The yearly Black History Month invites us all to reflect on Black, African and Afro-diasporic historical struggles, contributions and their critique. Afro-diasporic events and meetings are a crucial way to connect and exchange. However, I want to stress that these forums are more than moments of networking. I would like to use the opportunity of Black History Month to think of African and Afro-diasporic forums as spaces of resistance and worldmaking that we can find in history and today.

I see resistance in the broadest sense as a form of agency. This places emphasis on actors and their specific needs, aims, strategies, conditions and contexts. That said, it is clear that actors operate within structural constraints. Madhok and colleagues rightly claim that the conditions in which we exercise agency matter. [1] They think of agency and coercion as entwined and remind us that “agency is always exercised within constraints, that inequality is an ever-present component, and that the constraints relate to social not just personal power relations”. [2] Taking this as a starting point, I follow Lilja and colleagues by understanding resistance in this think piece as a subaltern practice. [3] Black resistance is thus understood as a form of agency from the margins embedded in social and political power relations.

The series of Pan-African Congresses in the 20^th century illustrate how Afro-diasporic and African forums constitute spaces of resistance. The fifth Pan-African Congress in 1945 in Manchester can be taken as a particularly clear example of Black resistance. At a time when colonialism was present and racial segregation was the reality in many societies, exchanges and debates at the congress resulted in two declarations that resisted racist oppression. Poe draws special attention to the second declaration titled ‘Declaration to the Colonial Peoples of the world’ as an act of agency; therein a battle against imperialism was declared based on the organisation of the masses. [4] United in their anti-racist struggles, Afro-diasporic and African intellectuals rebelled against the status quo and put the liberation of African people at the heart of their resistance. [5] These forms of resistance were directed against a variety of the liberal script that used ‘race’ as a category to justify the imperial rule. A prominent historical figure that shows how racism was anchored in liberal thought is the liberal political thinker John Stuart Mill, who justified colonialism by referring to a racist logic that assumed the supremacy of whiteness. [6] African and Afro-diasporic agency resisted and countered this racist form of liberalism through these forums. At the same time, these spaces can be read as moments of worldmaking.

The notion of worldmaking has long been present in literary and culture studies, where marginalised groups respond to the silencing of their practices by developing their own discourses, creating room for exchange and connectedness and criticising dominant narratives. [7] Transferred to the postcolonial context, worldmaking can be understood as a process “in which previously colonised actors seek to simultaneously transform the domestic and international context they are navigating”. [8] Historically, this sheds new light on Afro-diasporic and African actors at the Pan-African Congress; not only can they be seen as actors who resisted but also as worldmakers. Decolonisation was thus, according to Getachew, a reordering of the international order and a form of worldmaking. [9]

The series of Pan-African Congresses worked on shaping new understandings of citizenship and national self-determination which contributed to the independence of African states and introduced strategies to overcome international hierarches. [10] Worldmaking also happened in other historical forums in which Afro-diasporic actors participated, including the Universal Races Congress in 1911 in London. By rejecting biological race theories, Pan-Africanist actors moved from a duties-based understanding of citizenship towards a more modern rights-based understanding. In doing so, they influenced domestic and international norms and defined citizenship through transnational networks and forums. [11] This shows how the African and Afro-diasporic anticolonial project has contributed to a liberal reordering of the world. [12] In other words, African and Afro-diasporic agency shaped the liberal script by introducing modern notions of citizenship and national self-determination.

This brief historical journey illustrates pointedly how Afro-diasporic actors became forces of resistance and worldmaking through transnational forums, resisting but also re-shaping the international liberal script. But where might we find those sparks of resistance and worldmaking today? I would argue in a lot of spaces, as there are tons of forums and exchanges on domestic and transnational issues in which people of African descent are participating. The Afro-diaspora calendar 2022 (see also download below) shows a snapshot of myriad meetings (co-)organised by the African diaspora or events in which diaspora organisations participated with a transnational focus.

Taking the Diaspora Summit in Germany organised in March 2022 as an example, it becomes clear that forms of resistance and worldmaking can still be found today. The Diaspora Summit was organised by a heterogenous group of diaspora organisations, including African diasporic organisations. By writing a position paper, inviting German government representatives to panel discussions and organising the first Diaspora Summit in Germany, the actors clearly aimed to influence domestic and international policy making. They actively demanded to be included in strategic policy making processes and openly questioned notions of institutionalisation. All this can be read as aspects of worldmaking. At the same time, they criticised and resisted bureaucratic funding structure and political agenda-setting, creating instances of resistance. Finally, they also advocated for the liberal script by describing themselves as agents of democracy (Position paper link). This hints to the fact that the relationship between Afro-diasporic agency and liberalism is fluid and context-specific. While they resist liberal notions in some circumstances, they re-shape or even advocate for liberal values in other instances according to the historical context but also to the version of the liberal script that they are encountering.

To conclude, I want to send out a reminder that resistance and worldmaking can be bold and public, but might also be quiet and hardly visible. Sometimes, we might want to look for the ember in the ashes.  

 

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[1] Madhok, Sumi/ Phillips, Anne/ Wilson, Kalpana 2013: Introduction, in: Madhok, Sumi/ Phillips, Anne/ Wilson, Kalpana (ed.): Gender, Agency, and Coercion, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-13.

[2] Madhok, Sumi/ Phillips, Anne/ Wilson, Kalpana 2013: Introduction, in: Madhok, Sumi/ Phillips, Anne/ Wilson, Kalpana (ed.): Gender, Agency, and Coercion, London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1-13.

[3] Lilja, Mona/ Baaz, Mikael/ Schulz, Michael/ Vinthagen, Stellan 2017: How resistance encourages resistance. Theorizing the nexus between power, ‘Organised Resistance’ and ‘Everyday Resistance’, Journal of Political Power 10(1), 40-54.

[4] Poe, Daryl Zizwe 2003: Kwame Nkrumah’s Contribution to Pan-African Agency. An Afrocentric Analysis, Florence: Routledge, 87.

[5] Dieng, Omar 2022: Afro-European Pan-Africanism. A Twenty-First Century Black Europeans’ Mobilizations, Journal of African American Studies, 26, 339–354.

[6] Mehta, Uday Singh 1999: Liberalism and Empire. A Study in Nineteenth-Century Liberal Thought, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Losurdo, Domenico 2014: Liberalism. A Counter-History, London: Verso Books.

[7] Schultermandl, Silvia/ Aresin, Jana/ Simić, Dijana/ Whybrew, Si Sophie Pages 2022: Introduction. Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality, in: Schultermandl, Silvia/ Aresin, Jana/ Whybrew, Si Sophie Pages/ Simić, Dijana (ed.) Affective Worldmaking. Narrative Counterpublics of Gender and Sexuality, Bielefeld: transcript, 14.

[8] Berger, Tobias 2022: Worldmaking from the margins: interactions between domestic and international ordering in mid-20^th-century India, European Journal of International Relations 28(4), 834-858.

[9] Getachew, Adom 2019: Worldmaking after Empire. The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 3.

[10] Getachew, Adom 2019: Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 23.

Dieng, Omar 2022: Afro-European Pan-Africanism. A Twenty-First Century Black Europeans’ Mobilizations, Journal of African American Studies, 26, 339–354.

Dunstan, Sarah Claire 2016: Conflicts of Interest. The 1919 Pan-African Congress and the Wilsonian Moment, Callaloo 39(1), 133-150.

[11] Smith, Thomas E. 2018: Emancipation without Equality. Pan-African Activism and the Global Color Line, Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 145-147.

[12] Getachew, Adom 2019: Worldmaking after Empire. The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination, Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2.

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Susan Bergner is a doctoral researcher at the Berlin Graduate School for Transnational Studies at SCRIPTS within the Research Unit ‘Orders’. Her dissertation is about African diasporic actors in Germany and their role as domestic and international political agents. Before joining SCRIPTS she worked at the German Institute for International and Security Affairs.

Twitter: @bergner_susan