Human Rights, Race, and Resistance in Africa and the African Diaspora

Africans and their descendants have long been faced with abuse of their human rights, most frequently due to racism or racialized issues. Consequently, understanding shifting conceptualizations of race and identity is essential to understanding how people of color confronted these encounters. This book addresses these issues and their connections to social justice, discrimination, and equality movements. From colonial abuses or their legacies, black people around the world have historically encountered discrimination, and yet they do not experience injustice opaquely. The chapters in this book explore and clarify how Africans, and their descendants, struggled to achieve agency despite long histories of discrimination. Contributors draw upon a range of case studies related to resistance, and examine these in conjunction with human rights and the concept of race to provide a thorough exploration of the diasporic experience. Human Rights, Race, and Resistance in Africa and the African Diaspora will appeal to students and scholars of Ethnic and Racial Studies, African History, and Diaspora Studies.

Introduction Part I: Human Rights 1. Human Rights as Natural Rights: The Quest for a Theoretical Grounding, Wanjala S. Nasong’o 2. Exploring the Social Protection Right of the African Child, Rachael Ojima Agarry 3. Untangling Discursive Reproduction: Negras, Sterilization, and Reproductive Rights in Brazil, Ugo Felicia Edu 4. Human Rights and Physical Capital: Panacea to Sustainable Development in AfricaJonathan, Ali Ogwuche Part II: Race, Racism, and Discrimination 5: Yearning for Whiteness: Racial Identification Among the Coloureds of Antigua, 1660s – 1860s, Nsaka Sesepkekiu 6. The African Drum, Bantu World and South African-United States Transnational Linkages, 1949-1954, Derek Charles Catsam 7. Organized Labor and the Struggle for Black and Working-Class Citizenship in Cienfuegos, Cuba, 1899-1902, Bonnie Lucero Part III: Discrimination and Resistance 8. State Violence, Radical Protest and the Black/African Female Body, Kanyinsola O. Obayan 9. Revolution at the Crossroads: Re-framing the Haitian Revolution from the Heights of Platons, Michael Becker 10. Uprooted: African Americans in Mexico; International Propaganda, Migration, and the Resistance against U.S. Racial Hegemony, Alfredo Aguilar 11. Re-Membering Samson OtherWise: Resistance, Revolution, and Relationality within the Carnivalesque-Creolized Chronotope of Judges 13-16A, Paige Rawson

Toyin Falola is the Jacob and Frances Sanger Mossiker Chair in the Humanities and University Distinguished Teaching Professor at the University of Texas at Austin, US. Cacee Hoyer an Assistant Professor in the Department of History at the University of Southern Indiana, US.