Toward a Sociology of Black Liberation: Centering Black Bodies, Culture, & Souls

• In Event: Centering Body, Mind, and Spirit for Radical Transformation in Racial and Ethnic Sociology

Abstract

In this paper, I show how embodied cultural forms (specifically Afro-West Indian popular music and dance traditions) that express Black histories of anti-colonial resistance, provide a non-Black community (specifically, Indo-Caribbeans or West Indians of South Asian descent) embodied knowledge and psychic tools to resist anti-Black racism and sexism imposed by South Asian Americans who pressure them to conform to an Asian American "model minority" stereotype. The data is drawn from 18 months of research and 140 interviews with Indo-Caribbeans, Afro-West Indians, and South Asians in New York City. Drawing on this work, I argue that a truly decolonial sociology needs to take Black culture seriously; to analyzes its depth, history, origins, and current expressions; and to understand it as subaltern resistance. I discuss how decentering White epistemes requires that we understand Black embodiment and Black culture as the collective resistance of Black souls. Not only will such a re-orientation will help our discipline properly humanize and re-value (rather than consistently pathologize) Black life. It will also provide our discipline with a profound epistemic resource for a systematic critique of coloniality and of contemporary racial capitalist systems.

Author

• Anjanette M Chan Tack, Northeastern University