Global
Blackness

Global Blackness is a transnational research platform, nurturing multimodal scholarship driven by Black, African, anti-/decolonial feminist and queer agendas of emancipation. We use the term “global Blackness” to signal our investment in exploring the multiplicity of Black experience, intellectual traditions, and perspectives as well as modes of Black theory. We ask: What are the geographies, practices, and theories of Blackness with which we work? How is Blackness instantiated in different spacetimes?

“JIAS’s Global Blackness project brings together scholars, activists, artists and everyday folks who seek to meditate on Blackness as a global category of identification and local iterations across different times and geopolitical locations.” - Prof Victoria J. Collis-Buthelezi

Driven by JIAS Director Prof Collis-Buthelezi and a cohort of Global Blackness Research Associates and Visiting Professors, the Global Blackness platform offers a unique intellectual space for experimental scholarship on Black intellectual, creative, spiritual, and everyday practices of refusal and repair. This is otherwise work, (re)thinking the world through a historical/futural imagination responsive to the multiple temporalities, geographies, and specificities of Black and other discursively minoritised experiences, and the productive entanglements of Black radical, Black feminist, anti-/decolonial, indigenous and queer forms of knowledge production.

In addition to research fellowships and residencies, the platform supports a dynamic programme of reading groups, workshops, seminars, exhibitions, and an annual Global Blackness Summer School.

As a key research stream at JIAS, Global Blackness reflects our commitment to thinking Blackness globally, in tandem with other forms of racialisation and difference. Although transnational in reach, the platform is grounded in a dynamic conception of the local, in which the particular histories and encounters that have informed Black political thought and praxis in South Africa are understood in relation to the intimacies, adjacencies and intersections of Pan-African and Black diasporic emancipatory struggles. We recognise that South Africa’s particular conditions of continued violence have global resonance, entangled as they are in other histories, experiences, and present conditions of racialised and gendered oppressive norms and class inequities.

As an ongoing project, Global Blackness presents a generative platform for speculative thinking (and doing), framed by African and Black diasporic realities, struggles and complexities; and oriented towards reparative justice, radical intimacy, decolonisation, and Black feminist love. 

Recent highlights with David Scott!

 
 
 

Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi
JIAS Director

Global Blackness - our journey to JIAS

Global Blackness was established as a multimodal, transnational research platform in 2021 by Prof Victoria Collis-Buthelezi, then Director of the Centre for the Study of Race, Gender & Class (RGC), University of Johannesburg. Over four years, the project nurtured a growing local and diasporic community, facilitating dialogue, exchange and creative research through a dynamic programme of reading groups, seminars, workshops, listening sessions, body-work classes and art activations.

Held over November and early December, an annual calendar highlight has been the Global Blackness Summer School - a tradition we look forward to extending at JIAS from 2025. In these free and public programmes, invited guiding lights from South Africa, the continent and across the Black diaspora share on what it means to survive and reimagine a global order of anti-Black violence.

  • Global Blackness Summer School ‘23
    For Wholeness. Black being well

  • Global Blackness Summer School ‘22
    Black Geographies of Care

  • Global Blackness Summer School ‘21
    Black Articulation Otherwise

Other key programmes developed under Global Blackness at RGC included: a series of Black Digital South residencies for scholars and artists from the continent, the Repolla Reading Series (curated by Maneo Mohale), the Sighting Black Girlhood curriculum and exhibition project, and the transnational convening, Think from Black: a lexicon (with the Practicing Refusal Collective).

Following her appointment as JIAS Director in late 2024, Prof Collis-Buthelezi and the new team at JIAS are excited to grow the Global Blackness project and community, drawing on the unique possibilities offered by a Black women-led Johannesburg-based institute for advanced study.