of mestize Latinidad, decentering “ethno nationalism” while embracing the multiplicity of Black Indigeneity. This chapter is one of the only in the collection that engages Afro-Latinx and Afro-Latin American Studies together, and in doing so, helps reveal the wider nexuses of Black Latinidad in the Americas.

Taken as a whole, Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability offers an enormous contribution to scholarship on Black subjectivity, political struggle, and futurity in Latin America. In some chapters, authors at times left rich theoretical work somewhat disconnected from their grounded analysis, setting up compelling arguments without consistently following through in their engagement with sources. But even with those brief gaps, the collection paints a portrait of Black life in Latin America with capacious originality and deep care. Most importantly, the collection makes clear that while Afrodescendant communities share connections across space and time—indeed, constitute a “hemispheric” self—scholars must also attend to their survival in the Americas with specificity.

In a recent conversation with my friend, Aabid Allibhai, a historian of slavery and abolition in New England, he reflected that we “should not treat community as self-evident.” Rather, Black diasporic community throughout the hemisphere has been a contingent process, requiring distinct relationships to land, to memory, to kinship, to political strategy, to embodiment and belonging. This edited collection honors such process.

Maya Doig-Acuña is a writer from Brooklyn and a Ph.D. candidate in African & African American Studies at Harvard University. Her dissertation draws on Black feminist methods to examine how Afro-Caribbean commemorative practice between Panama and New York illuminates the quotidian, affective, and gendered dimensions of 20th century Black diaspora-making. You can find her other published work in Southern Cultures Journal, Remezcla, Guernica Magazine, Lampblack Magazine, and elsewhere.