Leniqueca Annah Welcome

Come Out of This World is a monograph with a central visual collage component that 1) analyzes the co-constitutive projects of racialization, criminalization, and statecraft in contemporary Trinidad that perpetuate black death and 2) speculates on a radical alterity where all life is cared for. Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork contextualized through archival analysis, this monograph details the juridical, political, and affective production and management of the figure of the “gang murderer” in Trinidad to show how it is used to constitute the Creole respectable nation even as it menacing presence jeopardizes the nation-state’s stability. As this monograph reveals the ways anti-black violence undergirds black sovereignty, interrogates how the popular moral framing of violent crime legitimizes and masks this phenomenon, and visualizes through collage how an otherwise can be imagined and remade from existing archives of violence, it responds to calls for a radical humanist and abolitionist anthropology. Ultimately, Come Out of This World underscores the limits of black/multicultural nationalist projects and shows the necessity of ending criminalization and policing—through which violent anti-blackness endures—for true liberation to be felt by all.