The transnationalism of the Black Lives Matter movement: From London to Sydney

Abstract

Drawing on the diverse cases of London and Sydney, this thesis explores the transnationalism of the Black Lives Matter movement. While a substantive body of Black Lives Matter scholarship has emerged from the US, the issue of transnationalism poses a gap in current literature, which I attend to by recognising that ideas of Black Lives Matter travel. I argue, the transnationalism of the Black Lives Matter movement is understood through the diverse adoption and adaption of Black Lives Matter, creating different political sites of struggle. Thus, illuminating the ways that Black Lives Matter has been adopted by a range of actors across place and adapted to embody diverse forms of racial violence, such as, racialised policing, neoliberal urbanism, and environmental racism. Using a multi-sited ethnographic approach over a period of ten-months, including 30 semi-structured interviews between August 2019 and June 2020, this thesis draws on the perspectives of Black Asian Minority Ethnic and Aboriginal Black Lives Matter activists in London and Sydney, examining how a transnational Black Lives Matter movement is both possible and necessary, as well as anti-racist and decolonial possibilities. I employ an intersectional approach to transnationalism, informed by Black Marxist, Black Feminist and decolonial scholarship, in analysing the different ways that Black Lives Matter is shaped across place by Black Asian Minority Ethnic and Aboriginal activists. This reveals the diverse ways that Black Lives Matter feeds into long standing anti-racist and decolonial struggles and enables agency and resistance. As such, London and Sydney are used as exemplars for wider-transnationalism and provide crucial insight into how ideas of Black Lives Matter travel. This thesis not only makes intellectual contributions to the transnationalism of Black Lives Matter, but also to work on social movements, the study of intersectionality, policing, neoliberal urbanism, environmental racism and the geographies of race and place.