All are welcome to a panel discussion that will provide a preview and summary of a major edited volume on hemispheric racial formations and anti-racist struggles, to be published in the coming months. The book’s central argument, based on relational analysis of seven sites of struggle in the Americas, is two-fold. First, we contend that a three-decade general expansion of rights regimes, offering substantive if limited spaces for the empowerment of Black and indigenous peoples in the Americas, is coming to a complex close in the different contexts we examined, replaced by a noxious fusion of neoliberal capitalism and new (or renewed) patterns of racial recalcitrance. Second, the distinct processes of resistance that we accompanied through activist research generate special insight into the workings of this new racial project, and point to urgently needed “post-rights” strategies of anti-racist struggle. These strategies give priority to autonomous race-based political-economic power, with recourse to state-endorsed rights as a contingent and decidedly secondary tactic; and they insist on an intersectional anti-racism, refusing the sterile dichotomies that separate racism from patriarchy, and racism from class oppression. Each of the five panelists will speak for seven minutes, illustrating the overarching arguments with material from one or more of the seven sites of struggle, linking our distinctive research methods to our substantive findings.
When: Tuesday, September 18th
Where: Liberal Arts 4310
Time: 3:30 p.m.
Panel:
Pamela Calla (NYU)
Charles Hale (UC Santa Barbara)
Juliet Hooker (Brown)
Leith Mullings (CUNY Graduate Center)
Irma Alicia Velasquez Nimatuj (Brown)
