To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women's Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua

<p>Recorded on March 7, 2023 at UC Berkeley's Social Science Matrix, this  <a href= "https://matrix.berkeley.edu/category/event-type/authors-meet-critics/"> Authors Meet Critics</a> panel focused on <a href= "https://matrix.berkeley.edu/category/event-type/authors-meet-critics/"> <em>To Defend This Sunrise: Black Women’s Activism and the Authoritarian Turn in Nicaragua</em></a>, by <strong>Courtney Desiree Morris</strong>, Assistant Professor and Vice Chair of Research in Gender and Women’s Studies at UC Berkeley. Morris was joined in conversation by <strong>Tianna Paschel</strong>, Associate Professor in the UC Berkeley Department of African American Studies. The panel was moderated by <strong>Lok Siu</strong>, Chair of the Asian American Research Center and Professor of Ethnic Studies and Asian American/Asian Diaspora Studies at UC Berkeley.</p> <p>The panel was co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley <a role="link" href="https://africam.berkeley.edu/">Department of African American Studies</a>, <a role="link" href= "https://clas.berkeley.edu/">Center for Latin American Studies</a>, and <a role="link" href="https://gws.berkeley.edu/">Department of Gender & Women’s Studies</a>.</p> <h3>About the Book</h3> <p><a href= "https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/to-defend-this-sunrise/9781978804791"> <em>To Defend this Sunrise</em></a> 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 mul