Jaime Amparo Alves - Home

“Zombies, believe me, are more terrifying than colonists”
― Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth

What actions are needed to decolonize the antiblack city?How might we attend to the urgent call of Black activists to defend the dead and to make Black lives livable? Centered around these questions my research proposes a Fanonian reading of cityscapes as colonialscapes. It also locates insurgent social imaginaries and spatial praxis, here understood as Blackscapes, to reclaim Black autonomy in these racially-charged contexts of urban precarity.

PERSONAL DIGITAL REPOSITORY

My personal repository includes professional writings on public journalism and activist research. As a freelancer journalist I have collaborated with alternative media outlets denouncing police terror and broader practices of state-sanctioned violence against Black populations in Brazil and Colombia. As an activist anthropologist, I have worked with Black-centered grassroots in the cities of Santiago de Cali and São Paulo where I have carried out longitudinal ethnographic research on blackcity. My current project deals with questions of urban coloniality (pax colonial) enforced by current technologies of policing within the context of the 'war on drugs' and peace-building. Likewise, I am interested in inciting, studying and participating in projects of spatial insurgency and black sovereignties beyond the urban margins. I teach Black Studies in the University of California, Santa Barbara.
Original background image:
Black Lives Matter, by Daniel Leal-Olivas. AFP/cnn.com

ACTIVIST RESEARCH

PUBLIC JOURNALISM