About

Jaime Alves is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and is affiliated with the Black Studies Department. His specialization is indicated as part of his academic profile, though specific research focus areas are not detailed in the provided text. He can be contacted via email at jaimealves@blackstudies.ucsb.edu and by phone at (805) 893-2257. The department is located in the Humanities and Social Sciences Building (HSSB) at UCSB. Further information about his research, background, and key contributions is not included in the provided content.

Research topics

• Political Science
• Sociology
• Law
• Geography
• Humanities
• Political economy
• Criminology
• Economy
• Economics
• Development economics
• Art

Selected publications

• In/Tratoráveis

  Revista AntHropológicas · 2025-03-17

  articleOpen accessSenior author

  Este texto pretende lançar uma análise informada pela crítica da antinegritude ao modo de feitura de duas cidades latinoamericanas, onde cada um de nós desenvolve pesquisa etnográfica de longa duração, a saber, Santiago de Cali (Colômbia) e São Paulo (Brasil). Alinhamos-nos com argumentos do campo dos Black Studies acerca da vida póstuma da plantation nessas cidades antinegro e apresentamos alguma fugitividade na recusa ao aprisionamento total à menos-que-humanidade, sobretudo a partir de considerações sobre acontecimentos recentes na região do Bixiga, em São Paulo. Os elementos centrais por meio dos quais desenvolvemos nossa análise são as retroescavadeiras que produzem e performam espetáculos de destruição e remoção; e as pessoas que vivem em ocupações e se recusam a serem subsumidas a populações tratoráveis/trituráveis.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Blackness As a Call For Action

  Callaloo · 2025-12-01

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Raising Two Fists: Struggles of Black Citizenship in Multicultural Colombia

  The Journal of Development Studies · 2024-07-25

  article1st authorCorresponding
  PublisherDOI

• Em defesa da Antropologia

  ABA Publicações eBooks · 2024-01-01

  book-chapter1st authorCorresponding

  Fazer Antropologia a partir das margens urbanas implica um deslocamen­to radical da autoridade etnográfica que insiste em transformar o morro e a favela em laboratórios. Obcecados por decifrar a mente, a sociabilidade, o “ethos guerreiro” dos “donos do morro” e suas populações — enquanto os “donos da cidade” têm estado relativamente fora da gaze antropológica —, antropólogos constroem a periferia em zona de exploração (econômica/epistêmica) e fronteira da alteridade. Embora uma corrente marginal tenha documentado à exaustão o sofrimento da periferia, particularmente o ati­vismo de mães contra o assassinato de jovens negros pela polícia e as ações políticas das juventudes negras urbanas contra o genocídio, a Antropologia Urbana ainda não prestou contas sobre sua cumplicidade em produzir a fa­vela como zona fanoniana do não ser. Essa cumplicidade vai dos discursos patológicos das espacialidades negras às leituras sanitarizadas do terror policial.

  PublisherDOI

• Polis Amefricana:

  Latitude · 2023-08-10 · 4 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  A polis latino-americana é uma disposição geo-ontológica antinegra. O termo América e suas derivações estão enraizados no genocídio colonial e suas manifestações contemporâneas. Não se trata somente do papel das ‘elites criolas’ mas principalmente de um inconsciente coletivo planetário que constrói e reflete o que se convencionou chamar de América Latina não apenas em oposição à Europa, mas principalmente em oposição à negritude e aos corpos, culturas, epistemologias, e territórios associados a ela. Recusando estabelecer comparações, e sem ambições de oferecer uma leitura hemisférica, o artigo se propõe a discutir, a partir de uma perspectiva relacional, os limites de Américas, como comunidade política e modo de sociabilidade fundado na anti*negri*cidade constitutiva do projeto de latinidade.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• Impossible Chronos: Contents

  Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies · 2022-01-27

  articleSenior author

  None

  PublisherDOI

• F*ck the Police!

  Focaal · 2021 · 17 citations

  1st authorCorresponding
  • Political Science
  • Sociology
  • Criminology

  Abstract On the morning of 6 May 2021, the military police invaded the favela of Jacarezinho, one of Rio de Janeiro's slums, and killed 28 people during a military operation tellingly named Operation Exceptis. Photos of dead bodies in the alleys of the favela and denouncements of extrajudicial executions of individuals who had already surrendered circulated widely on the internet. Jacarezinho adds to a troubling record of police killings that includes and goes far beyond the 1992 Massacre of Carandiru, when 111 prisoners were slaughtered by São Paulo's police during a prison riot, and the equally infamous 2006 Crimes of May, when at least six hundred civilians were killed within the span of one week (Mães de Maio 2019). While human rights organizations denounced the Jacarezinho massacre for what it was, the police argued that “the only execution that took place was that of the police, unfortunately. The other deaths that happened were those of traffickers who attacked the lives of policemen and were neutralized” (Betim 2021). On a social media network, President Jair Bolsonaro praised “all the warriors who risk their lives in the daily mission to protect the good people,” and lamented that instead of honoring the life of the officer killed during the operation, human rights activists were treating “criminals who steal, kill, and destroy families” (Veja 2021) as innocent victims.

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

• White Apocalypses, Global Antiblackness, and the Art of Living through and against Death-Worlds

  Kalfou A Journal of Comparative and Relational Ethnic Studies · 2021-12-07 · 1 citations

  articleSenior author

  Implicit in what follows is our attempt to answer a complicated question: How do we mourn the loss of Black life globally in a way that does not reproduce the primacy of the Human over Nature or the Global Black Male over all other differentially positioned Black gendered subjects? Or, put otherwise, what happens when Black mourning goes global, who gets to be mourned, what is being mourned, and what do we risk reifying when we mourn Black life through the heuristics of the “global” or when holding grieving fantasies about the Human project, as Sylvia Wynter would have it? To explore these questions, we first frame how it is that we think about Black globality to then geospatialize it in locally grounded and rooted places and temporalities. From there, we reflect on the competing temporal dimensions of global Black life by interrogating how racial capitalism informs our desires for a new normal, sometimes prefigured as a return to the old normal—a mourning for lost time that quickly forgets the colonial ordering that never ceased and therefore always already awaits our return. We end in honoring the dead by listening to the living, amplifying the voices of our contributors, who serve as conduits for our ancestors. We see them engaging in what Sharon P. Holland calls the “ultimate queer act” of “bringing back the dead (or saving the living from the shadow of death).” In this way, we see our entire issue as a kind of memorial. Accordingly, we chose to forego an introduction to instead reflect upon and re-collect with the reader the offerings provided by the talented group of scholars and activists who made this issue come to life, even as it was born out of global Black death(s).

  PublisherDOI

• Fatal blow: Urbicidal geographies, pax colonial and black sovereignty in the Colombian city

  Environment and Planning D Society and Space · 2021-09-06 · 4 citations

  article1st authorCorresponding

  This article gives ethnographic form to Fanon’s warning that in the colonial world, “zombies are more terrifying than settlers,” by analyzing how racial mythologies produce spatial classifications of Black urban communities as unruly places and how Black individuals challenge their wretched condition by embracing a “program of complete disorder.” To do so, the article analyzes the short(ened) life of Paco, a young Black man under house arrest whose retaliatory violence against, and territorial dispute with, the police is an entry point for exploring resistance to urban coloniality in Santiago de Cali/Colombia. The article engages with the field of Black geography to propose a Fanonian reading of contemporary cityscapes as colonial spaces. Such colonial spatialities, it is argued, are not defined merely by subjugation to death but also, as Paco’s refusal to be killed may reveal, by an insurgent spatial praxis that might reposition the Black subject in relation to the city and the regime of Law.

  PublisherDOI

• “Esa paz blanca, esa paz de muerte”: tiempos de paz, tiempos de guerra y el cronos negro imposible en el posconflicto colombiano

  Revista Colombiana de Antropología · 2021-07-01 · 1 citations

  articleOpen access1st authorCorresponding

  El 24 de agosto de 2016, el presidente colombiano Juan Manuel Santos anunció el final formal de una guerra de cincuenta años con las Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC). Esta guerrilla acordó deponer las armas y participar en las elecciones generales de 2018. Desde entonces, casi seiscientos activistas han sido asesinados, la violencia homicida contra la juventud urbana no dejó de crecer y el prospecto de paz positiva en los territorios negros e indígenas es esquivo. En este contexto, el artículo examina dos preguntas: ¿cómo entender la transición a la paz cuando los tiempos de guerra y los tiempos de paz son experimentados como evento a‐temporal según la alteridad racial de los sujetos? ¿Pueden los marcos normativos de conflicto/posconflicto explicar la transhistoricidad de la experiencia negra en sociedades de la diáspora africana?

  PublisherOA PDFDOI

Frequent coauthors

• João Costa Vargas

  The University of Texas at Austin

  11 shared

• T.K. Sundari Ravindran

  Centro de Investigación de la Caña de Azúcar de Colombia

  2 shared

• Nathalie Méndez

  1 shared

• João da Costa Vargas

  University of California, Riverside

  1 shared

• Aurora Vergara Figueroa

  1 shared

• Santiago Tobón

  1 shared

• Andrés Casas Casas

  1 shared

• Isabel Cristina Montes Gutiérrez

  1 shared

Education

• Especialista em ECOLOGIA E GESTÃO AMBIENTAL, Pós-Graduação em ECOLOGIA E GESTÃO AMBIENTAL

  Faculdade Iguaçu

• Licenciatura em Ciências Sociais, Humanidades

  ETEP Centro Universitário

  2025

• Investigador afiliado al CEAF. Una estancia postdoctoral por el SSRC (enero de 2013 a junio de 2014), Centro de Estudios Afrodiaspóricos -CEAF

  Icesi University

  2019

• PhD , Anthropology

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2012

• Master of Arts, Social Anthropology, African Diaspora

  The University of Texas at Austin

  2008

• Bachelor of Arts, Communication Studies, Journalism

  Universidade de Ribeirão Preto

  2003