A poetics of living rebellion: Sociocultural anthropology in 2021

Abstract

AbstractIn this experimental year‐in‐review article, we center the everyday, ongoing, and emergent rebellions of livingness against imbricated structures of antiblackness and Indigenous erasure that shape carceral global landscapes to think with the premise that “liberation is an already existing and unfinished and unmet possibility” (McKittrick 2021, 13). We do so through engaging what Orisanmi Burton (2021, 2) theorizes as the “ethnographic and political modality” of letter writing as an intimate practice of radical kinship and rebellious method. Our focus is on rebellious methods of living and loving that call on anthropologists to think with the fugitive acts of everyday people struggling to survive the shifting terrains of white supremacy, settler‐colonial and capitalist power, and ecological devastation while also tending to the forms of expansion, imagination, and rearticulation that always already exist in and beyond this frame. Sharing practices of rebellion and rebellious method across geographies allows us to hone anthropological insights from terrains of struggle through which alternative futures can be imagined, including constellations of a new humanism and anticipatory vocabularies of otherwise worlds.