Race & U.S. Empire Archive (2016-2017)

We are delighted to announce the first gathering of the new Race and U.S. Empire Working Group on September 28, 2016 in the Institute for the Humanities.  Please join organizers Nadine Suleiman Naber (Gender and Women’s Studies/Asian American Studies) and Andy Clarno (Sociology/African American Studies) for coffee and conversation.

The first meeting will be organized as a discussion of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents (Duke University Press 2015).

Date(s): Wednesday, 9/28 2:00 PM to Wednesday, 9/28 4:00 PM
Campus Address: Lower Level – Stevenson Hall
Address: 701 S. Morgan Street
Location: Chicago, IL, United States
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Website: https://huminst.red.uic.edu/
Phone: 312-996-6352

Book Discussion:

Glen Coulthard’s book, Red Skin, White Masks: Rejecting the Colonial Politics of Recognition (University of Minnesota Press 2014).

The meeting will be organized as a book discussion.  Please plan to complete the reading before the Race and U.S. Empire Working Group meeting.

Date(s): Wednesday, 11/2 2:00 PM to Wednesday, 11/2 4:00 PM
Campus Address: Lower Level – Stevenson Hall
Address: 701 South Morgan St.
Location: Chicago, IL, United States
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Phone: 312-996-6352

The introduction to Lisa Cacho’s book, Social Death: Racialized Rightlessness and the Criminalization of the Unprotected (NYU Press 2012).

The introduction to Jordan Camp’s book, Incarcerating the Crisis: Freedom Struggles and the Rise of the Neoliberal State (University of California Press 2016).

Please see Race and U.S. Empire Working group page for PDF files of the readings.

The meeting will be organized as a book discussion.  Please plan to complete the reading before the Race and U.S. Empire Working Group meeting.

Date(s): Wednesday, 11/9 1:00 PM to Wednesday, 11/9 3:00 PM

Campus Address: Lower Level – Stevenson Hall
Address: 701 South Morgan St.
Location: Chicago, Illinois, United States
Contact: Linda Vavra
Email: lvavra@uic.edu
Website: https://huminst.uic.edu/
Phone: 312-996-6352

Discussion of Alex Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus (Duke University Press 2014)

Please plan to complete some or all of the reading before the Race and U.S. Empire Working Group meeting.

Audra Simpson, Columbia University

“The Architecture of “Consent” and the Anatomy of “Refusal”: Cases from North America and Australia”

This paper examines the ordered ghost of reason that shades notions of “consent” in historical cases from Indigenous North America and Australia with attention to the ways in which Indigenous life refused, did not consent to, and still refuses to be folded into a larger encompassing colonizing and settler colonial narratives of savagery, of failure, of diminishment. It is those narratives that inform the apprehension and at times, the ethnography and governance of Indigenous life and are pushed back upon in order to document, reread, theorize and enact ways out of the notion of a fixed past and settled present.

Audra Simpson is the author of Mohawk Interruptus ( Duke University Press 2014) and co-editor of Theorizing Native Studies (Andrea Smith) (Duke University Press 2014). Her research examines those formations of citizenship and nationhood that occur in spite of state power and imposition, in particular, in declarative and practice-oriented acts of independence.

Co-Sponsored by the Departments of Gender and Women’s Studies, Sociology, and Anthropology, the Social Justice Initiative, and the Institute for Research on Race and Public Policy.