This event is part of the Beyond Borders, Across Boundaries: Black and LatinX Knowledge Formations speaker series presented by Mellon Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity
Whiteness in the United States has always been constructed through an ‘Other.’ Writers and scholars such as Toni Morrison and Phil Deloria Jr. have written significantly on this topic as they relate to Black Americans and Indigenous peoples. However, I want to take a step back from whiteness, and explore how Black Americans understand their sense of belonging in the United States, and place this within the context of this being Indigenous land. This paper challenges two core assumptions. First, it challenges the idea that Black people are “settlers” or “guests” on Turtle Island. Second, it articulates how Black people have tried to construct a sense of place within the settler state, as people who have been consistently treated as second-class citizens and at other times, non-human. Using case studies from Pan-Africanism, the Black Power Movement, and contemporary popular culture, this paper argues for a new way of talkin’ and thinking about Black belonging on Indigenous land.
Kyle T. Mays (Black/Saginaw Anishinaabe) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of African American Studies and the American Indian Studies Center, at the University of California, Los Angeles. He is a transdisciplinary scholar of Afro-Indigenous Studies, Indigenous popular culture, and urban history. He is the author of Hip Hop Beats, Indigenous Rhymes: Modernity and Hip Hop in Indigenous North America (SUNY Press, 2018). He is finishing a book tentatively titled, Aunt Judy’s Detroit: Constructing Belonging and Place in the Motor City, under contract with the University of Washington Press. He is currently writing a new book on Afro-Indigenous history in the United States.
This event is organized by the Mellon Intersections Group on Global Blackness and Latinx Identity with support from the Center for the Humanities and the Public Sphere, George A. Smathers Libraries, Center for Gender, Sexualities, and Women’s Studies Research, Center for Latin American Studies, and Club Creole.
This event is free and open to the public. For more information, contact: humanities-center@ufl.edu or Dr. Bryce Henson (bryce.henson@ufl.edu).
https://intersections.humanities.ufl.edu/upcoming_events/the-mobility-of-belonging-how-black-people-construct-indigeneity-on-turtle-island-with-kyle-mays/