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Open Access Publications from the University of California

Scholarly Works (3 results)

  • Article
  • Peer Reviewed
UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2020)
Tomando como referencia los patrones de segregación racial en Salvador, Rio de Janeiro, Santiago de Cali y Bogotá, este artículo de reflexión propone un nuevo léxico político en los estudios sobre las dimensiones espaciales del racismo a partir de los conceptos de biopolis, necrópolis y blackpolis. Sostengo que los referenciales teóricos del “derecho a la ciudad” son importantes pero insuficientes para dar cuenta de la experiencia única de las gentes negras con las ingeniarías macabras que producen la ciudad multicultural. Blackpolis/Negrópolis es, entonces, presentada como una comunidad política alternativa fundada en una ética negra que resignifica lo que entendemos como humanidad, que reorganiza el mundo de la producción y que reconfigura radicalmente el vivir urbano de los condenados y condenadas de la ciudad.
    Cover page: Biopólis, necrópolis, ‘blackpolis’: notas para un nuevo léxico político en los análisis socio-espaciales del racismo [Biópolis, necrópolis, negrópolis: notas para um novo léxico político nos estudos sócio-espaciais sobre o racismo].
    • Article
    • Peer Reviewed
    UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2019)
      Cover page: “Esa paz blanca, esa paz de muerte”: Peacetime, Wartime, and Black Impossible Chronos in Postconflict Colombia
      • Article
      • Peer Reviewed
      UC Santa Barbara Previously Published Works (2020)

      The port-city of Buenaventura (in the Colombian Pacific coast) is at the center of national and international geopolitical interest as “the capital of the Pacific Alliance”, a US$ 3 trillion trade bloc formed by Mexico, Chile, Colombia and Peru to advance regional integration and cross-pacific trade. At the same time, the city is also known for extraordinary levels of gruesome violence, dismembered dead bodies that now and then appear floating in the low-tide area of port-expansion being its most visible aspect. In this article, we ask: How is racial terror tied to such a promising future for capitalist development? How can we theorize the dynamics of capital’s flow, economic expansion and global integration in this Fanonian zone of nonbeing? To answer these questions, we first analyze the colonial geography of this predominantly Black port-city as well as its place in the geographic imaginary of Colombia. Then, in dialogue with literature on multiple dimensions of racial capitalism and structural antiblackness such as racialized surplus populations and social death, we analyze some spatial dynamics that dialectically produce Buenaventura simultaneously as a dystopic and a value-producing spatiality that 

      repositions Colombia in the global economy. Finally, borrowing from Rhonda Williams’ analysis of racialized dispossession as “accumulation-as-evisceration,” we provide some reflection on the racially-driven eviscerating politics of capital- making in this port-city as it relates to current global geopolitics as well as to lasting antiblack injustices in Colombia and beyond.

        Cover page: Racial Capitalism, the Free Trade Zone of Pacific Alliance, and Colombian Utopic Spatialities of Antiblackness
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