Between crime and colony: Interrogating (im)mobilities aboard the convict ship

Recent literature in carceral geography has attended to the importance of mobilities in interrogating the experience and control of spaces of imprisonment, detention and confinement. Scholars have explored the paradoxical nature of incarcerated experience as individuals oscillate between moments of fixity and motion as they are transported to/from carceral environments. This paper draws upon the convict ship – an example yet to gain attention within these emerging discussions – which is both an exemplar of this paradox and a lens through which to complicate understandings of carceral (im)mobilities. The ship is a space of macro-movement from point A to B, whilst simultaneously a site of apparent confinement for those aboard who are unable to move beyond its physical parameters. Yet, we contend that all manner of mobilities permeate the internal space of the ship. Accordingly, we challenge the binary thinking that separates moments of fixity from motion and explore the constituent parts that shape movement. In paying attention to movements in motion on the ship, we argue that studies of carceral mobility must attend to both methods of moving in the space between points A and B; as micro, embodied and intimate (im)mobilities are also played out within large-scale regimes of movement

Reading Postemancipation In/Security: Negotiations of Everyday Freedom

This essay examines in/securities through a central focus on strategies for securing livelihoods after emancipation. While the postemancipation period in the Caribbean was marked by clamorous debate about the region’s economic future, this essay is concerned with the quieter practices that shaped the texture of freedom. An engagement with travel narratives, specifically attentive to reading against the grain of elite mobilities, is proposed as a means through which to reveal the everyday negotiation of livelihoods. Offering the market as a case study, the essay argues that everyday negotiations of economic insecurity rested on mobile strategies and that the mobilization of such strategies took on a new significance with the rise of tourism in the decades after emancipation

Screening and Panel Discussion on the work of Angela Davis, Free Angela and Other Political Prisoners

The screening and panel have been organised to coincide with Angela Davis receiving an honorary degree from Goldsmiths on December 14th 2013. We will be recognising and celebrating the work of Angela Davis with a specific focus on her contributions to Black feminism. The panel with Sara Ahmed (Media and Communications), Joan Anim-Addo (English Language and Literature/Centre for Caribbean Studies), Claudia Bernard (Social, Therapeutic and Community Studies), Heidi Mirza (Sociology), Nirmal Puwar (Sociology) and Sunera Thobani (UBC, Vancouver). This event continues a series on ‘feminist and queer of colour scholarship and activism’ that began in 2011, with a day focusing on the work of Audre Lorde

Activist-mothers maybe, sisters surely? Black British feminism, absence and transformation

This article, drawing on selected feminist magazines of the 1980s, particularly Feminist Arts News (FAN) and GEN, offers a textual ‘braiding’ of narratives to re-present a history of Black British feminism. I attempt to chart a history of Black British feminist inheritance while proposing the politics of (other)mothering as a politics of potential, pluralistic and democratic community building, where Black thought and everyday living carry a primary and participant role. The personal—mothering our children—is the political, affording a nurturing of alterity through a politics of care that is fundamentally antiracist and antisexist. I attempt to show how Black feminist thought can significantly contribute to democracy in the present and how Black British history and thought, as fundamentally antiracist and anticolonial, can generate a reinvention much needed in the present of a shared British history. I argue for feminist intervention premised upon a politics of care, addressing through activist mothering the urgency of Black absence from prestigious institutions. Such debilitating absence in Britain inhibits the development of scholarship, distorts feminist history and seriously concerns potential Black feminists. From diverse texts, I develop a genealogical narrative supplemented through memory work. This ‘gathering and re-using’ privileges Black women’s theorising as a crucial component of the methodological métissage, which includes auto-theorising to develop ideas of resemblance in relation to Black British feminism and feminist kinship. The resultant ‘braiding’, I suggest after Lionnet, questions the absence of intersubjective spaces for reflection on Black British feminist praxis, indicating a direction for British feminists of all complexions. Attentive to the 1980s as historical context while invoking the maternal, I consider what is required to engage generationally, counterwrite the academy and pursue a dynamic process of transformation within a transnational feminism that challenges Black British absence from academic knowledge production, while nurturing its presence