Captivity: A Provocation

O’Neill, Kevin Lewis; Dua, Jatin

doi:10.1215/08992363-4189131

Cited by 9 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(7 reference statements)

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“…Cooper () foregrounded the language of “unruly affects” in her examination of homeless individuals in San Francisco who elude US criminal court control, despite legal efforts to contain and render them fixed. As O'Neill and Dua (, 8) argue, “people want out, and they want it now.” Sometimes the unruly or bumptious (Haraway ) is a matter of improvisation and bricolage in relation to divine agency (Bjork‐James ; Elisha ; Friedner ; O'Neill ; Scherz ) or in the face of global capitalism or neoliberalism (Degani ; Gershon ; Hoag ; Ofstehage ; Taylor ; Zhu ), while other times the unruly is a matter of life and death, terror and madness (Burraway ; Luna ). Some of this work used the language of the unruly to point to the contagious spilling over of affect in an attempt to take seriously a range of ways of being in the world.…”

Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…In this review piece, I consider articles from 2018 cultural anthropology journals to ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its walls, borders, or confinements? O'Neill and Dua (, 5), in a Public Culture piece, asked us to move beyond understanding politics as a “matter of abandonment” to seeing it as a “matter of captivity,” a “politics constituted by the tracking and capturing of humans and animals, but especially humans as animals.” Captivity involves both practices and affects and invites us to examine temporality, scale, and the politics of escape (6–7). What happens when we take captivity as a central provocation for staying with the trouble in the contemporary moment?…”

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confidence: 99%

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Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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This essay reviews articles produced in the four key American Anthropological Association cultural anthropology journals throughout 2018, and identifies the ways cultural anthropologists took up Haraway's invitation to "stay with the trouble" through implicit and explicit engagement with logics of captivity and its failures. This work suggests ongoing attention to long-standing themes in cultural anthropology-tensions between capture and escape, constraint and resistance, structure and agency-even as it suggests that captivity and its unruly failures can productively draw our attention to new ways of thinking about governance, temporality, scale, affect, political economy, posthumanism, ontology, care, and infrastructure. In this review, I ask: What can and cannot be contained in the contemporary moment, and what is at stake in that containment, or in the seepage that exceeds its borders?The review focuses on key ways anthropologists analyzed these long-standing questions anew in 2018: captivity and the nature of the human, dependency and exile, and violence and borders, and, by contrast, runaway change and uncertainty, unruly people and affects, and seeping waste and toxicity. Overall, I suggest that captivity and seepage provide productive provocations for further study. [year in review, sociocultural anthropology, captivity, escape, uncertainty, waste] RESUMEN Este ensayo revisa artículos producidos en las cuatro revistas científicas claves de la Asociación Americana de Antropología a lo largo de 2018, e identifica las formas como los antropólogos culturales aceptaron la invitación de Haraway para "quedarse con el problema" a través de un envolvimiento con las lógicas de la captividad y sus fallas. Este trabajo sugiere atención continua a temas de larga data en antropología cultural -tensiones entre captura y escape, restricción y resistencia, estructura y agencia-aun cuando sugiere que esa captividad y sus fallas ingobernables pueden productivamente llamar nuestra atención a nuevas formas de pensar sobre gobernanza, temporalidad, escala, afecto, economía política, posthumanismo, ontología, cuidado e infraestructura.En esta revisión, pregunto: ¿Qué puede y qué no puede ser contenido en el momento contemporáneo, y qué está en juego en esa contención o en la filtración que supera sus fronteras? La revisión se enfoca en las formas claves en que los antropólogos analizaron estas cuestiones de larga data de nuevo en 2018: captividad y la naturaleza de lo humano, dependencia y exilio, y violencia y fronteras y, por contraste, cambio desenfrenado e incertidumbre, personas rebeldes y afectos, y residuos filtrantes y toxicidad. En general, sugiero que la captividad y la filtración proveen provocaciones productivas para estudio posterior. [año en revisión, antropología sociocultural, captividad, escape, incertidumbre, residuos]

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Section: Unruly People and Affectsmentioning

confidence: 99%

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Doughty

2019

American Anthropologist

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“…This is why a useful theory of captivity should resist becoming like discipline or sovereignty, a generalized model for power in society; captivity is not uncommon, but it is also not ubiquitous—or if it is, then there are other problems at work. Similarly, captivity’s “commitment to contact” is a helpful counterpoint to the more general focus on precarity and abandonment in theorizations of power (O’Neill and Dua 2017, 7). Far from eschewing slavery or racialization, attending to captivity can help refine our tools for theorizing the relationships between these subjects and many others.…”

Section: The Muse (Or Ruse) Of Gtmomentioning

confidence: 99%

Captive Passages: Geographies of Blackness in Guantánamo Memoirs

2022

Transforming Anthropology

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This article reckons with the figure of Blackness in the US military prison at Guant anamo Bay, from captives who are racialized as both Muslim and Black to the invocations of racism and slavery in discourses incited by the prison. Broad continuities between the War on Terror and various forms of anti-Black state violence have long been observed by critical commentators, but this article aims to theorize these relationships with greater precision through the analytic of captivity. As a modality of racialization, captivity entails mobility across contexts as well as encounters of captivation through public narrative. This approach offers a distinctive vantage point on how the War on Terror's racialization of Muslims cross-cuts diverse geographies of Blackness, including in Muslim-majority societies. This essay follows the memoirs of Mohamedou Ould Slahi (Mauritania) and Walid Muhammad al-Hajj (Sudan) and is informed by the author's experiences as an attorney and activist working to close the prison. [captivity, Blackness, Guant anamo, Muslims, Arabness] 20

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“…In this work, captivity narratives emerge as dense sites from which to explore social memories and hidden forms of power (Lepselter 2016). In a recent provocation on captivity, Kevin O'Neill and Jatin Dua write, “Captivity—as event, description, and ultimately an analytic—provokes us to consider anew the complex contours of violence and economy, affect and agency, and bondage and freedom” (O'Neill and Dua 2017, 5). Captivity, they suggest, provides a lens to rethink broader discussions about the interrelationships between criminality, politics, and economy today (see also Comaroff and Comaroff 2006; Nordstrom 2007; Roitman 2004).…”

Section: Capture As Phenomenon and Analyticmentioning

confidence: 99%

Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans

Cons

2021

American Ethnologist

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What is the relationship between climate change and criminal predation? Bangladesh's Sundarbans, the world's largest mangrove forest, has, over the past decade, emerged as a climate frontier. It is a space viewed not only as a climate hot spot but also as a zone where control and opportunity emerge out of friction between long‐standing political economies, new conservation interventions, and the materialities of the mangrove forest. Concomitantly, those who work in the Sundarbans have reported a dramatic increase in banditry and kidnapping. This article proposes the concept of an “ecology of capture” to chart the articulations between such kidnappings and other attempts to control rents, resources, and territory. Seen through the lens of capture, the Sundarbans highlights how the global rush to secure climate hot spots against degradation and displacement produces new configurations of expropriation and exploitation. [climate change, piracy, capture, conservation, Sundarbans, Bangladesh]

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Captivity: A Provocation

Cited by 9 publications

References 25 publications

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Cultural Anthropology in 2018: Captivity and Its Unruly Failures

Captive Passages: Geographies of Blackness in Guantánamo Memoirs

Ecologies of capture in Bangladesh's Sundarbans

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