Settler sexuality, family, and “love” are key to sustaining settler property relations in the US and Canada. In this in-process book chapter (a shorter version was previously published in a 2024 edited volume), I draw on the work of historians, anthropologists, and science and technology studies (STS) scholars who have investigated the history of state-sanctioned marriage and monogamy in the US, Hawai’i, Canada, and Europe. I also build on popular and academic polyamory literatures, Native American and Indigenous Studies and critical race theory. In addition, (auto)ethnographic examination of eco-erotic, polyamorous, and other more-than-monogamous relating inform alternative concepts of anticolonial relating after the unsettling of settler sex and family. Finally, I center the role of country—both music and place—to think through and beyond unsustainable settler-colonial practices of making relations with human loves and more-than-human loves. Decolonization is more sustainable with music.

Kim TallBear (Sisseton-Wahpeton Oyate) is Professor and Canada Research Chair in Indigenous Peoples, Technoscience, and Society, Faculty of Native Studies, University of Alberta. She is the author of Native American DNA: Tribal Belonging and the False Promise of Genetic Science. In addition to studying genome science disruptions to Indigenous self-definitions, Dr. TallBear studies colonial disruptions to Indigenous sexual relations. She is a regular panelist on the Media Indigena podcast. She is also a regular media commentator on topics including Indigenous peoples, science, and technology; and Indigenous sexualities. You can also follow her Substack newsletter, Unsettle: Indigenous affairs, cultural politics & (de)colonization at https://kimtallbear.substack.com.

Date | Time
January 15, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

“Race relations” became synonymous with various obstacles to the “integration” of Commonwealth migrants in postwar Britain and, ultimately, shorthand for social and political issues perceived to be related to racial differences in general. However, interest in race relations did not center initially on Caribbean, South Asian, and African migrants to metropolitan Britain. Before the mid-1960s, race relations served as a means of conceptualizing and grappling with “problems of the end of Empire,” and efforts to study and manage them focused on centers of extractive industries in British settler colonies in Africa. This talk demonstrates how white liberals and business leaders in colonial Africa provided institutional models and much of the personnel and start-up capital for a race relations industry in Britain that depoliticized racism and delegitimated anticolonial and Black Power politics by attributing them to racial identification. Studies of and policies targeting race relations in 1960s Britain emerged alongside and in connection with efforts to manage, co-opt, or divert the transformative potential of decolonization and to shape postcolonial futures with neoliberal solutions. From this perspective, when it comes to liberal politics of race, as the South African artist William Kentridge suggests, “London is a suburb of Johannesburg” (“Art in a State of Siege (100 Years of Easy Living),” 1988).

Marc Matera is Professor of History at the University of California, Santa Cruz. He is the author of Black London: The Imperial Metropolis and Decolonization in the Twentieth Century (University of California Press, 2015). He co-authored The Global 1930s: The International Decade (Routledge, 2017) with Susan Kingsley Kent and The Women’s War of 1929: Gender and Violence in Colonial Nigeria (Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) with Misty L. Bastian and Susan Kingsley Kent. He recently contributed to and coauthored introductory and concluding essays for a thematic issue of Modern British History, “Marking Race in Twentieth Century Britain”. The research for Professor Matera’s talk was supported in part by a research fellowship from the American Council of Learned Societies.

Date | Time
January 22, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

Amid the US-backed Israeli genocide in Palestine and the UAE-backed genocide in Sudan, the constellation of transnational and multiracial movement solidarities forged throughout the myriad capitalist and colonialist crises of the 21st century continue to reckon with the precarity of their uneven legibility across various regional, continental, and global contexts. Expanding on the titular catalogue essay composed alongside The Art Institute of Chicago’s current exhibition, Project a Black Planet: The Art and Culture of Panafrica, this talk navigates a genealogy of similarly unsettled anticolonial solidarities throughout Africa and its diaspora during the Non-Aligned era. By narrowing in on the contentious relationship between “North” and “Sub-Saharan” African artistic production in this period – particularly during the 1969 “First” Pan-African Cultural Festival in Algiers – I explore how varying articulations and mis/translations of Blackness, Arabness, and Africanness in the political and cultural realm ultimately elude a stable and coherent Pan-African sensibility. However, I also contend that the necessarily fleeting nature of these cultural encounters did still chart routes towards an African diasporic relation of difference that strives towards the most emancipatory possibilities of a transnational and anticolonial practice of solidarity.

Sophia Azeb (she/they) is an assistant professor of Black Studies in the Department of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Santa Cruz. Sophia’s current book project, Another Country: Translational Blackness and the Afro-Arab, explores the currents of transnational and translational blackness charted by African American, Afro-Caribbean, African, and Afro-Arab peoples across 20th century North Africa and Europe. Prior to joining the faculty at UC Santa Cruz, Sophia was a member of the faculty collective that founded the Department of Race, Diaspora, and Indigeneity at the University of Chicago. Sophia is a frequent contributor to The Funambulist magazine.

Date | Time
January 29, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This talk is hosted in collaboration with History of Consciousness and is co-sponsored by the UC’s Interdisciplinary Marxism Working Group (IMWG), the Marxist Institute for Research (MIR), UC Berkeley’s Department of German Languages and Literatures, UC Berkeley’s Townsend Center for the Humanities, UC Berkeley’s Department of English and Program in Critical Theory.

Please note: This is a hybrid event. Register here for the Zoom link.

This presentation will discuss the history of Anglophone translations of Capital (Vol. 1) Karl Marx’s magnus opus, paying particular attention to the different circumstances that have shaped important translation decisions. It will also identify some of the major translation challenges the text poses and ask how the meaning of the Capital varies according to how we respond to those  challenges.

Paul Reitter teaches in the German department at Ohio State University. He is the author, most recently, of Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age (cowritten with Chad Wellmon). His articles and essays have appeared in venues ranging from Representations to The New York Review of Books.

Paul North is Maurice Natanson Professor of German at Yale University. He teaches and writes critical theory. His books include The Problem of Distraction (Stanford University Press, 2011), The Yield: Kafka’s Atheological Reformation (Stanford University Press, 2015), Bizarre-Privileged Items in the Universe: The Logic of Likeness (Princeton University Press, 2021), and a new translation and critical reading edition of Marx’s Capital, Volume 1 (Princeton University Press, 2024).

Date | Time
February 5, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This presentation is culled from The Afromantic: Black Love Out Yonder, a book-length cultural history, critical theory, aesthetic expression, and existential assertion of B/black love outside. The project will follow black love to cookouts, carnivals, rooftops, rallies, jazz funerals, cruising spots, garden plots, hush harbors, distant stars, and forest clearings—emphasizing ways of loving that escape and exceed normative enclosures of Western modernity. In a public sphere overrun with spectacles of black death outside, I plan to compile a counter-archive and counter-narrative of B/black love that can breathe under open sky, in the open air.

La Marr Jurelle Bruce is a philosopher, fever dreamer, interdisciplinary humanities scholar, first-generation college graduate, and Associate Professor of American Studies at the University of Maryland, College Park. Much of his scholarship explores and activates B/black, queer, and mad expressive cultures—spanning literature, music, film, theatre, and the art and aesthetics of quotidian life. Dr. Bruce’s writing is featured or forthcoming in African American Review, American Quarterly, The Black Scholar, GLQ, Social Text, TDR, and several anthologies. His debut book, How to Go Mad without Losing Your Mind: Madness and Black Radical Creativity (2021), earned the Modern Language Association’s First Book Prize.

Date | Time
February 12, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

This talk attends to what the Subaltern Studies tradition begins to think and gives to our own times to think. The emergence of Subaltern Studies was part of the increasing prominence of the “New Social Movements,” new because they were focused more on oppression than exploitation. Recognizing this allows us to discern that the Subaltern Studies project is driven by a subaltern intimation of freedom—a freedom that recognizes that domination takes the form of not only exploitation but oppression, and a freedom that, even as it exits subalternity, seeks not to make a new group subaltern in either way. Revisiting my 1999 book, Hybrid Histories, I explore this subaltern intimation of freedom by focusing on 1) how it played a role in the turn away from a focus on subaltern autonomy; 2) how the community constituted by it differs from those constituted by claims to oppression such as those made by Hindu nationalists or white nationalists; and 3) how it allows us to read differently the claim to indigeneity involved in the identity “Adivasi.”

Ajay Skaria studied Political Science and History at Maharaja Sayajirao University, Vadodara, during which he also worked as a journalist for Indian Express. He teaches at the University of Minnesota. A member of the Subaltern Studies editorial collective from 1995 until its dissolution, he is one of the co-editors of Subaltern Studies Vol. XII, and the author of Hybrid Histories: Forests, Frontiers and Wildness in Western India (1999) and Unconditional Equality: Gandhi’s Religion of Resistance (2016). He is currently completing a collection of essays, Thinking With Gandhi and Ambedkar, and is also working on another book, Ambedkar’s Buddhism.

Date | Time
February 19, 2025 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz

If “climate apartheid” is on the rise, as Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò warns, then Cop City Atlanta—the multimillion-dollar new police training facility built by clear-cutting the city’s largest green space—offers an ominous flashpoint. For not only is Cop City’s contested construction (which is ongoing) an exemplary story of the violent repression of community activism at the nexus of abolition, decolonization, and environmentalism. It also spotlights the forces of contemporary counterinsurgency—including its aesthetic modalities—that are operating to prevent any political transformation beyond the status quo. If the environmental movement is losing in the struggle to stop world-ending climate change, then continuing to focus on practices of ecological repair is increasingly myopic, even escapist, without taking into account the forces blocking any meaningful change. How might a prehensive climate-justice-directed art history, and an insurgent arts of the possible, meaningfully respond?

T. J. Demos is Professor in the Department of the History of Art and Visual Culture, at University of California, Santa Cruz, and founding Director of its Center for Creative Ecologies. Demos is the author of several books, including Against the Anthropocene: Visual Culture and Environment Today (Sternberg Press, 2017); Decolonizing Nature: Contemporary Art and the Politics of Ecology (Sternberg Press, 2016); and The Migrant Image: The Art and Politics of Documentary During Global Crisis (Duke University Press, 2013) – winner of the College Art Association’s 2014 Frank Jewett Mather Award. He co-edited The Routledge Companion on Contemporary Art, Visual Culture, and Climate Change (2021), was a Getty Research Institute Fellow (Spring 2020), and directed the Mellon-funded Sawyer Seminar research project Beyond the End of the World (2019-21). His new book, Radical Futurisms: Ecologies of Collapse, Chronopolitics, and Justice-to-Come, 2023, is out from Sternberg Press.

Date | Time
October 9, 2024 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 210
University of California, Santa Cruz