Building Black Diaspora Networks and Meshworks for Knowledge, Justice, Peace, and Human Rights

If intellectuals, especially those based within academic settings, attempt to align their scholarship with the dismantling of racism in its multiple modalities and entanglements with other inequalities, then it is imperative that they collaborate in building alliances. Grassroots activists, practitioners within nongovernmental organizations, philanthropists, and other parties with varying stakes in racial justice can potentially work together in coalitions of knowledge and mobilization promoting human rights and patterns of development based on principles of economic and environmental justice. Scholarship for transformations of this sort cannot be limited to conversations in which academics talk mainly to themselves, invoking the most recent theoretical trends in endogamous and, largely, elitist terms. Appropriating a language of power and change when largely disengaged from the high-stakes, life-and-death struggles around the world does nothing to bring about substantive change. The particular struggles with which this chapter as well as the others in this book are most immediately concerned are those among people of African descent in Latin America and the Caribbean. The cultural and political-economic geography of this part of the Americas is a dynamic zone of historicity, pluriculturality, power, and intellectual engagement that informs our thinking about both the usefulness and the limitations of "Diaspora" and "Black Atlantic" (Gilroy 1993) as conceptual and intercommunity organizing tools.