A Language of Blackness: Black Subjectivity and Black Activist Politics in Belgium

This chapter traces the emergence of a language of Blackness in Belgium. Based on the political uses of ‘Black’ in anti-racist mobilizing, the authors show how a relatively new construction of Black subjectivity is negotiated through various Black activist political expressions. Expanding on existing yet niche work on ‘Pan-African’ organizing of African associations in Belgium, this chapter sheds light on more recent discursive developments of anti-racist movements and Black cultural organizing, i.e. in the 2010s and beyond. It gives an account of how notions of Africanness and Blackness come together to form delicate and intricate ways of identification, providing a framework of political subjectivity among people of African descent across Belgium. Critical of the way ‘Black’, as a marker of racialized differentiation, was originally constructed to inferiorize specific groups of people based on skin tone and ethnic descent, the authors argue that the ways in which such a term is being reclaimed and embodied in the former colonial metropole that is Belgium, represent—however ambivalently—a powerful act of resistance against and refusal of (post)colonial subordination.