Toward a Black Pacific

In 1989, the Colombian anthropologist Nina S. de Friedemann was the first scholar to utilize the term “Black Pacific” when she published Criele Criele Son, Del Pacífico Negro: Arte, Religión, y Cultura en el Litoral Pacífico (Criele Criele Son, of the Black Pacific: Art, Religion, and Culture in the Pacific Littoral). Over the past several decades, scholars across various disciplines have employed the neologism of the “Black Pacific” whilst examining vastly distinct histories and cultures of African-descended peoples in the Pacific World, from Afro-Peruvian coastal musical formations to anti-colonial bonds of solidarity between activists in the African Diaspora and Oceania. Yet, the question remains, where and what exactly is the “Black Pacific”? And what is its relationship to Paul Gilroy’s formulation of the “Black Atlantic”?

This paper provides the first historiographical analysis of scholarship on the “Black Pacific” and identifies three areas of conceptual foci—cultural, transnational networks, and critical empire studies—within this richly diverse literature. Placed in conversation with Gilroy’s “Black Atlantic,” this paper claims that the “Black Pacific” offers an alternative paradigm of African disaporic study that dovetails and departs from Atlantic world-centered historical explanations and narratives. Finally, the paper turns to the “Black Pacific” of Latin America, focusing especially on the formation of historically African descended communities along the Pacific Coast of South America. This paper argues that the historical geographical, economic, and political structures of the “Black Pacific” of Latin America invites scholars to reimagine the ties and divides between Black Atlantic and Pacific World histories.