#mimi sheller

[haitianhistory]

Sheller, Mimi. Democracy after Slavery: Black Publics and Peasant Radicalism in Haiti and Jamaica. Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2000, 224pp.

Liberté ou la mort: Placing the Haitian Revolution in the Age of Revolution and Atlantic History

In the words of the publisher: “Mimi Sheller's ground-breaking comparative study analyzes the struggle for freedom and democracy in two Caribbean societies in the aftermath of the abolition of slavery.”

“Pairing the revolutionary Republic of Haiti with the British colony of Jamaica, the author shows how peasants in the 19th-century Caribbean developed a radical critique of elite liberalism and constructed an alternative Pan-Caribbean African identity. Comparing two major peasant rebellions and the relation between them, she describes how Haitian and Jamaican survivors of slavery contributed to the making of democracy in the West. Scholars of the Caribbean and of postemancipation societies will find this book essential. At the same time, the issues Sheller addresses on democracy, citizenship, and subaltern publics will also be useful to the broader communities of sociologists, political scientists, and students of colonial and postcolonial studies.”

*You can read a review of this important book (written by Prof. Patrick E. Bryan) to understand some of the challenges faced by early independent Haiti here.

[aampmuseum]

“Kerry James Marshall’s work arises from a black radical tradition that encompasses pan-African, Caribbean, and Black Atlantic writing, philosophy, and art.” See the rest of MImi Sheller’s essay for Hyperallergic here.

[librarycards]

“Deliberation over transport justice is therefore not simply about expanding mobility or even accessibility but must also concern itself with the cultural meanings and hierarchies surrounding various means of and infrastructures for mobility, including their valuation and who determines this value. In fact, it calls into question what constitutes relevant facts and meanings—i.e., are we deliberating over mobility, or health, or racial justice, or ecological well-being, and who decides?”

Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

[emphasis mine]

[librarycards]

"'Subversive mobilities' may also be a form of resistance against dominant mobility regimes. Historian Jacob Shell has traced many practices associated with 'ungovernable patterns of mobility and rebellious geographies of evasion and connection,' often based around the use of subversive forms of animal mobility including camel trains in the desert, mule trains across hilly country, sled dogs in the far north, or elephant-based transport in South Asia. 

Anthropologist James C. Scott likewise gives a fascinating account of a vast region outside the state, known as Zomia, in the highlands of Southeast Asia where 'autonomous people lived not only in the hills but also in the marshes, swamps, mangrove coasts, and labyrinthine waterways of estuarial regions.' In these peripheral extra-state areas, 'a zone of refuge from state power, a zone of relative equality and physical mobility,' there was a constant movement of people escaping the reach of the state yet existing in relation to its modes of governance.

Historians of early modern working classes describe 'the unlikely ways in which the geographies of early Atlantic imperialism also provided a skeleton for the emergence of a surprising flesh of connections across vast spatial networks.' In the midst of slavery, dislocation, piracy, exploitation, and incarceration, argue Peter Linebaugh and Markus Rediker, there also took shape a mobile world of 'sailors, pilots, felons, lovers, translators, musicians' and 'mobile workers of all kinds [who] made new and unexpected connections.' 

Taking inspiration from this, Deb Cowen finds similar processes at work in the fluid infrastructure space of the contemporary world, where 'the Arab Spring, the Occupy movement, the so-called Somali pirates, a global wave of logistics labor actions, and Indigenous protests of new rounds of dispossession'—despite all their political differences—'point to the potential for a different occupation and organization of logistics space.' And we could add, a different politics of mobility: a kinopolitical struggle for alternative ways of moving and dwelling.

Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

[emphases mine]

[librarycards]

Infrastructure space is not mere background but takes active forms. Keller Easterling describes the “political character of infrastructure space” based on “accidental, covert, or stubborn forms of power” that hide in its folds. Infrastructure space has “dispositions” that take active forms, she argues, through the organization of components into dynamic mechanisms including multipliers, switches and remotes, wiring and topology, and interplays and governors. The car, for example, is a multiplier that determines the shape of the road, highway, suburb, housing forms, and exurban development. The elevator is a multiplier that shapes the vertical densities of cities. The cell phone is also a multiplier that can expand dimensionally without a point-to-point centralized network. A highway interchange, a dam, or a landing-point for an undersea cable are all examples of “switches” that control flows.

Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

[emphases mine]

[librarycards]

Kotef, however, also highlights the resistance to [hegemonic] power: the practices “from below” of what people “do” with movement. Focusing on the context of Israeli checkpoints, she calls on us to study more closely how people cross checkpoints: “how they move; where they go; in what ways differential movement (prescribed, incited, or transgressive) dictate differential use of space; what strategies people develop when they are stopped; what obstacles do they find to block the violent movement of the state itself (building barricades, burning tires, sitting tight on a road).” To investigate the various modes of meaning, affect, drives, and momentary encounters that arise during such movements, any inquiry “would have to go beyond the movements of people themselves, and incorporate the movements of things and different forms of assemblages forming between them.” Borders, then, are a complex assemblage of people and things, data and bodies, objects and representations, all of which are put into relative relations of (im)mobility with each other. We can situate these arguments in relation to a wider turn in border studies that has found many theorists rethinking the relation between territory and borders, and between mobility and containment. In contrast to theories that “distinguish between fixed territorial logics of state power versus the mobility of capital accumulation, relational theorists emphasize that it is through acts of bordering and debordering that a territory is at once produced, stabilized, and sometimes deterritorialized. Borders are not simply edges, limits, or barriers for controlling mobility in and out of adjacent territories, nor does territory pre-exist the border, but instead the relation between the two terms can be understood as “bordering practices.” The “state border is not simply a borderline,” Sassen writes. “It is a mix of regimes with variable contents and geographic and institutional locations,” including different flows of capital, information, professionals, undocumented migrants, smuggled goods, etc.

Mimi Sheller, Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes.

[lapeaudelamemoire]

One social implication of mobilities research is that we need to address entire mobility systems, logistical practices, energy cultures, and the ways in which everyday mobility practices are embedded in these larger socio-technical systems that are complex, interdependent, and more-than-human. These are fundamentally political and social questions that require attention to the social injustices built into present ways of "doing" everyday life, going places, moving things, and processing mobile information.

Mimi Sheller, Preface to Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, p. xv. 2018, pub. Verso Books

[lapeaudelamemoire]

How can we begin to develop notions of mobility justice that encompass these many different vectors of class, racial, gender, and other injustices across entangled scales? While climate change, migration, and urban equity may appear to be a disparate set of problems [...] in many ways they all come back to questions of uneven (im)mobilities.

Mimi Sheller, Preface to Mobility Justice: The Politics of Movement in an Age of Extremes, p. xiv. 2018, pub. Verso Books