Chris Affor wrote "My Story" and "A Tribute to Solidarity: My Oasis" while serving time in Kirikiri maximum security prison in Lagos State, Nigeria. He was a member of the PRAWA programme, which works to build solidarity among prisoners. Chris continues to serve time on awaiting-trial holding charges.Uju Agomoh has a PhD in criminology and prison studies (University of Ibadan, Nigeria), an MPhil degree in Criminology from the University of Cambridge, England, and an LLB from the University of London (Queen Mary and Westfi eld College). She is involved in monitoring human rights violations within African penal systems. Her work includes training, research, documentation, and provision of support services to prisoners, ex-prisoners, torture survivors, and their families. She has undertaken prison assessment visits in over 100 prisons in Nigeria, South Africa, The Gambia, and Rwanda. Her work has facilitated training over 5,000 prison guards in good prison practice and international human rights standards for the treatment of prisoners in Ghana and Nigeria. She is the founder and executive director of a human rights non-governmental organization, Prisoners Rehabilitation and Welfare Action (PRAWA), with headquarters in Lagos, Nigeria. She was appointed in July 2000 as a federal commissioner and member of the Governing Council of the National Human Rights Commission in Nigeria. She is the xi xii | Colonial Systems of Control special rapporteur on police, prison, and other centres of detention for the Nigerian Human Rights Commission and a member of the Nigerian Presidential Committee on the Prerogative of Mercy.
This paper uses what Toni Morrison named ‘rememory’ in Beloved (1987) to redefine what Jacques Derrida named ‘hauntology’ in Specters of Marx (1994) to produce Black Feminist Hauntology: a counter-analysis to broken conceptions of time and bodies that critiques dominant, White supremacist constructions of colonized/colonizing, enslaved/enslaving and imprisoned/imprisoning bodies, lives, deaths, and histories. Black Feminist Hauntology is a socio-philosophical study of ghosts through whom we can locate the abusive and morally bankrupt nature of structural race relations as they manifest through the violent race-making and land-grabbing conquests of colonialism. If, as Baucom (2001, 80) proposes, “time does not pass, it accumulates”, then what does it mean to live within a system of incarceration in the United States where the majority of those shackled and locked up are the direct descendants of enslaved Africans, while the majority of those who lock them up and profit from their confinement are the direct descendants of European slave holders and colonists? This localized inquiry can be applied to varying contexts, namely White nation-states and their systems as they occupy lands and resources across the globe. Black Feminist Hauntology provides a framework intent upon exorcizing Colonial Systems of Control (Saleh-Hanna, 2008) through which race, class, gender, and sexuality are constructed, conquered and enforced. To facilitate the application of this exorcism the article introduces three intersecting shape-shifting methodologies: transcendent, metamorphic, and structural. Each is inspired by Egyptian mythology, reawakening a point of vision and definition born in analytic spaces dwelling well beyond the shadows and reaches of colonial slavery.
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