Since the publication of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double-Consciousness in 1993, voluminous historical works have traced the making of complex social, cultural, and politically hybrid African Diasporic worlds in what has come to be known as the “Black Atlantic.” But how we begin to understand other African diasporic and Black histories that go beyond the geographic and paradigmatic shores of the “Black Atlantic”? This panel turns to the “Black Pacific,” a historical and theoretical framework that centers the distinctive experiences and histories of peoples of African descent in the vast Pacific World, home to the earth’s largest and deepest ocean.

This transnational panel features papers that span multiple geographical spaces and historical timeframes in the Black Pacific. The first paper “From Slavery to Empire: Colonization to the Black Pacific during America’s Long Reconstruction” by Guy Emerson Mount offers a global history of American Reconstruction by exploring the post-emancipation lives of African American migrants in Hawai’i and the Philippines. Based on an eclectic range of quotidian sources across America’s Pacific Empire, such as Hawaiian plantation ledgers and Afro-Caribbean restaurant menus in Manila, Mount’s paper disrupts traditional American historiographies of slavery, emancipation, and empire. The second paper “Blinded by Bandung?: Illumining West Papua, Senegal, and the Black Pacific” by Quito Swan investigates the complicated racial and political struggles against Indonesian imperialism by West Papuan activists, who self-identified as Melanesian “Negroids of the Pacific” in the 1960s. Utilizing indigenous magazines, newspapers, and other archival materials on Melanesia, Swan’s paper delineates the limits of African Diaspora frameworks calibrated to the Black Atlantic. Finally, the last paper “Toward a Black Pacific” by Yesenia Barragan provides a historiographical and theoretical accounting of the “Black Pacific” paradigm over the past two decades. Focusing especially on the shared histories of the Black Atlantic and Afro-Pacific Latin America, Barragan’s paper offers new intellectual and comparative points of entry for future scholarship on the Black Pacific in the Americas.

The commentator and chair are both award-winning historians of race and slavery in the Americas and Pacific World. The commentator, Gerald Horne, is the author of thirty books, including The White Pacific: U.S. Imperialism and Black Slavery in the South Seas After the Civil War (2006), while the chair, Tatiana Sejias, is the author of Asian Slaves in Colonial Mexico: From Chinos to Indians. We expect that historians and scholars of race, slavery, emancipation, empire, and imperialism in the Black Atlantic and Pacific Worlds, in addition to scholars of the African Diaspora, will be especially interested in this panel.