THE BLACK DIASPORA AS GENOCIDE: BRAZIL, UNITED STATES, OR, A SUPRANATIONAL GEOGRAPHY OF DEATH AND ITS ALTERNATIVES

Abstract

As it suggests a notion of the Black Diaspora marked by a multiplicity of anti-Black genocidal processes, this essay aims at the following: first, to de-center the US, dislocate its/our seldom conscious imperial gaze and self-understanding, by centering it in the Black Diaspora: to show how anti-Black processes, more easily associated with so-called third world locations, are not only prevalent but immanent to this imperial nation-state. Second, it proposes a complementary concept of Diaspora that, while attentive to its shifting, experiential, performative, and ultimately political facets, focuses on racial terror, and more specifically, anti-Black genocide as its foundational characteristic. And third, as it recognizes the urgency of survival, which necessarily implies the related requirement of political struggle, the perspective offered in this essay centers on the liberatory imperative of the Black Diaspora. If some of the conditions of possibility of nation-states such as Brazil and the United States rest on the impossibility of the Black condition – the impossibility of full citizenship, the impossibility of a fully recognized and lived humanity – then what are the political options open to members of the Black Diaspora?