What does it take to cultivate decolonized subjects in postcolonial times? When anti-colonial struggles are all said and done, and the dust settles on a profoundly reshaped social, economic, and political landscape in their wake, what kinds of intellectual and political labor are required to undo colonized subjectivities and to gradually and systematically produce decolonized ones in their stead? This talk brings the oeuvres of central contemporary Arab thinkers to bear on these questions and discusses what the current resonances of their thought might be for our times. 

Yasmeen Daifallah is Assistant Professor of Politics at UCSC and has been teaching there since January 2019. She arrived by way of UMass-Amherst, the University of Southern California, and UC Berkeley, where she also earned her PhD in political science. She has research interests in critical and postcolonial theory, comparative political theory, and Arab and Islamic political thought.

Date | Time
May 26, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, May 26th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Spring 2021 series, please fill out this form.

In the wake of Hurricane Maria, unprecedented attention turned to the unincorporated territory of Puerto Rico and its enduring colonial relationship with the United States. This presentation will examine the rising popularity and shifting strategies of the Puerto Rican statehood movement, which has grown even as the Puerto Rican territory has experienced an unprecedented economic crisis, with failing infrastructure, a seemingly unpayable public debt, and historic levels of out-migration. Within this context many residents envision annexation as the only way of safeguarding a precarious and unguaranteed place within the nation. Bonilla offers an ethnographic analysis of how statehood is imagined and defended by its supporters and shows how this movement uniquely articulates the very contradictions and power asymmetries that structure Puerto Rico’s relationship to the US.

Yarimar Bonilla is a Professor in the Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies at Hunter College and the Ph.D. Program in Anthropology at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York. She is the author of Non-Sovereign Futures: French Caribbean Politics in the Wake of Disenchantment (2015); co-editor of Aftershocks of Disaster: Puerto Rico Before and After the Storm (2019); and a founder of the Puerto Rico Syllabus Project. Bonilla also writes a monthly column in the Puerto Rican newspaper El Nuevo Día and is a regular contributor to The Washington Post, The Nation, Jacobin, and The New Yorker, and a frequent guest on National Public Radio’s Democracy Now! Her current research—for which she was named a 2018-2020 Carnegie Fellow —examines the politics of recovery in Puerto Rico after Hurricane Maria and the forms of political and social trauma that the storm revealed.

Date | Time
Jan 13, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-sponsored by Critical Race and Ethnic Studies (CRES), the Research Center for the Americas (RCA), and the Anthropology Department.

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 13th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

The U.S. President’s Inauguration is on January 20th. We use that date as an occasion to think about alternative futures and political possibilities not beholden to colonial and capitalist dispossession, U.S. sovereignty, and the nation-state form, focusing in particular on Indigenous pathways to alternative political-ethical futures. Melanie Yazzie (University of New Mexico) and Michelle Daigle (University of Toronto) will be in conversation with Gina Dent (UCSC) and Caitlin Keliiaa (UCSC) to discuss methods of resurgence and freedom premised on abolitionist, decolonial, and feminist praxis.

Melanie K. Yazzie (Diné) is an Assistant Professor of Native American studies and American studies at the University of New Mexico. She is also the national chair of the Red Nation, a grassroots organization committed to the liberation of Indigenous people from colonialism and capitalism. She does historical research at the intersections of Indigenous studies, feminist and queer studies, carceral studies, Diné (Navajo) studies, and environmental studies. She also does public intellectual and activist work on Native women’s rights, LGBTQ2 rights, environmental justice, policing and incarceration, Indigenous housing justice, urban Indigenous issues, and international solidarity.

Michelle Daigle is Mushkegowuk (Cree), a member of Constance Lake First Nation in Treaty 9, and of French ancestry. She is an Assistant Professor in the Centre for Indigenous Studies and the Department of Geography & Planning at the University of Toronto. Her research examines colonial capitalist dispossession and violence on Indigenous lands and bodies, as well as Indigenous practices of resurgence and freedom. Her current research project is on extractive geographies in Mushkegowuk territory. Her writing has been published in Antipode, Environment & Planning D, and Political Geography.

Date | Time
Jan 20, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 20th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

In the last decade, access to digital communication technologies has created opportunities for young people on the margins of the national imaginary in India to take part in transnational media worlds. In his recently published book, Dattatreyan uses the ‘globally familiar’ as an analytic to engage with the recursive effects of online media consumption, production, and circulation amongst young migrant men in Delhi who invest their energies in the Black aesthetics of hip hop. In this talk, he reflects on how, eight years after he first started fieldwork with these young men, the social and economic opportunities that have emerged for them as a result of their online/offline hip hop play continue to shape their gendered aspirations in and through circuits of late capitalism.

Ethiraj Gabriel Dattatreyan is a Senior Lecturer in the Department of Anthropology at Goldsmiths, University of London. His research engages with the ways in which digital media consumption, production, and circulation shape understandings of migration, gender, race, and urban space. His first book, The Globally Familiar: Digital Hip-Hop, Masculinity, and Urban Space in Delhi, was published by Duke University Press in 2020.

Date | Time
Jan 27, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, January 27th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk addresses a global network of camera operators working on behalf of the Lumière Brothers film company between 1896-1903. Not only did these camera operators record films at sites from Algiers to Berlin to Tokyo, they also pictured the world anew, whether framing a street scene in Alexandria or offering a close up on a passing face in Jerusalem. The Lumière Brothers’ broader vision was to bring the world to the world, and they imagined a global network of films easily circulable beyond the constraints of language and literacy. Engaging the implications of cinematic versus literary capture, Allan’s talk explores the stakes of world literature in the age of the world picture.

Michael Allan is an Associate Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Oregon and editor of the journal Comparative Literature. He is the author of In the Shadow of World Literature: Sites of Reading in Colonial Egypt (Princeton 2016, Co-Winner of the MLA First Book Prize). His current research focuses on the travels of the Lumière Brothers film company across North Africa and the Middle East.

Date | Time
February 3, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 3rd; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Reimagining cultural healing ways is central to healing justice, Black Lives Matter, and other contemporary movements. However, “moving from race to culture to creation,” as Resmaa Menakem puts it, takes work. This talk engages in this work by centering epistemologies of Black/African-American traditional medicine, often reclaimed as “conjure.” Drawing on short stories by Zora Neale Hurston and interviews, Jones will consider how Black “knowings” of health, healing, and biomedicine continue to be both racialized and mobilized – and the urgency of taking other(ed) knowledge seriously in this pandemic moment (and beyond).

Naya Jones (she/her/hers) is an Assistant Professor of Sociology and Core Faculty in the Global and Community Health Program at UCSC. As a geographer and cultural worker, she especially studies Black geographies of community health and healing in North and Latin America (African-American and Afro-Latinx). Often in partnership with community-rooted organizations, she engages a range of storytelling, embodied, and arts-based methods. She is a former Culture of Health Leader (Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, 2017-2020) and a recent recipient of the Anne S. Chatham Fellowship for Medicinal Botany (Garden Club of America).

Date | Time
February 10, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 10th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk proposes a cultural genealogy of contemporary human mediatic forms – that is, the use of humans as the media of other humans. Beginning with a reading of José Rizal’s 1891 novel, El Filibusterismo, and its encapsulation of a political moment of transformation of natives (naturales) into nationals, indios into free citizen-subjects, Tadiar explores practices and relations of humans as media in Philippine cultures and the transformation of such persistent forms of life into vital components of today’s global capitalist platform economy.

Neferti X. M. Tadiar is Professor of Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies at Barnard College, Columbia University. She is the author of Things Fall Away: Philippine Historical Experience and the Makings of Globalization (2009) and Fantasy-Production: Sexual Economies and Other Philippine Consequences for the New World Order (2004). Her current book, Remaindered Life, a meditation on the disposability and surplus of life-making under contemporary conditions of global empire, is forthcoming from Duke University Press.

Date | Time
February 17, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]
This colloquium is co-presented with the Southeast Asian Center for Costal Interactions (SEACoast).

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 17th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Over the last eight months, the lines separating private from public domains of grief, protest from mourning, dying from being killed, the dead from the living, the fleshly from the pixellated, have been blurred. Through sound, theory, image, and affect, Farman and his collaborators explore some practices of daily resurrection and critical mourning.

With visual magic by Shelby Coley and Danielle Gauthier.

Abou Farman is an anthropologist, writer and artist. He is the author of On Not Dying: Secular Immortality in the Age of Technoscience (2020, University of Minnesota Press) and Clerks of the Passage (2012, Linda Leith Press). He is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at The New School for Social Research and founder of Art Space Sanctuary as well as the Shipibo Conibo Center of New York.

Leonor Caraballo worked as a photographer and video artist between Buenos Aires and New York. She is the co-director of the feature film Icaros: a vision. She has won a number of fellowships and grants, including the Latin American Guggenheim Fellowship, a New York Foundation for the Arts grant, and an Eyebeam Art and Technology Center residency. Leonor left her body on Saturday January 24th, 2015.

Leo and Abou conspire together as artists.

Sholeh Asgary is an Iranian-born interdisciplinary artist who creates immersive works, sound performances, and audience participatory workshops. She has participated in numerous artist residencies, including Headlands Center for the Arts (2021) and Mass MoCA (2021). Her work has been exhibited and screened at ARoS Art Museum, Sotheby’s Institute of Art, Minnesota Street Projects, and Gray Area Foundation for the Arts. She is a lecturer in the Department of Art Practice at UC Berkeley.

Hossein Sharang is the founder and president of the Wild Republic of Sharangestan.

(Hossein’s contribution includes music by Claude Maheu.)

Date | Time
February 24, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, February 24th; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

This talk discusses music and the politics of creativity in the context of South Asia more broadly and Hindustani music more specifically (what is today called “Indian classical music”). Neuman traces how elite Muslim (sharif) culture became radically disrupted after British rule was formalized in 1857, and court musicians were dispersed throughout India, with many lineages and traditions quickly fading to obscurity, while a new class of hereditary musicians emerged. These new musicians came from predominantly low-class Muslim bardic communities, and their socio-musical innovations can be better understood in relation to their forceful critiques of feudal hierarchies and caste exclusions. Through oral histories, family genealogies and analysis of music performance, Neuman traces how musicians from “outsider” lineages integrated aesthetic and ideological knowledge systems to forge a fundamentally new socio-musical aesthetic, one that broke from established traditions to widen access to non-elite lineages, but did so in ways determined by heterodox and populist Sufi/Bhakti ideologies and socio-musical translations of classical sources.

Dard Neuman is the Hasan Endowed Chair in Classical Indian Music and Associate Professor of Music at the University of California, Santa Cruz, as well as Co-Director of the Center of South Asian Studies. He received his Ph.D. in Anthropology from Columbia University in 2004 and joined the Music faculty at UC Santa Cruz in 2005. He has studied the sitar for almost four decades. His research interests concern the musical cultivation, transmission and performance of Hindustani music in twentieth century North India as well as the role of music in social action. He has published articles for SEM and Asian Music and his book, Hindustani Music, Heterodoxy and the Politics of Creativity is forthcoming with Wesleyan University Press.

Date | Time
March 3, 2021 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, March 3rd; you will receive the Zoom link and password at 11:30 AM the day of the colloquium.

To RSVP for the entire Winter 2021 series, please fill out this form.

Two radical collectives in South Africa working inside and outside the academy to agitate against ongoing histories of dispossession consider what redistribution means in the most unequal national context on earth. This 50-minute film looks at how the promises of redistribution in the anti-apartheid liberation movement were foreclosed during the transition out of apartheid in South Africa. The film features three left economists who were active in the anti-apartheid movement but have lived through a transition in which the promise and idea of redistribution was abandoned as South Africa inserted a post-apartheid project into global processes of financialization and neoliberalization.

We will screen the film and then discuss it with filmmakers Asher Gamedze and Kelly Gillespie and featured economist Rasigan Maharajh.

Kelly Gillespie is a political and legal anthropologist and cultural worker with a research focus on criminal justice and abolition in South Africa. She works at the department of Anthropology at the University of the Western Cape. She writes and teaches about urbanism, violence, sexualities, race, and the praxis of social justice. In 2008 she co-founded the Johannesburg Workshop in Theory and Criticism (JWTC). 

Asher Gamedze is a cultural worker based in Cape Town, South Africa, working mainly as a musician, student, and writer. He is also involved, as an organiser and an educator, with various cultural and political collectives such as Fulan Fulan, The Interim, and Radical Education Network. His debut album, dialectic soul, was released in July 2020.

Rasigan Maharajh is an activist scholar whose research focuses on the political economy of innovation and development, including the changing world of work, democratic governance, and ecological reconstruction. He is the founding Chief Director of the Institute for Economic Research on Innovation based at the Tshwane University of Technology and Professor Extraordinary of the Centre for Research on Evaluation, Science and Technology at Stellenbosch University.

Date/Time
Oct 7, 2020 | 12:15 PM – 2 PM

RSVP by 11 AM on Wednesday, October 7th to receive Zoom link and password.