Amir Curry (He/They)Ph.D. Student (2023 Cohort)

Amir arrives with a B.A. in American Political Studies from the oldest HBCU, Cheyney University of Pennsylvania. Amir’s work will navigate the historicization of slavery and slave rebellion, particularly in the Anglophone Caribbean, specifically countries including: Antigua and Barbuda, Barbados, and Jamaica. Interrogating the lineage of resistance movements challenging slavery, Amir aims to re-orient the genealogy of the Black Radical Tradition. While tracing the development of anti-colonialism in the Black Atlantic, Amir will center the ritualistic technologies of Obeah, Myal, Shango etc. to underscore how sustained ancestral and religious systems served as a critical impetus in driving a series of interwoven liberation movements spanning centuries. Amir intends to conduct his research by engaging the archive and converging diasporic ethnographic field work. Wielding a multidimensional approach Amir will deviate from the conventions of the institutional archive and recover the remnants of insurgency throughout the Black Atlantic and broader Global South that is otherwise muted by the archive. Foregrounding these historical and contemporary memories Amir will aid in elevating alternative routes to understanding and accessing public history. Ultimately, Amir’s work considers how anti-colonial struggle against slavery produced sovereign formations superseding the hegemonized epistemologies of freedom, equality, and the human.

Amir’s research strives to interweave the study of British Imperialism, 17-19th Century Slave Insurgency, Marronage, Caribbean Geography and Ecology, Cultural Interchange in the Black Atlantic, Critical Theory, and Public Memory. Amir will emphasize how the enslaved bolstered the urgency of revolt, and levy a critique on how contemporary notions of Black liberation abandons its revolutionary foundation in slavery’s current  afterlife.