AHA Session 283
Sunday, January 5, 2025: 3:30 PM-5:00 PM
Clinton Room (New York Hilton, Second Floor)
Chair:
Glenn Anthony Chambers, Michigan State University
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel explores the diversity of Black and Latino experiences in New England and adopts an interdisciplinary and transnational framework that complicates our understanding of race, ethnic belonging, and community formation in the 20th century US. The projects offer new spatial and urban histories using models and methodologies drawn from African American and Caribbean historiographies and integrate GIS, oral histories, and social network analysis to make these communities’ experiences more visible, more audible. The panel reconsiders and disrupts the conventional chronologies, narratives, and geographies that have informed disparate historiographies that treat these migrations as discrete movements in African American, Puerto Rican, West Indian, and American history. The panel, therefore, engages the histories of diasporic blackness, racial and ethnic identities, belonging and integration in US migration studies.The narration of these experiences through oral histories and in collaboration with communities and their archives offers a corrective to homogenizing approaches that acknowledge archival silence, but do little to address archival absence. These three projects are committed to Black and Latino intellectual production in Hartford and New Bedford while maintaining a critical view of our own positionalities and blindspots as academics. Through this research, the whaling and tobacco industries as handmaidens of racial capitalism, come into view as do fractious intraracial and intraethnic faultlines freighted in histories of imperialism and global circuits of capital and labor. Often relegated to marginal roles, these communities, nevertheless, exerted agency over their lives by leveraging their cultural heritage as part of their strategies to secure employment, housing, family unification, political representation, and autonomous social and business spaces. Our audiences include scholars interested in the intersections of race, ethnicity, urbanization, and immigration.
See more of: AHA Sessions