Narratives of resistance and decolonial futures in the politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement

Abstract

In this paper, I examine the spatial politics of the Bermudian Black Power movement and its connections to Black Power political formations in the wider Caribbean and North America. This spatial politics is examined in detail through an engagement with the First Regional International Black Power Conference (BPC) held in Bermuda on 10–13 July 1969 and the subsequent Black Power political activity on the island that the conference inspired. Through this engagement it is shown how the island of Bermuda and its black population were constitutive of transnational circulations of radical Black Power, and aligned thinkers and activists. This paper develops a reading of a politics of Black Power on the island as challenging hegemonic geographies and political spatialities of white supremacy through the envisioning of alternative, decolonial futures and a resultant pre-figurative political praxis. Such a reading is built on the theory of West Indian scholars David Scott and Brian Meeks and the spatial ontology of Doreen Massey. D. Scott and Meeks have been key contributors to Caribbean critical thought for many decades, with D. Scott the long-time editor of the Caribbean studies journal Small Axe, and both have been concerned with post and de-colonial politics in the region and the role of temporality and historiography in conceptualisations of the Modern Caribbean and Jamaica in particular. This paper offers an exploration of a decolonial spatial politics and political praxis, through the theory of post-colonial Caribbean intellectuals, that foregrounds the agentive and insurgent capacity of Black Power as a political movement in the imagining and pre-figuration of emancipatory futures beyond hegemonic geographies of white supremacy, (neo)colonialism, and (neo)imperialism.