From the “Black Atlantic Communication Network” to #BlackLivesMatter

Thursday 13 March

CAMRI Research Seminar with Wendy Willems (London School of Economics)

Please join the Westminster Communication and Media Research Institute (CAMRI) for a research seminar with with Dr Wendy Willems, placing transnational activist networks in historical context – and addressing the “short memory of digital media and communication studies”.

Details

The #BlackLivesMatter protests in 2020 culminated into both a global expression of solidarity with the killing of George Floyd as well as a racial reckoning with the afterlife of histories of slavery and colonialism in different national contexts outside the United States. Digital networked communication via social media was considered crucial in the transnational circulation of these anti-racist protests which took place both online and offline. In their analyses of these protests and other forms of digital activism, digital media scholars often centre the digital network, building on other older foundational concepts such as the ‘network society’ (Castells 1996) or ‘networked publics (boyd 2010) whilst reviving older methods such as ‘network analysis’ to make sense of digital networks. Indirectly, the key question that has shaped these debates is what difference digital technology makes to these forms of activism and how it has changed protest.

Instead of focusing on change, this paper highlights the continuities between older and newer transnational networks. It discusses the case of the “Black Atlantic Communication Network” which emerged in the late 18th and early 19th century, linking up African American (and later Caribbean) sailors with Black South Africans in Cape Town (Atkins 1996). In the 1920s, as a result of these connections, Cape Town became a hub of Garveyism, with its own branch of the Universal Negro Improvement Association (UNIA), a transnational Black movement set up by Jamaican activist Marcus Garvey in New York in 1914. This paper examines the role of UNIA’s successful and globally circulating newspaper, Negro World, which was published weekly and brought to Cape Town by Caribbean sailors. It argues that both Negro World and #BlackLivesMatter could be seen as moments of heightened global Black consciousness part of longer histories of anti-colonial, Black internationalist networks.

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