What the Sea Knows: Charting a way beyond the criminalization of blackness
Topics: Black Geographies
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Keywords: criminalization, carcerality, blackness, abolition geographies
Session Type: Virtual Paper Abstract
Day: Sunday
Session Start / End Time: 2/27/2022 03:40 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada)) - 2/27/2022 05:00 PM (Eastern Time (US & Canada))
Room: Virtual 60
Authors:
Leniqueca Welcome, Trinity College
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Abstract
In this modern world that is foundationally anti-black, genocidal, and extractivist, an otherwise that is radically different often seems impossible. Violence that simultaneously feels the past, the present, and the future produces a collective sense of being stuck. Yet, quoting from Dionne Brand’s poem, Inventory, “A boat, even a wrecked and wretched boat, still has all the possibilities of moving.” Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and experimental collaging practice, this paper explores the sea as a site of wreckage but also, more critically, as one of repair. I situate its potentiality against the production of the racialized and gendered figure of the violent criminal in Trinidad as an object that can be exposed to violence with impunity. Criminalization—rooted in the logics of the plantation—remains a technology through which to legitimize the political and economic elite’s casting of poor Black lives as disposable. Given the way the plantation as a carceral terrain continues to produce deathly conditions for Black people, I explore how attention to the sea’s ways of knowing, revealed over time in its movements, may help us see an otherwise in the now. How might thinking and feeling with water energize our conceptualizations of freedom and aid us in enacting an abolitionist world where life is unconditionally precious?
What the Sea Knows: Charting a way beyond the criminalization of blackness
Category
Virtual Paper Abstract
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