Abstract Starting with items on display at the Hall of Asian Peoples in the American Museum of Natural History, this essay tells the story of an expedition to Greater Syria (including today's Israel/Palestine, Jordan, Lebanon, and Syria) from 1899 to 1901, told through archival records of a young college graduate and biological anthropologist, Henry Minor Huxley, who was brought on to identify “types of peoples” in Syria through techniques of “anthropometry,” the systematic measurement of physical properties of the human body. Figures of great and minor historical significance appear in this story: the anthropologist Franz Boas; Princeton professor and archaeologist Howard Crosby Butler; business leaders of Philadelphia and New York City at the turn of the twentieth century; and the US president Woodrow Wilson, who, in preparation for the Versailles peace conferences at the end of World War I, commissioned a group of scientists and academics to assess the “civilizational capacities” of Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire. Findings from this expedition were used to support the decision to deny self-determination and sovereign nation-states to Syria. The essay broadens more familiar accounts of early twentieth-century debates about race and racialization in anthropology at the turn of the twentieth century to bring today's Middle East squarely into view.
Abstract Bronwyn Katz's multidisciplinary practice investigates the deep entanglements of land, materiality, and memory through sculpture, installation, and performance. Working with found materials and used objects, Katz maps geographies of absence and presence to articulate histories of displacement, colonial extraction, and ecological repair. Framed through Tiffany Lethabo King's “shoal” (2019), Christina Sharpe's concept of “weather” (2016), and Denise Ferreira da Silva's “dark matter” (2022), their work positions Blackness as a material force rooted in ancestral reverence for the Earth. In this interview, Katz discusses land as a collaborator and non-human entities as reparative witnesses. Configuring personal narratives with collective struggle, their artistic practice unearths critical methodologies for sensing interconnected histories and futures.
Abstract Extractivism is more than an economic system that brokers the sequestration of matter qua resources from existence. Extractivism is a cosmology. Weaponizing the force of segregation, extractivism's agents and acolytes reorganize and revalorize existence into entrenched hierarchies. Those formations of existence relegated to the bottom—Black and Indigenous people and the Black Earth—are further segregated from their own selves, divided into alienable and cumulable parcels of private property. Extractivism did not end with the abolition of slavery; it was retrofitted to a new era organized along new commodity flows. We can trace the evolution of extractive logics and landscapes along a continuum from colonial genocide and slavery to fossil fuel production and climate change. And yet, as the cosmology of extractivism and technologies of exploitation were trafficked across the globe, so were African indigenous cosmologies and technologies seeded in the forested mountains and cypress swamps located beyond the borders of the plantation grid. In Louisiana, the Black antebellum burial ground, which manifests as a grove of trees surrounded by miles of monocrop fields, is the key to understanding how ecological resistance to extractivism became entrenched in these liminal lifeworlds. This article suggests that Louisiana's burial groves be considered through the lens of African sacred groves: at once a sacred site, a cultural heritage site, a biodiverse microecology, and a remnant of and monument to the forest that was cleared to make way for the dominion of slave plantations.
Abstract This essay is an introspection on a teaching of twinned concurrent courses across academic institutions. The courses offered took place in the Spring semester of 2024, and they included “Abolition Geography” at Wesleyan University, taught by Dr. Zaira Simone-Thompson, and “Freedom Is a Place! Abolition Geography” at Princeton University, taught by Dr. Allison Guess. Following this sister course pairing, the first ever undergraduate Abolition Geography Student Symposium was organized in April of 2024. Here the essay explores the genealogy of the project, proposing not an argument, but a series of meditations on this pedagogical undertaking while taking note of the challenges and the inversed potentialities of doing this kind of work in a moment of extensive reckoning. The essay presents an offering; one which demonstrates how the authors employ abolition in their own work as scholars of Reparations/Grief and the notion of Black Land. In doing so, the essay reflects on how abolition — as both a theory and as a historical tradition with an attendant set of ever-evolving practices — responds to and in our present while providing a different path to consider.
Abstract This article investigates the relationship between attention and large-scale killing that takes place away from warzones and battlefields. Structural femicide in India in the form of dowry deaths and female feticide arguably erases as many lives every year as many wars and conflicts, yet it barely begets any public attention today. The collective apathy toward structural femicide is puzzling and cannot be accounted for by the neoliberal turn of the feminist movement in India, or then by the juridical domestication of dowry-deaths and sex-selection. This article offers a new genealogy for the demise of the protests against dowry-deaths and the escalation of female feticide. It argues that the new temporality inaugurated by The Hindu Marriage Act (1955) disembedded marriage alliances from long-term ritual exchange to a pared down temporality calculable by law, enabling marriage payments to conjoin with the logic of capital in new ways. Examining the waxing and waning of the public ire against dowry deaths, on the one hand, and a consistent indifference toward feticide, on the other, offers an opportunity to examine the political work of attention and releases the anthropological scholarship on attention from its current emphasis on algorithmic consumerism and self-cultivation. While the protests against dowry killings in the 1970s and 1980s were an exceptional moment, what pushed them out of political attention span was neither habituation, nor loss of newness, but rather new infrastructures of inattention constituted by capital, ritual, and the law.
Abstract A sensibility that evidences a capacity to adapt to and mitigate the impact of global climate change is key to contemporary state making. Bureaucratic documents are the primary artefacts through which this sensibility is performed. This article follows drains and plastics as two slippery “objects” through which the state performs such climate action in attempts to rationalize the city. Taking Delhi as our context, the authors critically analyze these two “climate objects” in their bureaucratic lives, following the complex entanglements through which they are made and unmade. After a close reading of the archive, they focus on affective registers such as “anxiety” within a selection of chosen policy documents. This reveals the epistemological uncertainties governing messy objects. Employing an ethnographic sensibility to read bureaucratic documents, this article suggests that climate policy is not a straightforward process. It is instead about considerations other than the climate itself: what is available as data and what can be made into data, drawing attention to the makeshift nature of seemingly formal processes. The informal nature of these formalizations renders invisible some territories of the city. The archive of the bureau invokes a timeless city of regulation, a closed system of rationalization. The clock-time of the climate crisis, the long-term trend of growing numbers in the bastis of Delhi and the rhythms of city governance all run at different speeds. Unpacking the politics of knowledge production in this context becomes key to understanding better how the state attempts to govern slippery climate objects.
Abstract An early 1940s, editorial of the West African Pilot laments that in Lagos, most residential homes had been converted into pubs and that each street had at least one pub, in a genre of moral pamphlet which often took the city at night as a site whose assumed excessive nature brought about specters of delayed, suspended, or compromised futures. This article proposes to read these pamphlets as manifestations of a desire for straight time, that is, an ordered, progressive timescape “shaped by linked discourses of heteronormativity, capitalism, modernity and apocalypse.” Taking inhabitation at night as its object, this paper examines the vexed relationship between nighttime and the category of “life” in Lagos, looking instead at taverns turned into homes, with the contemporary proliferation of kill your traffic bars. These are sites where urban residents try to avoid traffic, subverting sites of entertainment into functional proxy-homes or temporary shelters. Kill your traffic bars are but one element of a constellation of migratory sleeping places for low- and middle-income urban workers during a given week—from the occasional night in the vehicle one works with to shared rented rooms, bedholds, friends’ houses, or partner's houses. As a form of temporal waywardness, these forms of nocturnal inhabitation disrupt the idea of “nightlife” as contained excess within functionalist imaginations of social reproduction. As commuters produce and inhabit contradictory social times, the outstretched, shapeless contours of nightlife express a social world in disarray. A hegemonic “straight time” still fails to cohere in the chronic instability of nocturnal habitation in contemporary Lagos, as neoliberal reconfigurations of the city multiply proxy-homes, bedholds, and “kill-your-traffic” bars and nightclubs. Contemporary night/life in Lagos point out to the ways in which hegemonic norms fail all the time, as well as to points of potential rearticulation of a politics of solidarity, of shared homelessness, vulnerability, and abjection from straight time. In Cathy Cohen's essential formulation: “Who, we might ask, is truly on the outside of heteronormative power—maybe most of us?”
Abstract This is the introduction to a special section on Blackness as Matter. The collection builds upon a series of dialogues that emerged at two seminars, the first on “Urban Life at the Extensions,” which convened at the University of London Institute in Paris in 2023 and the second, “Ecologies of Black Living,” at the British Academy in London (2025). Both seminars were concerned with Black livingness and the current politics of inhabitation in times of heightened uncertainty, ecological collapse, and the exhaustion of representational politics. Extending these conversations, this special issue asks what a deep engagement with the concept of matter might bring to conversations on Black livingness in such uncertain times.
Abstract This article suggests that recent disputes over the preservation of public monuments typically commemorating “great men” of history (alongside similar artifacts of the built environment) are just one aspect of spatial politics requiring greater scholarly analysis. Contests over the material commemoration of historical figures in civic spaces must also be assessed in relation to the everyday decisions public and private actors make during the design, construction, and maintenance of public infrastructure about preserving (or eradicating) Others’ histories, material culture, and especially, their biological remains. Such decisions contribute to the hauntology of infrastructure. Application of Achille Mbembe's theories of necropolitics and necropower to development practices in everyday American public spaces is critical to the ensuing discussion of infrastructural hauntology. Eminent domain powers are inextricably connected to necropolitics, and ultimately, to infrastructure's hauntology. The status of the dead is contrasted with that of their physical representations in statues, monuments, and other commemorative facsimiles in greater Charlottesville, Virginia. The analysis shows how conceptions of race and (infra)structural racial formations can both inadvertently and deliberately produce the desecration of minoritized mortuary properties.
This article traces the history of the research hub Visible Justice, fore-grounding the necessity for transdisciplinary thinking and the need to seek alternative modes of address for transformative discourse in cultural spaces. Founded at University of the Arts London in 2018, and emerging from a global moment of political unrest and mass mobilization, the initiative is dedicated to exploring the intersections of visual culture, ethics, aesthetics, and social justice beyond the confines of traditional legal frameworks. Visible Justice fosters collaboration between artists, activists, scholars, and legal practitioners, channeling political voice through visual, sonic, and performative interventions. It seeks to reckon with the specters of slavery, empire, colonial rule, and totalitarian control—forces that have never been laid to rest and that continue to render lives unlivable and environments unbreathable today. Recent projects have examined the algorithmic mediation of justice, the rise of neocolonial “frontierism” in space exploration, and the entanglements of climate colonialism with indigenous and diasporic dispossession. Through a series of symposia, exhibitions, and performances, Visible Justice envisions transformative, collective futures grounded in environmental, racial, and social justice. Can working across traditional disciplinary lines with artists, activists, academics, lawyers, and arts institutions create collective routes to political freedom?
Abstract This article argues that alternative music in Lebanon is a privileged site for imagining and reconfiguring the country's futures. The work of Lebanese bands like Soapkills, Scrambled Eggs, and Mashrou’ Leila articulates situated experiences of the present through their “belligerent optimism,” a musical and ideological orientation that is irreverent and cynical but meets sensationalist narratives of Lebanon's intractable violence with a stubborn insistence on the possibility of futures beyond endless war. Through the framework of belligerent optimism, the article considers how the sonic, aesthetic, and presentational qualities of their music become speculative tools for envisioning a different Lebanon. The article provides a framework for examining much of the Arab world and similar contexts that centers vitality and joy rather than resistance or suffering. More broadly, belligerent optimism maps a path toward theorizing radical action as possible in the absence of remarkable or revolutionary events and with a stubborn indifference toward engagement with ossified identity categories.
Abstract In recent years, numerous studies have indicated a strong connection between accidents and platformed delivery work. This article examines food delivery platforms in Singapore to explore how injuries are funneled into an economy of debility, where injury is directed toward profitable ends. Responding to this in Singapore, the Advisory Committee on Platform Workers forwarded plans to include platform workers under the Workers Injury Compensation Act (WICA), the country's workers’ compensation program, in 2022. The article assesses this move by analyzing three key areas: the sentimental videos used to justify this policy, dashcam footage of accidents on social media, and the accident insurance provided by platforms. Videos reflect on how injury is consistently presented as a personal issue that exacerbates a culture of debility by leading workers to downplay risks. This also shapes public sentiment, making it more likely that delivery workers are blamed for accidents. Platforms then monetize injury by implementing measures to reduce claims from accident policies, and by transforming workers into consumers of personalized insurance products. Together, these analyses provide a critical reading of the progressiveness of WICA, revealing its necessary interventions but also the compromises involved in recognizing debility.
Abstract Who is the public in a public trial—who has access and who listens? And what does it mean—for the law and for ordinary people—to listen in the context of white supremacy and hate? In 2021, dozens of white supremacists, Christian nationalists and neo-Nazis faced trial for orchestrating the violent 2017 Unite the Right rally in Charlottesville, Virginia. The trial of Sines v. Kessler also represented a novel way for members of the public to engage with federal cases in the United States. Through recent innovations, hundreds of listeners were able to dial into a public access line each day to follow the proceedings. Remote audio access to trials raises questions of what it means to listen to the law, as audio mediates and, in some cases, transforms expectations and experiences of open justice. This article analyzes audio remote access in Sines, with reference to listening in other mediatized trials of public significance, to show how agency becomes dispersed through this technology. As the courts lose a degree of their cherished control over proceedings, audio remote access gives rise to unintended consequences and produces its own legal and social meanings.
Abstract This article reconstructs a 1903 smallpox outbreak in Omdurman by following the life of a sixteen-year-old girl, Kantousha, whose illness sheds light on an expansive regime of colonial medical surveillance. Drawing on Sudan Medical Department archives, the article reads clinical records against their intended logic, tracing how colonial medicine simultaneously enacted care, coercion, and obfuscation particularly around slavery and unfreedom. Foregrounding the social worlds of children, enslaved people, and working families, the author ponders how illness makes lives legible. Quarantine camps, vaccination campaigns, and policing collapsed distinctions between criminality and contagion, while masking the persistence of slavery under British colonial rule. By centering relationships of friendship, captivity, and care, the article exposes the limits of colonial archives and the ethical stakes of historical narration. Disease takes shape not only as a biological event but also as a spatial, social, and political force that mapped Omdurman's neighborhoods, hierarchies, and fractures. Ultimately, the article offers accompaniment as a historical practice: a slow, reflexive method attentive to presence and absence, violence and intimacy, and the historian's complicity in regimes of knowledge.
Abstract When Mexico City was struck by the second most destructive earthquake in its history, residents of the city responded spontaneously, rescuing people from fallen buildings, administering aid, and transporting goods. This was referred to as “solidarity.” Solidarity has been the term used to describe post-disaster civilian responses in Mexico since 1985, when the most destructive earthquake in Mexican history devastated Mexico City. A dominant narrative in Mexican historiography is that solidarity demonstrated after the 1985 earthquake turned Mexico into a democracy in 2000. But after the 2017 earthquake, participants in the civil response were wracked with recurring nightmares — dreams not of the earthquake but of an impossible rescue in its aftermath. Through thirty months’ ethnographic research among civil responders in Mexico City, and sustained conversations with people affected by recurring dreams — all men, in their late thirties and early forties — I suggest that these recurring dreams were caused by the practice of historicizing the solidarity of the 1985 earthquake. The recurring dreams of solidarity emerged from the historiographical operation that separated Mexico's democratic present from its authoritarian past, revealing the force of the act of historicizing itself.
Located in China's northeastern frontier, the Daqing Oil Field was built at the height of socialist revolutionary fervor. This article approaches Daqing's extractive zone as a mediated space that hosts geotechnical encounters between humans, geomatter, and machine. To understand oil drilling as eventful mediation, a few anecdotes are first recounted to reenact Maoist contradiction as geotechnical contradiction — that is, conduct celebrated as embodying the Maoist spirit is revealed to be a result of first-order geotechnical mediation. The article then examines prospecting as a question of visuality, whereby oil workers’ skyward vision in propaganda posters is reoriented to become earthbound gazes whose fixation on data collection and whose receptiveness to energy flows suggest an alternative model of subject formation. The conclusion draws attention to underground fissures — the micro-openings in rock layers in which oil is stored — and considers them a site of non-knowledge from which the possibility of earthbound thinking emerges.
Situated against the generations-long loss of Black agricultural land in the United States, this article revisits the role of Farm Security Administration cooperatives in negotiating land dispossession, racial segregation, and organized abandonment in the American South during the Great Depression. Ambiguously positioned between the Washingtonian model of self-help and the Du Boisian mantra of cooperation, these state-initiated enterprises ultimately presented a paradox: they enabled spaces of opposition to the routinized violence and land theft perpetrated under Jim Crow yet also proved assimilable into the prevailing logics of American racial capitalism — namely, by absorbing the surpluses generated by a rapidly mechanizing plantation economy and shifting the financial burden of the New Deal's social welfare expenditures onto impoverished Black communities. The article begins with a discussion of the regional Black tradition of cooperative organization, collectivism, and mutual aid that was contemporaneously denied by state administrators and retrospectively obscured in historiography. It then examines three federal resettlement projects in the Black Belt region of Alabama: the Tuskegee Land Use Demonstration Project and Prairie Farms, both in Macon County; and Gee's Bend in Wilcox County. The conclusion reflects on W. E. B. Du Bois's unfulfilled vision for a Black cooperative network, the wartime withdrawal of funding from federal experiments in cooperative development, and the persistence of cooperatives within a repertoire of anticapitalist and decolonial world-building.
