Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Christen Smith, Archie Davis, and Bethânia Gomes. Beatriz Nascimento was an Afro-Brazilian woman intellectual who developed theories about race relations and racial inequality in Brazil and theories of the quilombo in relationship to race and Blackness. She wrote during a time when Brazil considered itself a society in which racial mixture eroded the lines between Black and white and thus erased the existence of racism. Nascimento was a committed activist with the Unified Black Movement and traveled widely to speak about racial inequality in Brazil.
The roundtable begins on August 26, 2024 and concludes on September 3, 2024. It will feature essays by Carole Boyce Davies (Howard University/Cornell University), Erica Williams (Spelman College), Daniela Gomes (San Diego State University), and Bryce Henson (Texas A&M University). At the conclusion the editors Christen Smith (UT Austin), Archie Davis (Queen Mary University of London), and Bethânia Gomes (Beatriz Nascimento Foundation) will respond.
During the week of the online roundtable, Black Perspectives will publish new blog posts every day at 5:30AM EST. Please follow Black Perspectives (@BlkPerspectives) and AAIHS (@AAIHS) on Twitter, like AAIHS on Facebook, or subscribe to our blog for updates. By subscribing to Black Perspectives, each new post will automatically be delivered to your inbox during the week of the roundtable.
About the Participants
Carole Boyce-Davies is Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita andProfessor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) on the internalization of Caribbean culture; and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English. In addition to over a hundred essays, articles published in major professional journals, Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published fifteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture such as the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2); the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia JonesBeyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) and Pan-African Connections (2019) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated GeneralHistoryofAfrica, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). Her most recent publication is Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022/2023). She is a past president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016. Her popular essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian (London), The Washington Post, The Crisis, Ms Magazine, Ithaca Journal, The Black Scholar, Miami Herald, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian, Caribbean Today, Caribbean Contact, Newsweek.
Erica L. Williams is Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013). She is co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018) along with Ira Harrison and Deborah Johnson-Simon, and Speechifying: The Words and Legacy of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, along with Celeste Watkins-Hayes and Johnnetta Betsch Cole (Duke University Press, 2023). She has also published peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; and several book chapters inedited volumes. She is currently writing an ethnography of Black feminist activism in Salvador, Bahia, and an autoethnographic travel memoir. She is the Book and Film Review Editor for Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), and Secretary of the National Women’s Studies Association(NWSA).Winner of the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, race and identity in Latin America, globalization, and feminist ethnography. She is an Advisory Board Member for VidaAfroLatina, an emerging international women’s fund that mobilizes resources and connects them with Afro-descendant women-led organizations in Latin America that address sexual violence.
Congratulations on the initiative of the Online Round Table – The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, as a black researcher investigating the trajectory of Beatriz Nascimento, I look forward to watching this dialogue with different views on this Afro-dysporic intellectual.
Black Perspectives, the award-winning blog of the African American Intellectual History Society (AAIHS), is hosting an online roundtable on The Dialectic is in the Sea: The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento (Princeton University Press, 2024) by Christen Smith, Archie Davis, and Bethânia Gomes. Beatriz Nascimento was an Afro-Brazilian woman intellectual who developed theories about race relations and racial inequality in Brazil and theories of the quilombo in relationship to race and Blackness. She wrote during a time when Brazil considered itself a society in which racial mixture eroded the lines between Black and white and thus erased the existence of racism. Nascimento was a committed activist with the Unified Black Movement and traveled widely to speak about racial inequality in Brazil.
Carole Boyce-Davies is Chair of the English Department at Howard University and H.T. Rhodes Professor of Humane Letters emerita andProfessor of Africana Studies and Literatures in English at Cornell University. She is the author of the prize-wining Left of Karl Marx. The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones (2008); the classic Black Women, Writing and Identity: Migrations of the Subject (1994); Caribbean Spaces. Escape Routes from Twilight Zones (2013) on the internalization of Caribbean culture; and a bi-lingual children’s story Walking/An Avan (2016/2017) in Haitian Kreyol and English. In addition to over a hundred essays, articles published in major professional journals, Dr. Boyce-Davies has also published fifteen critical editions on African, African Diaspora and Caribbean literature and culture such as the two-volume collection of critical and creative writing Moving Beyond Boundaries (1995): International Dimensions of Black Women’s Writing (volume 1), Black Women’s Diasporas (volume 2); the 3-volume Encyclopedia of the African Diaspora (Oxford: ABC-CLIO, 2008) and Claudia Jones Beyond Containment: Autobiographical Reflections, Poetry, Essays (2011) and Pan-African Connections (2019) A member of the scientific committee for UNESCO’s updated General History of Africa, she edited the epistemological forum on “Global Blackness” for the African Diaspora volume and is a member of the Scientific Committee of the African Humanities Forum (based in Mali). Her most recent publication is Black Women’s Rights. Leadership and the Circularities of Power (2022/2023). She is a past president of the Caribbean Studies Association which organized under her leadership the first CSA Conference in Haiti in 2016. Her popular essays and reviews have appeared in The Guardian (London), The Washington Post, The Crisis, Ms Magazine, Ithaca Journal, The Black Scholar, Miami Herald, Trinidad Express, Trinidad Guardian, Caribbean Today, Caribbean Contact, Newsweek.
Erica L. Williams is Professor of Anthropology at Spelman College. She has a Ph.D. and M.A. in Cultural Anthropology from Stanford University, and a B.A. in Anthropology and Africana Studies from New York University. She is the author of Sex Tourism in Bahia: Ambiguous Entanglements (2013). She is co-editor of The Second Generation of African American Pioneers in Anthropology (2018) along with Ira Harrison and Deborah Johnson-Simon, and Speechifying: The Words and Legacy of Johnnetta Betsch Cole, along with Celeste Watkins-Hayes and Johnnetta Betsch Cole (Duke University Press, 2023). She has also published peer-reviewed journal articles in Feminist Anthropology, Transforming Anthropology, Feminist Studies, Gender, Place, and Culture; and several book chapters in edited volumes. She is currently writing an ethnography of Black feminist activism in Salvador, Bahia, and an autoethnographic travel memoir. She is the Book and Film Review Editor for Transforming Anthropology, the journal of the Association of Black Anthropologists (ABA), and Secretary of the National Women’s Studies Association (NWSA). Winner of the Vulcan Teaching Excellence Award, she teaches courses on gender and sexuality, race and identity in Latin America, globalization, and feminist ethnography. She is an Advisory Board Member for VidaAfroLatina, an emerging international women’s fund that mobilizes resources and connects them with Afro-descendant women-led organizations in Latin America that address sexual violence.
Congratulations on the initiative of the Online Round Table – The Black Radical Thought of Beatriz Nascimento, as a black researcher investigating the trajectory of Beatriz Nascimento, I look forward to watching this dialogue with different views on this Afro-dysporic intellectual.