Girvetz 2320
This talk explores the Black Mediterranean as both a political analytic and an imaginative terrain, challenging the metrics of proof and verifiability that define state-sanctioned belonging. Smythe foregrounds the dispossessed as theorists of an otherwise, taking up Audre Lorde's provocation that poetry—and, by extension, aesthetic practice—is a “vital necessity” in struggles for liberation. In a time of intensifying authoritarianism, trans antagonism, and climate catastrophe, the evidence that legitimates citizenship and humanity remains deeply racialized and exclusionary. Through engagement with archival, juridical, and media sources, Smythe interrogates Western (US/EU)-led citizenship policies, proposed psychiatric registries (schedature) for trans/nonbinary people, deteriorating conditions in Italy's migrant detention centers, and the necropolitical calculus of Frontex and other supranational border regimes. Thinking through littoral and archipelagic possibilities of the Mediterranean, Smythe traces the insurgent poetics of Black life and freedom dreams beyond state recognition, offering a coalitional vision of diasporic belonging unmoored from the nation-state.
Dr. SA Smythe is a critical theorist, transmedia artist, and educator. They work as Assistant Professor of Black Studies & the Archive and Director of the Collaboratory for Black Poiēsis at the University of Toronto.