Surrender: The Death of the West, Caribbean World-Building, and the Future of Us All

Sovereignty has become something of a disavowed category among those committed to Black thriving.  How can one imagine sovereignty in a context in which the specter of Black death on the plantation remains an ordinary parameter for organizing social and economic value?  How can one enact self-determination when new forms of dispossession are continuously rewritten over earlier removals and displacements?  These questions suffuse our engagements with notions of freedom, liberation, and justice, and seem to negate the possibility of sovereignty in Black life, insofar as sovereignty remains tethered to the state, or to the parameters of its institutions.  For many of us, however, a particular understanding of what we might term collective self-making or world-building – something sometimes popularly glossed as “sovereignty” – remains a discursively pertinent frame, insofar as it speaks to the necessity of living outside of but in relation to the juridical structures that govern modern Western political and social life.  In this talk, I will argue that reaching toward a sovereignty “otherwise” requires that we plumb other terms that might afford a clearer articulation of the histories and futures of (in this case) Caribbean freedom.  I will posit “possession” as a kind of companion term to sovereignty, one that both aligns with and disrupts imperialist and nationalist aspirations, and one that will ultimately lead us to another term, “surrender,” which can attune us to relations of repetition, recovery, return, and repair.

For registration, please send an email to hamza.esmili@kuleuven.be.