Can modes of lamentation in poetry contribute to current thought on international border regimes? How do literary forms and temporalities of grief rework our understanding of border regimes as they bind and fracture political collectivities? This talk takes up such questions in readings of Aracelis Girmay’s The Black Maria (2016) and Sara Uribe’s Antígona González (2012, transl. 2016). It considers how Girmay and Uribe each construct a poetics of citation and assemblage that rework grief over the violence of border regimes, from the militarized deportation regime for African migrants in Israel to the U.S.-led transnational drug war that both prompts and exploits border politics. Such poetry incorporates ancient Greek narratives and contemporary geopolitical realities to press against humanitarian and citizenship-centered understandings of mourning, justice, and sovereignty. The talk explores how Girmay and Uribe’s poetry of grief envision a future-oriented politics of the living in a time of war and global apartheid on the right to move.


Angela Naimou is Associate Professor of English at Clemson University and co-editor of the journal Humanity. She is the author of Salvage Work: U.S. and Caribbean Literatures amid the Debris of Legal Personhood (Fordham University Press 2015), which won the Association for the Study of the Arts of the Present (ASAP) Book Prize and received Honorable Mention for the MLA’s William Sanders Scarborough Award. Her current book project examines contemporary literature as it reconceptualizes migrant and refugee futurity. In addition to co-editing the journal Humanity, she also serves on the board of ASAP and is an associate editor of the journal Contemporary Literature.