Interdiction, Terror, and Resistance: On The Structural Positionality of Blackness in the Americas

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

Over the past decade, Afro-descendants across the Americas have mobilized as political subjects, demanding and securing the formal recognition of territorial, political, and economic rights for ethno-racial communities. While these advancements represent a crucial break in the “racial democracy” tradition of the region, it is important to recognize that these achievements have been accompanied by persistent and routinized state terror, resulting in gratuitous violence and Black death. This panel includes papers based on research in Colombia, Brazil, and the Dominican Republic that offer an analysis of the ways in which the modern nation-state ––including its discourses, logics, and imaginations –– is only able to exist through Black death. In other words, Black death persists as the terms and conditions of recognition and inclusion of Black life in the region, and the grounds upon which discourses of multiculturalism, diversity, and inclusion are made possible (Smith 2016, Paschel 2017).

In this context, this panel asks: How do we account for the ways Black life exists under/in death in “the afterlife of slavery” (Hartman 2007)? How is blackness structurally positioned for “accumulation” and “fungibility” (Spillers 1987, Wilderson 2010)? How do contemporary mobilizations and political imaginations of Afro-descendants push the modern nation-state into crisis through demands for Black life? Finally, what are the ethical demands of attending to the Black dead that force us to reposition the discourse of justice outside of the framework of inclusion, and into one of “wake work” (Sharpe 2016) and “redress” (Hartman 1997)?

Sub Track

• Afro-Latin/Indigenous Peoples

Session Organizer

• Jameelah Morris, Stanford University

Chair

• Amarilys Estrella, New York University

Discussant

• Christen A Smith, University of Texas/Austin

Individual Presentations

• Afterlives of Property: Non/Status and Dispossession of Black Communities in Cartagena, Colombia - Jameelah Morris, Stanford University

• Between the Dead and the Living: The Significance of Zombies, Ghosts and 'Muertos Civiles' for Black Haitian-Dominican Activists in the Dominican Republic - Amarilys Estrella, New York University

• A Negra Empoderada Incomoda: Policing and Incarcerating Black Women in São Paulo, Brazil - Meryleen M Mena, University of Colorado/Boulder