American Elegy: A Triptych

Abstract

On March 26, 2018, Jennifer Hart drove her SUV off a cliff along the northern coast of California with her partner and at least five of their transracially adopted Black children inside. Their remains were recovered at the crash site. As of this writing, a sixth child, Devonte, remains missing and is presumed dead. Four years before the crash, Devonte was famously photographed at the age of twelve, tearfully hugging a white police officer at a Ferguson rally in Portland, Oregon. By simultaneously occupying the feel-good spectacle of interracial intimacy and the everyday tragedy of interracial violence, Devonte embodies and embodied the conditions of contemporary Black life and death in the United States. His disappearance is intimately linked to other forms and histories of American state violence. Through cultural analysis, autoethnography, and poetic intervention, this essay performs wake work as a method for living with the unmournable.

Dear Sylvie: A Handful of Letters to Nearly Perfect Strangers

“…Our encounters, though brief, were thick with the “affective rush of sensation that stirs not from within the body, but between bodies” (Parreñas 2018, 17). Gone as quickly as they came, these strangers have nonetheless remained intimately, viscerally present: they’ve stayed with me, moved me, even in their absence (Mariner 2020). These letters combine what I wished I had told them then and what I’d like to say to them now.…”

“…In style and form, this project was inspired by the works of Kathryn Mariner (2020; 2019), Maggie Nelson (2015), and Laurence Ralph (2020). Mariner gave me a way to think about words; Nelson, to think alongside authors; and Ralph, to think through letters.…”

“Who you are in these pieces of paper”: Imagining Future Kinship through Auto/Biographical Adoption Documents in the United States

“…In a recent ethnographic monograph based on my fieldwork at First Steps, I argue that future‐oriented experiences of waiting, apprehension, and speculation prove central to the American adoption process, which is constituted through a set of interwoven practices of anticipation, economic investment, and observation/surveillance that I term “intimate speculation” (Mariner 2019a). In a series of related articles, I have traced the intimacies and intricacies of domestic transracial adoption through twinned modes of surveillance and monitoring in the ultrasound and home study, which allow social workers to mobilize a penetrating gaze (Mariner 2018); the entanglements of race and kinship evident in white adoptive parents' care of their Black children's hair (Mariner 2019b); and the contemporary reverberations of historical racial trauma in the 2018 disappearance of the transracial adoptee Devonte Hart (Mariner 2020). The previous arguments I have developed about the relationship between social inequality and adoption—particularly regarding race, class, and gender—inform the current analysis, but cannot be reproduced here.…”

Kentucky Kindling: Stoking Swidden Anthropology with Fire‐play on the Family Farm

“…“ But ,” I’m told, “Henry was Mammy’s favorite person! And she didn’t like hardly anybody.” “In a white nation built on Black disposability, can whiteness love Blackness?” (Mariner 2020, 11).…”

“…Saidiya Hartman (2008, 8) says that writing at the edges of the unspeakable and unknown “create[s] a space for mourning where it is prohibited.” Holding open hauntings, horrors, grief, and “ambiguous loss” (Mariner 2020) for the hazy yet “awesome ghosts of history” (Coates 2014) is, perhaps, a method of witnessing and reckoning with enduring violence in the wake of chattel slavery (Sharpe 2016a; Thomas 2019). Refusing neat arguments, quick liberal fixes, and turns to redemption (Povinelli 2016; Shange 2019; Jobson 2020) requires taking the heat.…”