Professor, Department of African American Studies, Princeton University

“Foreign” Black Women: Confronting Xenophobic Antiblackness Globally

We are living in extraordinary times for the history of Black people.  In these first two and a half decades of the millennium we have seen an unprecedented growth in Black economic power, we have witnessed Black people occupying positions of prestige and influence from national politics to board of corporations to directorships of academic and cultural spaces. These accomplishments have been matched by symbolic and institutional commitments from states and private agencies such as the creation of museums and the launching of new prestigious awards. But these last two and a half decades have also seen the largest wave of Black migration across the globe, mostly from places where conflicts and famine are destroying communities (places like Sudan, Eritrea and Haiti) .  We have witnessed a surge of Black women mortality during childbirth, a raise of Black women unemployment, an increase on violence against Black women, particularly trans Black women, and a growth in Black women poverty rate across continents.[1]  For all that is new about this genocidal violent antiblack moment we find ourselves in, one thing that remains across time and space is the systematic violence and oppression of poor, trans and immigrant Black women by everyone around them, which is only matched in magnitude and awe by their radical resilience. Black women across the globe continuously teach us how to survive disaster; how to not fall in the abyss and how to imagine otherwise.  In this lecture, Professor García Peña focuses on the lives and work of Black women from across Latin America and Europe, bringing attention to the ways in which migration and anti-immigrant violence affect Black women as well as the multiple movements of resistance they have created and inspired.