Sam C. Tenorio's new book Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality emerges through the leaps of the enslaved from the overwhelming geographic violence of the slave ships that carried them. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates jumping overboard as merely a suicidal symptom of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, the author demonstrates how bringing this practice to bear on the foundations of Black politics and carceral power allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.

In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration, Jump attends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the anti-Black world. Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakur's abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, by centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and extends a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.