To Defend this Sunrise examines how black women on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua engage in regional, national, and transnational modes of activism to remap the nation’s racial order under conditions of increasing economic precarity and autocracy. The book considers how, since the 19th century, black women activists have resisted historical and contemporary patterns of racialized state violence, economic exclusion, territorial dispossession, and political repression. Specifically, it explores how the new Sandinista state under Daniel Ortega and Rosario Murillo has utilized multicultural rhetoric as a mode of political, economic, and territorial dispossession. In the face of the Sandinista state’s co-optation of multicultural discourse and growing authoritarianism, black communities have had to recalibrate their activist strategies and modes of critique to resist these new forms of “multicultural dispossession.” This concept describes the ways that state actors and institutions drain multiculturalism of its radical, transformative potential by espousing the rhetoric of democratic recognition while simultaneously supporting illiberal practices and policies that undermine black political demands and weaken the legal frameworks that provide the basis for the claims of these activists against the state.
 

COURTNEY DESIREE MORRIS is an assistant professor of gender and women’s studies at the University of California, Berkeley.

Preface: An Unexpected Uprising?
Introduction: Black Women’s Activism in Dangerous Times
Part I: Genealogies
1 Grand Dames, Garveyites, and Obeah Women: State Violence, Regional Radicalisms, and Unruly Femininities in the Mosquitia
2 Entre el Rojo y Negro: Black Women’s Social Memory and the Sandinista Revolution
Part II: Multicultural Dispossession
3 Cruise Ships, Call Centers, and Chamba: Managing Autonomy and Multiculturalism in the Neoliberal Era
4 Dangerous Locations: Black Suffering, Mestizo Victimhood, and the Geography of Blame in the Struggle for Land Rights
Part III: Resisting State Violence
5 “See how de blood dey run”: Sexual Violence, Silence, and the Politics of Intimate Solidarity
6 From Autonomy to Autocracy: Development, Multicultural Dispossession, and the Authoritarian Turn
Conclusion: Transition in Saeculae Saeculorum
Acknowledgments
Notes
References
Index