Nathalie Etoke is associate professor of French and Africana studies at the Graduate Center, CUNY. Her book Melancholia Africana received the Frantz Fanon Book Award from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. In 2011, she made a documentary entitled Afro Diasporic French Identities thatexamines how the legacy of slavery and colonization challenges the republican ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity.

• IntroductionI: Diasporic BluesChapter 1: Black in Blue: Subjectivity, catastrophe, and memory in Guy Deslauriers' The Middle PassageChapter 2: Sing to Be FreeChapter 3: Haiti 2010, Life Arises from the RubbleII: Come on Children of the Homeland, the Day of Glory has ArrivedChapter 4: Black in Blue, Red, and WhiteChapter 5: "COMMUNITY" and "COLOR" : Black in Blue White and RedChapter 6: I Remember Therefore I suffer/I Remember Therefore I amIII: I called from the depthChapter 7: Human/Non-Human: The Negative Utopia of Sub-Saharan African MigrationChapter 8: The other Nègre: Treatment of Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender People in Uganda and South AfricaConclusion

It is tempting to regard the 2020 murder of George Floyd by law enforcement as a contemporary variant of the meaning of Blackness in society, a meaning traceable to slavery, colonialism, and then postcolonialism. In such a case, Blackness translates into a cynical and pessimistic outlook on life for Black people everywhere. Further, some see this pessimism manifested in so-called Black-on-Black violence. It is this very cynical outlook that Etoke challenges here. By analyzing Black people's creative productions—e.g., spirituals during slavery, the freedom songs of the 1960s, contemporary hip-hop and rap music, and Black theatrical performances—Etoke argues, contra the Afro-Pessimists, that Black people have constantly been affirming their humanity and subjectivity, hence optimism, even in the face of white supremacist domination and oppression. Etoke calls attention to oppressive structures specifically in France and the US but generally in the Global North, where the notion of Black citizenship seems like an oxymoron. Even so, Black people have not just been “singing the Blues” and waiting for death, but instead have been articulating forms of resistance and engaging in self-affirmation that bespeaks optimism and existential freedom. Recommended. Advanced undergraduates through faculty.