Responding to Racial Militarism: A Study of Black Caribbean Women's Transnational Organising

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The geographic and symbolic separation between the Dominican Republic and Haiti has beenproduced through relations of militarism and occupation. Under brutal US occupation from 1915-1933, discourses of Haiti were constructed around racialised, feminising tropes of Afro-religion and the nation's Black majority (Renda, 2001). Looking to the 2013 denationalisation of 300,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and increased military procurement directed at the border, thesepolicies emerge from an ongoing history of anti-Haitian racial violence. My project responds simultaneously to the lack of attention to the Hispanic Caribbean in Black feminist approaches to Security Studies and International Relations (IR), and the overwhelming focus on black masculinist resistance to US colonial projects. Organising against the US occupation in Haiti was inspired by the significance of the Haitian struggle in the North American Blackinternationalist consciousness (Dalleo, 2016). In this context the Haitian revolution has been promoted as a model for Black guerrilla masculinities and demonstration of the redemptive potential of armed struggle (West & Martin, 2009).In order to shift this unerring focus on masculinist forms of Black internationalism organised around heroic male leadership, it is important to bring attention to the work of Black women in producing counterhegemonic discourses of US occupation. In contrast to dominant masculinist accounts, Black women's transnational organising has produced alternative narratives surrounding the occupation of Haiti. My project explores the ongoing role of Black feminist organising in crafting critical narratives of US occupation of Haiti and its afterlives. This draws on the work of Erica Edwards (2021) in chronicling Black women in the US have exposed the long history in which Blackness domestically and internationally has been used to rationalise violent security regimes, and thus Black literatures have invented new 'grammars 'of Blackness to contest this. My proposed research will look at marginalised modes through which Black women have sought to contest anti-Black bordering regimes by emphasising transnational subjectivities and diaspora. As such, my project draws from feminist epistemologies of Black liberation in organisations such as the Universal NegroImprovement Association (UNIA) in their critiques of US imperialism.