Laleh Khalili's latest manuscript, The Corporeal Life of Seafaring (2024), gives breath to the complex and hidden life of seafaring. Khalili provides a vivid account of the lives of seafarers who power the vast global trade network, typically hidden from land-based consumers. The researcher embarked on two voyages, twenty months apart, aboard different CMA CGM ships travelling from Malta to Jabal Ali, Dubai. Using a mix of ethnographic notes, photographs, interviews, and archival materials, Khalili reveals the living conditions aboard these cargo ships.

Devastating to families from Honduras, Guatemala, and El Salvador, in particular--countries where US meddling has long stoked the violence and instability that cause migrants to flee in the first place--this and other policies of the Trump era can be understood, as Ananya Roy has put it, as an ideological commitment to, and renewal of, “white power in statecraft”.

Readers will be well aware of the ways in which black women’s representation in popular discourses is deeply caricatured – as angry, as devoutly Christian, as “in the life” of prostitution and drug addiction. Williamson argues that the knee jerk criticism and refusal of stereotypes that sometimes follow from the deployment of these representations can also reproduce structured absences of black women’s sociality.

What might it mean, Andrew Culp asks in Dark Deleuze, to 'give up on all the reasons given for saving this world' (Culp, 2016b: 66)? In response, this interview explores the pathways offered by a 'dark' Deleuze, a politics of cruelty, Afro-Pessimism, partisan knowledges, destituent power, and tactics of escape.

Jared Sexton is Associate Professor of African American Studies and Film and Media Studies at the University of California, Irvine, where he also holds an affiliation with the Center for Law, Culture, and Society. He is the author of Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Black Masculinity and the Cinema of Policing (Palgrave Macmillan, 2017).