This dissertation provides a socio-spatial account of black anarchism that emerges from a central concern with the practice of slaves’ jumps from the slave ship. It demonstrates how a substantive theoretical attention to these jumps generates possibilities for thinking about black radical politics differently. Through death, mobility, destruction, and escape, the jump communicates criticisms of the existing anti-black world. This dissertation argues that the form of total refusal enacted in the slave jumping from the slave ship contains an anatomy of black anarchism that can be seen in other areas of challenge or interruption to colonial-racial regimes regulating the location and mobility of black populations including the voyages of the Black Star Line, the 1965 Watts Rebellion, and Assata Shakur’s escape from prison. In its other forms, the jumps elaborate the collective, cataclysm, and abolition. In tracing this lineage of black anarchism through the spatial environments it contests, this dissertation also presents a different origin story of our carceral state. Each chapter illustrates the slave ship’s legacy of black confinement, demonstrating how its principles have been reinscribed in various institutional forms so as to extend the state of capture. In so doing, this dissertation contends that contemporary spatialities of anti-black discipline, from enslavement to mass incarceration, are better understood when we begin with the slave ship rather than colorblind conceptions of the convict ship or the panopticon. The purpose is to examine the ways that both detention and mobility are twinned necessities in the racial regimes of the modern era as well as indicate how processes of confinement constitute racial and gendered hierarchies. In addition, this dissertation argues that while localized, exertions of spatial disruption work to institute new social relations and ways of being that exist both against the colonial-racial state and Western norms of political participation as world-questioning politics.

Last modified

• 04/15/2019

Creator

• Sam C Tenorio

DOI

• https://doi.org/10.21985/N2BR1K

Subject

• African-American Studies

Keyword

• Black political thought
• Black politics
• Anarchism
• Slavery
• Carceral

Date created

• 2018-01-01

Resource type

• Dissertation

Rights statement

• In Copyright