In this talk, Dr. Summers explores the history of unhoused populations in Oakland, the cyclical displacements of Black locals, and the appearance and reappearance of parking lots in these stories of disruption. She tells the story of West Oakland, in particular, as a testing ground for speculative urbanism–an urbanism based not in speculator’s profit or the spectacles of a city’s self-branding, but in the utopian and dystopian possibilities that unfold in an ongoing (implicitly and explicitly racialized) housing emergency.

Brandi T. Summers, PhD is assistant professor of Geography at UC Berkeley, and is founding co-director of the Berkeley Lab for Speculative Urbanisms. Her research examines the relationship between and function of race, space, urban infrastructure, and architecture. Her book, Black in Place: The Spatial Aesthetics of Race in a Post-Chocolate City (UNC Press, 2019), explores how competing notions of blackness organize efforts to structure economic relations and develop land in gentrifying Washington DC. Her current book project explores the roots and routes of Black resistance that laid a foundation for the current affective economies organized to reclaim space through public cultures, politics, and the aesthetics of Black life in her hometown, Oakland, California. Dr. Summers has published several articles and essays that analyze the relationship between race, power, aesthetics, and urbanization that appear in both scholarly and popular publications, including New York Times, The Boston, Globe, Places Journal, and Antipode.

Date | Time
April 20, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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

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Since 2002, prisoners at Guantánamo Bay detention camp have been force-fed as punishment for hunger striking, prompting the question of how to understand the feeding tube’s various uses as both a form of medical treatment and torture instrument. By placing force-feeding practices at Guantánamo Bay within a larger history of medicalized punishment, this talk tracks how the functions of the feeding tube are altered and reimagined by the US military. The talk also explores end-of-life politics at Guantánamo Bay by investigating the recent possibility of palliative care for aging prisoners at the camps. I consider how the military’s plans for hospice is made possible by humanitarian logics of war that continue to centralize care in similar ways to that of force-feeding.

Michelle Velasquez-Potts is an educator and writer working at the intersections of feminist and queer thought. Broadly, her work attempts to imagine more relational ways of approaching questions of state violence and punishment. Her first book project, Suspended Animation, focuses on the relationship between medicine and punishment, and in particular the rise of force-feeding post-9/11. She has published essays in Women and Performance, Public Culture, Captive Genders: Trans Embodiment and the Prison Industrial Complex, Abolition Journal, and Art Journal Open.

Date | Time
April 27 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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Readers have always been fascinated by Dante’s distinctive habit of placing episodes from Scripture side by side with ancient pagan myths, as though the latter had a comparable authority. As my reading shows, a popular medieval school text, known as the Eclogue of Theodulus (Ecloga Theoduli), supplied a fitting precedent and model for this practice and might have suggested some specific series of examples that Dante stages in his Purgatorio. By constructing a system of parallel mythological and biblical examples, the Ecloga Theoduli featured a syncretic account of universal history that suggested mythology was a prefiguration of the events recounted in the Bible. Whereas the Ecloga depicts a clash between Christian and pagan cultures, however, dismissing the latter as a lie, Dante harmonizes the two traditions, providing a syncretic program for the moral instruction of the Christian reader. Although the Purgatorio’s syncretic discourse constituted a remarkable innovation, which exerted long-lasting influence on later authors, it nonetheless retained some of the cultural limitations imposed by the Ecloga—as, for instance, in the representation of Virgil’s inability to cross the river Lethe in Eden. The chapter goes on to argue that first in Paradiso 19 and then in his last work, the second Egloga to Giovanni del Virgilio, Dante obliquely criticizes the Ecloga Theoduli’s condemnation of ancient poetic wisdom. The case of the Ecloga, therefore, well encapsulates Dante’s conflicting attitude toward his own education. The paper ends by showing that Boccaccio’s eclogue Olympia (Buccolicum Carmen 14) provides a sophisticated parody and refutation of the Ecloga Theoduli that takes as its model and interlocutor Dante’s wrestling with the same text in his own oeuvre.

Filippo has been part of the Literature Department at UCSC since 2019. He works on Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio and lay education in the Middle Ages and the Renaissance. He is interested in the ways literature and education (particularly literacy) intersect with and inform each other. He has published mostly on the topic of Dante’s intellectual formation and is currently writing a book provisionally titled “Training the Reader: Dante and the Rise of Vernacular Literacy.” The book investigates Dante’s debts to his earliest scholastic readings and his critical stance toward contemporary education.

Date | Time
May 4, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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Toni Morrison said a book is not “This is what I believe,” because that would be “just a tract.” Rather, a book is “I don’t know what it is, but I am interested in finding out what it might mean to me, as well as to other people.” This talk’s “I don’t know” is a concept that has been used to describe everything from language to a life stage to the creative power of the internet: generativity. Arguing against uncritical visions of generative AI, I frame generativity as a fact and a force at work across multiple scales of networked life. It is something people do together, and that might yet be done differently.

Kyle Parry is Assistant Professor of History of Art and Visual Culture at UC Santa Cruz. His research focuses on how people use and understand digital media. His forthcoming book, _A Theory of Assembly: From Museums to Memes_, proposes that a cultural form deserving of the name assembly has come to equal narrative and representation in its reach and influence. A second, co-edited book, _Ubiquity: Photography’s Multitudes_, reframes the ubiquity of photography as a political and historical fantasy. He’s working on a new book on generativity.

Date | Time
May 11, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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From the mid-nineteenth century into the twentieth, Africa for the Africans was the banner under which a range of pan-Africanists imaginaries and political projects were articulated. This lecture charts the transformations of this pan-African motto, examining in particular the shifting conceptions of “Africa” in the first two decades of the twentieth century.

Adom Getachew is Neubauer Family Assistant Professor of Political Science at the University of Chicago. She is a political theorist with research interests in the history of political thought, theories of race and empire, and postcolonial political theory. Her work focuses on the intellectual and political histories of Africa and the Caribbean. She is the author of Worldmaking after Empire: The Rise and Fall of Self-Determination from Princeton University Press (2019) and co-editor, with Jennifer Pitts, of the forthcoming W .E. B. Du Bois’s International Thought. She is currently working on a second book on the intellectual origins and political practices of Garveyism—the black nationalist/pan-African movement, which had its height in the 1920s. Her public writing has appeared in Dissent, Foreign Affairs, the London Review of Books, the Nation, and New York Times.

Date | Time
May 18, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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A native of New Orleans, Barbara McCullough has spent most of her life in southern California. Her initial interest was in photography but the moving image, immediacy, and possible forum for ideas set her on a path of exploration. McCullough’s work progressed to examining the creative process of artists but always maintaining a fascination with experimental film and video. McCullough sees herself as part of the continuum of African American storytellers whose aim is to preserve knowledge by capturing the essence of her culture — its life, spirit, and magic. She states, “I am dedicated to the preservation of the heritage of the African American artist/cultural worker by documenting her/his achievements for future generations to keep the music and visual poetry alive.” Her work has been shown in galleries, museums, and film festivals nationally and internationally and she is associated with UCLA filmmakers known as the LA Rebellion.

Date | Time
May 25, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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Incidents of state violence and activism against that violence illustrate the continuing significance of race and the persistence of white supremacy in France, the United States, and worldwide. Based on past and current ethnographic research and interviews with ethnic minorities in the Parisian metropolitan region, this talk argues that, despite France’s colorblind and Republican ethos, France’s “visible minorities” function under a “suspect citizenship” in which their full societal belonging is never granted. I focus on the growing problem of state-sponsored violence against ethnic minorities which reveals how France is creating a “bright boundary” (Alba 2005) between whites and non-whites, furthering disparate outcomes based on race and ethnic origin. By considering the multifaceted dimensions of citizenship and belonging in France, I demonstrate the limitations of full societal inclusion for France’s non-white denizens and how French Republicanism continues to mark, rather than erase, racial and ethnic distinctions.

Jean Beaman is Associate Professor of Sociology, with affiliations with Black Studies, Political Science, Feminist Studies, Global Studies, and the Center for Black Studies Research, at the University of California, Santa Barbara. Previously, she was faculty at Purdue University and held visiting fellowships at Duke University and the European University Institute (Florence, Italy). Her research is ethnographic in nature and focuses on race/ethnicity, racism, international migration, and state violence in both France and the United States. She is author of Citizen Outsider: Children of North African Immigrants in France (University of California Press, 2017), as well as numerous articles and book chapters. Her current book project is on suspect citizenship and belonging, anti-racist mobilization, and activism against police violence in France. She received her Ph.D. in Sociology from Northwestern University. She is also an Associate Editor of the journal, Identities: Global Studies in Culture and Power and a Corresponding Editor for the journal Metropolitics/Metropolitiques. She is the Co-PI for the Mellon Foundation Sawyer Seminar grant, “Race, Precarity, and Privilege: Migration in a Global Context” for 2020-2022.

Date | Time
January 12, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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This talk examines how bodily regulation unfolded on Native women domestic workers in the early 20th-century Bay Area and how sexual surveillance in the Bay Area Outing Program affected Native women. To this end, Keliiaa analyzes cases of sexual surveillance, presumed delinquency, sexually transmitted infections and policing of Native women’s bodies. Through these intimate stories, Keliiaa demonstrates the ways in which the settler state attempted to and at times succeeded in managing and controlling Native women.

Caitlin “Katie” Keliiaa is Assistant Professor of Feminist Studies at UC Santa Cruz. She is an interdisciplinary feminist historian specializing in 20th-century Native experiences in the West. Her scholarship engages Indian labor exploitation, dispossession and surveillance of Native bodies especially in Native Californian contexts. Her book project examines how Native women domestic workers negotiated and challenged an early 20th-century Indian labor program based in the San Francisco Bay Area. In this work, Professor Keliiaa centers Native women’s voices uncovered from federal archives.

Date | Time
January 19, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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During the height of COVID restrictions in 2020, a group of Black queer artists in Cape Town occupied a ritzy home that had been converted into an Air B and B. They intended to overstay their original booking in order to bring attention to the issue of inequitable housing policy in South Africa, and the particular ways that the continuation of apartheid urban planning created disproportionate vulnerabilities for Black queer folk in Cape Town. In this talk, I will consider the political implications of joining queerness with the land question in post-apartheid South Africa through direct political action and performance.

Xavier Livermon is Associate Professor of Critical Race and Ethnic Studies at UCSC.

Date | Time
January 26, 2022 | 12:15 – 1:30 PM [PST]

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

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