STeMS Speaker Series | Sensing Bimbia: Ancestry Reconnection in an Anti-Crisis Atmosphere

This talk examines the disappearance of the slavery memorial, Bimbia, from ancestry reconnection programming activities in 2018 as the result of an emerging effect of the “Anglophone” crisis in 2018: an anti-crisis atmosphere. Building on growing literature that treats atmosphere as a mode of sensorial attunement, this article puts ethnographic focus on anti-crisis not simply as a conceptual framework, but a logic that unfolds ethnographically, notably under conditions in which crisis knowledge production takes shape not through the saturation of crisis narratives but their evacuation and denunciation, including the disappearance of bodies like the slavery memorial site. By connecting crisis knowledge production’s entanglement with the atmospheric violence of the postcolonial state to the affective conditions of ancestral knowledge production between African Americans and Cameroonians to mutually dissociate from historical conditions of racialization, this article seeks to deterritorialize how sense is made of crisis’s blind spot in ways that may neither be seen nor heard but can be on the precipice of being felt in ways that are not so much deeply embodied but unfold through the creation of ethical voids that become difficult to escape.

Victoria M. Massie, Ph.D. (she/her) is an Assistant Professor of Anthropology and a Faculty Affiliate for the Center for African & African American Studies (CAAAS), the Center for the Study of Women, Gender & Sexuality (CSWGS), the Medical Humanities Program, and the Science & Technology Studies Program at Rice University. Her work explores 21st century ideas of biovalue developing around African ancestry, connecting the markets shaping scientific and biomedical knowledge production to global flows of racial capitalism, with a focus on Cameroon and the US. She addresses these issues through research projects ranging from ancestry reconnection programs to help the genetic diaspora feel at home in West Africa, statelessness as a chronic health condition for Black migrants in Texas, and generational weathering as a framework for chronic stress. With support from the Voices of Our Nation's Arts (VONA) Foundation and the Hurston/Wright Foundation, she is also recognized as a multi-genre writer experimenting with ethnographic form.