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

Co-sponsored by the Center for South Asian Studies.

The recent student-led mass uprising which ousted the longstanding autocrat, Sheikh Hasina, from office ushered in a new era in Bangladesh politics. How did an uprising that began with a demand for students’ job quota reform become a mass movement to reclaim the people’s sovereignty? What united people of different religions, regions, castes, classes, and generations to confront authoritarian rule? And what political possibilities and precarities lie ahead for post-uprising Bangladesh? This talk examines how the uprising creatively broke prevailing binaries of secular-religious, nationalist-anti-nationalist, freedom fighter-Rajakar, etc. by fostering cultural and ideological coexistence, thus creating a space for collective resistance and new discourses that go beyond conventional party politics and ideological contestation.

Md Mizanur Rahman is a PhD candidate in Politics at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on liberalism and its critics, Islamic political thought, and religion and politics in South Asia. He is particularly interested in Bangladesh politics and has written on debates concerning Islam, modernity, and the politics of Islamic seminaries in Bangladesh.

Date | Time
October 10, 2024 | 11:00 AM – 12:00 PM [PST]
Free and open to the public

Venue | Location
Humanities Building 1, Room 202
University of California, Santa Cruz

Co-sponsored by UCSC’s More-Than-Human(ities) Laboratory.

This talk explores emergent water cultures. How might a theory and praxis of hydrocommoning support transitions to alternative hydrosocial relations beyond modern urban and extractive paradigms. I will lay out a methodological route for interdisciplinary water research that takes seriously situated embodied knowledge and planetary hydrologies by arguing for the generative role of art in igniting multiscalar engagements with liquid ecologies. Drawing on projects developed through the entre—ríos collective, I will situate engaged curatorial practice as a response to calls in the environmental humanities to contribute aesthetic forms that support a reclaiming of common waters.

Lisa Blackmore is a researcher, curator and educator, working with water cultures in Latin America. Since 2018, she has been directing entre—ríos, a research and artistic platform for collaborative methodologies connecting communities to bodies of water. She is a Visiting Scholar at the Department of Environmental Science, Policy, and Management at UC Berkeley and Senior Lecturer in Art History and Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Essex, UK. Her recent publications include the co-edited volume Hydrocommons Cultures: Art, Pedagogy and Care Practices in the Americas (2024) and “Water” in the Handbook of Latin American Environmental Aesthetics (2023). entre-rios.net / lisablackmore.net

Date | Time
October 16, 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