Hemispheric Blackness

Hemispheric Blackness and the Exigencies of Accountability examines the way Afrodescendant and Black communities use the land on which they live, the rule of law, and their bodies to assert their historical, ontological, and physical presence across South, Central, and North America. Their demand for the recognition of ancestral lands, responsive policies, and human rights sheds new light on their permanent yet tenuous presence throughout the region. The authors argue that by deploying a discourse of transcontinental historical continuity, Black communities assert their presence in local, national, and international political spheres. This conceptualization of hemispheric Blackness is the driving force confronting the historical loss, dismissal, and disparagement of Black lives across the Américas. Through twelve case studies that cover a wide range of locations, their work examines contemporary manifestations of sovereignty of Black body and mind, Black-Indigenous nexuses, and national revisions that challenge more than a quincentennial of denial and state unaccountability in the hemisphere.

"Hemispheric Blackness adds twelve significant and elucidating chapters to the dialogue about the African diaspora in the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking Americas. Collectively, the chapters cut deeply into new dimensions and perspectives on the concept of Amefricanity, the historical and present-day interconnectedness of afro-descendants in North, South, and Central America and the Caribbean expanses. From the introduction to the final chapter, readers will be engrossed thoroughly, through interdisciplinary research approaches, in the vibrant advocacy for and affirmation of a unified Blackness in mind, body, and soul in colonial and postcolonial times. In many palpable ways, this anthology is a veritable tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement." --James J. Davis, professor of Spanish and associate dean for the Humanities, Howard University, "The essays in Hemispheric Blackness engage a wide range of methodologies used from literary and cultural studies to visual anthropology and media studies, which will make this a useful volume for students and scholars in many disciplines interested in the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Hemispheric Blackness fully recognizes that Afro-descendant and Afro-indigenous populations have resisted across time and geographic location political, social, and material marginalization." --Dorothy E. Mosby, Mount Holyoke College

Jennifer Carolina Gómez Menjívar is associate professor of media arts at the University of North Texas.Héctor Nicolás Ramos Flores is assistant professor of Spanish and Latinx Studies at Colby College.