Zwart/ Negra/o/x*/ Nègre/ Black
Small Axe 68, July 2022
Keywords in Caribbean Studies
Zwart/ Negra/o/x*/ Nègre/ Black2
March 2023
Contributors:
Grégory Pierrot
Gloria Wekker
Leniqueca A. Welcome
Omaris Z. Zamora
Moderated by:
Ryan Cecil Jobson and Vanessa Pérez-Rosario
In Small Axe 68, July 2022, we launched our Keywords in Caribbean Studies project. We began with Zwart, Negro/a/x*, Nègre, and Black. Few words in Caribbean discourse (popular or scholarly) have the multiplicity of meaning and fraught history of these.
Read more about our Keywords project: smallaxe.net/sx/issues/68
Contact: Vanessa Pérez-Rosario, vpr@smallaxe.net
Co-sponsored by Sou Sou: UChicago Humanities Laboratory in Caribbean Studies
Recorded conversation
Contributors
Grégory Pierrot is Associate Professor of English at the University of Connecticut at Stamford. He is the author of Decolonize Hipsters (OR Books, 2021), The Black Avenger in Atlantic Culture (UGA, 2019) and co-editor of Haitian Revolutionary Fictions: An Anthology (UVA, 2022) and Marcus Rainsford’s An Historical Account of the Black Empire of Hayti (Duke, 2013). He has also translated Philippe Carles and Jean-Louis Comolli's Free Jazz/Black Power (Mississippi, 2015) and is currently working with Jean-Baptiste Naudy on a French translation of Merle Collins' The Colour of Forgetting for Rot Bo Krik Press in France.
Gloria Wekker is an Afro-Surinamese Dutch socio-cultural anthropologist with specializations in gender studies, sexuality, African-American and Caribbean Studies. She is emerita professor in gender studies at Utrecht University. Among her noteworthy publications are The Politics of Passion: Women’s Sexual Culture in the Afro-Surinamese Diaspora (2006) and White Innocence: Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (2016). In 2017, she was distinguished as one of the ten most influential academics in the Netherlands.
Leniqueca A. Welcome is an anthropologist and an architect by training. She is currently assistant professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University. Her research and teaching interests include postcolonial statecraft, racialization, gendering, criminalization, visuality, affect and liberation. Her work, informed by Black feminist, decolonial and abolitionist theory, combines more traditional ethnographic methods with photography and collaging.
Omaris Z. Zamora is an assistant professor of AfroLatinx Studies at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She is jointly appointed in the Department of Latino and Caribbean Studies and the Department of Africana Studies. Zamora is a transnational Black Dominican Studies scholar and spoken-word poet. Her research interests include: theorizing AfroLatinidad in the context of race, gender, sexuality through Afro-diasporic approaches. Her book project tentatively titled Cigüapa Unbound: “AfroLatina Feminist Epistemologies of Tranceformation.” You can follow her on Twitter @OmarisZamora