Kinfolk on Both Sides of the Atlantic Ocean: Towards Inclusive Liberation for the African Diaspora

• In Event: Of kinship, family, and oceans

Description for Program

My paper engages the subfield of “Rivers of Change: Ferguson and the long histories of Black freedom struggles” to examine how European imperialism’s entanglement with colonization and enslavement has shaped the oppression, marginalization, and responsive resistance of the African diaspora. I implicate Eurocentric colonial and racist ideologies in the divisive rhetoric among exclusionary movements within the African diaspora while proposing new frameworks for collaborative resistance that recognize and preserve our inherent heterogeneity.
Taking a decolonial perspective, drawing inspiration from scholars like Frantz Fanon and Aimé Césaire, I analyze historiography and peer-reviewed studies on African colonial and trans-Atlantic enslavement experiences to identify parallels. I center the shared political, legal, and economic mechanisms of domination in both Western colonialism and enslavement, highlighting how racial ideologies and identity construction were used to justify the dehumanization of African peoples and the similarities in the resistance strategies focused on cultural preservation and liberation, as well as the lingering traumas from both systems. I connect these to contemporary issues of systemic marginalization and economic exploitation within the African diaspora. Ultimately, I argue for the necessity of starving the conflict between descendants of enslaved people in the United States, other descendants of enslaved (and colonized) people in the diasporas, and the descendants of the colonized people in Africa, divesting from and dismantling colonial and racist ideologies, and I propose an inclusive, collective strategy for revolution and reconstruction as a path toward true liberation.
This work contributes to the broader interdisciplinary scholarship that bears witness to the systemic injustices rooted in European imperialism, manifested through enslavement and colonialism and the racist structures designed to maintain these systems, as well as to the need and methods of collaborative decolonial resistance and inclusive liberation.
Name: Faith Ebiere Eguolo Odele
Institution: Texas A&M University

Author

• Faith Odele, Texas A&M University