This talk describes Maroon anti-necropolitics and its implications for multispecies justice to aid in creating a genuinely decolonial Caribbean ecological theory. 

Ndyuka Maroons, the descendants of one nation of self-liberated formerly enslaved Black Surinamese peoples, have created a cosmopolitical order based on the refusal of necropolitics (which is the assumption that politics must be predicated on the sovereign human appropriation of the right to kill or let die). In its place, Ndyukas practice an ethics of sociality premised on the shared collective vulnerability of present and future generations to the consequences of acts of killing.

This Maroon anti-necropolitics has three primary principles: (1) death always relates specific deaths to future collective harm; (2) humans do not have a sovereign right to death over the lives of others; and (3) death does not rupture relations between the living and the dead, or the community and its enemies, but intensifies them by imposing ineradicable connections of tragic loss between perpetrators and victims.

Ndyukas accordingly articulate a theory of relational justice that rejects human sovereignty while emphasizing human responsibility. In doing so, I illustrate how Maroons have imagined a world beyond necropolitics and why this helps confront the ways in which necropolitical assumptions inflect how multispecies justice is imagined.

Speaker

Stuart Earle Strange is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the National University of Singapore and a Maria Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Institute for Cultural Studies and Asian Language, University of Oslo. He is the author of Suspect others: Spirit mediums, self-Knowledge, and race in multiethnic Suriname (2021) and has published articles and chapters on Singapore, Suriname, Maroon communities, multispecies anthropology, and plantations, among other topics.

Moderator

David Kloos is a historian and anthropologist with a focus on Southeast Asia. His main interests are religion (particularly Islam), gender, the politics of knowledge formation, visual methods, and the study of the social, political, and cultural aspects of climate change.

Format, date, time & venue

This seminar is a hybrid event and will be held in the conference room of KITLV, Herta Mohr building, room 1.30, Witte Singel 27 A, Leiden and online via Zoom, on Thursday 24 April from 14.00 – 15.30 PM (CET).

Registration

If you want to join this seminar on location, please register via: kitlv@kitlv.nl

If you wish to join this seminar online, please register here

Image

Photo by Stuart Earle Strange.