How to Lose the Hounds: A Book Forum with Author Celeste Winston
Saturday, June 1 | 1 PM | Kaplan Gallery
Join us for a conversation between author Celeste Winston and independent curator Mae A. Miller-Likhethe about Winston’s book, How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World beyond Policing, and its connection to our current exhibition, Wade.
In How to Lose the Hounds, Winston explores marronage—the practice of flight from and placemaking beyond slavery—as a guide to police abolition. She examines historically Black maroon communities in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, DC that have been subjected to violent excesses of police power from slavery until the present day.
Tracing the long and ongoing historical geography of Black freedom struggles in the face of anti-Black police violence in these communities, Winston shows how marronage provides critical lessons for reimagining public safety and community wellbeing. These freedom struggles take place in what Winston calls maroon geographies—sites of flight from slavery and the spaces of freedom produced in multigenerational Black communities.
Maroon geographies constitute part of a Black placemaking tradition that asserts life-affirming forms of community. Winston contends that maroon geographies operate as a central method of Black flight, holding ground, and constructing places of freedom in ways that imagine and plan a world beyond policing.
Celeste Winston is an abolitionist geographer who centers everyday Black life and placemaking practices as models for liberation. She received a PhD in Earth and Environmental Sciences in 2019 from the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. Her work is driven by her love and accountability for Black people and Black communities. Her book How to Lose the Hounds: Maroon Geographies and a World beyond Policing is a guide to police abolition connecting slavery-era Black freedom struggles and modern efforts to build a world beyond policing. Amid rising calls for abolition, this book reveals long-standing ways to secure public safety and community well-being without police. Celeste grew up in the DC metro area and her book focuses on histories of marronage and multigenerational Black communities in Montgomery County, Maryland.
About Mae A. Miller-Likhethe:Â
Mae A. Miller-Likhethe is an interdisciplinary scholar, educator, and curator working at the intersections of the oceanic humanities, the global Black radical tradition, and cultural histories of infrastructure and empire. She researches the intellectual histories and political cultures of the Black diaspora and Third World Left throughout the twentieth century. Miller-Likhethe is currently a postdoctoral researcher in the Geography Department at the University of California, Berkeley and a Curatorial Fellow at IMPAKT Centre for Media Culture in the Netherlands.
This event is free and open to the public. RSVP below to reserve your space.
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