Venues: Museu de Cultura e História Afro-Brasileira (Muhcab); IPPUR-UFRJ; Museu da Maré, Quilombo das Bruxas-Assentamento Terra Prometida, Terreiro Ilé Omiojuarô de Mãe Beata de Iemanjá.
As the most recent spectacle of state violence surrounding the killing of George Floyd in Minneapolis has demonstrated, anti-Blackness remains deeply entrenched in the architecture of urban governance in the United States. More importantly, the ensuing national and global dissemination of protests against state violence—to distant places such as Dakar and Berlin—demonstrate that the dialectical relationship between anti-Blackness and the Black radical tradition remains globally resonant. Brazil and the United States prove to be apt case studies to examine the articulations of racial capitalism and global racial regimes, and how these regimes are spatialized in the concrete locals of urban environments. This is especially so given that both countries have long histories entwined with slavery and marronage, as well as their parallel contemporary forms of violent urban confinement and rapidly growing Black social movements.
This two-part International Seminar Series brings Black Geographies into Urban Studies while simultaneously strengthening the global network of researchers and activists interested in Black geographies studies and activist interventions against the racialized power dynamics that perpetuates devaluation, expropriation, and marginalization of Black lives and majority-Black places. It highlights the need for urban theorists to foreground Black Studies epistemologies in their work, and in so doing, to also draw on the important contributions of social movement participants in our collective knowledge production.
The seminars will take place in academic and grassroots spaces both in Brazil and the United States, bringing together Black activists and scholars from Mexico, Puerto Rico, USA, Brazil, and Jamaica.
It will make space for a multiplicity of modes of interaction and knowledge production including series conversation circles, round tables, film screenings, artistic presentations, and field visits to places of Black historical importance and favelas in Rio de Janeiro that stand out for their histories and long traditions of urban struggles and community activism in different fields.
It will take place over five days, and each day will center one of four axes of the Black experience and organizing: Black Ecologies, Policing and Abolition Movements, Black Community Economies and Spatial Struggles and the Right to Memory and Racial Justice. The last day will host the first gathering of of the Global Black Geographies Network.
The Seminars have been planned and organized collectively by the coordinating commitee that includes lead organisers Dr. Priscilla Ferreira (Rutgers University-New Brunswick) and Dr. Renato Emerson dos Santos (IPPUR-Federal University of Rio de Janeiro), Dr. Willie Wright (University of Florida), Dr. Yousuf Al Bulushi (University of California-Irvine and Adam Bledsoe (University of Minnessota), Gizele Martins (Favela Movements of Rio de Janeiro, Community Journalist at Favela da Maré, PhD student of Communication/UFRJ, and Fransergio Goulart-Executive Director at IDMJR-Instituto de Memoria e Justiça Racial.
The second part of this International Seminar Series will take place in the first week of November 2022 at Rutgers University New-Brunswick (USA) and in Black grassroots organizations in NYC and Philadelphia.
For more information: priscilla.pferreira@rutgers.edu (Priscilla Ferreira), globalblackgeographies@gmail.com ; insta: @geografiasnegrasglobais