Sam Tenorio
Gender and SexualityPolitics and the Black Radical Tradition
Professional Bio
Sam C. Tenorio (he/they) is an assistant professor of African American studies and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies. He received his doctoral and master’s degrees in African American studies, with a subfield in political theory, from Northwestern University and a bachelor’s degree in history and women’s studies (now gender and sexuality studies) from the University of California, Irvine. Prior to his professorship, he held a postdoctoral fellowship with the Africana Research Center here at Penn State. He is also an alumnus of the School of Criticism and Theory (’14) at Cornell University.
As an interdisciplinary scholar, he maintains broad research and teaching interests but largely focuses on Black political thought and practice, carceral geographies, and Black trans and trans of color critique. His first book, Jump: Black Anarchism and Antiblack Carcerality (NYU Press 2024), offers a socio-spatial account of Black anarchism and an alternative theorization of the modern carceral state that emerges in the practice of enslaved people jumping from slave ships during the Middle Passage. His recent essays can be found in South Atlantic Quarterly and Cultural Dynamics.
Professor Tenorio’s current research is concerned with the analytic dis/placement of Blackness vis-à-vis gender in trans worldbuilding narratives.
Publication Date: April 2024
Website: https://nyupress.org/9781479828296/jump/
Description: Writing a new story of Black politics, Jump emerges from the practice of enslaved Africans jumping overboard off their slavers’ ships. Reading against the narrative that depoliticizes and denigrates the leaps of the enslaved as merely suicidal symptoms of chattel slavery and the Middle Passage, Sam C. Tenorio demonstrates how bringing these jumps to bear on the foundations of Black politics allows us to rethink a politics of refusal.
In a period of increasing political mobilization against police brutality and mass incarceration, Jump attends to the layers of confinement that constitute the racial and gendered hierarchies of the antiblack world. Centering radical acts too often relegated to the periphery of Black politics, Tenorio proposes a Black anarchist politics of refusal that helps us to think dissent anew.
Tracing iterations of the jump through the carceral wake of the slave ship, Tenorio explores the voyages of the Black Star Line in defiance of the bordered authority of the nation state, the Watts Rebellion of 1965 against the property relation of ghettoization, and Assata Shakur’s abscondence from prison to Cuba. Ultimately, Tenorio argues that considering the jump as a progenitor of Black politics deepens and widens our conceptualization of the Black radical tradition and introduces a paradigm-shifting attention to Black anarchism.
