Paper short abstract:

We show how race, gender, class and ecocide are so inextricably intertwined in the Afro-Atlantic that any one could not exist without the others, thus upending Western anti-racist, feminist, Marxist and ecologist discourses and shedding light on how hegemony operates and is subverted in real lives.

Paper long abstract:

Across the Afro-Atlantic, novel understandings of hybridity and rhizomatic connection are helping us to acknowledge the multiplex dimensions of intersectionality. As a result, the pluri-genetic and multi-directional trajectories of ethnocentrism/racism and other systems of discursive and coercive domination are becoming better understood. This has allowed us, for example, to abandon the futile quest to determine a singular fundamental, unifying dynamic to which can be traced all of the different systems of domination that are ruining our lives, in favor of a more intersectional recognition that ethnocentrism, patriarchy, economic plunder and anthropocentrism are inextricably and irretrievably intertwined and mutually conditioned and co-dependent. The colonial history of the Afro-Atlantic provides ample evidence that any one of these systems could not exist without all of the others, and the intensification of any one of them involves a concomitant intensification of all of the others. While such an approach seriously questions and complicates traditional Western anti-racist, feminist, Marxist and ecologist discourses, it is already proving its merit in achieving a more nuanced grasp of how profoundly manipulative (but also vulnerably contradictory) hegemonies have operated in real lives, and how such hegemonies have been unsettled and subverted in countless ways by real people in the Afro-Atlantic. Because these subversive acts are situated within rhizomatic networks where a multitude of dynamics of identification, counter-identification and dis-identification are constantly reconfiguring themselves, it is becoming increasingly clear that some of the most promising frameworks are those that allow for simultaneously trans-raced, trans-genedered, trans-classed and trans-speciated performances.