Black History Month 2024 Keynote Lecture: Melanie J. Newton

“This Mess of a Colonial Legacy”: Revolutionary Relationalities, Arrivant Statehood and Afro-Indigenous Futures

Melanie J. Newton
Associate Professor of History

This lecture draws on Barbadian thinker Kamau Brathwaite to historicise the Garifuna and Maya peoples’ struggles to redefine their relationships with the post-plantation or ‘arrivant’ states of the Anglophone circum-Caribbean. The survival strategies of Indigenous Antilleans, Africans and their descendants created a terraqueous space of revolutionary relationality in the early colonial Caribbean. This posed a constant threat to imperial authority and defied the racial taxonomies on which European imperial systems of governance in the Atlantic World depended. The analysis in this lecture situates these struggles at the heart of five centuries of imperial statecraft, which have produced the settler states of North America, practices of violent state-driven Black and Indigenous erasure in continental Latin America and the embattled, fragmented and precarious forms of arrivant sovereignty that followed independence in the Caribbean. I argue for the fundamental importance of these Afro-Indigenous, circum-Caribbean stories to any full historical account of Black and Indigenous relationalities and experiences with white supremacist, settler and neo-plantocratic governance in the Americas and the Atlantic World. These histories of Afro-Indigenous Caribbean co-presence, negotiation and place making are a necessary point of return from which to imagine a more hopeful future based on reparatory governance in the face of ongoing, state-driven, colonial practices of systemic anti-Black and anti-Indigenous violence.

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