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.
