Come Out of This World

Leniqueca A. Welcome is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and International Affairs at George Washington University.

"For Welcome, life is precious, but the world as we have inherited it is not. Weaving political history with the social memory of East Port-of-Spain, Come Out This Worldis a portal to an otherwise Trinidad glimpsed through intimate collages of ethnography, photography, memoir & theory. Welcome articulates a landscape in which Afro-descended subjecthood is manifest through the policing of even-Blacker Blacks, a citizenship infrastructure that requires the subordination of some Black folks to subtend the upliftment of others. Against the constitutive antiblackness of post-Emancipation Trinidad, Welcome deploys visuality as a weapon against carceral common sense, creating collages of fine art photography, criminal evidentiary images and newspaper archives that refract the light of police surveillance toward another horizon of opaque, living, Black presence. By witnessing the intergenerational grief and healing of Black Trinidadians, Welcome exposes the yawning chasm between policing crime and actually interrupting harm. Abolitionist in orientation and masterful in scope, Come Out This Worlddemands that we are accountable to both who is made to come out of this world, and how their expulsion shapes the world we make next.-Savannah Shange, University of California, Santa Cruz "This book arrived in my hands as protests erupted over the murder of Joshua Samaroo by Trinidad and Tobago police and the retributive arrest of his common-law partner, Kaia Sealy. Come Out of This Worldexposes the false coin of creole nationalism, which champions racial democracy and inclusion while condemning those it deems criminal, unruly, or dispensable. Welcome's ethnography vindicates those condemned by this world and inhabits the wisdom forged by ordinary people in defiance of state violence in the postcolonial Caribbean. With this wisdom as our guide, another world is possible."-Ryan Jobson, The University of Chicago