Some "new" articles

It's been a while since I've posted an update on this site, and I wanted to take a moment and share a new piece out this year and some older ones as well. The most recent is my article in Current Anthropology, "Racializing Aesthetics: 'Boat People,' Maritime Worlds, and the Metonymy of the Haitian Sloop." It's a full research article with wonderful commentaries that add a comparative maritime angle to the questions raised in the main piece, bringing in conversations related to the Mediterranean and Indian Ocean. I've learned a great deal from the comments and reply structure of Current Anthropology since my graduate school days, and it was an honor to participate as an author in this exchange. Going back a bit further to 2022, there's my piece in the Alabama Law Review, the fruit of a series of sustained conversations with a new generation of legal anthropologists that I'm delighted to have been a part of. I'm grateful to Deepa Das Acevedo for organizing the panels and conferences that led to this and another fascinating volume in Law and Social Inquiry. My own contribution to the ALR issue lays out some of what "newer" materialist approaches in anthropology can offer scholars within the legal academy who typically associate the discipline with a narrow band of empirical work on what anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot referred to as the "Savage slot." My article in Hau: Journal of Ethnographic Theory, "Border Dialectics and the Border Multiple," also came out in 2022. As the title suggests, it tackles questions related to the multiplicity (a term coined by Annemarie Mol) and dialectics (two concepts often deemed incompatible) of the maritime border spaces of the northern Caribbean. Finally, there's my chapter on "Ocean Gentrification" in a volume edited by Irus Braverman on the Laws of the Sea (it's open access!). The collection brought together scholars from law, geography, literature, and other disciplines to ponder a host of maritime legal themes with the support of the Research Council of Norway.

I have some public-facing pieces out as well: one in Boston Review on the often-forgotten legacy of detaining Haitians at Guantánamo (going back to the 1970s!); another in Slate on the parallels between the justification for Title 42 expulsions at the U.S. border and the exclusion and offshore detention of Haitians living with HIV in the 1990s; and a piece in Just Security on potential legal challenges under the Convention Against Torture to the Biden administration's commitment to continue deporting Haitian citizens amidst rampant gang violence and apparent state-sanctioned extortion in the national penitentiary. More news to come.