Mapping Black Geographies of Freedom: Plantations, Prisons & Decolonial Politics

• In Event: Global Decolonial Politics and Black Liberation

Abstract

This article intends to explore the ways in which colonial domains have functioned to delimit spaces of black liberation. It engages the question of what might a black geography mean in a postcolonial world saturated with anti-black domains. Historically, black spaces of habituation have been either the colonial plantation or the postcolonial prison. In either space, black labor has been commodified, propertied or arrested by instruments of Euromodern politics. The enslavement and concomitant imprisonment of black praxis, understood as generative movements toward political freedom, have enrooted the sphere of anti-black racism in the modern world. The brutalities of the carceral state are, in many ways, reflective of the slavocratic-plantocratic state before it. For this reason, there needs be a re-evaluation of what might constitute new geographies of black freedom in the struggle toward a decarceral world order. The question of decolonial politics must, then, be applied to the question of newly emerging black geographies beyond statist appeals to national sovereignty. As such, this paper takes seriously prison abolition as an Afromodern form of decolonial politics. Here, I intend to engage decolonial thinkers from Frantz Fanon to Ruth Wilson Gilmore. Furthermore, the paper begins to think through the carceral condition outside the American context to also imagine ways of imprisonment within the postcolonial Caribbean. That is to say, how can we make sense of Caribbean carcerality as economic and socio-political geographies? I intend to engage Afro-Caribbean thinkers such as Sylvia Wynter, Claudia Jones, George Padmore, among others in order to flesh out the arrest of black labor. In the end, I offer the mapping of black geographies of freedom as decarceral praxis predicated on the ongoing struggle for a decolonial politics of liberation.

Author

• Derefe Kimarley Chevannes, University of Memphis