[Re]framing Blackness and Black Solidarities Through Anti-Colonial and Decolonial Prisms: An Introduction

Abstract

I begin this chapter by positioning the self, personal, and political as intertwined. I write about Blackness from a complicated socio-political location as an African-born scholar, researcher, and community worker living on Indigenous people’s Lands in North America. Indigenous people of this Land call this place Turtle Island. I come from a colonized African community struggling to reclaim our Indigeneity. I strategically evoke Blackness and Black subjectivity as part of an invention of an Africanness in Diasporic context to gesture to the particular intellectual politics I wish to pursue in this book. I share the overall learning objective to [re]conceptualize Blackness in a complicated and inclusive ways while acknowledging the many dimensions of Blackness. In my work, I attempt to offer a way of re-reading Blackness differently. I have decided to focus on a couple of interrelated issues to complement the extensive work of Blackness: (a) to include Africa[ness], as a strategic re-invention of Africanness in diasporic contexts; (b) to reclaim my African Indigeneity in global knowledge production as a way of knowing that speaks to history, culture, identity, African spiritual ontologies, and a politics of the African/Black body; (c) to undertake a conscious intellectual shift in reading Black/African diasporic presence on Indigenous peoples Lands from a discursive prism of “colonial settlerhood” and discourses of “complicities in our claims of citizenship” to one of “collective implications” and “differential responsibilities” so as to foster decolonization and, particularly, decolonial solidarities among colonized, oppressed, and Indigenous peoples; (d) to highlight questions of Black/African development and education and the responsibilities of the Black/African learner in the [Western] academy; and (e) to re-read Black[ness] in ways that speaks to the continental African subject who may decry the color descriptor of Black[ness]. Concretely, I see my work as part of decolonial and anti-colonial projects seeking to subvert imperial and colonial knowledges for action-oriented knowledging, grounded in African Indigenousness and the pursuit of politics, subject[ive] and resistance. Colonial and colonizing relations are ongoing [never-ended]. Rather than seeing them as “foreign or alien,” they are continually “imposed and dominating” (see Dei 2000; Dei and Asgharzadeh 2001).