The afterlives of Gregory Smith: blackness,queerness and viral insurgency

Abstract

This article explores the counter archive of Black queer AIDS activist Gregory Smith, and the ways in which his incarcerated AIDS activism became a means of resistance to the carceral state and premature death. Against the register of the case which follows a racial as juridical index, Smith’s own letters form a counter to the official record -- exceeding it -- as it documents his ‘agency’ only as a racialized pathos of criminality and threat to the security of the social contract and prison form. I show how Black AIDS activism confronts premature death—not as a new violence on the political scene but rather as a constitutive violence of modernity, a plantation modernity realized and actualized through the slave ship and the apparatuses of the slave fort as colonial, bio and necropolitical and carceral technologies.