Conveners: Elisabeth Engel (DHI Washington), Nicholas Grant (University of East Anglia), Mischa Honeck (DHI Washington)
The demise of the peculiar institution of slavery in the U.S. South following the Civil War put African Americans in motion to a degree not witnessed before or since. Moving to the North, to the Caribbean, to Africa, to Europe, and to the Asian Pacific—African Americans carried with them the cultures, practices, and politics of the U.S. South. As descendants of slaves they assumed new roles as agronomists, scientists, missionaries, journalists, or political activists within and beyond the U.S. They became symbols and agents of the struggle for black emancipation in the (post-)colonial South as well as Northern metropoles. And yet, their movements, approaches, and aims remained informed by experiences of racial segregation and subjected to racist politics that persisted in various places around the world. This workshop will explore how, following their emancipation, African Americans navigated and shaped a transnational social space that was marked by the interconnected racial histories of the American South and the (post-)colonial South—a space we are calling the ‘South' of the black Atlantic.
Recent historical scholarship has emphasized that the Jim Crow South had a profound influence on how race relations were discussed in colonial and global contexts. Bringing North American history into conversation with postcolonial studies, this historiography also demonstrates how the Jim Crow South was the product of transnational racial politics, post-plantation cultures and anticolonial networks that long connected the Americas, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the Pacific. This workshop aims to examine the role African Americans played in establishing such transnational connections, with a specific focus on the ways in which African American ideas, cultures, and experiences of the South ‘traveled' beyond U.S. borders.
By looking at the Jim Crow South from the perspective of African Americans in motion, we aim to critically re-engage with Paul Gilroy's concept of the "black Atlantic." Building on Gilroy's notion that African Americans transcended ethnic and national borders, we seek to explore the regional boundaries of "Southernness" black transnational agents may have encountered, constructed, propagated, or contested on the move. Taking African American representations of the Jim Crow South as a starting point helps us to understand how regional conceptions of race shaped novel connections between the American South and the wider black Atlantic world.
Based around a historical re-conceptualization of the black Atlantic, this workshop seeks to open up a dialogue with New Southern Studies which use the history of the U.S. South to rethink ideas of objecthood, identity, space, nation, region, the body, and empire in ways that complicate "old borders and terrains." With an approach that views the Jim Crow South as implicated with the formation of the post-emancipation black Atlantic, we aim to historicize conflations of "Southernness" and blackness on various scales, ranging from the U.S. South to the Global South. Bringing together black Atlantic and New Southern Studies, we hope that this workshop will serve as a starting point to think through how the black post-emancipation South was incorporated into the emergence of a global colonial South.
The workshop aims to address the following questions:
- How can concepts of the Jim Crow South, the black Atlantic, and global South be brought into conversation with one another? What technological developments, political organizations, and cultural movements can be analyzed in order to frame regional transnational connections?
- How has the Jim Crow South been constructed transnationally? How did these constructions serve the circulation of black political activists and how did they help to restrain the scope of these activists' movements beyond the U.S.?
- What role did the Jim Crow South play in order to designate African-American-ness in the global South?
- How did actors from the U.S. South re-imagine ‘their' South on the move? Which representations of race, nation and gender did they assert or contest? How did these actors construct their "Southernness" by looking and moving across national borders?
- How has the South been central to the spread of transnational blackness, whiteness, and other Atlantics, such as red or yellow ones?
- How have constructions of the Jim Crow South changed over time? Has this genealogy been driven by political and cultural events in the global South?