Intellectuals and activists in motion: the construction of the black transnationalism in the Twentieth Century

• Grant number: 16/24075-8
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 23, 2017
• End date: September 22, 2017
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Other specific Sociologies
• Principal Investigator: Valter Roberto Silvério
• Grantee: Valter Roberto Silvério
• Host Investigator: Caroline Knowles
• Host Institution: Centro de Educação e Ciências Humanas (CECH). Universidade Federal de São Carlos (UFSCAR). São Carlos , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Goldsmiths, University of London, England

Abstract

Among the research goals, the mainly one is to analyze how the idea of diaspora, applied to the black experience in the New World, is reframing the meaning of being black, at least since the end of World War II in 1945, when it is matured in Paris the idea of an "African Presence", affirmed in the Pan-African Congress in Manchester. The sense of a large meeting of black men from all parts of the world was not new at all.However, what we have called African Diaspora in the middle of the 1960s, it takes part of a long historical process of an identity construction outside the continent. My argument is that the identification in the 20th century with the African continent produced the emergence of a kind of associativism forged in the experience of exclusion and physical and symbolic rejection of blacks, as well as in the positive appreciation of the African origin.The interest in Africa, the racial consciousness and the African consciousness (or the African origin) are interlaced aspects reported in the experiences, among others, from African descendant intellectuals and activists in the diaspora; therefore, it is a documental research in which the emphasis will be on some records of this experience since the turn of the 20th century; for instance: the foundation of The African Association in London, in 1987; the Pan-African Conference of 1900 in London; the Pan-African Congresses, specially the 5th hosted in Manchester, England, in 1945; the meetings of black writers and artists in 1956 (Paris) and 1959 (Roma) are important moments for expressing contexts of social changes.