Black Archaeologies Beyond Western Epistemologies, An Impossible Goal?

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Global Black Archaeologies: Mobilizing Critical, Anti-Racist, De/Anti-Colonial, and Black Feminist Archaeologies in Uncertain Times", at the 2023 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Through their increasing occupation of a very much still hegemonically white and western field of knowledge, Black and Indigenous archaeologists have raised concerns about the inherent complicities of the discipline in structural colonial and racist oppressions. Furthermore, initiatives centering Global Black thinkers as well as critical, anti-racist, and decolonial scholarship are increasingly present in archaeological work they conduct. This paper intends to provide a contribution to existing discussions led by Black archaeologists based on Saidiya Hartman’s notion of redress as an impossible yet necessary goal. How can we conceptualize redress in terms of its ontological and epistemological dimensions within a world overwhelmingly defined by the colonial order? The reflections proposed are rooted in African Diasporic world perceptions from the Global South, raising different challenges and offering other perspectives for Black Archaeologies.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Pre-Recorded Video Presentation Global Black Archaeologies: Mobilizing Critical, Anti-Racist, De/Anti-Colonial, and Black Feminist Archaeologies in Uncertain Times   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2023

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow