Parahumanity in Cockpit Country, Jamaica, as a minor mode of resistance amongst contemporary maroon communities.

My proposed research is a practice-led, anthropological exploration of human-animal-lifeform relations amongst the maroon community in Cockpit Country, Jamaica. I will explore how a continuation of parahumanity might be subversively used to resist and recalibrate colonial and Enlightenment conceptions of the body, personhood and agency, offering a minoritarian and anticolonial mode. Parahumanity is a term coined by Monique Allewaert in her monograph, Ariel's Ecology, that refers to the subjectivity forced upon enslaved Africans in the American Tropics in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries (2013). The parahuman is sustained as "para" or "beside" humanity and not accorded the ontic or political rights of the (white, male) subject. However, parahuman also offers a dissolution of the hierarchical distinctions between human - animal - lifeform, revealing a deep scepticism about the desirability of the Western category of the human. How might parahumanity as a mode of existence indicate ways of inhabiting Caribbean spaces that depart from the logic of colonialism and thus the modes of redress possible within it? How do the differing animal-human-lifeform relations in Cockpit Country lend themselves to an anticolonial shift in what it means to be human? Through an ethnographic investigation into the ways these differing relationships manifest - through quotidian interaction, shared knowledge systems and power dynamics - my research will ask in what ways parahumanity might present a mode of ongoing resistance within subaltern communities. As a practice-led PhD, my research will incorporate experimental film work across 16mm and digital formats.