Teaching a transnational ethic of Black Lives Matter: an AfroCubana Americana’s theory of Calle

ABSTRACT

The material conditions of populations in the Global South are interconnected with the material conditions of Black working-class urban communities in the U.S. Through this multi-scalar construction, I put forward a theory of Calle – a transnational ethic of ethno-racial-spatial solidarity. Set within stages of dual geographies, my AfroCuban American cultural and familial history are paramount to understanding the landscapes that shaped my scholarly identity and pedagogy. As a researcher of the Ferguson movement while at the University of Missouri, I learned that Ferguson student-activists led several campus movements: Occupy SLU at St. Louis University (fall 2014), University of Missouri (MU) for Mike Brown (fall 2014), and Concerned Student 1950 (fall 2015) both at the University of Missouri. This residential foundation served as a site of liberation, inquiry, and pedagogy. In this article, I aim to disrupt the binaries of community/classroom, teacher/student, and engage in dialectics centered on the literal and figurative streets of Ferguson, Missouri. This rooting of a racial bone memory aligns with Black Lives Matter (BLM)'s tenet of globalism, which elevates a solidarity between all people of African descent on the continent of Africa and in the diaspora.

Keywords:

• Transnationalism
• AfroLatinx
• student activism
• Black Consciousness
• higher education

Notes

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 A residential unit that pre 1886 were homes of slave masters, but upon emancipation, slaves became occupiers of their master’s residences and dividing them up. Stereotypically, a solar is marked as poor and slum-like, similar to descriptions of U.S. urban housing projects (Cardona, 2008).

2 Latinx is a gender inclusive term replacing Latino and Latin@ (Logue, 2015).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Amalia Dache

Dr. Amalia Dache is an Afro-Cuban American scholar and Assistant Professor at The University of Pennsylvania's Graduate School of Education. Her experiences as a former Cuban refugee and student traversing U.S. educational systems, such as inner-city K-12 schools, community college, state college and a private research-intensive university inform her research.