Event

Deprovincializing the Police: Towards a Transnational Solidarity against Brutality

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The murder of George Floyd by now-former Minneapolis police officer Derek Chauvin in 2020 generated intense scrutiny and solidarity around the globe. And nowhere as critically as from the African continent, which shortly after experienced its own “Floyd moment” in the form of the #EndSARS movement against police brutality.

Taking Nigeria and the United States as contexts-in-common, two nations that rarely share the same stage, this talk will locate police brutality within the necropolitics that naturalize certain bodies as fungible and disposable. By grounding instances of spectacular police brutality in the spectral, we are able to track the ghost-like effects of the state across vast and multiple interacting spaces. Herein lies the work of ‘deprovincialization.’

Daniel E. Agbiboa is Assistant Professor of African and African American Studies at Harvard University and Member of the Institute for Advanced Study at Princeton. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and an MPhil from the University of Cambridge. His research interests focus on the relationship between state and nonstate actors in urban Africa. Professor Agbiboa is the author of several books, including They Eat Our Sweat: Transport Labor, Corruption and Everyday Survival in Urban Nigeria (Oxford University Press, 2022) and Mobility, Mobilization and Counter/Insurgency: The Routes of Terror in an African Context (Michigan University Press, 2022).