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Jump offers a socio-spatial account of Black anarchism and an alternative theorization of the modern carceral state that emerges in the practice of enslaved people jumping from slave ships during the Middle Passage. 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, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.

Sam C. Tenorio (he/they) received his doctoral and master of arts degrees in African American studies, with a subfield in political theory, from Northwestern University and a bachelor of arts degree in history and women’s studies (now gender and sexuality studies) from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to his professorship, Tenorio held a postdoc with Penn State’s Africana Research Center and is an alumnus of the School of Criticism and Theory (’14) at Cornell University. His recent essays can be found in South Atlantic Quarterly and Cultural Dynamics and his current research is concerned with the analytic dis/placement of Blackness vis-à-vis gender in trans worldbuilding narratives and what it means to center destruction rather than fetishize affirmative resistance.