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Blackscapes: Urban Precarity Poetics of Fugitivity in Suspended Times
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featuring
Jaime Alves, Associate Professor, UCSB
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3:30-5:00 p.m. |
Social Science Plaza A, Room 2112
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What actions are needed to decolonize the antiblack city? How might we attend to the urgent call of Black activists to defend the dead and to make Black lives livable? Centered around these questions, this presentation proposes a Fanonian reading of cityscapes as colonial sites. It also locates insurgent social imaginaries and spatial praxis, here understood as Blackscapes, to reclaim Black autonomy in these racially-charged contexts of urban precarity. As a theoretical project, Blackscapes is an ethnographic engagement with the political life of the socially dead. It invites us to reimagine politics and life beyond the right-to-city politics and its exclusionary bases of social organizing. Can the painful and creative experiments of Black livelihoods provide an expansive theory and practice of the social? Who is this insurgent subject that embraces social death to create (conditions of) life in the suspended time of the plantation city? It may be the case that, to locate these practices, we need both to embrace a politics of no-arrival as Black life is life lived in a permanent state of fugitivity and a sublime politics of love that, through divine violence, disrupts the violent sanctity of life itself.
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Sponsored by: Department of Anthropology
For further information or questions, please contact Melissa Valdez, valdezmm@uci.edu.
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