Dispossessed Lives insists that historical studies of the black Atlantic inform the ways in which race, gender, and sexuality continue to shape the lives of African-descended people worldwide. It is a history of how people of African descent became disposable, when black lives were objectified and thus vulnerable to the caprice, lusts, and economic desires of colonial authorities. It documents the strategies and structures that made black Atlantic lives subject to violence of thought and action. It offers material to reflect on the stakes of resistance in such systems and the reproduction of raced and gendered configurations of vulnerability. It begins to mark the way that the archive and history have erased black bodies and how the legacies of slavery–the racialized sexism and legal, socioeconomic, and physical violence against people of African descent–manifest in the violence we continue to confront. It is a gesture toward a reckoning of our own time. It is a history of our present.
(Via jmjafrx)