External Partners

This transnational collaboration joins the University College London and Yale University in a collective study of the longue durée of colonial racial capitalism and its expression in the contemporary moment in which cruel austerity measures deepen economic dispossession and authoritarian states subject the poor, unhoused, and most vulnerable to state violence, ethnonationalism, incarceration, and death. We ask about the endurance of the unreckoned colonial past in these present conditions and extrapolate possibilities for contestation. We assess the adequacy and limitations of existing political languages and disciplinary knowledge frames for understanding this relationship of colonial conditions in the present, and consider interdisciplinary studies as not simply the combination of multiple methods or objects, but more significantly, as the interrogation of disciplinary knowledge productions and the state and social order they uphold. Finally, we ask what other objects, practices, and questions might be mobilized to disrupt the closure of current frames and bring forward other ways of understanding this longue durée?

RITM spearheaded and managed the logistics for seven graduate students selected to serve for six months as Digital Archival Fellows.

The fellowship has two components. From July 1st-21st, Fellows traveled to Germany to collaborate with graduate students from the Technical University Berlin and the Universität der Künste to digitize materials in Berlin that contribute to the broader Intersectional Black European Studies archive. In Fall 2023, Fellows will create a digital archive in collaboration with students from the course, "New Developments in Global African Diaspora Studies."

The digital archive project addresses the challenges posed by the transnational and multilingual formation of the African diaspora in Europe (and elsewhere) on the one hand, and by the marginalizing of Black knowledge production in European societies, including institutions like museums and universities, on the other.

In the summer of 2022 Yale’s Center for the Study of Race, Indigeneity, and Transnational Migration (RITM) joined Rutgers University’s Center for Latin American Studies in developing the Puerto Rico Archival Collaboration. Yale’s program, the Puerto Rico Archival Internship Project (PRAIP) provided fellowship funding to three Yale graduate students and one or two local student interns at the Archivo General de Puerto Rico and Puerto Rico National Library.

Yale Fellows supported archival efforts in Puerto Rico as short-term interns while pursuing their own doctoral research projects. Each internship at the Archivo General/Biblioteca Nacional de Puerto Rico (Puerto Rico Institute of Culture) was intended to preserve and disseminate materials of historical importance.