Transcript

Alex Chávez (AC) [00:00]: Waiting for the elevated train during a pale afternoon, I looked down on Armitage Street, full of quaint old buildings, upscale stores, and fashionable mothers pushing white-walled baby carriages on well-heeled sidewalks, and to think. It seems just like yesterday on Armitage Street that Alfredo and Chacha played hide and seek with Quinto the cop, while Cosmo and Aydita made love in the gangway, when radios blared out open windows, dressed in five-and-dimed lace curtains, when staccato Spanish bounced between buildings high above the rolling traffic, when candles danced amber-hued in roach-sprayed apartments from all-night vigils for the dead before being shipped back home in a self-addressed stamped coffin, and the children kissed their cold cheeks, grateful for all the candy and stories, and the dead knew they would be missed.

Alejandro Echeverria (AE) [00:57]: That was the voice of Alex Chávez from his presentation, “Black Flag” from the panel “Sonic Traces of Possibility and Peril” in which he reads the poem “Armitage Street” by poet David Hernandez. In this piece, Chávez explores themes of memory, history, and place in the context of increasing violence and border enforcement regimes targeting Latinx communities, specifically the Puerto Rican diaspora in Chicago.

Chávez calls for resisting the erasure of Latinx histories across various locations in the United States by challenging the narrative that frames these communities as perpetual newcomers with no history, an idea often used to justify deportations and restrictive immigration policies. This excerpt offers an important perspective on the theme of race across borders.

Hello and welcome to AnthroPod, the Podcast of the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We are your hosts. I am Alejandro Echeverria.

Sharon Jacobs (SJ) [01:53]: And I’m Sharon Jacobs.

In this episode, we’re showcasing presentations from the 2025 AAA Conference in New Orleans that engage the theme of race across borders—such as how borders are shaped by embodiment, memory, and movement and power. From the streets of New Orleans to the borderlands of the Dominican Republic and Haiti; from Puerto Rican and Black diasporas to queer diasporas; from performance spaces to the bureaucratic offices of Berlin, these presentations ask: What does it mean to live, move, and make kin under the shadow of borders? And how do people create spaces of freedom and resistance within and along border regimes?

Together, they explore how race is not only policed at national boundaries, but embedded in streets, atmospheres, stages, and intimate relationships.

This episode is part two of a three-part miniseries sharing conference highlights and key moments from events organized by the Society for Cultural Anthropology. We reached out to nearly one hundred presenters, inviting them to record and share their presentations or roundtable contributions, and we received thirty-five recordings. While we’re not able to share everyone’s work in full, this miniseries highlights recurring themes, striking stories, and powerful ideas that emerged from this year’s conference.

[03:09] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [03:17]: We begin in New Orleans, a city often imagined as free, vibrant, and uninhibited, but where the traces of confinement run deep. Rashauna Johnson, as part of the Culture@Large lecture series hosted by Society for Cultural Anthropology, invites us to walk the streets of New Orleans not just as observers, but as witnesses to history in motion in the presentation, “Spectral City—Walking New Orleans through Slavery’s Present Pasts.”

Johnson invites us to see how enslaved people navigated the city, created networks of survival, and forged freedom in the cracks of oppression across landscapes and borders in New Orleans.

Rashauna Johnson (RJ) [03:57]: So I will begin with two quotations, both from the same 2007 PBS American Experience documentary entitled “New Orleans.” And I highly recommend it. The first is from Irvin Mayfield, a prominent jazz musician—also slightly controversial in the recent past, but a very important jazz musician here. And that quote is this: “New Orleans is a very old city with a lot of tradition, a lot of culture that is born out of ceremony. You can find history anywhere, but in New Orleans, it’s kind of like we are always living the history; the history is being lived on a daily basis. People don’t tell history. They do history.”

And then, right after in that documentary—which I love, and it’s great in classrooms, I should also say—the late John Scott, very important and prominent local author and artist, his quote is this one: “There is so much history and cultural richness in that city that it oozes up out the sidewalk. You know, it’s hard to be there, and really be there, and not begin to absorb that. Of all the places I’ve been in the world, New Orleans is the only place I’ve ever been where, if you listen, sidewalks will speak to you.”

Obviously, that gives me the motivation here. Today I want to think about those sidewalks, and to think of them collectively as a palimpsest, right—or, sites that contain traces of all that has come before. Drawing on material from my first book project and with some from the second, I want to examine both the not-so-laudatory, the stories you won’t hear on the tours around here, and the liberatory human stories that speak to us from these storied sidewalks.

And, as Yukiko mentioned, that first book is a spatial history of slavery in Atlantic New Orleans at the turn of the 19th century. And frankly, it started with a very basic research question, which is: How, in a city even then known for debauchery and not following all the rules—how do you make slavery work, in a society in which it seems nothing worked according to the order and the rules by which most of commonsense norms happened?

[06:00] And so that started my research question, and what I came up with—and we’ve already kind of gestured toward it—is that, in contrast to the kind of carceral landscape that we often associate with plantation slavery in rural areas—say, in my second project, even—in this port city, and to some extent its rural surrounding areas, a unified slavocracy did not conspire to physically contain or uniformly isolate enslaved persons. And instead, political leaders, slave owners and slave holders, Anglo-Americans and French Creoles, free and enslaved persons, all contested the best uses and regulation of enslaved mobility. And so that’s what I wanted to sort of think through, right—rather than focus on the ways that these people attempted to limit slave movement, which is often what we think about in the context of chattel slavery, I wanted to think about the many contexts and techniques for regulating the essential enslaved mobility on which the city’s history depended.

There’s also the parallel here, right, which is that that very mobility and connectedness also allowed for the sort of seeds of the institution’s destruction, to some extent. And that’s overstating it in the earlier period, obviously, but, right, that very sort of connectedness, that compulsory mobility that I think of as confined cosmopolitanism, also allowed enslaved people to create communities, to engage with diverse people across the urban landscape, to survive, to resist, to run away, right, to engage in the kind of fugitivity that could pull at the workings of chattel slavery.

[07:59] And so I call this phenomenon “confined cosmopolitanism,” which refers to two related but distinct dynamics. One of which is asking us to think about heterogeneous assemblage on an urban landscape. And so that’s one piece. And then the second piece is to ask us to think about the individual journeys across the boundaries of the city, the region, and even the Atlantic world. And so trying to really shake up overly fixed and rigid notions of mobility in the context of slavery—not simply in a straightforward, liberatory way, but to think in a complex way about the ways this could be liberatory, but it could also, this kind of compulsory mobility could work, could be essential to the founding and maintenance of this slaveholding metropolis.

[08:42] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [08:49]: Moving alongside this relationship of streets and history we now transition to two presentations from the “Haunting Atmospheres” panel, where atmospheres can be as restrictive as walls themselves.

First we have Karina Bera’s presentation called “The Haunted as a Haunting Being: The Imaginary of Haitians as Other-Than-Human."

Across the island of Hispaniola that is shared by Haiti and Dominican Republic, Beras explores how Haitian subjects are imagined not merely as outsiders, but as hauntings that unsettle national identity in the Dominican Republic.

In gated communities, along borders, and fences as well as within the social fabric of the island, race, embodied by the Haitian body, becomes or is atmospheric. The state itself appears ghostly, shaped by histories that refuse to disappear. Here, the past and present intertwine where Haitian bodies are rendered hyper-visible as threats, while others navigate invisible borders of exclusion, all haunting the atmosphere.

Karina Beras (KB) [09:48]: In January of 2023, upon my return after a trip back to the U.S. for the Christmas holiday, I noticed a change across Batay Libertad, historically a sugarcane settlement community and my primary field site. As soon as I stepped foot onto the batay, I saw a set of gates enclosing Lisaura’s porch. Soon thereafter, while walking over to Suri’s house for a cup of coffee, I noticed five other homes with newly installed gates enclosing their front porches, and a handful of other houses with an added metal gate to their home entryways. Suddenly I felt as though I had entered a gated community, the kind that resembled a prison. The phrase “gated community” typically evokes ideas about exclusivity and aesthetically similar housing structures conceived as spaces where people of particular financial status reside, i.e., usually not poor. There is also the notion that such residential designs are meant to keep out certain groups of people. Yet, to keep out some means to keep others in. Gates, of course, are also technologies of incarceration that are increasingly used as infrastructures for migration and border control. Only two hours east of the batay, a giant gate is being constructed as a mural wall along the Dominican-Haitian border to deter Haitian migration into the D.R. However, in the batay, gates are installed as mechanisms to keep out immigration agents and police officers. In both cases, they symbolize a kind of safety, though not guaranteed.

The site of the newly installed gates stayed with me as I ruminated on why they were erected during the time that I was gone. I learned that in the face of increasing persecution and the traumatic aftermath of the immigration raids of November and December of 2022, several families decided that gated entryways and blocked-off porches were one of the few options available to them as a means of protection. Though the gates are not a complete barrier or deterrence mechanism, they do complicate the work of agents looking to drag people out of their homes, break down wooden doors, and steal goods and monies from the houses that they’re able to access during the raids.

[11:48] The juxtaposition of these changes is that while the residents feel more secure with gated entrances and porches, they also live within an even more carceral space. Given the circumstances under which batay residents made the decision to add metal gates to their homes, which has less to do with creating a sanctuary and more with forming a barrier against violence, the bars must then be understood as constituting a disciplining instrument that, in this case, inadvertently reproduced state logics of carcerality and containment of the black Haitian subject.

Prior to the gates, Lisaura and her family often spilled out from the porch and onto the small patch of dirt outside of their home. Children ran in and out of the house with ease, and neighbors often stopped by to sit on the wooden bench across from her home while having morning and afternoon chit chats. After the installation of the gates, however, I often saw two of the younger children holding on to the metal bars, attempting to squeeze their faces through the gaps, and gazing out at the other children, wishing to be let out. Lisaura’s youngest daughter often complained about her inability to leave the house, as she once did, without having to alert her mother. Her daily patterns shifted, including her sense of freedom. Everyone in the family was essentially trapped in, and those of us who walked past were kept out. The neighborly exchanges and casual hangouts diminished as a consequence of the imposing structure.

The gates were evidence of a pervasive fear of deportation and the accompanying family separation. The immigration raids were already producing part of the state’s intended effects of severing community ties and relegating people into the shadows. The gates isolated people and instilled a paralyzing panic in those whom the state sought to displace, expel, and deprive of rights. Zaire Dinzey-Flores states that gates for the poor are, quote, “meant to shut undesirables in. Gates have assumed an enemy inside, an enemy outside.” End quote.

[13:50] The erection of gates across Batay Libertad reinforces the state’s logic that people of Haitian descent are to stay hidden and out of sight, out of society, or altogether removed. Given the government’s increased deportation and removal missions, many residents have resolved that the decision to remain within the borders of the batay is their best chance for permanence in the D.R. Importantly, Paul Brodwin argues that, quote, “The need for concealment creates a pervasive anxiety about personal security in everyday life.” End quote. This anxiety is the effect of state haunting.

[14:26] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [14:37]: In another presentation from the “Haunting Atmospheres” panel, if Beras asks us to sense race in the air and the spaces around us, Jasmine Blanks Jones, in her presentation, “Sankofa, Tuko Pamoja, Yor yor! Atmospheric Conditions of Engagement in and Through Performance,” turns our focus to the body itself, mainly to demonstrate how history, diaspora, and spirit travel through movement, song, and performance.

AE [15:02]: Through three compelling cases, Blanks Jones explores how interpretation and cultural boundaries shape movement across borders. The first case takes us to a private tour of the National Great Blacks in Wax Museum in Baltimore where she and her classmates are welcomed by an interpreter portraying Harriet Tubman. The second case follows her journey through Tanzania, where she encounters a cultural border where sacred songs are not meant for outsiders to hear. While these songs are performed, she finds herself indoors beyond earshot of the divine. In the third case, Blanks Jones brings us to an outdoor theater performance where distinctions between colonial pasts and present blend as the lines between audience and performer begin to blur—notably, with the call of “yor yor” that means “we are with you.” Here is Blanks Jones’s performance.

Jasmine Blank Jones (JBJ) [15:53]: With an ensemble composed of Liberian actors from Before You Theater, black American actors from Colonial Williamsburg Foundation and dancers from the intergenerational Angels of Praise Dance Ministry in Baltimore, Maryland, U.S., the performance depicts three variations of the 1822 historical encounter and centers on the co-mingled voices of two women elders, one from pre-Revolutionary War America, and the other from the Basa ethnic group of the West African Pepper Coast. These elders share ancestral knowledge and ask questions that call the audience and their fellow actors to ponder the very nature of pre-colonial political thought in the black world and its ramifications for how citizenship and the diaspora are constantly unmade, remade, and repaired in the space of Liberia.

The play aims to unearth the possibilities of early interactions between Black Americans and Indigenous people who met them upon their arrival, with implications for how diasporic hegemonies may be overcome by the affective nature of theater-making as an embodied practice.

Yor yor, 2022. In the first example that we shared, Mama Janice, the griot of the state of Maryland in the U.S., does not act. She interprets. But more so, she “channels” Harriet Tubman, is the terminology she uses to describe her performance-based work. The second case, our Masai sisters, they do not perform their dances and songs, but they access the sacred through sung and embodied prayer.

[17:50] And in the third case, the Liberian and diasporan performers learn that we could not tell this story without accessing the ancestral. Calling together people in the present to do any collective work relies on such recallings and reckonings. It requires us to sit in both history and heaven and our present bodies, recognizing each person’s spirit and the divine purpose that they have in the present, earthly moment. But what lies beyond speculation? When the archive goes silent, how do we create performance that moves beyond critical fabulation? Does the spirit speak? And how do we listen as anthropologists, as community-based researchers? This kind of soul work has long been at the forefront of Black storytelling and embodied community-building practices.

Former President of the Association of Black Storytellers and former official griot of the city of Philadelphia Linda Goss’s 1989 anthology Talk That Talk does such soul work. It brings together people and thought from the Caribbean, from the continental United States, stories from Africa, through not just the stories that people tell, but how they tell their stories.

Black storytelling is about the griot with audience. These stories are able to grapple with social complexities such as displacement from sacred land, environmental emergencies, and our ability to belong to each other, because Black storytelling moves people—like the yor-yor call and response that means “we are with you.”

[19:53] Black storytelling embodies the spirit of sankofa, carrying the future on our backs and unpacking our past to move forward. It is never merely performative. Some interchange, be it corrective or healing, must take place for the collective good. Tuko pumoja, we are all together

In thinking through these terms of gathering, and the ancestral, and atmospheric conditions, I’m drawn to the new ways we might employ critical fabulation in the context of people in the environment, rather than apart from it—thinking through the Anthropocene through an African perspective. How does the natural world help us understand what may have been or been lost through displacements such as colonialism and its afterlives? How does the spirit in nature offer new ways of speaking? How are changing atmospheric conditions related to climate change impacting our spiritual conditions, and how we may or may not understand ourselves as part of a shared spiritual community, irrespective of religious practice? And finally, what does the body know and speak when we are knowing and speaking with others in changing atmospheric conditions?

[21:26] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [21:36]: Now onto a series of presenters from the panel, “From Refusal to Repair: Global Ethnographic Perspectives.” This panel explores how refusing repair is not neglect, but rather a lens for critiquing structures built on extraction and oppression.

First we have Faruk Seref’s presentation, “Queer Refusal as Holding Space: Deportability, Queer Kinship, and Intimacy Beyond Love in Berlin” where survival itself is negotiated through care, solidarity, and refusal.

In Berlin, Seref introduces a Turkish butch lesbian named Jabo who navigates threats of deportation by engaging in non-traditional forms of marital relationships like polyamory and paper marriage to maintain visa status.

Between “real” and “sham,” Seref shows how this blurring is an act of solidarity where survival and care emerge through refusal.

Faruk Seref (FS) [22:25]: Jabo explained her decision as follows: “First, our lives are already too enmeshed, like, we don’t want to live together, for example. Second, Kora already has too much on her plate, including her own citizenship process. So the whole marriage bureaucracy of two lesbian Turkish citizens requires more than our combined emotional and material resources. And third, I don’t want to risk such a big imbalance in our relationship dynamics. Of course, Kora said she would marry me out of solidarity, independent from all the other things, but yeah, I don’t want it, and she agrees.” Unquote.

So Jabo and Kora understood that their nuclear family would not be enough to grant them the kinship safety that they needed. It wasn’t only that Jabo didn’t desire normative ways—like, she didn’t, but also she was aware that Kora was too precarious for that kind of sponsorship. Scholars like David Eng and Lisa Lowe remind us that the family’s privatization is historically tied to racial capitalism. The state offloads responsibility for care onto households while relying on the labor of racialized subjects. Like in most queer “soli-marriages,” Jabo’s concerns illustrate that not only their non-normative desires, but also their racialized experiences of class and non-citizenship led them toward non-normative ways of relating.

After a couple of months, Jabo announced her plan to marry a white, northern European trans man, who I call M, that she’d known through overlapping queer networks. Unlike most monogamous couples, neither Jobo nor Kora viewed this arrangement as a threat to their relationship.

[24:01] Instead, the collective commitment of them, also their kin, to negotiate boundaries and question the hegemonic relationship conventions accorded Jabo the much-needed mental, emotional, and material care. Preparing for the marriage was communal. Kora coordinated logistics. Others helped organize documents. Informed by the community, they chose to wed in M’s home country where they would face much fewer obstacles than the heavy surveillance of German authorities on marriage migration.

Friends staged photo shoots, later editing dates to construct this kind of romantic timeline that the state demands. Then came the wedding ceremony, celebration—no, not ceremony, the celebration that we had at the public park, during which thousands of us genuinely cherished Jabo’s new journey and also M’s inclusion to our kin. We had music, colorful balloons, flowers, rainbow flags, food, drinks, and we took a lot of selfies and group photos as we would do at any other celebratory gathering. The photographs from before and during the wedding celebration were essential materials of kinship, as Karsten would highlight.

As much as proving the loving couple’s forever bond to the state, they were actually for documenting the collective joy we shared. Jabo and M then began living together. M replaced Jabo’s former flatmate. And in addition to household tasks, groceries, expenses, occasional meals, and small talks, they began sharing taxes and health insurance responsibilities. Like, they made a home together literally as a family. It was just, instead of sexual or romantic attachment, their household was built on solidarity and a commitment to care. We can also formulate it as a specific form of friendship, like a significant kinship category that is often downplayed as a form of light touch intimacy.

[25:52] My own relationship with M also revealed the affective reach of extended kinship. Though we never became close friends, we often found each other at nightlife, at community events, and checked in with one another. Whenever needed, we held space for each other. And in my two years after meeting him, knowing M was nearby made the space feel more like home to me. This too, I think, was the feeling of kinship that reshaped the very experience of space and making it into more like a home.

Jabo and Kora recently broke up, and, per our phone conversations, it was not easy for either. Yet, they’ve been navigating it with an emphasis on accountability and care, finding to deepen their collaboration and friendship with the support of their queer kin. Meanwhile, Jabo has secured permanent residency and Kora has become naturalized into German citizenship.

So I will now wrap up. Soli-marriage is commonly practiced among queers both in Germany and in the U.S. As I demonstrated, it usually involves friends or friends of friends who live together and perform as a couple against the state surveillance on citizen-non-citizen marriages. Although such marriages can easily be misinterpreted as “sham,” my discussion shows that such arrangements often provide stable and reliable kinship care, primarily because they’re not based on romance or sexuality, but on border-crossing solidarities.

Jabo’s story is a testament to resourcefulness and creativity of queers of color. I’ve shown that they utilize marriage while refusing the private family, questioning the dominant entanglement of romantic love with commitment and kinship care, and blurring the line between real and sham.

To cross these borders of coupledom exclusivity and the state’s demand for the authentic marriage, they adopt the queer grammar of polyamory. Expanding Jabo’s formulation of soli-marriage, I conceptualize such border-defying practices of relatedness as “soli-kinship,” a politically informed infrastructure of kinship where accountability is practiced beyond hetero- and homo-normative expectations of romantic love and monogamous coupledom.

So, final words, soli-kinship is based on two kinds of border refusal.

[27:56] First, the commitment to solidarities that transgress national borders. And two, the refusal of hegemonic boundaries of the so-called “authentic” and “real” kinship structures like friendship, life partnership, and being lovers. Border-crossing solidarity guides its politics of care and accountability, and the queer refusal allows alternative kinship practices through the language of polyamory. Ultimately, as a queer practice against the harm of the borders, soli-kinship primarily begins with the combined refusal of national and affective borders. Ultimately, I’ve shown that soli-kinship is a border crossing practice of making place against the so-called border regimes. Thank you.

[28:36] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [28:45]: The next voice from this panel asks us to rethink what repair itself might mean. Ramon de Haan’s presentation, “Refusing and Dismantling the Afterlives of Slavery and Colonialism,” centers debates about reparations for slavery in Suriname and the Dutch Caribbean, which are proposals sometimes framed around billions of dollars in compensation that often center on financial redress. But De Haan reminds us that the legacy of slavery cannot be repaired through money alone.

Repair, he argues, must be understood as something far broader. It is a process that is spiritual, environmental, political, and cultural, that ultimately requires confronting the ongoing “afterlives” of slavery.

Ramon de Haan (RDH) [29:24]: So in Curaçao, as a de facto colony of the Netherlands, there is no directed government effort on reparations. Suriname, however, has been independent since 1975, becoming the first colony to peacefully gain independence out of the modern Dutch Empire. Recently, the country is on the verge of a potential economic boom. Large offshore fossil fuel fields were mapped out, and the talk of oil and gas is everywhere. As a member of CADICOM, Suriname has its own National Reparations Commission, led by the aforementioned economist, Armand Zunder. Yet in Suriname, party politics impedes collaboration. Each ethnic group has its own legacy political party, in addition to the party founded by the former dictator and later democratically elected president, Desi Boutersen. The effectiveness and budget of the National Reparations Commission depends on the ruling coalition, and some parties ignore it as a, quote, “black issue.” This has produced many civil society repair initiatives siloed around ethnic and political affiliations, which avoid the state, both because of unstable and unreliable government subsidies, and because of long-standing tensions rooted in colonial management after the emancipation in 1873.

However, there is a strong agreement among those working on repair around refusing a different state: the Dutch. And refusal of the Dutch state, and Dutchness in general, manifests in multiple ways. But here I will focus on one incident involving the former Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte and Surinamese communities both in the Netherlands and in Suriname. This reflects the same principle as in Curaçao. Surinamese actors refuse to engage with repair if it’s not on their own terms.

[31:20] So in the fall of 2022, Dutch media reported that Prime Minister Mark Rutte was preparing a formal apology for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade. The news provoked immediate backlash from Suriname, Surinamese organizations in the Netherlands, and the Dutch extreme right, who view colonial history as a source of pride. Rutte’s handling of the apology reflected the Dutch government’s colonial mindset. It was a secretive top-down process. The date itself, December 19, seemed arbitrarily chosen without consulting descendants of the enslaved or Caribbean governments. And it turned out to be a budget decision, as Minister Franc Weerwind was already planning a business trip to Suriname at that time. Up until the speech, it was unclear what Rutte would say, or if apologies would even be made. So here, refusal manifested in concrete actions. Surinamese organizations in the Netherlands tried to sue the Dutch government to delay the apology until proper consultations occurred. This lawsuit failed, by the way. The Dutch minister Franc Weerwind, of Surinamese descent, was initially assigned to deliver the apology during his planned visit to Suriname.

And the absurdity of this, a descendant of enslaved offering Rutte’s apology to Suriname, sparked widespread protest. Both the Surinamese government and civil society refused to participate. The Dutch vice prime minister was ultimately sent to Suriname to smooth things over. And in the end, no formal apology happened in Suriname, and Weerwind only participated in a group discussion.

[33:01] Rutte’s speech, which was watched over live stream, was met with cautious optimism, especially his assertion that, quote, “the healing process must start now, and we will write the program for that process together.” Yet Surinamers on both sides of the Atlantic asserted that they would only participate on their own terms, refusing the format and to some extent the content of Rutte’s apology, effectively denying the Dutch authority over the process of repair.

So to conclude, refusal is a central practice of repair. In Curaçao, activists at the conference reframed decolonization itself through the lens of repair, articulating local agendas for social, political, and environmental justice. In Suriname, fragmented politics have made state-led initiatives difficult, yet activists continue to refuse Dutch definitions of reparations, insisting on leading repair themselves.

And across these contexts, refusal is not simple opposition. It is a creative, multi-dimensional practice of repair that challenges top-down approaches and centers the agency, knowledge, and priorities of those most affected by the afterlives of slavery and colonialism. It is, in fact, a practice that I’m still learning from my partners in the field.

[34:24] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [34:33]: If De Haan asks us to rethink repair in the context of colonial histories, Lea Coffineau’s presentation “Refusal of Colonial Charity and Collective Politicization of West African Migrant Youth in France” brings us to the present day of Paris, where migrant youth begin raising broader questions about racism, colonial legacies, and displacement through acts of refusal.

Coffineau’s work follows young West African migrant minors in Paris who find themselves caught in a legal and social limbo. Many arrive seeking recognition as minors and access to child protection services. Instead, they are often denied legal status, housing, and aid, which leaves many navigating life on the streets where they face constant policing.

Lea Coffineau (LC) [35:17]: In December 2023, thirty-four young men, supported by their allies, occupied the Parc de Belleville community center and refused to leave until housing was secured for all. Within twenty-four hours of negotiations, the city offered an acceptable solution. For many, this is the day the Collective des Jeunes du Parc de Belleville, literally Belleville Park Youth Collective, was born. Encouraged by this initial victory, the collective gained confidence and consolidated its organization. It started holding weekly general assemblies, launched an online fundraiser, designed a logo, created an Instagram account, and purchased its first megaphone. Alongside regular rallies and disruptions of public events, the collective staged several occupations of municipal buildings, which pressured the city of Paris into providing emergency housing for over 700 dismissed youth living on the street in 2024.

Sustained by a continuous influx of new members and strengthened through the political education of their citizen-allies, the collective’s members rapidly gained a permanent place in the French anti-racist and anti-colonial network. They forged alliances beyond migrant solidarity circles to include housing and climate justice movements, police abolitionists, anti-fascist groups, and educators and social workers’ unions. This collective politicization challenges the normative ethical expectations imposed on migrants—and what is more, on child migrants, who should show gratitude, docility, and resilience.

Refusing the role of passive beneficiaries of humanitarian aid, these youth broke out of the shell into which they had withdrawn since their rescue at sea, an event that marked the beginning of their dependence on NGOs.

[37:12] Through the experience of taking new risks and building community with peers and members of French society on an equal footing, they progressively rebuilt themselves as political subjects in their own right. Using refusal as a collective method of struggle, each member engaged in what Deborah Thomas calls a process of recapturing bodily sovereignty, a forward-looking practice of constructing the person they aspire to become in this new life.

Yet, despite their efforts, media outlets and public opinion consider them “manipulated” by their leftist allies—a convenient denial of agency for those unsettled by their demands. While demanding housing, education, and health care, the youth held firmly onto two non-negotiable conditions.

The first one was the refusal to be divided. Each time youth and allies negotiated with the city, they faced the request to establish a shortlist of the most, quote, “vulnerable” among them. The definition of the term remained vague, though it referred mainly to those whose bare lives were immediately at risk, the severely sick and the women, categories that already benefited in priority from the scarce resources of migrant aid organizations anyway. Each time the collective discussed the proposition as a group, and each time they refused to comply with what they saw as an attempt to demobilize them. Furthermore, for them, producing such a list meant reproducing the very hierarchies that govern the management of migrant lives, deciding who deserves protection and who can be left out. The youth insisted on collective treatment: It’s either all of us or none of us.

[38:59] This stance directly opposed the humanitarian logic of selective compassion that seeks to isolate individual cases of suffering rather than address the structural violence affecting the group as a whole. On vit à Paris, on chie à Paris, on reste à Paris—literally, “We live in Paris, we shit in Paris, we stay in Paris”—became their slogan. Although they found great strength and community in this collective stance, their interlocutors at the city grew cautious of what they viewed as, quote, “radicalization,” an argument too often loaded with racist and Islamophobic contempt.

Their second non-negotiable condition was the refusal to be sent away from the Paris region. To give some background, the collective emerged in the year leading up to the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics. With millions of tourists and as many cameras expected to flood the city, authorities ordered the clearing of the streets and the fencing-off of public spaces to prevent the installation of new tents. This process was widely described as a campaign of, quote, “social cleansing.” For the collective youth, this moment represented a strategic opportunity. The city, they argued, should house them, not out of charity, but to avoid unwelcome commotion during such a highly publicized global event. Their interlocutors responded to these threats by proposing to load them onto buses and send them off to other French cities. This offer was simply unacceptable. They had no say in where they would be sent, often hours away from the capital, no information about the living conditions awaiting them there, and no means to return. Being relocated far from Paris would sever their access to lawyers, doctors, and administrative offices. It would cut them off from their network of solidarity and make it nearly impossible to pursue their legal cases.

[41:00] The so-called “solution” was in effect a guarantee of disappearance. As it could be anticipated, these two non-negotiable conditions—the refusal to be divided and the refusal to be displaced—also worked against the collective. What the youth saw as necessary affirmations of self-preservation were read by city officials, and to a certain extent by public opinion, as signs of intransigence, even bad faith. Their insistence on staying together and remaining in Paris was portrayed as an unwillingness to compromise or else an abuse of the city’s generosity, reinforcing the stereotype of the, quote, “ungrateful migrant.”

In a context where obedience and gratitude are expected in exchange for the means of bare survival, the very principles that sustain the youth unity became grounds for their moral disqualification. Repairing who they are as individuals meant letting go of the performance of innocence inherent to the child migrant identity.

For refusal to be understood as a political act, it must be a deliberate choice, a renouncement made in full awareness of what is at stake. The youths’ “no” to displacement, to invisibility, to dependency, is not a negation, but an affirmation of the kind of life they wish to lead. It marks a shift from being acted upon to acting in the world, from being managed by humanitarian regimes to being regarded as political subjects.

[42:33] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [42:43]: In this next panel called, “Habitable Air,” we hear three presentations that explore what it means to live, survive, and care for one another in spaces shaped by environmental crisis, inequality, and political power.

First we have Laurence Ralph and Jé Judson, who take us to New Orleans. In their presentation, titled, “Sacrificial Habitation: Pollution and Policing in New Orleans, Louisiana” they examine how public safety is shaped not just by policing, but by infrastructure, environmental risk, and government priorities. Their presentation looks at how funding decisions leave communities vulnerable to storms, failing systems, and long-standing racial inequalities—which leads them to question of what happens when protection is treated as a political choice. Let’s take a listen.

Laurence Ralph (LR) [43:30]: So this is where, for us, this idea of sacrificial habitation comes from—a very concrete way in which communities are made to live with the consequences of political choices that prioritize punitive policing over something like concern over the environment. And so we look at this as not accidental or something that just happens, but a product of policy choices. And so while Katrina became a touchstone for these feelings of unsafety, as I mentioned, it was really important because it exposed all of these failures, not only on the city level, but on the federal level, the state level, when responding and creating more vulnerabilities that are predictable based on race, class, access to resources. And as we were coming together for the “Habitable Air” project, it was on the heels of another hurricane, which was Hurricane Ida, in which, again, some of those same lessons from Katrina were reproduced, only in smaller form.

[45:03] And so it’s not as if the local government learned from Katrina and then enacted all these safety measures. The city was still vulnerable, and in many ways more vulnerable—but just because of the aging dynamics of the city.

And so at the same time, there were debates about how local governments, how politicians, in particular, are spending their money, which really brought this question of sacrificial habitation to the fore in our understanding of public safety.

Jé Judson (JJ) [45:34]: As Laurence mentioned, we live in a city with outdated critical infrastructure. So our levies and our flood control require sustained local, state, and federal investments. Our energy grid is outdated, and that hardening process requires federal support. And the flood pumps that are necessary for keeping us dry require electricity in order to work. So when the power goes out, the pumps go out—which means it doesn’t really matter if the pumps are working or not, they’re not going to work that day. And so it’s not just that we’re passive victims of natural disasters. We live within a political economy that systematically prioritizes community state functions, most notably policing, over investments in these critical infrastructures that are capable of providing more enduring concepts of safety.

And so vulnerability is actively reproduced through these fiscal choices. So in 2020 to 2021, we had several strikes. So sanitation and city maintenance workers went on strike over unfair wages, unsafe conditions, and a lack of PPE during COVID. Sanitation is critical for pest and rodent management, particularly in this climate. Both are disease vectors. And the catch basins, which are the—like, I don’t even know how to describe them, but if you look at the curve, there’s a little metal like thing where the water goes in. We have to keep those clean in order for flood mitigation to work. And in a city like New Orleans, between debris just from the environment, and Mardi Gras beads, our catch basins are often closed.

[47:14] And so in summer of 2021, the city decided to break the sanitation worker strike by using prison labor, rather than negotiating those contracts. And later that summer, we were hit by Hurricane Ida, which was not as big of a storm as Katrina and not as strong when it made landfall, but it was one of the first storms to maintain major category status the entire time and move from the coast up through Louisiana. So it stayed at a category four or three all the way through the state. Hurricane Ida brought catastrophic power failure to New Orleans. The entire grid was knocked out, including the French Quarter, which did not happen during Katrina. And as a result of that, and many other things, we had no trash collection for six weeks. And the temporary stopgap was supposed to be that we have reduced trash pickup for just down to once a week, but we have still been at once a week since then. So it’s been four years of once a week trash pickup, and now we are facing a plan to increase the cost of trash collection by fifty percent. So we’re fewer services at a higher cost.

And so the state government also reinforces this structural bargain. In 2020, the state legislature passed an anti-“defund the police statute”—which meant that any municipality that reduced police funding by more than ten percent for a fiscal year would forfeit eligibility for state funds. Additionally, in 2022, when Roe v. Wade was overturned, Louisiana has what we call a “trigger law,” which meant that abortion immediately became illegal as soon as Roe v. Wade went away.

[48:57] And so the city was very clear that we weren’t going to prioritize prosecuting people for abortions. And as a result, the state—the former attorney general, who is now the governor—proposed withholding all state funding as punishment for that position and settled instead on flood funds—which meant that the Louisiana State Bond Commission delayed $39 million in flood control funds over this decision, and those funds would be necessary to finance that power station to operate the drainage rumps.

And then, I’ll just try to do this quickly, but in 2023, the city decided they were going to perform community input into the city budget, and they did a survey among residents, and the survey obviously has a very low sample size, so we can put that somewhere else in terms of its validity. But basically, the budget process was manipulated to legitimize prioritizing police. And so when you think about the categories that are presented here for how people have to rank what their priorities are, it forces public safety and public health into conversation with each other when they’re not necessarily aligned.

[50:04] People generally would have tied their priorities of funding police and fire as high as they prioritized improving streets and infrastructure.

[50:16] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [50:25]: Next, Nicole Fadeke Castor, in their presentation, “The Enduring [Urgency] of Black Breath: African Diaspora Perspectives” reflects on breath as a source of healing, memory, and collective care. Honoring the work of Omotayo Jolaosho, this presentation weaves together personal reflection, Black studies, and spiritual practice to explore how breathing together can become a way of resisting violence, holding grief, and imagining new forms of connection and restoration.

Nicole Fadeke Castor (NFC) [50:55]: “Breath as/and Blackness.” In the weekly meetings of our collective care circle, Tayo often directed us to breathe together and that when we were ready—only when you are ready, they would gently offer—to mindfully move in ways that healed our bodies, our spirits, our souls. This all started with us gathering and breathing. We breathed together for over a year, every week, in one of the many collective care circles that they led as projects of their nonprofit, Breath & Body Alive, which was founded to affirm the significance and sanctity of Black lives, of Black bodies, of Black breath. We had a breathing practice that we would come to call “home,” where we synced our breathing cycles to a series of rising and falling notes that provided the temporal and oral structure to regulate our breaths—if I remember correctly, a four-four-four pattern.

[51:58] In 2020, it grounded us and brought us into a shared “otherwise” space in that first year of the pandemic and in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Our breathing together illustrated Christina Sharpe’s definition of breathing: “Collective noun, a multitude of black persons gathered, a breathing.”

We gathered in response to Tayo’s call on social media and over email to form a, quote, “breathing” that in our collective breath would come to affirm both our Blackness and our beingness. This call emerged from and was informed by their praxis on embodied epistemology and healing justice. That praxis manifested in the ways they created spaces for us to breathe, to share breath, to experience collective breathing, to be Black, for Blackness breathing. This nexus was a manifestation of how they moved through and engaged the world.

Many theorize praxis, but fewer embody it. Tayo was a person whose self informed both their practice and their theory, if one can be distinguished from the other. They wrote in the beginning of their article that their concept of, quote, “Black breath affirms the significance and sanctity of Black lives and Black bodies, especially given the perilous convergences of police violence, the global pandemic, and racial inequities,” end quote, which they also saw as, quote, “a powerful material and spiritual force, a point not only of harm, but also of recovery.”

In the repetition of these weekly meetings, we, or the “us,” experienced an intersubjectivity that created a whole greater than the sum of its parts, that, while fleeting, was also a source of sustenance. Yet the sustenance of stringing together out of fleeting moments week after week, it built us a refuge, a hush harbor, if you will.

[54:00] For me, there was an unexpected power to create an otherwise space in the coming together of our bodies, mediated across space by video, of all things.

Hershini Bhana Young asks us, reflecting on a loved one’s verbal stuttering, to consider what happens if, quote, “we envision his particular muscular tensions, rhythms, and patterns of words as an alternate world-making practice based in Black sociality and epiphenomenal time.” End quote. In a work where she also muses that, quote, “the act of breathing contests ideas of a unitary bodily whole self,” end quote, could it be that over time, that our collective embodied practice, the muscles drawing in the air, holding it and then letting it go, crafted a form of Black sociality? Was then our Black folks’ collective care circle, our hush harbor, our breathing, in the Christina Sharpe sense of the word, that is in our collective breathing and our weekly gatherings, perhaps we expanded past our subjectivities to engage our intersubjectivities and build an alternative world that was restorative refuge for us and for our Blackness.

In the next section—and I’m going to keep it short for the sake of time—but it was “Black Breath as Restorative.” And I said that this is central to the work of social change and social justice, and that is a shared point of departure between me and Tayo. So from this understanding, I reflect on our time breathing together in the wake of the murder of George Floyd as a time of both healing and activist work, and both here as a compound of both. The engagement of the body through breath is a practice that heals and advocates for a conceptualization of a body subjectivity that is more than some of its parts.

[56:00] As Ashon Crawley reflects in speaking of Black breath in the context of Black Pentecostalism, quote, “The capacity for the plural movement and displacement of inhalation and exhalation to enunciate life, life that is exorbitant, capacious, and fundamentally social, though it is also life that is structured through and engulfed by brutal violence. This life, life in Blackness, otherwise Black life, exceeds the very capacities of seemingly gratuitous violence to be totalizing.” End quote. The practices that Crawley describes in the Black Pentecostal context—including shouting, whooping, and speaking in tongues—challenge the objectifying stance and practices of anti-Blackness that through physical and epistemic violence attempt to reduce Black life and people to something fungible and less than human. The power of collective breathing in the Sharpe sense of, quote, “a multitude of black persons gathered,” end quote, creates expressive expression and creation that breaks through the attempted totalizing of anti-Blackness that Crawley references.

[57:14] The last section, “The Spirit as Black Breath,” brings us back to where we started, with Christina Sharpe’s breathing. For as Crawley so aptly says, quote, “we do not merely share in sociality, we share in the materiality of that which quickens flesh. We share air, breath, breathing through the process of inhalation and exhalation.” End quote. Here, in the breathing, in the sharing of Black breath, is found not only a collective affirmation, but also healing in the face of all the insufferable violences. Structures of white supremacy, from social to environmental, bring to bear on the multitude of positions and subjectivities marked under the organizing rubric of Blackness.

[58:04] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [58:18]: Finally, Bjørn Enge Bertelsen, in “The Non-Linearity of Time: Mozambican Politics of Irreconciliation and Extractivism,” brings us to northern Mozambique, where communities are living through the impacts of war, displacement, and resource extraction. Through stories from people affected by violence surrounding gas development projects, he explores how breath, survival, and humanity are challenged as well as sustained while in the midst of conflict and deep environmental changes. A quick disclaimer, this presentation contains scenes of extreme violence.

Bjørn Enge Bertelsen (BEB) [58:52]: During my own fieldwork in Pemba in 2023, accounts of violence were shared with visiting strangers such as myself, often with a sense of urgency and importance. One such account came from Ansha, a female inhabitant of Paquitequete in Pemba. Paquitequete is one of several high-density poor neighborhoods that have been filled with people fleeing the war. Being a Muslim, Ansha had herself fled to the city in 2019.

I provide here just a short excerpt from her account. “They (the Mozambican armed forces) killed my uncle, burned all the nets for fishing, and many of the boats. They destroyed much more than the rebels. It was the same in other places, I’ve heard. In Mocímboa da Praia, Macomia. The rebels are not real Muslims. They burn the Quran, they burn the mosques, they kill other Muslims. Worst of all, when they capture other Muslims, they cut their heads off. I saw a father being killed and the child had to carry the head. With all this violence from the rebels, from the government, from the Rwandans, from the Total people, it is difficult to live. It is difficult to breathe, both at night and during the day.” End of quote.

Ansha’s account is painful, but what I would like to underline is how she linked violence and war to breath, or rather the difficulties of breathing. In a very real sense, decapitation entails killing a person by taking their breath away. However, Ansha also speaks of stifling circumstances beyond the severing of head from body. This relates to how breath is fundamental to necessary cyclical, life-giving and life-affirming practices to become and remain fully human in life as well as in death.

[1:00:00] Breath, it is held in most Mozambican sociocultural contexts, and I think also in South Africa, and this is what Kerry alluded to, is central to the transition from living corporal being to eternal spirit. This transition is commonly secured through rites being undertaken following death. This may involve leaving a path of air out of the grave so that the breath or the spirit of the person may leave the soil to become part of the atmosphere. The interruption of such cycles through violence means that a number of spirits will be left unrecognized and unintegrated into the sociocultural and environmental order. The spirits will also thereby be excluded from an atmospheric order where living breath means allowing ancestral spirits to flow through or be around human bodies.

Ansha and others, therefore, did not only narrate the stifling and devitalizing violence directed both at individual persons and the interruption of these cycles of vitality in humanity. Instead, she recounted how, when they had settled in Pemba, she started engaging in pro-social and life-affirming activities. And again, I quote:

[01:02:03] “War is death. It can stay with you, also, if you do not do anything. We, those that arrived in Paquitequete, decided to do something for those who arrived. They came in boats to Pemba from across Cabo Delgado, from Mocímboa da Praia, Mecúfi, Quissanga. It did not matter who they were, if they were family or not, Muslim or not. They were human. We met them there, on the shore, as they hit the beach. They were all tired and had seen death. Many had left their family behind. We gave them hot tea with sugar, some beans, and maize meal so that they could eat. We also gave them a place to stay. But most important was to give them something to drink so that they could open their throats, so that they could breathe.” End of quote.

Ancha and other residents of Paquitequete met their fellow humans on the beach with food and promises of accommodation. However, they also exercised, I would suggest, a variety of what Paul Gilroy has called “offshore humanism.” For Ansha and her fellows, the question of humanity was not in doubt, and those arriving should be given tea to cleanse their throats to regain humanness. As anthropologists, I think we should not limit ourselves to present such cases from northern Mozambique as more-or-less perfect exemplars of global configurations of capital, of planet-wide anthropocenic extraction mechanistics, or as the fragmentation of sovereignty. To do so would be to risk replicating a helicopter view of human suffering, far too often projected onto complex realities. For, as I have attempted to show here, these are not simply local cases reflecting global processes, threatening the capacity to breathe and making air uninhabitable.

[01:03:56] Instead, conflicts such as that in Cabo Delgado assume importance and should be explored to identify the oftentimes murky global connectivities spanning the terrestrial and aquatic spheres of the globe. To zoom in, to listen, and to engage in such circumstances reveal two central dynamics, if we are to grapple with conflicts around energy complexes. For one, they show the hugely important in situ cosmologies of life cycles and humanity that persist also in very dire contexts. Second, they demonstrate, as in this case, how forms of offshore humanism are central to face stifling circumstances of violent extractivism and war.

[01:04:46] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

AE [01:04:56]: [On] our last panel, “Sonic Traces of Possibility and Peril,” we have Alexandra Lippman with her presentation titled “Temporalities of Funk: Weaving, Cutting, and Imagining Future Time in Brazil.”

In this talk, Lippman argues that music is not only a form of resistance, but also a way of performing sovereignty. Through Brazilian funk, she explores how Black artists in Rio’s favelas use music, media, and performance to claim power, dignity, and belonging in the face of racialized policing. Rather than seeing funk simply as protest, she asks us to hear it as an assertion of Black sovereignty. The excerpt you’ll hear focuses on the artist MC Poze, whose music challenges stereotypes of Black criminality while exposing how those very claims to autonomy are policed by the Brazilian state.

Alexandra Lippman (AL) [01:05:46]: In this case, Poze gets the last laugh. “Me Sinto Abençoado” (I feel blessed) is his most popular song on Spotify, with 178 million streams. Police silence Poze’s performance of sovereignty. Arresting the MC, they broadcast unspeakable white supremacy of the nation’s racial democracy. In the live broadcast, Poze arrives at the police station, his hands shackled behind his back, flanked by police with machine guns. The white hands of a policeman grip Poze by the neck, pushing the favela king’s head down for the entire time. White hands stick microphones in his face. Women’s voices ask him if he’s a gang member. Poze remains silent, and the journalist answers for him. The MC does shows in areas dominated by criminal factions in the presence of various traffickers. When he does answer another reporter’s question, she continues to speak over him. Images that went viral recently show men heavily armed at events that Poze performs at. The sale of drugs at these events feed the criminal system for buying narcotics and arms.

In Unpayable Debt, the Brazilian feminist and philosopher Denise Ferreira da Silva traces how raciality—emblematic of coloniality—produces violence. Quote: “The image of the other that racial knowledge manufacture,” she writes, “is an effect of this double violence.” The mediatized spectacle of the MC’s arrest reinforces racial knowledge that inscribes the Black male body not only as criminal and violent, but also as powerless. As Christen Smith argues, quote, “Violence against the black body is a rehearsed, embodied, haunted script.” Moments of violent encounter between the police and Black residents are scenarios of racial contact that make visible ghosts of racial tension that haunt the nation.

[01:07:49] She notes how these spectacles of racialization kind of continue and remain unspeakable. Yet funky has made race and racism utterable in Brazil. The criminalization of funky, with mediatized arrests of MCs, push race and racism into public discourse.

Five days into his ninety-day pre-trial sentence, a judge freed MC Poze through habeas corpus. One day later, MC Poze dropped the music video for “Desabafo 2” (Exhale 2), to his four and a half million YouTube subscribers. The video remediates his arrest, now in black and white, and speeds up the reporters narrating his charges. Once he’s freed, the reporters ask him, yet again, if he belongs to Comando Vermelio, Poze shouts back, “Me, a bandit? I’m a trabalhador, a worker, an artist. Why are they doing with this to me? Is it because I’m black or because I’m favalado?” He challenges the reporter. “I had my luta, my fight. I built my castle. My money’s clean. It’s from my luta, it’s from my shows. Leave me in peace.” His song begins and the image changes to color.

[01:09:09] So I’m going to try to play a little bit of this.

[01:09:18] [MC Poze’s music plays]

[01:09:48] In the video, thousands filled the street in front of Bangu Place to welcome Poze to freedom. The crowd recalls Carnival De Rua, or a political protest. Can you hear me talking over this? The montage, police spraying tear gas and firing rubber bullets to disperse the crowd, with anxious close-ups of Poze’s wife crying, creates a dialectic between state-sponsored police violence colliding with the suffering of working-class Black favelados. A wide shot of the MC jogging out of the prison in a shiny white T-shirt, a huge smile on his face, past police and fans into the arms of his wife, the influencer Vivi Noronha. And I’ll just skip over this a little bit to save time. The video fades to black. “MC não é bandido” (an MC isn’t a bandit or a gangster), flashes on the screen. “Desabafo 2” is multiple, a dramatization of Black liberation, the favela winning against the police, and the MC’s power. MC Poze transforms his arrest into power. Victorious over the police and the mass media, Poze declares, “A favela venceu” (the favela won), with lots of N's. “Desabafo 2” dramatizes the joy and pain of the anti-Black carceral state and imagines radical freedom with Poze as a proxy for others.

[01:11:18] Last month, on October 28th, Rio’s civil and military police executed over 120 young men and boys in the deadliest one-day massacre in modern Brazilian history. More than 2,500 police mobilized in Penha and Complexo Alemão favelas in an operation to arrest the top red command narco-traffickers. Four police officers died. While most of the dead had no arrest warrants, Rio’s governor, Claudio Castro, asserted that only the police were victims. In considering how, quote, “death mediates sovereignty,” Deborah Thomas asked what sovereign and non-sovereign death feel like. Four days after, residents carried corpses in alleys in the forest up to a main street for identification by family members and the hope of a proper burial. Now these people are actually being investigated for interrupting the investigation and for committing criminal fraud by moving the bodies of their neighbors and family members.

So these deaths are beyond the limits of Brazilian sovereignty. The responsibility to, to quote Lula again, “take care of,” has been a unique and defining feature of Lula’s discourse on sovereignty.

[01:12:38] However, rather than calling for care for the victims, their families, or the thousands of people in the favelas injured during these failed extradition operations, Lula responded by emphasizing the need to be tough on crime. Instead of denouncing police killing, Lula immediately signed an anti-faction law to expand sentencing and announced, quote, “The government of Brazil is working to break the spine of drug trafficking and organized crime.”

Lulu’s response shows the limits of sovereignty. How Brazil Soberano emerged as a political meme and how an MC was imprisoned for performing sovereignty as the King of the Favela reveals the way in which sovereignty, quote, “is having a moment.” However, the massacre, [in] which only police officers were victims, reveals sovereignty’s limits.

[01:13:32] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]

SJ [01:13:39]: To wrap up, lets return to Chávez’s presentation, “Black Flag,” from the panel “Sonic Traces of Possibility and Peril.”

He challenges the idea that certain communities are “newcomers,” especially in places like Chicago, where Puerto Rican communities have long histories shaped by migration, state violence, and cultural resistance. Drawing on poetry, soundscapes, and urban history he shows how sound and silence become political. Let’s hear from Chávez’s presentation.

[01:14:09] [Corillo music in Humboldt Park, Chicago plays]

AC [01:14:47]: So these are the sounds of the corillo, which is a long-standing Sunday jam session which began in 1975 in Humboldt Park, the neighborhood, the heart of Puerto Rican Chicago, and the city’s northwest side. And when the corillo is cooking on a hot, syrupy summer’s day in the city in these moments, culture exceeds objectified former practice. The congregation attunes shifts in dispersal as listeners are asked to stay put in space, to be still in time, to dwell in a sweet, syncopated break. And resting in the break, to invoke Fred Moten, sounds out the possibilities of the unrecognized, or the unheard, carrying forth aspects of what exceeds the moment itself and expressing its connectivity to other moments, to other histories and places. And the corillo is a site of such poesis, from Chicago to Puerto Rico.

In July of 2019, more than a million Puerto Ricans across the island protested for several weeks, resulting in the resignation of Governor Ricardo Rosselló.

[01:15:54] And these mobilizations erupted in response to PROMESA austerity measures and allegations of government corruption, all made public through leaked communications between the governor and his aides, deriving journalists and political opponents, as well as mocking the struggles of Puerto Ricans in the wake of Hurricane Maria. And protesters drew on old and new forms of activism to mobilize a range of people, as Veronica Dávila and Marisol Lebrón documented, including, quote, “young people dancing provocatively on the steps of the oldest cathedral in the New World to reggaeton beats,” end quote. Now these protests were historic, given their size, their efficacy, but also because of their creativity—giving rise to, what you see here, the Puerto Rican black flag of mourning.

[01:16:41] As a form of protest, altering the flag was significant given its symbolic value, having been outlawed by the U.S. colonial regime from 1898 to 1952. Yet, the black flag endures globally, on the island, in Chicago, and its symbolism provides a useful envelope for listening to the perils and possibilities of Puerto Rican Chicago and its political otherwise.

AE [01:17:06]: Together, these presentations have shown that borders are more than lines on a map. They shape notions of race, redefine belonging, and influence potential futures of diverse communities. From the spectral streets of New Orleans to the heart of Paris, from Mozambique to the Dominican Republic, and from Chicago to Berlin, race traverses across landscapes, borders, and bodies. However, these narratives also serve as a reminder that borders are not absolute. Through the transformative power of migration, poetry, performance, and the courageous act of refusal and repair, individuals continue to redefine racial identities, histories, and relationships. Overall, these presentations affirm that race and borders are not solely tales of exclusion but also sites of resistance, sovereignty, and the creation of new possibilities.

SJ [01:17:55]: Thank you for listening to AnthroPod. This episode is part of our three-part series highlighting presentations from the 2025 meetings of the American Anthropological Association in New Orleans. Stay tuned for the next episode, as we showcase panelists engaging in environmental issues and contexts.

[01:18:11] [AnthroPod theme music, “All the Colors in the World” by Podington Bear]