Jim Crow Meets Post-Racial Democracy: Inter-American Blackness in the Shadow of the Panama Canal Zone

• In Event: Blackness in Latina/o America: Working Across Latina/o, Latin American and Black Diaspora Studies

Abstract

Drawing on analyses of Panamanian West Indian literature, interviews, music, and digital media, this talk posits a new pathway for studying inter-American and trans-area relationality, in general, and Afro-diasporic identities in the Americas, in particular. In doing so, it illuminates a conceptual toolkit that can help scholars uncover rich, yet previously overlooked, dimensions of other diasporic and American lives and literatures.

Panama has been at the crossroads of North, Central, and South America politically, culturally, and metaphorically since its founding in 1903. The US-led construction of the canal, which began in 1904, brought US engineers, politicians, and federal workers into sustained contact with Central American elites and Black British Caribbean/West Indian laborers as well as with indigenous populations, descendants of the Chinese who had come to work on the Panama Railroad, and people of African descent brought to the region by the Spanish during the colonial era. The result is a Panamanian nation in which inter-American engagement, both material and ideological, is a fundamental part of everyday life. These historical connections, along with continuous migrations between and among the US, Panama, and the West Indies, has had a profound impact on the decisions these descendants make about whether and how to represent themselves in the public sphere.

At once Latin American, US American, Latino/a, African American, and British West Indian/Caribbean, Panamanian West Indian literature and culture push us to create new theoretical tools and vocabularies that can help us understand aspects of the lives and literatures of Our Americas (North, South, Central, and archipelagic) we may have previously missed. They require analytical frameworks that are capaciously trans-national and trans-imperial, and that transgress the borders between our fields, areas, and subfields. They push us to create new theoretical tools and vocabularies that can help us understand aspects of the lives and literatures of Our Americas (North, South, Central, and archipelagic) that we may have previously missed by focusing only on a single area, language, or colonial power, or even by comparing the American dimensions of only two areas, languages, or colonial powers.

Author

• Ifeoma C Kiddoe Nwankwo, Vanderbilt University