The Black Arts Archive: The Challenge of Translation

Northwestern University proposes to host a John E. Sawyer Seminar on transnational black arts, with a specific emphasis on the archives of African diasporic art forms across the globe. We are particularly invested in this topic given a series of recent social movements in the black diaspora that mobilized black art tactics and strategies. Namely, in 2015, the Rhodes Must Fall movement called for radical changes in the cultural, political, and academic realms from Cape Town to Oxford. Contemporaneously, Black Lives Matter activists demanded the transformation of judicial, political, and educational spheres in the United States. In 2016, protestors in Nassau, Bahamas, took to the streets over landfill fires, taking up a mantra of Black Lives Matter, “I Can’t Breathe.” And in 2017, in response to the devastation left in the wake of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, artists protested their colonial racialization by U.S. authorities and the resulting inadequacies of emergency aid.