This is an edited version of an interview undertaken by Rita Gayle in conversation with Jovan Scott Lewis, Head of Geography, UC Berkeley. This transcript text and its translations are amended versions of the audio mp3 recording posted on this website.
Rita Gayle
In your ongoing consideration of repair and reparations, I was thinking of the similarities and differences in the context and aspirations of reparations between the Black diaspora locations. For example, the differences and similarities between Jamaica, Britain and the United States. My question to you is, how has your thinking shifted as a result of your own lived experiences of a Black diasporic? You know, the nations, regions and communities you have inhabited?
Jovan Lewis
Sure. Yeah, that’s a really great question. What we’re seeing to my mind, it’s a troubling development is this kind of cordoning off of reparative attempts, policies, organisation, within the kind of confines of a nationalist framing. What you have is effectively a Diasporic operation. What you have is an ability to think about racialization as it moves through context. As it moves through these contexts across time. And as a diasporic subject whose kind of lived in all of these places you’ve mentioned. I’ve lived in Jamaica, lived in the UK and I’ve lived in the United States. The truth is that there is a consistency to the lived experience of blackness irrespective of your location. There are modifications. There are, of course differences. But what we see is that there is a fundamental quality to blackness that does, in fact, trace across these various contexts. When we’re thinking about the question of reparations or repair if we’re thinking that reparations for African enslavement and colonisation has to be responsive to these initial injuries. Well, we see that the injuries themselves were mobile. We see, for example, Africans enslaved in Virginia in 1619, were effectively no different than Africans enslaved in Jamaica, in 1619. Both geographies were British colonies. However, in the United States here, especially with the 1619 Project from The New York Times a couple of years ago. There’s a different kind of geographic orientation around what the 1619 Colony of Virginia meant. It’s kind of wrong. in fact, historically, enslaved Africans were broken-in in the Caribbean islands before being transported to the United States or what we would come to know as the United States. We know that Caribbean enslaved Africans were then exported to Canada. We understand that there is fluidity to the injury. Reparations have to also be equally fluid. We can’t easily and truly find these seemingly arbitrary ways to create silos of injury, and therefore, silos of repair, that work basically, on some kind of nationalist framework that we know when we’re thinking about the global economy of which slavery was it mean instigator, that there was no such thing as a nationalist limitation. So today in 2021, we’re not necessarily thinking about slavery, but we are thinking about the injury that is lived within, that is rooted in the kind of structural position and condition of blackness as rooted in that moment and in the process obviously.
Rita Gayle
Thank you. I agree and I guess these are the some of the conversations that we’re really dealing with, but trying to do it in a very practical way by having the different people in the space, as opposed to trying to manufacture those as that’s the easiest thing to do. Although it’s hard to do in practice! I will say that. Congratulations on your appointment to the California State Task Force to Study Reparations for African Americans, which was announced earlier this year. If I could ask, what will you be doing in your role?
Jovan Lewis
Sure. What we’ll be doing is deciding what reparations for African Americans in California are. It’s a pretty amazing opportunity in that it will, in many ways set a precedent for what reparations discourses and policies look like within the foremost spheres of government. The idea is that, in thinking about what happens in California, we’re able to kind of think about what might happen federally here in the United States. And then it will join, hopefully, other ongoing movements globally that are already underway, thinking about the CARICOM Reparations Commission. There are folks who are doing things already with what we might consider kinds of state support. The C.R.C. coming out of CARICOM is one of those examples.
Rita Gayle
Are you in liaison with them, with CARICOM at all?
Jovan Lewis
No, not yet. What’s interesting about what’s happening here in California is the challenge that goes back to exactly what I was saying in my first answer. Which is that there is a very concrete, an increasingly concrete sense of who we’re talking about. There is a sense of what blackness or a question of what blackness means within the context of California history. Who qualifies? Who does not qualify?
Rita Gayle
And who does qualify at this time, if I may ask?
Jovan Lewis
So, if you read the bill. It’s the study for reparations for African Americans with special consideration for American descendants of slavery. What we have here in the US-
Rita Gayle
– So this is specifically talking about the ‘Black Americans’ as I would define them?
Jovan Lewis
Right. So I don’t qualify.
Rita Gayle
Right. That’s what I wanted to know.
Jovan Lewis
Yes, I don’t qualify. My son doesn’t qualify. The idea is that you have here in California, what is called a kind of A.D.O.S. movement; American descendants of slavery, and sometimes it’s known as Americans descended of chattel slavery. And the argument is that blackness must be disaggregated. There is no function of value in thinking about blackness in the United States as a collective category that includes Black immigrants. Basically, there’s actually a bill being proposed right now in California, Assembly Bill 105, which is called the Upward Mobility Bill, which is asking that the California census (to) actually do this aggregative work by specifying within the category of blackness; national origin, etc., similar to what they do here with Asian Americans. Whether you are a Pacific Islander, that kind of thing. In some ways, it’s not controversial but in other ways it is quite remarkable that there is a proposed bill to really rethink the qualification of blackness in this way. When we’re talking about reparations here in California, we are specifically thinking of African Americans who have ancestors who were enslaved. Africans enslaved in the United States. The question is, how do we accommodate that from within the framework of the state of California? There are a lot of fascinating and really complicated considerations that we have to think through. Are we thinking about slavery? What is the relationship that the state of California had to the practice and policy and economies of slavery? We’re thinking about a multiplicity of injuries, not just slavery but of course, the big one is the general regime of Jim Crow, The Red-Lining, Blockbusting (and) the various forms of discrimination that African Americans in fact, did experience in the state of California. Urban renewal, the demolition of neighbourhoods to develop highways and that kind of thing. What we have is really complicated. This complicated mixture of injuries which, again, is what we should be doing. Thinking about the multiplicity. Thinking about the kind of mobility of the injuries that require repair.
Rita Gayle
Are you seeing it more as a starting point for the conversation, right? It’s like, get the conversation going?
Jovan Lewis
I see it as a starting point but something even greater than that. Which is that African Americans have attempted at various moments throughout the history since slavery, emancipation, reconstruction and I talk about this a little bit in my next book. There was a fleeting moment in which African Americans pursued what we might consider the experience and existence and condition of sovereignty. There was a moment in this country’s history, United States history, where African Americans wanted to have a state or several states of their own. We should think of that as being not dissimilar to what happened as a result of the various independence movements throughout the Caribbean. We can think about Haiti. We can think about Jamaica. We can think about some of these Caribbean nations as Black nations who are effectively sovereign. We will put to the side for the moment, all of the complications of we understand that the rules of the game really don’t change. Nevertheless, we can see that there is at least a discourse of sovereignty that is legitimate in countries like Haiti and Jamaica. Perhaps I’m being just purely optimistic but I see with this discourse around disaggregating blackness. These African Americans descended of slavery. Let’s just call them that just to make sure that we know who/what I’m talking about are effectively trying to take ownership of an American identity which I believe is appropriate. You are born in this place. You have multiple generations of being in this state, this place, this geography. You should have something greater than just the accommodation of some ostensible citizenship. My hope, and again this is not where the conversation is I think with these groups, these various ADOS groups or ADOS affiliated groups. But my projection is that in the long term this could, in fact, be the starting point for what we might consider as being a resurgence of an African American project of sovereignty building. And I’m hoping that’s what it is. Because if we have what we can consider at least a sovereign formation or ideation of what it means to be African American. Meaning not simply a part of the general Americanist project but being distinct from it then you actually have what you can think of as a commensurable political realities and commensurable political grammars between the United States and a place like Jamaica. It actually creates a kind of relational reality that we can begin to see each other within the Diaspora on these on these same terms. That’s very different say from Afro-Caribbeans in the UK.
Rita Gayle
I would say actually, we’re probably at that, I think, the turning point, I would say where that conversation is now starting to happen. I’m actually writing something at the moment, which kind of suggests that. We’re getting into the kind of third, fourth and fifth generation of Black Britons, descendants of that post war, World War Two migration. For them, it would be the grandparents or great grandparents who migrated from the region of the Caribbean and they don’t have a relationship to the Caribbean. It’s a place on a map. And so ostensibly, all they know is Britain. This experience of the city that they live in or the region of the country they live in. I guess we’re working through that now. It’s slightly different for me because my parents are from Jamaica but even I’m having that conversation because I’m not going to return I think to Jamaica but I want to maintain a relationship with it. That’s really important. So we’ll see. I feel like it’s unravelling right now as we speak.
Jovan Lewis
And something about say the UK is that there are these Caribbean retentions. That in many ways create a different kind of relationality but one that is still very much rooted in the Caribbean. When I first moved to London, I was surprised by the fact that, say Jamaican slang was part of everyday discourse that was actually a multicultural discourse. And so, that’s something to kind of hold on to and one doesn’t necessarily have to have, say, a direct geographic relationship with Jamaica to kind of understand what Jamaica or any of the Caribbean nations as we’re just thinking about the Caribbean for the moment. We can have this conversation thinking about, like West Africa and East Africa communities in the UK, and in London, specifically. But still, there’s something there. Whereas for the African American population, if you’re asking a third or fourth generation British Caribbean to have an attachment to Jamaica, asking an African American who is centuries removed from Africa to have some kind of relationship that Africa is even more improbable, right? And so, without having that alternative reference, what African Americans need to develop is a sovereign sense of self and of community within the context of the geography of the United States. I hope this is what is happening with this kind of ADOS movement here in the United States, especially coming out of California.
Rita Gayle
Geography as a discipline has a troubling past and present with regards to the lived experiences of Black people globally. What are your aspirations for scholars and the academy at this time?
Jovan Lewis
The future of the discipline and geography while it has this very troubling past as does all Western science, there is still a radical streak within the discipline. And it is simply for us to continue to marshal the energy, the tradition of radicalism within the discipline, to continue to push forward. Which is why I think you all doing the kind of global Black geographies thing are now at the vanguard of that work. American Black geographies, if we’re going to call it that to kind of counter position and maybe you should actually say what you’re doing. I don’t want to make too many presumptions. But my reading of what you’re doing is somewhat of a critique of what perhaps has been happening in a discourse around Black geographies over the past few years.
Rita Gayle
I agree. Yeah, it has been that. I think often, the American Academy, I call it the Anglo-American Academy because the British, the Black Britons are implicated in this. I wouldn’t want it to be seen that it we’re just talking about US or the North American Academy because I think for me It includes the UK, and I guess the privileging of those regions; North America. Well, the US, Canada, Britain, and the English language. The combination of those things keeps certain voices out of the loop. If they don’t speak English, don’t have a good translator, or are not located or have access to those three regions then that their voices are just not there. What we’re trying to do is help prioritise or certainly put in place a space for those voices that are not currently there to hear and just by having their voices, it changes the conversation.
Jovan Lewis
And in their voices, you get your frameworks. So, incorporation and representation are the kind of double-edged sword, if you will, of some of this work politically because you can have voices show up but their frameworks don’t get incorporated. And this goes back to the kind of like Caribbean foundations of Black studies and Black geographies where you are kind of happy to have a Caribbean thinker show up but their lived experiences are disqualified or somehow the lived experience, or their theories are extracted from the lived experience, and then imported into some other kind of lived experience. And while perhaps very valid, going back to the earlier discussion we had about the kind of diasporic sensibility of blackness and its operation. You’re leaving behind the lived experience and the actual people, and the histories that formed those theories. It’s a delicate balance. It’s one that I think is made even more complicated by what we can see as being the increasing trendiness, the political desire, incentives even to have Black people show up in certain places. And if you’re there and you’re not immediately working to actually change the terms of engagement, then what you see is that it’s a fleeting presence. It is not a long standing and influencing presence. It is simply an accommodation. Black folk have been accommodated. We’ve been readily accommodated over the centuries. I don’t want to do Black geographies in my department. I just want a department. I don’t want to be accommodated. I don’t want to have a lab. I don’t want to have a thematic stream. I just wanted a department. And that is what sovereignty as a kind of intellectual project, meaning not as an intellectual project of sovereign ideation but (what) sovereignty as a project in the academy looks like.