Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality [Hardcover]

Asks how we can better understand a politics of refusal

Writing a new story of Black politics,Jumpemerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.

In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration,Jumpattends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world. Centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery of Black politics, Tenorio proposes a Black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew.

Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakurs abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.

Sam C. Tenoriois Assistant Professor in the Department of Womens, Gender, and Sexuality Studies and the Department of African American Studies at The Pennsylvania State University. Challenging and powerful, Sam C. Tenorio'sJumpinvites us to extend our thinking to the many ways that black people refuse the colonial order. By reexamining histories that are often foreclosed, Tenorio helps us apprehend the multiple forms and measures by which Black unfreedom is constructed and extended and the multiple ways that black(l#d