Temple University Press Journals
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Elasticity Inhabited
No full textIn critiquing the trope of resilience, Kaiama Glover has defined it as “elasticity,” “the capacity to resume an original form, or a condition.” She points to how that term has been used “gleefully” when talking about migrants and refugees, as “a category” that is “long applicable to Haitians, as they are, if nothing else, resilient.” This paper proposes an exploration of elasticity as a possible site of imagining an “otherwise” of the diasporic experience: an open space in which both the nostalgia of the old home and the experiencing of the new one can be engaged with and nurture a new sense of self
The United States of America v. Darren Seals
No full textIn January 2016, while I was co-teaching a college course with two incarcerated professors at Federal Bureau of Prisons Federal Correctional Facility McKean, the name of Darren Seals, a twenty-nine-year-old anti-police activist, was introduced by one of the educators into a lecture focusing on the history of the U.S. government murdering Black male political activists. At the time, the incarcerated educators made a compelling argument that Seals, one day, would also be murdered by the State, offering their own unique lived experiences and insights as members of underground anti-government movements. Fast forward to today, and the mythologies surrounding Darren Seals’s murder in September that year take center stage on social media accounts that focus on racial justice and police abolition in the United States. Seals’s unsolved brutal killing resonates throughout every podcast, every discussion board forum, and every video hosting platform
How to Become a Soldier in the Black Liberation Army: Sixteen Tomes
No full textFrom 1970 to 1983, it is estimated that the Black Liberation Army (BLA), by way of armed resistance in the name of revolutionary justice, was responsible for expropriating the lives of dozens of police officers across the United States of America. Yes, as unbelievable, and as extra-terrestrial as it might sound today, there was a very brief period in U.S. history when there were consequences for indiscriminate acts of police violence against the Black community. As a Black man who was born and raised in the womb of the Black Power Movement in 1960s Chicago, and an ethnographic scholar on Black armed resistance and counterinsurgency violence directed at racialized people, I am often asked, what served as the intellectual inspiration? Was there a sort of “book list” to become a soldier in the BLA
Kalfou at the Crossroads
No full textThe crossroads are a place where we find ourselves and each other. As Kalfou strives to generate new research and knowledge in reciprocal relation to aggrieved populations who are eyewitnesses to the effects of dominant social structures, our namesake—the term for crossroads in Haitian Creole—reminds us that important lessons are learned and decisions made at such critical junctions
Thoughts on Climate Financing, Postcolonialism, and Climate Adaptation in the Eastern Caribbean Region
No full textPostcolonial institutional arrangements, which politically situate several non-sovereign climate-vulnerable countries in the Global North, may be affecting the extent to which these countries are able to respond to climate threats—such as coastal erosion, sea-level rise, water resource management, and more. This piece highlights the issue by specifically examining France’s postcolonial footprint in the eastern Caribbean while also presenting an example of a climate resiliency measure implemented by the Kingdom of the Netherlands in an overseas Caribbean jurisdiction. In presenting this analysis, the overall objective is to ultimately minimize the exclusion of non-sovereign nations from existing and emerging supranational mechanisms for climate adaptation financing that they might otherwise be eligible for, if it were not for their longstanding status as postcolonial overseas territories of a European nation
A Pause amid Distractions
No full textThe world in which we live is full of distractions that are systemically mechanisms of neoliberalism but at times are of our own invention, for survival. This essay reflects on the current age by taking a look back to Black feminist wisdom of the past. It also offers a space for discourse around what we are challenged with as individuals and what we stand to gain when we focus on community
Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti: Staging Counterpublics in Neoliberal Haiti
No full textThis article discusses street theater actions by Brigade d’Intervention Théâtrale-Haïti (BITH), a Haitian performance collective whose work staged in 2018—preceding and in alignment with mass mobilizations that swept the nation that year—registered and interrogated the deep impacts on lived experience wrought by a process of intensified neoliberalization in post-2010 Haiti. BITH’s street performances (and subsequent online circulation) made visible and palpable certain Haitian people’s complicity in manifold inequities under such conditions as they also sparked emergent counterpublics through dialogue, affect, and popular aesthetics. Through what we term “creative interference,” BITH’s artivism catalyzed alternatives to civil society from the interstices of available modalities and infrastructures
The Improbability of John Brown
No full textI was a senior in high school when I saw the videorecording of Rodney King being beaten by LAPD officers Stacey Koon, Laurence Powell, Theodore Briseño, and Timothy Wind. I had just come home from my first year of college the day the L.A. riots broke out. I watched all of this, and more importantly I watched the reaction to it from the people closest to me. I observed these events through the lens of a young man who had always wanted to be a police officer, but was also coming to life intellectually in the world of higher education.
In 2000, I passed on a seat in the Pittsburgh Bureau of Police Training Academy in order to continue working to become a scholar of occupational culture and socialization within policing. To further my academic career, I had to focus on graduate funding, data, jobs, conference presentations, publications, grants, tenure, and promotion. It was a lot of work, it did not pay well, and in the end, I didn’t see how it was really helping anybody. By 2007, the weight of all that was crushing me. That’s when I was introduced to the Inside-Out Prison Exchange Program, and that changed everything