The Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive

Garcia, Angela

doi:10.14506/ca31.4.06

Cited by 35 publications

(12 citation statements)

References 25 publications

(21 reference statements)

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“…And so I returned to a project that I thought was finished. “The people and places that we circle back to in the ethnographic endeavor—hence in space, time, and writing—are critical practices integral to the making of new forms of knowledge,” wrote Angela Garcia (, 588).…”

mentioning

confidence: 99%

Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic

Hunleth

2019

Cult. Anthropol.

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Based on ethnographic fieldwork in Lusaka, Zambia, this article puts forth the concept of imaginal caring to examine a form of caring that is fantastical, exaggerated, and counterfactual. To develop this concept, I take the vantage point of young children (ages eight through twelve) who lived in households with persons who were suffering from tuberculosis and HIV. The children were involved in providing day‐to‐day care in many ways. They were also constrained in their efforts to give and show care because of their social positions, their access to resources, and their small human bodies. Through a series of examples, I demonstrate the ways in which children created and played with often visual images of giving care to family members in the past, present, and future. I show that fantastical imaginations and images of children's involvement in caring not only expressed that they cared for others but also served as ways for them to provide or perform care. There were high social and personal stakes for children in not being able to care for others, and children's efforts to care imaginally responded to such stakes, envisioning futures different from those scripted for them by global health discourses and the conditions of marginalization and exclusion into which they were born.

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mentioning

confidence: 99%

Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic

Hunleth

2019

Cult. Anthropol.

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“…On the shelf behind me is a row of more binders filled with archival letters that were either bequeathed to me by interlocutors or copies of letters that I have found in archives. Far from inert artifacts of the past, these letters are materialized experience, consciousness, affect, and social life (Garcia 2016(Garcia , 2020Luk 2018).…”

Section: Epistolary Methods Social Death and Black Masculine Care As Rebellionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Anthropologists and other social scientists have increasingly drawn on letters as sources of ethnographic material (Garcia 2016(Garcia , 2020Kohn 2012;Ralph 2020;Uzwiak and Bowles 2021). As a data-gathering strategy, Jennifer Harris (2008, 8) has found that correspondence is effective at eliciting intensely personal conversations that would be less likely to occur through traditional interviewing techniques.…”

Section: Epistolary Methods Social Death and Black Masculine Care As Rebellionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under Domestic Warfare

Burton

2021

American Anthropologist

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This article examines the forms of intergenerational kinship and care work that Black men perform within and beyond US prisons. First, I offer a historical conceptualization of domestic warfare as a multilayered process that targets Black radical activism, social/familial life, and the interiority of Black subjectivity. I argue that the rupturing of intimacy and familial relationships precipitated by the prison should be understood not as an incidental byproduct of a poorly designed carceral regime but as a tactic of war and a condition of genocide. Next, I theorize letter writing as an ethnographic and political modality that is part of a broader repertoire of strategies that Black men deploy to survive within and rebel against domestic war. I then draw on correspondence between myself and Absolute, an imprisoned Black man, as well as oral histories I collected with elders of New York's radical prison movement, to show how Black men care for each other, forge kinship networks, and transmit knowledge. I close by showing how Absolute carries on traditions of knowledge production and care to younger generations of captive Black men and by connecting this intergenerational practice to forms of collective rebellion. [prisons, kinship, Black masculinity, letters, warfare] RESUMEN Este artículo examina las formas de parentesco intergeneracional y el trabajo de cuidar que hombres negros desempeñan dentro y más allá de las prisiones de Estados Unidos. Primero, ofrezco una conceptualización histórica de la guerra doméstica como un proceso de múltiples niveles que va dirigido al activismo radical negro, vida

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“…Nevertheless, my argument here does not steer toward a final account of exclusion. The archive, writes Garcia, may “open up the possibility of new historical narratives and modes of subjectivity” (2016: 575). Exploring daily life in the unit, I investigated how Sory and his coworkers were able to tell their own stories through alternative mediums and in intimate circles, and notably through what I would describe as private archives: recorded interviews, pictures and private movies, together with material memories from the unit that represented for them proofs of their involvement (see Photo 4).…”

Section: A Visit To An Old Friendmentioning

confidence: 99%

Homage to Ebola Fighters: Black Labor and Humanitarian Media Campaigns

Gomez‐Temesio

2022

Med Anthropol Q

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During the Ebola outbreak that hit Guinea in 2014, most of the people employed at the Wonkifong Ebola treatment unit were from Africa or Cuba. Despite the recruitment of black personnel, the unit exposes how the humanitarian infrastructure exploited Guinean workers as if their lives were less vulnerable than those of the foreign personnel. The Africanization of aid reveals a post‐colonial segregation at the intersection of race, class, and locality. The article follows Guinean workers in the quarantine unit, as well as their enrolment in media campaigns. Their experience illuminates a triage at the core of Global Health according to which not only were local workers treated as expendable lives, but their stories were silenced. Yet how did Guinean workers inhabit this anti‐black world? The article unfolds the journey of workers during the outbreak and three years later, exploring the strategies they used to produce their own narratives through personal archives. [humanitarian aid, humanitarian media campaigns, race, Ebola, archives]

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The Blue Years: An Ethnography of a Prison Archive

Cited by 35 publications

References 25 publications

Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic

Zambian Children’s Imaginal Caring: On Fantasy, Play, and Anticipation in an Epidemic

Captivity, Kinship, and Black Masculine Care Work under Domestic Warfare

Homage to Ebola Fighters: Black Labor and Humanitarian Media Campaigns

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