Jennifer Goett

Black Autonomy

Race, Gender, and Afro-Nicaraguan Activism

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

Jennifer Goett is Associate Professor of Comparative Cultures and Politics at James Madison College, Michigan State University.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Seitenzahl: 240
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. November 2016
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 223mm x 155mm x 20mm
• Gewicht: 339g
• ISBN-13: 9781503600546
• ISBN-10: 1503600548
• Artikelnr.: 45008544

Autorenporträt

Jennifer Goett is Associate Professor of Comparative Cultures and Politics at James Madison College, Michigan State University.

Inhaltsangabe

Contents and Abstracts
Introduction
chapter abstract
This chapter provides an introduction to Monkey Point, including a
discussion of the feminist activist research methodologies used. It
contextualizes community activism within debates about ethnic autonomy
regimes in Latin America and develops new theoretical insights on the
relationship between security and capitalist intensification in postwar
Nicaragua. Specifically, the chapter locates the emergence of a politics of
black autonomy within wider processes of postwar governance. It analyzes
the transition from the neoliberal right to the socialist left in 2007,
arguing that there has been a shift in political discourse, but clear
continuities in capitalist development and security policy. The chapter
ends with an overview of the book, which is broadly chronological,
beginning with women's mobilization in the late 1990s and ending with
resistance to military occupation in the early 2010s.
1Women's Origin Stories
chapter abstract
This chapter examines the community's past via the oral histories of three
women elders who led the first wave of land rights activism in the late
1990s. It shows how diasporic subjectivities rooted in social memories of
slavery, migration, and race, class, and gender oppression drive community
activism for autonomous rights.Accounts of racialized domestic servitude
and labor run throughout the stories, providing a narrative thread that
links six generations of community women. Each woman tells these histories
in ways that are both politically strategic and pedagogic in the present.
For instance, they represent female ancestors as forceful political agents
and, in doing so, shore up their own leadership positions, which are often
contested by community men.They make race, class, and gender subordination
visible as past sites of struggle, and thus urge younger generations to
embrace these expressions of diasporic historical consciousness as grounds
for contemporary autonomous rights.
2"Bad Boys" and Direct Resistance
chapter abstract
This chapter focuses on young men's cultural practices and their armed
resistance to the speculation of community lands by outside venture
capitalists in the early 2000s. Many of the men involved in these acts of
direct resistance are known as "bad boys," a countercultural identity that
the men embrace and reproduce in their oppositional politics, personal
style, and diasporic investments in popular culture. For these men, Monkey
Point is an autonomous rural space where they can go to recover from drug
abuse and escape the degradation of being poor and heavily policed in
Bluefields. They are perhaps unlikely protagonists in the making of a
social movement, but their direct resistance to land speculation signaled a
deepening radicalism in community politics and an emergent political
strategy for dealing with some of the worst abuses of the postwar state.
3Life on the Edge of the Global Economy
chapter abstract
This chapter examines women's sociality as an autonomous sphere of
self-valorization that is resistant to capitalist and patriarchal social
relations and values. For women, livelihood politics are enmeshed in dense
networks of gendered sociality and intimacy, where reciprocity and shared
affective labor between women are central to survival under conditions of
capitalist intensification. Women's sociality makes it possible to live
independently of men and undermines a racial and gender division of labor
that promotes wageless Creole women's subordination to male wage earners.
The chapter argues that women's sociality is not a mere adaption to
oppressive systems because it produces pleasure, self-respect, and
solidarity and thus has autonomous social logics. As an affirmative
practice rooted in working class Creole culture, it drives women's activism
and their demands for collective rights.
4From Cold Wars to Drug Wars
chapter abstract
This chapter tracks shifting security paradigms by drawing on narratives
from community men who fought as contra during the 1980s and are now the
targets of counternarcotics policing. Their accounts give intimate insight
into how drug war violence and policing are historical outgrowths of cold
war conflict and US intervention in Central America. Wartime stories show
that coercion and physical violence were unavoidable for most Monkey Point
men, as their age, gender, race, and class overdetermined their roles as
Sandinista soldiers, contra fighters, draft evaders, deserters, and
refugees. But rather than bringing peace and security, refuge in Costa Rica
and repatriation to Nicaragua in the late 1980s and early 1990s signaled
the demise of one securitized masculine subject (enemy combatant) and the
rise of another (drug trafficker), producing new forms of securitized
social control.
5Sexual Violence and Autonomous Politics
chapter abstract
This chapter shows how ordinary life in Monkey Point was saturated and
interrupted by military occupation and state sexual violence in the late
2000s. Drawing on racialized and sexualized fantasy, the occupation
targeted local women and girls as objects of sexual domination, cast local
men as masculine subordinates and racialized security threats, and promoted
heteropatriarchal forms of mestizo territorial sovereignty. The soldier's
abuse of girls initially followed preexisting patterns of gendered and
sexual violence in the community before erupting into exceptional violence
that provoked a public politics of opposition to the state. Diverse
advocates for the girls struggled to fully decipher and politicize the
racial, gendered, and sexual articulation of violence under military
occupation, and state institutional power promoted impunity for mestizo
state actors.
Epilogue
chapter abstract
The epilogue reflects on the impact of more than a decade of community
mobilization. It assesses the political opportunities and potential
entrapments that recognition offers as community people continue to
confront violence and systemic inequality in their territory. It further
points to a reservoir of political knowledge and agency embedded in
vernacular practice, gendered subjectivity, and black diasporic
identification that challenges oppressive systems and suggests that
territorial recognition can serve as a strategic asset that emboldens and
radicalizes black autonomy and as a governance strategy that may facilitate
the expansion of state and capitalist power. The tension between these two
outcomes is likely to shape the contours of future struggle in the region.