Moving Blackness - by Lisa B Y Calvente

About the Book

Moving Blackness explores the centrality of circulation within the framework of western modernity and the racially structured regulations of mobility. Storytelling emerges as the primary mode through which blackness is conveyed: it serves as a means of circulating the lived experiences of being Black while also functioning as acts of resistance and solidarity performed by blackened individuals who were (once) colonized and enslaved.

Book Synopsis

Moving Blackness: Black Circulation, Racism, and Relations of Homespace delves into the intricate connections between communication, culture, power, and racism in relation to blackness. Through a blend of interviews, oral histories, and meticulous archival research, this book sheds light on the multifaceted narratives surrounding Black identity. It explores how these stories circulate, serving as tools of resistance, negotiation, and affirmation of diverse manifestations and representations of blackness. By emphasizing the significance of storytelling as a means through which blackness affirms itself, transcending time and space, the book underscores how communicative embodiments of Black identity enable individuals to persevere within marginalized contexts.

Engaging with theories of anti-Black racism, modernity, coloniality, and the Black diaspora, the book frames storytelling and the circulation of narratives as performances deeply rooted in the everyday lives of Black people across the diaspora. Starting with an examination of the racial construction of movement during colonialism and slavery, the book traces how this history shapes contemporary interactions. With its exploration of how Black circulation transforms movement and space, the book introduces a forward-thinking approach to the Black diaspora, anchored in a politics of identification rather than being confined to the past or a specific location. Moving Blackness argues that the desire for homespace, a yearning for belonging that transcends any particular physical space, fuels this envisioned future, rooted in the historical and material conditions of racism and marginalization.

Review Quotes

"In this thought-provoking book, Calvente argues for the critical role of stories in making and remaking worlds that privilege some at the expense of others. Using a compelling storyteller's subtlety and a meticulous ethnographer's eye, she offers an important contribution to communication and cultural studies that demonstrates some of the ways in which we speak our worlds--our homespaces--into tender, precarious, but decidedly realizable existence. Moving Blackness itself moves through colonial times and diasporic spaces to contextualize understandings of race/racism in the everyday and the existential."
--John L. Jackson, Jr. "author of Thin Description: Ethnography and the African Hebrew Israelites of Jerusalem"

"Calvente breaks new ground in this compelling interdisciplinary study. Through a combination of theory and methods, she brings to light the poetics and praxis of oral history performance."--D. Soyini Madison "author of Acts of Activism: Human Rights as Radical Performance"

About the Author

LISA B. Y. CALVENTE is an assistant professor of performance studies in the Department of Communication at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. She is the coauthor of Imprints of Revolution: Visual Representations of Resistance.