Racializing Aesthetics

Abstract

Since the 1960s, thousands of Haitians have boarded wooden sailing vessels in attempts to reach the United States. Commentators have long conflated the perceived characteristics of Haitians making this journey with the material qualities of the vessels they use, creating the racialized archetype of the “boat person” in the process. This article examines how Haitian vessels have emerged as metonyms of Haitian subjectivity within three discourses: US journalistic and security accounts concerned with Haitian migration by sea, North American sailing connoisseurs’ specialized “boat talk,” and Haitian mariners’ informal communications about sailing and boat building. By juxtaposing these discourses, I reveal a set of aesthetic regimes that authorize a range of material effects, including US migration policing at sea but also Haitian attempts to create enduring maritime worlds. While various actors point to socioculturally coded ensembles of material qualities to evaluate Haitian vessels, their assessments also depend on the directional movement and location of the entities they evaluate. I suggest, then, that such evaluations should be understood as kinetico-spatial in orientation. In attending to kinetico-spatial aesthetic evaluations and their racializing effects, anthropologists can illuminate the material entailments, the erasures, and the forms of life such interpretive orders render thinkable and unthinkable.

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