Race Beyond Borders

Nigel Richard, host of season 3 of Race Beyond Borders, talks with Black futurists Geci Karuri-Sebina and Rasheedah Phillips about the practice of futures thinking.

London-based Zimbabwean new media artist Kumbirai Makumbe talks Black quantum futures, the multiplicity of Black experiences and how the digital sphere provides new territory on which to map the multiverse of Blackness, beyond the boundaries of Afrofuturism. 

Author and journalist Morgan Jerkins breaks down the construction of Black identity on the internet drawing on her work investigating the ways in which Blackness can be co-opted online.

Remi Adekoya, author of Biracial Britain, breaks down demographic trends, and corresponding shifts in the way Blackness is lived and expressed in the United Kingdom.

"I find that listening to young people is like listening to the future,” Nigel says setting up this episode of Race Beyond Borders, which features the perspectives on the futures of race from young African people.

Post-humanist thinker, philosopher and poet Bayo Akomolafe, reflects on the ways in which Blackness can be trapped in the rhythmic call and response with whiteness, and explores ways of reimagining Black experiences.

Season 2 of Race Beyond Borders begins with a moving conversation with Adama Sanneh, co-founder and CEO of the Moleskine Foundation. Sanneh walks us through his coming of age as a young Black man in an Italy plagued by cultural silences about blackness. Despite these difficulties, Sanneh embraces possibilities for the emergence of an expansive Black identity in Italy, one fashioned by those who embody it.

In episode 2, we travel to Martinique, an overseas department of France and more importantly, the birthplace of Aimé Césaire and Frantz Fanon. Clinical psychologist and researcher Roseline Armange guides us into an exploration of the rich past and present of her people. In the conversation, she explains how Martinicans negotiate a complex relationship with mainland France while embracing a distinctive identity.

In episode 3, guests Manuel Gutiérrez and Ana María González-Forero take us through the challenges and opportunities of Colombia’s complex multicultural heritage.

Our guest, Priscillia Kounkou Hoveyda, founder of the Collective for Black Iranians, guides us through the emotional terrain of her country’s little-known Black experience.

Miguel Valerio, our guest in this episode of Race Beyond Borders, invites us into a journey across Latin America – beginning in the Dominican Republic, all the way to Mexico. He reflects on his experiences of being read and raced differently across the region and becoming aware of who he is as a product of history. An historian of Black royalty in Mexico in the 1600s, Valerio draws connections between historical expressions of Black resistance, sovereignty and joy, and the formation of Mexico. In the episode, he discusses both this rich history and the ongoing struggles for Black political inclusion across Latin America.

Pastel houses, pink sands and azure waters. In this episode of Race Beyond Borders, we journey to Bermuda, an island country that is also a British overseas territory. Our guest, award-winning historian Quito Swan, also takes us beyond his mid-Atlantic island home — to West Papua in Indonesia and to the global Black diaspora. Swan reflects on how the Black Pacific is a generative space for Black internationalism. In fact, he shows that an exploration of race and racialisation in Oceania both challenges established notions of what it means to be Black and enrich our understanding of the multiplicity inherent in the Black experience across the world.