What happens when the life one is trying to write exceeds the epistemological and narrative forms anthropology makes available for apprehending it? Drawing from an ongoing book project  about the life and death of the presenter's childhood friend Margaret “Missy” Allen, this talk considers the limits of anthropology for writing Black life beyond the forms of violence, injury, and  spectacular death through which Black subjects so often become ethnographically legible. Aimee Meredith Cox turns to Black feminist thought not simply as a critique or supplement to anthropology, but as a more  capacious intellectual, ethical, and methodological practice – one capable of locating theory in the ordinary, the intimate, the embodied, and the unfinished. In doing so, she asks what becomes possible when ethnographic writing is oriented not primarily toward explaining Black death, but toward apprehending the density, thought, relation, and aliveness of Black life.

Aimee Meredith Cox is an Associate Professor of Anthropology at the New York University. She is a critical ethnographer, writer, and movement artist. Cox has performed and toured internationally with Ailey II and the Dance Theatre of Harlem and has choreographed performances as interventions in public and private space in Newark, Philadelphia, and Brooklyn.