Browse

Autochthonomies is an intellectual project that engages readers in an interpretive journey: it engages and describes a process by which readers of texts created by artists and actors of African descent might engage such texts as legible within the context of African Diasporic historical and cultural discursive practices. It argues that there is a cultural and philosophical gain to understanding these texts not as products of, or responses only to, Western hegemonic dynamics or simply as products of discrete ethnic or national identities. By invoking a transnational African/Diasporic interpretive lens, negotiated through a virtual “lakou” or yard space in which such identities are transfigured, recognized, and exchanged, the study demonstrates how to best examine the salient features of the texts that underscore African/Diasporic sensibilities and renders them legible, thus offering a potential not only for richer readings of African Diasporic texts but also the possibility of rupturing the Manichean binary dynamics through which such texts have commonly been read. This produces an enriching interpretive capacity emphasizing the transnationalism of connections between subjects of African descent as the central pole for undertaking such investigations. Through the use of the neologism, autochthonomy, the study argues further that, despite colonial interruptions, critics of such works should seek to situate them as part of an intricate network of cultural and transnational exchanges.

In the 20^th century, black women in the French empire played crucial leadership roles in anticolonial movements. This book harnesses untapped archival documents to highlight the work of Suzanne Césaire, Paulette Nardal, Eugénie Éboué-Tell, Jane Vialle, Andrée Blouin, Aoua Kéita and Eslanda Robeson, women who remain relatively understudied in scholarship that continues to privilege male politicians and writers. Examining the literary production and political activism of African, Antillean, Guyanese and African American women, this book argues that black women writers and thinkers articulated multi-layered forms of citizenship that emphasized plural cultural and racial identities in direct opposition to colonialism. Their decolonial citizenship expanded the possibilities of belonging beyond the borders of the nation state and even the French empire to imagine transnational Pan-African and Pan-Caribbean identities informed by black feminist intellectual frameworks and practices.

Drawing upon deep ethnographic fieldwork, and written in lively prose that weaves together story and evidence, the book explores contemporary homesteading in Appalachia as a means of resistance to capitalist modernity. It is framed around two questions: Why are people still pursuing rural subsistence? And why are they often divided into two main groups, known to each other--not always kindly--as “hicks” and “hippies”? These turn out to be urgent questions, considering that the cultural divide between these two groups is one instance of the dangerous and growing schism between “liberal” and “conservative” in the contemporary United States. Because the answer turns upon the distribution of literacy and literate education, these also turn out to be profound questions that cannot be answered without exploring the inner workings of class and capitalism. Thus, the narrative begins by telling the complex and often misunderstood histories of both groups of back-to-the-landers, but turns in the middle chapters to an analysis of the ways in which working-class people are rendered educationally dispossessed through schooling and jobs, as well as discussion of the often devastating consequences of that dispossession. In the final chapter, the book returns to homesteading as a form of resistance, to address the question of whether it provides, as practitioners hope, a measure of shelter from the machine.