A Hemispheric Approach to Contemporary Black Activism

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Notes

1 In South Africa the #RhodesMustFall student protests at the University of Cape Town in 2015 succeeded in removing a statue of the British imperialist Cecil J. Rhodes from campus. They were followed by the #FeesMustFall protests of 2015 and 2016 against university fee increases as well as racially inequitable access to universities, failure to decolonize the curriculum, worker exploitation, and lack of Black demographic representation in institutions of higher education. Ferguson in Paris was founded in September 2014 following the murder of Michael Brown by U.S. police. It was created by activists fighting against Negrophobia and all forms of racism and discrimination “to demonstrate that in France, as in the U.S. and around the world, the same people are oppressed by neo-colonial capitalism, and although the contexts are different in different countries, the oppressive patterns remain the same.”

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Notes on contributors

Larnies A. Bowen

Larnies A. Bowen is an African diaspora content specialist who works in exhibition design. She has worked with leading cultural institutions including the Interational African American Museum, El Museo del Barrio, and the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture. She is a graduate student at NYU’s Center for Latin American & Caribbean Studies, where she is the recipient of a CLACS departmental fellowship. She received a B.A. from NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Study and was a Fulbright scholar to Panama.

Ayanna Legros

Ayanna Legros received her B.A. from Northwestern University in International Studies and African American studies and her M.A. in Africana studies from New York University. Her research focuses on Haitian, Afro-Latinx and circum-Caribbean identity within larger questions of racial geopolitics, political activism, and migration. She has curated talks on the artist Jean-Michel Basquiat as a co-founder of the BASQUIAT: STILL FLY @ 55 Project at The Museum of Modern Art, the Schomburg Center for Research in Black Culture, New York University, and WBAI Radio. She currently teaches Black studies courses at the City University of New York (CUNY)-Hostos and has a forthcoming publication in Small Axe Journal.

Tianna Paschel

Tianna Paschel is an assistant professor of African American studies at the University of California, Berkeley and the author of Becoming Black Political Subjects: Movements and Ethno-Racial Rights in Colombia and Brazil (Princeton University Press, 2016). Additionally, she is a Ford Fellow, a member of the American Political Science Association Task Force on Race and Class Inequality, and the Network of Antiracist Research and Action steering committee. She has also worked with the Afro-Colombian Solidarity Network.

Geísa Mattos

Geísa Mattos is a sociologist at the Federal University of Ceará’s Department of Social Science in Fortaleza, Brazil. Her research focuses on movements against racism and police brutality in Brazil and their connections with international activist networks across the Americas. She is also a member of the Laboratory of Research in Politics and Culture (LEPEC) at the Federal University of Ceará.

Kleaver Cruz

Kleaver Cruz is a co-founder of the New York City chapter of the Black Lives Matter Network. He is an uptown New York City native, writer, and activist. His work has been featured in the Huffington Post, La Galería, and African Voices magazines, among other outlets. Cruz is also one half of the poetic duo, The Delta, and creator of The Black Joy Project.

Juliet Hooker

Juliet Hooker is an associate professor of government and African and African diaspora studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of Race and the Politics of Solidarity (Oxford University Press, 2009) and Theorizing Race in the Americas: Douglass, Sarmiento, Du Bois, and Vasconcelos (Oxford University Press, 2017). Hooker served as co-chair of the American Political Science Association’s Presidential Task Force on Racial and Social Class Inequalities in the Americas (2014-2015) and was associate director of the Teresa Lozano Long Institute of Latin American Studies (LLILAS) at UT-Austin (2009-2014).