4 September 2024
Victoria Collis-Buthelezi argues that the crisis in Black Studies stems from silences around Black plurality in our theorization of Blackness both in the US (as more Black immigrants from a range of geo-political contexts settle there) and globally (as we apply Black theory born of one paradigm to make sense of racialized Black life across the globe). She responds to this crisis by doing two things. First, she locates Cape Town in wider Black cartographies to reveal that from the 1890s to 1948, Cape Town ordered the texture of Black struggle globally because for many Blacks it was the city in which they could be free. Second, she shows the significance of mineral extraction as another economic paradigm that enacted modes of Blackness and impacted Black struggle for liberation. Two capitalist regimes, the Plantation and the Mine manifest racialized Blackness to facilitate extraction differently. While the Plantation sought to collapse ethnic difference, the Mine has historically amplified it. The goal is to enrich conversations across Black, African, and African diaspora studies such that we come to better understand the points of connection and difference between the multiple forms of labor conscription that threatened and shaped Black life at the start of the twentieth century.
